NOTE: I wrote this and really hope it's OK to share here..
It’s 1980 and I play daily in Sunburst Circle with my friend Russell along 7000 South in Salt Lake City, a busy road that leads to local canyons and recreation. Strangers live there now.
Someone, one time, tossed a cassette tape out of the car on that busy street; Russ and I found it in the gutter — RUSH: PERMANENT WAVES — and fixed the exposed portion of tape portion so we could listen. We felt we were doing something edgy, borderline naughty, discovering some secret not meant for children.
Back then in my conservative Mormon community, rock music in general was frowned upon and “hard” rock especially. Rumor had it, R.U.S.H. was secret devil code for Rock Under Satan’s Hand. Living on the edge, we listened anyway and it had some surprisingly musical songs like SPIRIT OF RADIO and pre-teen me especially responded to FREEWILL, probably because its lyrics resonated with my young brain, but I still wasn’t quite a RUSH fan.
You can choose from phantom fears
And kindness that can kill
I will choose a path that's clear
I will choose free will
—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
It’s 1984 and I am in a Butler Middle School public speaking course with Mike Graves and Dale Larson. During the assignment to introduce a friend, both of them use the same object, a RUSH vinyl record album and sleeve of RUSH: GRACE UNDER PRESSURE.
They get marked down for using the same prop in two speeches but they explain that for both of them, it is literally their favorite album. Dale wore RUSH t-shirts to school and I seem to recall possibly both went to the May 14 show that year at the Salt Palace, long since torn down and replaced.
I would later learn that bassist Geddy Lee’s parents were survivors of WWII Nazi concentration camps before they immigrated in Canada. (Texas wouldn’t allow them to enter, by decree, as of this week.) Later, I would use a song from that album, about a prison camp, RED SECTOR A, in a college course.
Sickness to insanity
Prayer to profanity
Days and weeks and months go by
Don't feel the hunger, too weak to cry
I hear the sound of gunfire at the prison gate
Are the liberators here, do I hope or do I fear?
For my father and my brother, it's too late
But I must help my mother stand up straight
December of that same year, my brother in law gave me RUSH: 2112 on vinyl. The star in a circle seemed a little satanic but I was eager to learn more about this band and this iconic album that was on every rocker’s jean jacket.
Inside on the jacket sleeve was one of the most infamous band photos of all time, the trio with camel toe, silk robes and giant mustaches. But the record was warped and wouldn’t play, so I had to exchange it.
Only they didn’t have any more 2112 at the store, so I was forced to take home Def Leppard: High and Dry. Not long after, that band exploded and after hearing them on every radio station and coming from every teen singer’s mouth, I detested them because they were way too popular to be actually cool and I already realized: they were ruining metal.
—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
It’s 1985 and I wasn’t wrong about Def Leppard but RUSH: POWER WINDOWS is released and it uses a whole lot of synthesizer, features fantastically ugly band haircuts that smacked of New Wave — even electronic drums — and I love it anyway. I was definitely a RUSH fan and especially liked, and still like, its most synth song ever, MYSTIC RHYTHMS from that album.
I also played in a band for a talent show. Russ, Brad Webb, Rick Miller, John Roach and I called ourselves Contra Band and played a couple of numbers for the school. We couldn’t play Rush though.
Mike Graves — from that public speaking class — was a real friend by this point and I joined in the RUSH conversations at school. His older brother Scott was teaching guitar and Mike urged me to sign up, which I failed to do.
My sons Dresden and Logan — both excellent guitar players — go to Scott’s music school now and play RUSH songs at school concerts — RED BARCHETTA comes to mind. Dresden sometimes uses my old guitar. By 1985 I was a band evangelical.
Mystic rhythms capture my thoughts
Carry them away
Mysteries of night escape the light of day
Mystic rhythms under northern lights
Or a canopy of stars
We feel the push and pull
Of restless rhythms from afar
—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
It’s 1988 and in Brighton High School AP English I am challenged by our eccentric retirement-age teacher, swoons for my voice and definitely did more of the same when I wrote a slightly sexy ode to a girl, Gillian, after hiking with her “on a mountain’s stony thigh.”
