"Captain Jack" by Billy Joel
The last shuffle of 2021!
It’s sort of a bleak one, LOL.
I guess to some people that sums about 2021 though.
It’s also a bit of a memoiristic synchronicity too.
Because Billy Joel’s Greatest Hits double album was one of the first three CDs I ever owned, given to me by my dad.
My dad who I often credit as the spirit(s) of the shuffle.
So what’s he/they/it saying today?
On the plus side, this was the song to get Billy Joel a record deal.
As Wikipedia notes:
~It’s considered by some to be the most important and pivotal of his early compositions because his performance of the song at an April 15, 1972, live radio concert at Sigma Studios on WMMR in Philadelphia, and the subsequent airplay this live version received on the station, brought him to the attention of major record labels, including Columbia, with whom he would sign a recording contract in 1973.~
But like I said above, the lyrics are kinda bleak, LOL.
At least on the literal or surface level.
It’s about how Joel observed that upper-middle-class suburban young men, like himself/myself, sometimes waste their potential by escaping through alcohol, drugs, and masturbation.
Saturday night, and you're still hanging around
You're tired of living in your one horse townYour sister's gone out, she's on a date
And you just sit at home and masturbateBut Captain Jack will get you high tonight
And take you to your special island
Captain Jack will get you by tonight
Just a little push, and you'll be smiling
The chorus about “Captain Jack” is not about the alcohol but instead a dealer Billy Joel observed suburban kids going to buy heroin from in the New York City area.
The next verse is about the suburban anti-hero taking a holiday, but finding nowhere ‘cool’ to go.
And then he finds out that his father has committed suicide.
They just found your father
In the swimming pool
And you guess you won't be goin' back to school
Anymore
This brings him back to more Captain Jack.
He then plays his music and smokes his pot and hooks up with a girlfriend in a parking lot, but aches for what went wrong in his life.
Joel concludes the story with perhaps a suicide of his own via the heroin.
Well, now Captain Jack
Could make you die tonight
Just a little push, and you'll be smiling
Like I said, pretty bleak!
I think, though, what’s it doing from a memoir synchronicity perspective, for me today at least, is helping me take stock of my life since my father committed suicide himself and my whole life changed.
Since then, I no longer drink alcohol or caffeine.
I no longer imbibe drugs like cannabis, not even just a little CBD.
But I do still eat a lot of fancy food ;)
I divorced.
And I masturbate more now, LOL.
But I have gone out on a few dates.
I probably listen to too much music still.
And I sometimes care too much about finding out what kind of style of it is in.
But, a bit like Billy Joel, I have turned that into a somewhat useful practice that I hope serves others.
Finally, in a way, when my dad died, I did ‘go back to school’.
A mostly self-directed school, but a school nonetheless.
I had a dream last night about the spiritual teacher Russ Hudson who I studied with at Esalen and have been taking a year-long online class with.
It was after a day of studying Kabbalah.
Because I plan to incorporate the Jewish mystic tradition into my Curb Your Enthusiasm Haggadah.
I personally have so far found Kabbalah more than a bit obtuse.
Yet the last thing I read in The Essential Kabbalah: The Heart of Jewish Mysticism by Daniel C. Matt was:
“Stumbling: Whoever delves into mysticism cannot help but stumble, as it is written: ‘This stumbling block is in your hand.’ You cannot grasp these things unless you stumble over them.”
Which makes me feel better about how I’ve been living and then depicting for all of you my stumbles along this path.
Russ, of course, helped me understand that I likely have more work to do in the Enneagram around point 7 (instead of point 4), which has to do with gluttony/sobriety.
And that even though that gluttony can include pleasure-seeking of all kinds such as alcohol, drugs, and sex.
Sobriety doesn’t have to not be fun.
In fact, sobriety is joyous.
It’s a bringing of sober joy and what Viktor Frankl and The Atlantic recently called tragic optimism to my pain and others’.
Which is something I hope I’ve been able to do for some of you this year.
I’ll end on a song that I’ve chosen this time instead of shuffled to.
It’s full of that sober joy and tragic optimism and I hope it buoys you into 2022.
“I Love My Life” by Demarco
Thanks for reading!
Okay, that’s the three hundred and fortieth Shuffle Synchronicities.