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Stuck in Normal
by Chris Bertolet - bertolet@earthlink.net

My great Aunt Constance died last week. Apparently, she'd had a massive stroke and slipped into a coma two weeks earlier. But as folks lying in comas generally say little, no one on our side of the family heard about it until she was gone.

Forgive me for speaking ill of the dead, but there was really nothing that great about great Aunt Constance - save for perhaps her girth and her eccentricity. She never married, and never had children. Truth told, I don't think she liked them much. Unfailingly negative, she had a way of saying precisely the wrong thing at precisely the wrong time.

Constance was also miserly to the extreme; at holidays and birthdays, she'd often give gifts she found at yard sales or in the "as-is" bin at the discount store. More often than not, they were useless. In particular, I recall a kite with no string, and a dog-eared version of A TALE OF TWO CITIES, in French.

She gave me that one when I was three.

On the rare occasion when Constance found her way into family conversation, it was as the brunt of a joke. We snickered about her past in the WAAC's, and her penchant for comfortable shoes. We sometimes wondered about the fortune she'd accumulated under her mattress, and whether her stout-ankled postal carrier would one day find herself the beneficiary of a large check, sealed with a kiss, courtesy of Constance's "estate."

When the day finally came, though, the jokes suddenly weren't so funny anymore.

We came to learn that when her sister entered Constance's New Jersey home to inventory her belongings, she was met with stacks upon stacks of yellowed newspapers that Constance had obsessively hoarded from the 1950's to the present. Cobwebs lined the narrow paths that wound through the incomprehensible, door-to-door mess. Boxes of cash were stashed among reams of paper records of a life not lived.

Given a picture like that, it's hard to imagine that Constance's "Golden Years" were anything but greys and browns.

* * * *

As far back as I can remember, Aunt Constance obsessively chronicled our extended family, researching lineage and compiling every piece of information she could find into bulging trees and mind-numbing histories. She'd offer the fruits of her labor to historical societies, and to her family (at a modest discount, of course). She also admonished me at a very young age that I must one day father a male child, lest our little branch of the tree should wither and fall off.

Sure, it doesn't take a PhD to know that Constance had "issues." Though no one may ever know for sure, I imagine that someone, when she was young, tore her innocence violently and unspeakably away. The rest of her life, by extension, was a sadly fetishistic attempt to regain it by clinging to every vestige of the past she could find.

If you believe Freud, then loss of innocence, whether by sexualization or otherwise, equates in the subconscious to death. All of which points to an especially pathetic irony: in her fervent desire to cheat death by archiving life, great Aunt Constance missed out on it entirely.

* * * *

"You cannot create experience," Albert Camus once said, "You must undergo it." Indulge my own corollary to Camus' wise words: you can't re-create experience, either. You can't cram it into a bottle, and you can't write it onto a reel of magnetic tape.

Yes, undeniably, you can approximate experience, and the technologies we use to approximate experience are evolving at astonishing speed. I have an FOB tape from one of the 1997 Gorge Phish shows that sounds so sweet and crinkly, I can almost see the mineral oil smoke coiling up and around Chris Kuroda's lights.

But I know this because I listen to it.

If you're reading this, you probably know someone who has walls full of tapes, many hundreds or several thousands of hours of his favorite live band. Perhaps that person goes so far as to collect each and every show from each and every tour. Perhaps that person forgoes untold niceties, even traveling to see his favorite band, so that he can have more tapes on his shelf. Ironically, perhaps that person never listens to more than 20% of the tapes he collects. Perhaps that person is you.

My point is not to slander or even question tapers and the service they provide. Tapers are archivists, and without their selfless efforts, I wouldn't be able to listen to that transcendent Gorge show whenever the fancy struck. My point is to suggest that we all question, now and then, what forms our passion for music takes.

A quick Infoseek search suggests that hoarding behavior has deep psychological roots, often traumatic, other times instinctual. Bees hoard honey and squirrels hoard nuts for obvious reasons, but what makes fans like us hoard tapes? Is it that we fear a lean season ahead? Do we want to have enough music to last us through Armageddon, if need be? Is it, for others, a manifestation of the trauma of Jerry Garcia's passing? Or are we on some level, like Aunt Constance, trying to cheat death by collecting the past?

I'm not really sure. But I do think it's rather sad to sit in a room, stare at the walls, and listen to the past while the world flies by outside. And there's something even sadder about it when the collection of moments becomes greater than one's capacity to re-live them, and when the compulsion to hold on to the old eclipses the desire to go forward and live in the new.

So say a prayer for Aunt Constance, if you will, and for all the Aunt Constances out there in the world. And once in a while, when you think to yourself, "Just another three shows and I'll have the whole tour," remember Aunt Constance and all the drifting and dreaming she never did.

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When he's not tending the flock, Chris Bertolet is busy running a travel agency that specializes in tours of Third World sweatshops. He's hoping Michael Jordan will endorse his product.