I liked impressing my teacher, and I liked using my voice and I like to be involved in the arts — though I wouldn’t recognize this about myself for many years — so I learned the words to “Kubla Kahn” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge — who also wrote poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” I’ll still recite the beginning few lines of Kubla Kahn anytime you ask. It starts:
"In Xanadu did Kubla Kahn
A stately pleasure dome decree"
So I was aware of Coleridge, impressing my English teacher, because Neil Peart, RUSH’s drummer and lyricist, was aware of him first and penned the RUSH classic XANADU as an ode to the poem that is considered to contain the most beautiful sounds of any work in the English language. RUSH created its own version:
To stand within the pleasure dome
Decreed by Kubla Khan
To taste anew the fruits of life
The last immortal man
To find the sacred river Alph
To walk the caves of ice
Oh, I will dine on honey dew
And drink the milk of paradise, oh paradise
I quoted that last honey dew phrase a lot, every time my late mother served a melon tray, her favorite -- save ice cream only. There in 1988 I was also taking heaps of crap from Iron Maiden fans, thinking they were more hardcore than Rush fans. Maiden, as it turns out was heavily influenced by RUSH, including Peart’s lyrics, and followed in his footsteps, making “The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner.” by my friend, and William Wordsworth’s, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Peart and thus heavy metal, embraced the Romanic poetry.
I was also getting weird looks from the smart kids for liking heavy metal and progressive rock and growing long hair while they were preparing for Stanford and Harvard. The smart kids get the last laugh, but neither group can take away Kubla Kahn.
—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
It’s 1989 and I am going to graduate high school. Our yearbook gives us a few scrawny characters - a precursor to Twitter I suppose - to say whatever it is we want to say, to speak our words, to leave our mark, to record our voice for history.
I wrote a few stupid age-appropriate lines of drivel. I named some friends I imagined at the time were destined to stay an active part of my life until the day I died and I copied a line from RUSH album linear notes.
“Music by Lee and Lifeson
Lyrics by Peart.”
At least I got something right.
Growing up, it all seems so one-sided
Opinions all provided
The future pre-decided
Detached and subdivided
In the mass-production zone
Nowhere is the dreamer
Or the misfit so alone
Subdivisions
In the high school halls
In the shopping malls
Conform or be cast out
—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
It’s 1990 and by now, if somebody made a movie about me, RUSH is part of the soundtrack of my life. I have close friends that I share musical tastes with. Looking back, we had those important, formative “deep” conversations centered partially around music. There have been many nights in my parent’s basement from the era when I was 15 to 18 years old, trying to decipher the mysteries of RUSH. In my recent past, smart kids like Roach and Jason Yorgason sat around the record player enjoying the rock tunes and discussed lyrics, part of the teen ritual of thinking and growing up.
But in 1990, as a good, faithful church member, I am in New York City as missionary teaching people about Jesus after leaving rock music behind.
All those smart friends, close friends, dear friends still wanted to keep in touch so one day an audio tape arrived from my old bandmates. Mission rules forbid most worldly music, definitely including RUSH, but my savvy friends talked on this tape and then played the PRESTO album in the background, released only days before I left my home. I was months older than my friends, so I was gone and they were still “of the world.” I was skirting the rules but I remember well the pure pleasure of friends who “got” me in worls and music as SHOW DON’T TELL coursed through my earphones.
Who can you believe?
It's hard to play it safe
But apart from a few good friends
We don't take anything on faith
Until later
—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
It’s 1992 and I am back in Salt Lake City, but homesick for New York. I play a lot of basketball, volleyball and I am a college newspaper editor. Metallica became the biggest rock band in the world while I was away and I work concert security with Rick and sometimes Brad, mostly for fun. I see the RUSH: ROLL THE BONES tour and I fall in love for the first time in my life with a girl named Angela.
I am pretty passionate about RUSH at the time, attending the tour that year and she grew to love the band too. She is smarter than me, which I naively believed was new. I’ll never forget that moment of our cheeks pressed together in her dorm room at Stanford, tears streaming down both and mixing as we hugged goodbye.
