In his tent, Achilles grieved with his whole being and the gods saw he was a man already dead, a victim of the part that loved, the part that was mortal.
He had us meet him in a gravel parking lot just one turn off of the highway. As I turned onto the road I realized I’d driven past this innocuous patch of woods my whole life and never knew what was back here. We were only a handful of miles away from the city but as far as anyone was concerned it might as well have been a different country where we were. Soon after, it would feel like we were on a different planet.
Look for the green lime silo he said, and I had wondered if he meant that the silo would be lime green; but when I pulled up (the gravel pop-pop-popping under my tires, one of the subliminally great sounds of this life) it was just plain green with a chalk-white mineral, once liquid, crusted at the top of the silo, like spilt milk left to dry. Ah. Lime, I thought. It’s a green lime silo. Just like he said.
Nearby there was a pond that dumped out into some unnamed tributary. Fish poked around the tinted water, big plump ones preparing themselves for the long, slow, dark, hungry winter.
The thing about being on the Appalachian Plateau is that you can be physically standing on a mountain but it will feel like you’re just on some boring wooded hill. They rise and fall so nonchalantly; they’re a much older mountain system than the real stars of the show, so very old that the winds and water and time have sanded their edges completely, filled their crags (which now jut out of the soft earth like new teeth and torture hikers’ poor feet) with soil and clay and mud and they, in their ancient wisdom, once again permitted the trees and grasses blanket them completely. Their peaks no longer kiss the heavens; they are much more rooted on what’s happening on the ground. They are closer in relation to the Scottish Highlands than they are the Rockies, and that’s just fine. There’s enough space out there in this world for all sorts of mountains.
Anyways, we were pretty high up though it didn’t feel like it and we all loaded into his Jeep and we made our way up the mountain to, in his words, “see some shit.” As we climbed in the opposite direction of our parked cars the land gained a sinister air, and despite the people talking and the uneven road tossing the Jeep around like one of those rides at the arcade that just kind of shakes you up to make you feel like you’re going somewhere, the land looked too still. It was like being on an abandoned movie set.
Another pond, this one stained yellow, no fish.
Further up we got out of the Jeep and took a look around. The dirt was black now and the hills fractured by huge fissures caused by erosion and gravity. The pond here was lined with a rust-colored ring and the water bubbled unnaturally. He said the land up here was so acidic here that the only plant able to survive was white beech, but they only grow to be about as thick as a wrist and then they stop, they just run out of nutrients, or maybe they run out of will.
This is waste coal, he said, shaking the black soil out of his palms. The mill used to be over in that flat field, he said; the Hillmans dumped the rest out here. They made this mountain, shaped it, ironically with what was inside the mountains the whole time. We made mountains from mountains and now we can’t build on either of them. I gazed over the jet-black cliff face at the fractured grey earth, carved into almost-terraces by huge crevasses and landslides, the larger pieces of coal gleaming in the sunlight, and felt like I was on some alien planet. It was unlike any natural landmass I had ever seen, indescribable.
Do you hear that? he asked, and I said What? Silence, he said. Look around. There were no deer trudging along, their brown bodies laterally moving silently against the vertical trees; no squirrels running and tumbling and chittering, no birds chirping. The land was truly lifeless.
I’ll be dead by the time we get this all cleaned up, he said, we all will be, but it’ll be worth it.
The other wide of this particular chunk of the plateau was hollowed-out strip mine so it had a little more scrub on it but not much, and still no wildlife. The unstable land looked like a cheap shelf that was overloaded with detritus and about to buckle.
As for the ponds, he said, they’re the drainage from the strip mines and the groundwater from rainfall. We pump each pond down to the bottom and treat it with lime on the way down. Each level it gets a little cleaner. The end result actually makes its way into our waterways.
We turned around and looked upon this giant black gaping wound hidden by the Pennsylvania woods one last time before getting into our own cars and driving away, one by one, back up the gravel road. I was back in the city in 11 minutes. What we did to this country during the industrial revolution was incredible in the purest sense of the word. It was amazing but terrible. We harnessed some power we maybe weren’t supposed to learn, and in return we poisoned the earth. There was no Prometheus to punish this time, though. The cost will be levied on our children, and theirs.
A hundred years probably, he said. Maybe even a thousand.
