on seeing an idol

Brian Eno and David Byrne, 1981. Photographed by Marcia Resnick xxxxxx At sixteen, I used to drive to the gym at five in the morning while listening to More Songs About Buildings and Food. Hearing The Good Thing on loop was one of the few things that kept me awake, speeding on gravel rural roads on less than three hours of sleep. At seventeen, I spent 24 hours solo in the depths of Algonquin Park, three days of canoeing away from civilization. I climbed down a tree to get to the lake and sat for hours watching the sun, singing every Talking Heads song I could think of from memory. All of Stop Making Sense, all of Speaking in Tongues, all of Remain in Light. At eighteen, I felt the anxiety of the world pass me by with new elections and hundreds of new kinds of global disasters. I listened to Life During Wartime, and felt for once that someone really knew what it felt like to live in the times I was living in, and how to translate that feeling into a four minute song. At twenty-two, I…