Her mother and I drove away; I was dying inside, hurting more than I imagined possible at the time. I wasn’t ready for that relationship and it was needlessly volatile and eventually she dumped me, on an extremely snowy morning while she wore a blue dress and curled her brown hair for church, looking at me with brown eyes while she claimed her own life and crushed mine. She consoled me by telling me the boy she was choosing instead of me also liked RUSH and I would like him if I met him. I never did.
I don't believe in destiny
Or the guiding hand of fate
I don't believe in forever
Or love as a mystical state
I don't believe in the stars or the planets
Or angels watching from above
But I believe there's a ghost of a chance
We can find someone to love
And make it last
—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
It’s 1996 and after years of missing Angela, there is a girl I really like. She is unlike me in so many ways. Brad and Rick and I are close friends. We legitimately held actual RUSH parties, that even for non-RUSH fans were pretty fun; for some reason women I dated, and that included some fantastic young women, correctly thought I was a little, uh, unique. RUSH is something of a filter for some of these girls and yes, I was that stupid.
On Nov. 24, Shannon, that girl I really liked, accompanied me and Brad and James Cottle I think (sorry, beyond her, it’s vague) to Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas and we enjoyed a hell of a show with two set lists, including good old 2112, FREEWILL, RED SECTOR A, NATURAL SCIENCE and an encore of YYZ. It was ridiculously fun and so was she, putting up with my fandom. That might have been the best RUSH of my life, plus it was with her.
In 1999 I proposed to her and in 2000 we were married. In 2002, we had our first of three children together, followed by another in 2004, Dresden and Logan. These are the guitar-playing sons. Somehow with busy lives we caught the 30th Anniversary Tour in Utah in 2004. And insane as it seems, the band, in this decade, suddenly becomes pop-culture cool.
Time and motion
Wind and sun and rain
Days connect like boxcars in a train
Fill them up with precious cargo
Squeeze in all that you can find
Spontaneous elation
And the long-enduring kind
—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
It is 2010 and for some reason when I attend the RUSH show with Shannon she brings her good camera and for some reason security lets us walk on through with it. We took tremendous photos.
What you own is your own kingdom
What you do is your own glory
What you love is your own power
What you live is your own story
In your head is the answer
Let it guide you along
Let your heart be the anchor
And the beat of your own song
—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
It is 2015 and for some reason, prior travel plans perhaps, we can’t see the RUSH tour when it visits Utah. The band is saying, through back channels, this series of concerts might be its last. It is the 40th Anniversary Tour and I decide my sons, 15 and 13, need to see this band live, Shannon agrees and she is a tremendous mother, so they get this experience while old enough to remember it.
We attend the Vegas show; they only ever played three shows after in the following days and then live RUSH was indeed over. We nearly went to California for the final night, but it looked liked tickets would be impossible and sometimes reason has to rule art. Lots of other friends are bonded over Rush in this era. Mark Reece, Gary McKeller, Scott Iwasaki and Tracy Mangum come to mind immediately, but life and individual choices have sucked old friends away.
Time stand still
I'm not looking back
But I want to look around me now
Time stands still
See more of the people
And the places that surround me now
Time stands still
Freeze this moment
A little bit longer
Make each sensation
A little bit stronger
Experience slips away
—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
It is 2019 and RUSH has a one-day concert / documentary screening in movie theaters. Sons Dresden and Logan and I, with fans coast to coast, attend this pretty sweet event that may happen again. I hope so.
My parents have died. I am divorced now. Many of the cherished beliefs from my young years have died too. My political viewpoints are gone, obliterated by critical thinking and real-world experience and compassion and facts. My religious beliefs are gone too, evaporating under critical thinking and an understanding how emotions manipulate us and by learning about things I thought I already knew. With that, most of the old friends are gone too. I am still loved though and feel fortunate for friends I have.
I am trying to make a film career to go along with my journalism efforts. I have wrested with realizing I have the heart of an artist but I didn’t cultivate these abilities in critical years of development. Bonus, I am paying the balloon mortgage now for the years of ignoring my body’s health with bad food and sleep and too much sitting.
