Victor recommends “Being There” by Wilco
Happy “Being There” release date. I posted this five years ago and my sentiments about this record are the same, and though I am older and closer to ending my career and embracing my next iteration, it is still seminal to who I am:
On this day, October 29th, 1996, Wilco’s classic record “Being There” was released. Twenty one years, in my years, doesn’t seem much; however tracing my life, I was in my first year as a high school English teacher, Alec, wasn’t yet three, I was still living on the Wood Streets, and Toby wasn’t even a thought. Yet, this record hasn’t lost it’s lustre.
Jeff Tweedy, with whom I share a birthday, was dealing with my same pressures: Marriage, mortgage, work, responsibility, and the birth of a child. While I have come a long way in those 21 years, mostly good, there are times that I think of “Misunderstood” when Jeff sings “There’s a fortune inside your head/When all you touch turns to lead/You think you might just crawl back in bed/With The fortune inside your head.” I am grateful that I didn’t seek the comfort of the darkness and those elusive horizontal dreams. And while I haven’t created a classic record from years of toil, I have fostered my sons to the young men they are, motivated and engaged countless numbers of students to think, to read, to write, and to dream, and surrounded myself with friendships and community that spurs me on despite the thoughts of doubt and diffidence.
Though Tweedy ends the song with thirty-something angst by insisting “I’d like to thank you all for nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing at all, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing at all,” I’d like to thank Tweedy, and Wilco, for exploring this modern fatherhood that many men march with thought of the imperative, and not of the essential.
Victor Sandoval is a writer and English professor in Riverside, CA. The creator of Memoir Mixtapes is one of the students mentioned above, who he certainly motivated to think, read, write, and dream.
Listen:
