PART 2 A Return to Form Chicago, November–December 2025 Set list: Hotel California, The Eagles—or Bossa Bros Thinking Out Loud, Ed Sheeran Landslide, Fleetwood Mac What a Fool Believes, The Doobie Brothers House of the Rising Sun, The Animals The Wire, HAIM You Are the Sunshine of My Life, Stevie Wonder “You’re up early for a Sunday?” My wife comes into the kitchen. I can hear her open the cupboard behind me, where we keep the coffee cups. I stare out the window at the rising sun, just above the fence in our backyard. My wife pulls back a chair and sits down next to me. Steam from the coffee fogs her glasses. This tiny thing, this silly little gesture, reminds me that I love her. “I need to tell you a story,” I say, reaching for my wife’s hands. The next two hours pass by as I fill her in on Pannah: falling asleep at the office, going to find him with our daughter, karaoke, and finally his story of escape. “So the Vietnamese army invaded right in the nick of time?” My wife’s eyes grow wide. I wonder what mine look like. This is the third night I haven’t been able to sleep. “Yeah, a miracle. He was able to secure safe passage to Vietnam by showing the soldiers where the cache of hot dogs was.” I rub my face. My wife sets down a fresh cup of coffee in front of me. “He stayed there till Koeh was born. Then his wife got cancer, and they moved to Canada so she could see a specialist. After she died, they came here for Koeh to go to school.” “Wow, and all this time he didn’t learn English?” “Yeah. Koeh says that he’s stubborn about it, old-dog-new-tricks and all that. But actually, Koeh thinks the real reason his father doesn’t learn English is that he doesn’t want to know what the lyrics to his favorite songs mean—like they may not be as good as they are in his heart.” My wife brushes blonde hair from her forehead and warms her hands around her mug. “What next?” she asks. “I dunno. I guess we record an album.” “Why do you think he wanted to tell you all that?” My wife takes my hand in hers and traces the lines of my palm. Her hands are warm from her mug. “Not sure.” “Go to sleep. It’s Sunday. Nothing important to do. You need to rest.” She stands up and smiles down at me, and I look up at her. Maybe it’s the lack of sleep, but I don’t pull my eyes away. I study her irises—like if I keep looking, I can see who she really is—and that would somehow tell me who I am. That doesn’t happen. But I do see something I haven’t seen in a while: love. I leave her in the kitchen and pad down the hallway to the bathroom. As I piss, something deep and revelatory squeezes my temples. Was it that her love hadn’t been there before, or was it that I hadn’t looked long enough, hard enough, to see it? All the time I thought she was avoiding me, annoyed with me, secretly disappointed in me. Maybe I was scared to linger, to look at her and see what I feared in those eyes. I collapse into the bed and sleep all day. “The studio is on fire?!” It’s early in the morning, and I’m yelling at my brother on speakerphone. “Well, it’s not currently on fire, of course, but there was a fire, and they are closed for repairs.” “Hold on, I’m dropping off my kid,” I say. “Bye, Dad.” My daughter waves at me, walking backward. “Bye—oh, I’m still picking you up, right?” She smiles and nods. “Yep.” I pull out of the lot. “Hey, bro,” I ask. “Yeah?” “Do you own a dog?” “Yeah, two. Why?” “Never mind.” I sulk. “Anyway, thanks for trying to hook it up. I’ll just have to tap another resource. Let me know when we can get the deposit back.” “Hey! Wait. Don’t hang up.” “Yeah?” I turn onto the highway—no SBs today. “Didn’t you read the contract?” I feel a prick of dread on the back of my neck. “Yes.” I half-lie. There were way too many pages to fully read what was referred to me by my brothers as a standard boilerplate studio rental agreement. “So, you know that the deposit is non-refundable, right?” I feel my guts wallop. “What! For real?! That was a couple grand out the bank! How do I explain this to my wife? This expense, not to mention the musicians I hired—it’s close to 15k!” “Well, you can hope that the renovations get finished and you can keep your spot.” “Fine.” I wipe cold sweat from my forehead as I park at work. What the f**k am I supposed to do? “Hey, bro, what has you so excited to record again? You with a new band?” “Not exactly.” White noise builds up between us like accumulating snow. He wants an answer and won’t hang up till I give it. “Okay, I’ll send you the demo. It’s rough. I recorded it in my basement.” “I’ll be gentle, little bro.” He hangs up. I get to work, and my supervisor is standing by my cubicle. “So, how is the brain fog? Are you managing?” “Oh, yeah, actually I started taking cold showers,” I lie. “I’m much