I had wanted to, and even began, writing this long thing about Green Day and what makes me so sad about that band but then I abandoned it because one of their new songs is actually pretty good. But then I thought, this is exactly the problem! So instead of going ‘heist song’ deep on this, I think I can distill what makes me really sad about Green Day right now. I don’t know when this will go out in the newsletter so just pretend that when I type “now” I mean like the right now that you’re experiencing. Got it? Okay, great.
As far as rock bands go there are two traditional trajectories they can follow. There is a third one, which is still too new to include here, but the trajectory is: a band is successful in the early-to-mid-00s or even in the early twenty teens, thrived in the “indie revival” period, and is now languishing as they try to make music that the algorithm likes and thus spits out to more listeners. This is a novel problem, and doesn’t necessarily apply to Green Day (though an argument could be made this is part of the malaise but I simply can’t go there right now), so we will disregard this one.
The trajectories that famous rock bands traditionally follow are:
1) Find success early on but, almost in spite of that success, continue to push through, challenging themselves and their listeners, potentially evolving into new genres but never in a forced way, always trying to find that next creative breakthrough, sometimes stumbling but never giving in and doing something boring. Examples here would be Bob Dylan, Pearl Jam, Springsteen to some extent, Bowie, R.E.M., Wilco (except their *new* new stuff is very boring lol sorry), and The Cure.
2) After reaching some peak of success, never creatively evolve from there but continue to play at a top level and continue releasing new music. The new music always has a few songs that are really good and reminiscent of some gilded age of the band but most of it is not bad per se but very forgettable, and sometimes just straight up bad. But again, the band remains playing at the highest level and continue to tour in a “greatest hits” format. Examples here are most of the classic rock bands: AC/DC (perfect band imo), The Rolling Stones, The Who, Springsteen to some extent, Weezer to some extent, and, unfortunately, Green Day, the first band to mean the world to me.
I was probably 10 or 12 when I heard Insomniac, which I heard before Dookie and thus the former will always be my favorite Green Day record. It’s the Beggars Banquet of Green Day records. I will have a lot more to say when Dookie turns 30 early next year but that Dookie-Insomniac-Nimrod run was just SO important to me. It totally rewired my brain and musical tastes, and even Warning was such a big album to me. It’s easily forgotten, but when Dookie came out, Green Day were essentially the biggest band in America, and they deserved to be. But then it happened again in 2004 with American Idiot when, instead of settling into the dad-rock category they seemed to be clicking into, they exploded into an entire new audience. I remember seeing them around this time and when we left the venue and we saw the people waiting around the tour bus, I remember thinking Damn. This music is not being made for me anymore. And that’s okay!
How do you make two critically-lauded masterpieces at two distinct periods of your career, become the biggest band in America at two very different stages of adulthood, and not be a little messed up from it? What do you do creatively after reaching the top of the mountain TWICE? Whatever you should do, it doesn’t feel like the choices Green Day have made since launching their American Idiot musical is it. Is it just because their most memorable songs to me are from a period of my own life that’s gone? Or does their new music mostly suck? It feels like it might be a little bit of both.
I think on that first run early on, on Reprise Records, the band didn’t get super derailed on their long-term creative goal fulfillment path; they just couldn’t survive the second wave. These guys are fifty years old singing about taking Adderall in the mall parking lot and getting into fistfights and stuff and it feels like they’re kind of just doomed to do these Rolling Stones-esque tours where they play American Idiot-era songs for aging GenZ kids (and younger) while releasing an album of new material every couple years that's mostly filled with the most mindless music and very safe choices. The Rolling Stones path. I hope I’m wrong, man.
Anyways all of that to say, they put out a song from their new album along with a really dumb manifesto and the song was terrible. Then they put out another one and I kinda like it?
Probably because it sounds like their old stuff a little bit.
God, I’m old.
I just finished SCAVENGERS REIGN, streaming on Max, and I can’t stop thinking about it. It was beautiful to look at but also a bit disturbing. The music was so well done and there were parts of this seemingly-silly animated show about a planet doing everything it possibly can to murder its human colonists that truly moved me emotionally.
A lot of reviews point out what I could here (and I would do a better job obviously right??) but this thing is getting kind of long so I’ll just say that it was the most original and compelling science fiction story I have seen in...maybe ever.
Go watch it. Seriously, do it now.
Love the triptych of subjects and writing here. I haven't heard any of the new Green Day yet. Scavengers Reign is on my list of shows to watch, which is longer than it probably should be, but I love story in any form, so.