It went right by me
At the time it went over my head
I was looking out the window
I should have looked
At your face instead
It went right by me
Just another wall
There should have been a moment
When we let our barriers fall
I never meant
What you're thinking
That is not what I meant at all
Well I guess we all
Have these feelings
We can't leave unreconciled
Some of them burned on our ceilings
Some of them learned as a child
—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
It’s 2020. It is yesterday, and I am a social media manager for a TV news station and its website. Our promotions guy Chris walks up to my desk and asks if I’ve heard that Neil Peart died.
I hadn’t.
He explains to me who he is; I already know.
My heart withers in layers.
The only good thing is, I get to speak in behalf of the dead and write an obituary. I get to collect social media about Peart and put it in one place with some brief facts about his life and career and what it meant. I pushed for his death to make TV news. It did. The production crew is full of RUSH fans. Our male TV anchor understands them too, he speaks the words to living rooms around Utah. The show’s producer scheduled it at about the 10-minute mark.
Shannon texted me too, which was tender and appreciated because she wouldn’t feel it like I do, but she understood I would. I texted my sons.
It all feels strangely so personal to me, as if a friend had died. Iwasaki says on The Facebook that he is broken. Reece directs me to public radio, KRCL, which is playing wall-to-wall RUSH. A director of one of the news show explains to me briefly that of course I feel bad, because that guy, Peart, has been in my ears and my head and his words have been in my mouth and with me for years, and now that voice is silent. He is right.
So thanks Neil. Thanks for all your help. Thanks for your thinking. Thanks for elevating. Thanks for being so earnest. Thanks for the literature. Thanks for inspiring. Thanks for the friends. Thanks for the laughs. Thanks for everything.
Hero - the voice of reason
Against the howling mob
Hero - the pride of purpose
In the unrewarding job
Hero - not the champion player
Who plays the perfect game
Not the glamor boy
Who loves to sell his name
Everybody's buying
Nobody's hero
As the years went by, we drifted apart
When I heard that you were gone
I felt a shadow cross my heart
Hero
Music by Lee and Lifeson.
Lyrics by Peart.

The soundtrack of our lives: Music by Lee and Lifeson, Lyrics by Peart

It’s 1980 and I play daily in Sunburst Circle with my friend Russell along 7000 South in Salt Lake City, a busy road that leads to local canyons and recreation. Strangers live there now.
Someone, one time, tossed a cassette tape out of the car on that busy street; Russ and I found it in the gutter — RUSH: PERMANENT WAVES — and fixed the exposed portion of tape portion so we could listen. We felt we were doing something edgy, borderline naughty, discovering some secret not meant for children.
Back then in my conservative Mormon community, rock music in general was frowned upon and “hard” rock especially. Rumor had it, R.U.S.H. was secret devil code for Rock Under Satan’s Hand. Living on the edge, we listened anyway and it had some surprisingly musical songs like SPIRIT OF RADIO and pre-teen me especially responded to FREEWILL, probably because its lyrics resonated with my young brain, but I still wasn’t quite a RUSH fan.
You can choose from phantom fears
And kindness that can kill
I will choose a path that's clear
I will choose free will
—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
It’s 1984 and I am in a Butler Middle School public speaking course with Mike Graves and Dale Larson. During the assignment to introduce a friend, both of them use the same object, a RUSH vinyl record album and sleeve of RUSH: GRACE UNDER PRESSURE.
They get marked down for using the same prop in two speeches but they explain that for both of them, it is literally their favorite album. Dale wore RUSH t-shirts to school and I seem to recall possibly both went to the May 14 show that year at the Salt Palace, long since torn down and replaced.
I would later learn that bassist Geddy Lee’s parents were survivors of WWII Nazi concentration camps before they immigrated in Canada. (Texas wouldn’t allow them to enter, by decree, as of this week.) Later, I would use a song from that album, about a prison camp, RED SECTOR A, in a college course.
Sickness to insanity
Prayer to profanity
Days and weeks and months go by
Don't feel the hunger, too weak to cry
I hear the sound of gunfire at the prison gate
Are the liberators here, do I hope or do I fear?