more focused now.” To my horror, she pulls up a chair and sits, settling in for a fuller explanation. When I fail to give one, she scoots closer and drops her voice to a whisper. “Can I be honest?” I’m not sure what to say to that, but I nod. “Covid really messed me up too.” What is this b***h talking about? I feel my hackles rise. “That kind of radical change, the fear, the uncertainty. Powerful paradigm changes can really affect your mind, your relationships.” “Yeah.” I half-fake curiosity. I say half-fake because this is the first real conversation I’ve ever had at work. “Yup. The stay-at-home order was announced a week after I put my mother in a home. She died of Covid a month later.” My supervisor looks around conspiratorially. “I’m not supposed to share details about my life that are this personal. But that tragedy did something to me. I couldn’t enjoy what I enjoyed before. I didn’t think the same. I started to fixate on the strangest house projects, I made weird business investments, tried my hand at writing romantasy novels.” “Romantasy?” I ask, leaning back in my chair. “It’s a mix of romance and fantasy.” “And people like that?” I chuckle and scratch my scalp through my hat. “So many. You’d be amazed. Anyway, back to what I was saying—some psychologists call it ‘shaking the snow globe.’ When your life goes through a big change, your mind changes with it—you change. Sometimes for good and sometimes for the worse.” “Did you change for the better?” I ask. “My husband left me, my mom died, I lost a couple thousand dollars and hours of my life I can’t get back.” She pauses. “I changed, that’s all. No good, no bad, it just is what it is.” This pep talk was falling flat. I feel a prickly need to show her that her efforts weren’t in vain, so I nod my head. “But that’s not what I wanted to tell you,” she continues. “When life shakes the snow globe, it’s useless to ask whether you’re changing for better or worse. What matters is knowing that change is coming. You’re allowed to be afraid of it. But don’t waste time fearing that you’ll stay the same. That never happens.”**** I sit there with my mouth open. She looks concerned. “Brain fog again?” “Uh, no. Sorry. Thanks for saying that. That really helps.” Amazed, I realize I’m not lying. “No problem. Glad you’re back in the office.” She stands and walks away. “So I get to meet the band?” My daughter buckles up in the front seat. “Where are they from? How did you get them to join?” “You’re amped up,” I say. “I just really want Mr. P to be a famous singer.” She looks out the window and waves to her friends in the schoolyard. “My roommate back in college played bass in a punk band. He reached out to his sister, who is a classically trained jazz guitarist.” “Don’t you know someone involved with—” “I reached out,” I interrupt, “but haven’t heard anything. That guy is super busy. He probably has better things to do.” We drive into the heart of the city, into a blacktop lot behind a row of connected high street shops. The dumpsters are overflowing and covered with graffiti. “What a dump,” my daughter says, stepping out of the van. “It’s a place to practice. In this industry, you take what you can get.” My bassist is leaning against the back door of one of the shops. He sees me and waves through a fog of vape smoke. As he makes his way toward us, my daughter walks around the van to stand next to me. “Will Mr. P and Koeh be here?” she whispers. “Not tonight. I need to see if these guys have the right chemistry first. Plus, he’s cleaning my office building right now, remember.” “Hey!” My bassist reaches us and daps me up. “It’s been a while, man. Ready to jam?” My daughter cuts her eyes at this. “Come on in, man. The owner is real chill. He lets us play shows here sometimes—as well as practice.” We walk through a back door and into a shabby laundromat. Off to one side of a long bar is a dinky stage, complete with PA speakers and a drum set. We pass by rows of double-decker washing machines toward the stage. A very large man sits at the bar with his back to us. “Hey, Manny! Cool if we practice?” The man at the bar doesn’t turn around but simply grunts his consent and sips from a rocks glass. My daughter perches on an amp, kicking her legs in the air. My bassist slings his instrument over his shoulder and then pulls his long orange hair free from the strap, flipping it back. “You didn’t tell me you found a drummer,” he says. “I didn’t. Not yet,” I say, confused. A toilet flushes somewhere on the other side of the laundromat. “No way,” I say, dumbfounded. “Is that him!” screams my daughter. “Taylor Swift’s drummer?!” I cant believe my eyes. My college roommate who now plays in Taylor Swifts band comes out of the bathroom. He smiles and wipes his han