For my father and my brother, it's too late
But I must help my mother stand up straight
December of that same year, my brother in law gave me RUSH: 2112 on vinyl. The star in a circle seemed a little satanic but I was eager to learn more about this band and this iconic album that was on every rocker’s jean jacket.
Inside on the jacket sleeve was one of the most infamous band photos of all time, the trio with camel toe, silk robes and giant mustaches. But the record was warped and wouldn’t play, so I had to exchange it.
Only they didn’t have any more 2112 at the store, so I was forced to take home Def Leppard: High and Dry. Not long after, that band exploded and after hearing them on every radio station and coming from every teen singer’s mouth, I detested them because they were way too popular to be actually cool and I already realized: they were ruining metal.
—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
It’s 1985 and I wasn’t wrong about Def Leppard but RUSH: POWER WINDOWS is released and it uses a whole lot of synthesizer, features fantastically ugly band haircuts that smacked of New Wave — even electronic drums — and I love it anyway. I was definitely a RUSH fan and especially liked, and still like, its most synth song ever, MYSTIC RHYTHMS from that album.
I also played in a band for a talent show. Russ, Brad Webb, Rick Miller, John Roach and I called ourselves Contra Band and played a couple of numbers for the school. We couldn’t play Rush though.
Mike Graves — from that public speaking class — was a real friend by this point and I joined in the RUSH conversations at school. His older brother Scott was teaching guitar and Mike urged me to sign up, which I failed to do.
My sons Dresden and Logan — both excellent guitar players — go to Scott’s music school now and play RUSH songs at school concerts — RED BARCHETTA comes to mind. Dresden sometimes uses my old guitar. By 1985 I was a band evangelical.
Mystic rhythms capture my thoughts
Carry them away
Mysteries of night escape the light of day
Mystic rhythms under northern lights
Or a canopy of stars
We feel the push and pull
Of restless rhythms from afar
—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
It’s 1988 and in Brighton High School AP English I am challenged by our eccentric retirement-age teacher, swoons for my voice and definitely did more of the same when I wrote a slightly sexy ode to a girl, Gillian, after hiking with her “on a mountain’s stony thigh.”
I liked impressing my teacher, and I liked using my voice and I like to be involved in the arts — though I wouldn’t recognize this about myself for many years — so I learned the words to “Kubla Kahn” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge — who also wrote poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” I’ll still recite the beginning few lines of Kubla Kahn anytime you ask. It starts:
"In Xanadu did Kubla Kahn
A stately pleasure dome decree"
So I was aware of Coleridge, impressing my English teacher, because Neil Peart, RUSH’s drummer and lyricist, was aware of him first and penned the RUSH classic XANADU as an ode to the poem that is considered to contain the most beautiful sounds of any work in the English language. RUSH created its own version:
To stand within the pleasure dome
Decreed by Kubla Khan
To taste anew the fruits of life
The last immortal man
To find the sacred river Alph
To walk the caves of ice
Oh, I will dine on honey dew
And drink the milk of paradise, oh paradise
I quoted that last honey dew phrase a lot, every time my late mother served a melon tray, her favorite -- save ice cream only. There in 1988 I was also taking heaps of crap from Iron Maiden fans, thinking they were more hardcore than Rush fans. Maiden, as it turns out was heavily influenced by RUSH, including Peart’s lyrics, and followed in his footsteps, making “The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner.” by my friend, and William Wordsworth’s, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Peart and thus heavy metal, embraced the Romanic poetry.
I was also getting weird looks from the smart kids for liking heavy metal and progressive rock and growing long hair while they were preparing for Stanford and Harvard. The smart kids get the last laugh, but neither group can take away Kubla Kahn.
—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
It’s 1989 and I am going to graduate high school. Our yearbook gives us a few scrawny characters - a precursor to Twitter I suppose - to say whatever it is we want to say, to speak our words, to leave our mark, to record our voice for history.
I wrote a few stupid age-appropriate lines of drivel. I named some friends I imagined at the time were destined to stay an active part of my life until the day I died and I copied a line from RUSH album linear notes.
“Music by Lee and Lifeson
Lyrics by Peart.”
At least I got something right.
Growing up, it all seems so one-sided
Opinions all provided
The future pre-decided
Detached and subdivided
In the mass-production zone
Nowhere is the dreamer
Or the misfit so alone
Subdivisions
In the high school halls
In the shopping malls
Conform or be cast out
—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
It’s 1990 and by now, if somebody made a movie about me, RUSH is part of the soundtrack of my life. I have close friends that I share musical tastes with. Looking back, we had those important, formative “deep” conversations centered partially around music. There have been many nights in my parent’s basement from the era when I was 15 to 18 years old, trying to decipher the mysteries of RUSH. In my recent past, smart kids like Roach and Jason Yorgason sat around the record player enjoying the rock tunes and discussed lyrics, part of the teen ritual of thinking and growing up.
But in 1990, as a good, faithful church member, I am in New York City as missionary teaching people about Jesus after leaving rock music behind.
All those smart friends, close friends, dear friends still wanted to keep in touch so one day an audio tape arrived from my old bandmates. Mission rules forbid most worldly music, definitely including RUSH, but my savvy friends talked on this tape and then played the PRESTO album in the background, released only days before I left my home. I was months older than my friends, so I was gone and they were still “of the world.” I was skirting the rules but I remember well the pure pleasure of friends who “got” me in worls and music as SHOW DON’T TELL coursed through my earphones.
Who can you believe?
It's hard to play it safe
But apart from a few good friends
We don't take anything on faith
Until later
—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
It’s 1992 and I am back in Salt Lake City, but homesick for New York. I play a lot of basketball, volleyball and I am a college newspaper editor. Metallica became the biggest rock band in the world while I was away and I work concert security with Rick and sometimes Brad, mostly for fun. I see the RUSH: ROLL THE BONES tour and I fall in love for the first time in my life with a girl named Angela.
I am pretty passionate about RUSH at the time, attending the tour that year and she grew to love the band too. She is smarter than me, which I naively believed was new. I’ll never forget that moment of our cheeks pressed together in her dorm room at Stanford, tears streaming down both and mixing as we hugged goodbye.
Her mother and I drove away; I was dying inside, hurting more than I imagined possible at the time. I wasn’t ready for that relationship and it was needlessly volatile and eventually she dumped me, on an extremely snowy morning while she wore a blue dress and curled her brown hair for church, looking at me with brown eyes while she claimed her own life and crushed mine. She consoled me by telling me the boy she was choosing instead of me also liked RUSH and I would like him if I met him. I never did.
I don't believe in destiny
Or the guiding hand of fate
I don't believe in forever
Or love as a mystical state
I don't believe in the stars or the planets
Or angels watching from above
But I believe there's a ghost of a chance
We can find someone to love
And make it last
—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
It’s 1996 and after years of missing Angela, there is a girl I really like. She is unlike me in so many ways. Brad and Rick and I are close friends. We legitimately held actual RUSH parties, that even for non-RUSH fans were pretty fun; for some reason women I dated, and that included some fantastic young women, correctly thought I was a little, uh, unique. RUSH is something of a filter for some of these girls and yes, I was that stupid.
On Nov. 24, Shannon, that girl I really liked, accompanied me and Brad and James Cottle I think (sorry, beyond her, it’s vague) to Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas and we enjoyed a hell of a show with two set lists, including good old 2112, FREEWILL, RED SECTOR A, NATURAL SCIENCE and an encore of YYZ. It was ridiculously fun and so was she, putting up with my fandom. That might have been the best RUSH of my life, plus it was with her.
In 1999 I proposed to her and in 2000 we were married. In 2002, we had our first of three children together, followed by another in 2004, Dresden and Logan. These are the guitar-playing sons. Somehow with busy lives we caught the 30th Anniversary Tour in Utah in 2004. And insane as it seems, the band, in this decade, suddenly becomes pop-culture cool.
Time and motion
Wind and sun and rain
Days connect like boxcars in a train
Fill them up with precious cargo
Squeeze in all that you can find
Spontaneous elation
And the long-enduring kind
—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
It is 2010 and for some reason when I attend the RUSH show with Shannon she brings her good camera and for some reason security lets us walk on through with it. We took tremendous photos.
What you own is your own kingdom
What you do is your own glory
What you love is your own power
What you live is your own story
In your head is the answer
Let it guide you along
Let your heart be the anchor
And the beat of your own song
—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
It is 2015 and for some reason, prior travel plans perhaps, we can’t see the RUSH tour when it visits Utah. The band is saying, through back channels, this series of concerts might be its last. It is the 40th Anniversary Tour and I decide my sons, 15 and 13, need to see this band live, Shannon agrees and she is a tremendous mother, so they get this experience while old enough to remember it.
We attend the Vegas show; they only ever played three shows after in the following days and then live RUSH was indeed over. We nearly went to California for the final night, but it looked liked tickets would be impossible and sometimes reason has to rule art. Lots of other friends are bonded over Rush in this era. Mark Reece, Gary McKeller, Scott Iwasaki and Tracy Mangum come to mind immediately, but life and individual choices have sucked old friends away.
Time stand still
I'm not looking back
But I want to look around me now
Time stands still
See more of the people
And the places that surround me now
Time stands still
Freeze this moment
A little bit longer
Make each sensation
A little bit stronger
Experience slips away
—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
It is 2019 and RUSH has a one-day concert / documentary screening in movie theaters. Sons Dresden and Logan and I, with fans coast to coast, attend this pretty sweet event that may happen again. I hope so.
My parents have died. I am divorced now. Many of the cherished beliefs from my young years have died too. My political viewpoints are gone, obliterated by critical thinking and real-world experience and compassion and facts. My religious beliefs are gone too, evaporating under critical thinking and an understanding how emotions manipulate us and by learning about things I thought I already knew. With that, most of the old friends are gone too. I am still loved though and feel fortunate for friends I have.
I am trying to make a film career to go along with my journalism efforts. I have wrested with realizing I have the heart of an artist but I didn’t cultivate these abilities in critical years of development. Bonus, I am paying the balloon mortgage now for the years of ignoring my body’s health with bad food and sleep and too much sitting.
It went right by me
At the time it went over my head
I was looking out the window
I should have looked
At your face instead
It went right by me
Just another wall
There should have been a moment
When we let our barriers fall
I never meant
What you're thinking
That is not what I meant at all
Well I guess we all
Have these feelings
We can't leave unreconciled
Some of them burned on our ceilings
Some of them learned as a child
—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
It’s 2020. It is yesterday, and I am a social media manager for a TV news station and its website. Our promotions guy Chris walks up to my desk and asks if I’ve heard that Neil Peart died.
I hadn’t.
He explains to me who he is; I already know.
My heart withers in layers.
The only good thing is, I get to speak in behalf of the dead and write an obituary. I get to collect social media about Peart and put it in one place with some brief facts about his life and career and what it meant. I pushed for his death to make TV news. It did. The production crew is full of RUSH fans. Our male TV anchor understands them too, he speaks the words to living rooms around Utah. The show’s producer scheduled it at about the 10-minute mark.
Shannon texted me too, which was tender and appreciated because she wouldn’t feel it like I do, but she understood I would. I texted my sons.
It all feels strangely so personal to me, as if a friend had died. Iwasaki says on The Facebook that he is broken. Reece directs me to public radio, KRCL, which is playing wall-to-wall RUSH. A director of one of the news show explains to me briefly that of course I feel bad, because that guy, Peart, has been in my ears and my head and his words have been in my mouth and with me for years, and now that voice is silent. He is right.
So thanks Neil. Thanks for all your help. Thanks for your thinking. Thanks for elevating. Thanks for being so earnest. Thanks for the literature. Thanks for inspiring. Thanks for the friends. Thanks for the laughs. Thanks for everything.
Hero - the voice of reason
Against the howling mob
Hero - the pride of purpose
In the unrewarding job
Hero - not the champion player
Who plays the perfect game
Not the glamor boy
Who loves to sell his name
Everybody's buying
Nobody's hero
As the years went by, we drifted apart
When I heard that you were gone
I felt a shadow cross my heart
Hero
Music by Lee and Lifeson.
Lyrics by Peart.