To whomever reads this, I’m calling this “My Zombie Apocalypse Journal,” although I don’t know exactly what this is. I just know something strange is going on out there.
My neighbors are going through some kind of “happening.” I’m writing this journal entry in the hopes that if something were to happen to me, my notes might be of some help to authorities and, dare I say it, last responders.
I’ve watched all the zombie movies, and nothing ever starts suddenly. It starts off with a few weird, isolated events and builds gradually until everything is utter chaos.
I first noticed my neighbors walking their dogs and wearing noise canceling headphones, those large, bulbous contraptions usually worn by airport employees to drown out the sound of jet engines. The headphones are so tightly vice-gripped to their heads, I can barely recognize them. Their faces are squeezed like they’ve been caught in elevator doors.
“But it’s still no use,” mumbled my neighbor, Jen. “There’s no escaping this noise.”
I think it was Jen. The headphones had compressed her features into Picasso-esque proportions, but it sounded like her — if she were talking through elevator doors — so I just went with it.
“Oh, come on,” I said. “It’s not that bad!”
“He’s fine,” she said. “I’ll tell him you said hi.”
Jen didn’t understand me, but I gave her a thumbs up.
“Yeah, tell Kyle I said hi,” I replied. “Yes, please.”
“Not too bad,” she answered, “He should be all healed up in a few days.”
I had no idea what Jen was referring to, but I smiled and waved as I headed back to my yard. She waved back as she pulled the strap to her airport headphones tighter and hurried back to her house, her eyes darting about madly. Daisy, her Jack Russell terrier, resisted the leash and glared menacingly in all directions, not quite knowing where to focus her territorial inclinations. She was clearly outnumbered — she could feel it — but by what?
Last night, as I walked to my mailbox, I waved at a passing car. It was the mild-mannered father of a nice family up the road, a sweet, Clark Kent type. He didn’t see me wave. His eyes were fixed blankly on the road. I heard/felt the chest-rattling bass notes of Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle” as it pounded mercilessly from the inside of his pearl-gray minivan. I watched him pull into his driveway and sit there for the longest time, still staring blankly ahead. The last thing he wanted to do was open his door to the cacophony of countless mating insects.
Yesterday, I was attacked by a bluebird. Unprovoked. A bluebird! You know it’s getting bad when even characters from “Snow White” are wanting a piece of you.
This noise is affecting everyone. Backyard grills, once smoking intensely on any given weekend, sit abandoned, unused. A jovial, barrel-chested neighbor whose barbecued ribs can usually be smelled for blocks around on summer Saturdays stood lifeless in his garage this morning with his hands over his ears. I think he was crying. He was in Desert Storm, four deployments, but this might be his breaking point.
The gaunt faces of children are pressed sadly against the windows of neighboring homes. They look out at the trees with a distorted expression usually reserved for watching confusing sci-fi movies.
The cicada is one of the closest things to sci-fi I think I have ever encountered in nature, so I get it. I have always suspected that cicadas came here long ago from some distant galaxy or alternate universe. They seem like they could be another planet’s butterflies. They’re quite similar to butterflies, if you think about it. They morph from one thing to another, they emerge from a chrysalis, of sorts, just like butterflies. Yet, when they emerge, they look like something out of Stan Winston’s special effects studio.(1)
The outside buzz is so relentless, I can almost forget that it’s there. And like most musicians of a certain age, I have a touch of tinnitus, so what’s another layer of white noise in an already busy, buzz-addled brain?
But I have a small recording studio in my home. It’s mostly for making demos of my songs and recording my podcasts, but I have some very sensitive microphones. They pick up everything. After layering multiple tracks of harmonies over a particularly quiet, acoustic guitar tune the other day, the buzz became very present, layered as it was six-to-eight times. Divided by closed doors and windows, the outside cicadas are a distant drone, but when recorded multiple times and stacked on top of each other, it gets quite noticeable.
At first, I was annoyed. But as they(2) say, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. And join ’em, I did.
I grabbed my cellphone and headed for the backyard, waving at a neighbor wearing big headphones and walking a large dog. He just looked back at me blankly. The dog looked exhausted, like it hadn’t slept in days.
I opened my Voice Memos app and pushed “record.” What happened after that, I’m still trying to understand. I’ll do my best to put it into words.
As one who makes music, I have had several unforgettable encounters with nature. One spring day as I was playing my guitar and singing, working on a new song, I noticed a pair of robins outside my open window, a male and female. They were singing along with me. Their warbling notes grew louder and more lively when I played, and they softened when I played lighter. Over the next several minutes, I changed the tempo and volume of my playing, rising and falling to make sure I was hearing what I thought I was hearing. Virtuosos that they were, they kept right up with me. I’ve played with some amazing singers, but that was, without a doubt, the most magical trio I have ever been a part of.
There are bullfrogs on my 2005 release, “The Beige Album.”(3) I recorded them myself, sticking a microphone out my window toward the creek one sleepless night to capture their rhythmic “ribbits.” I wrote an instrumental guitar piece to go along with them and called it “Bull Frog Blues.”
The album was mixed by my friend, Dale, in his Chico, California, studio. There is a creek on the property.
Late one night, as Dale finished mixing “Bull Frog Blues” — mixing requires listening to a song repeatedly on big speakers — he stepped outside to see a large bullfrog on his welcome mat.
“He was looking up at me,” Dale recalls, “like, ‘I’m here for the party, man!’”
My Tennessee bullfrogs had made a friend. I wish they could have met. I have always wondered if that California bullfrog detected an accent in the “ribbits” of his Tennessee cousins.
And now I can add this cicada encounter to these stories. When standing in my backyard, surrounded by this wall of sound, I was overwhelmed with emotion. Similar to the feelings
The cicada is one of the closest things to sci-fi I have ever encountered in nature.
I had when watching the total eclipse on an Arkansas side road back in April, I felt a deep appreciation to be here now, on this rare occasion when lives collide and nature colludes to create such simple serendipity.
I put my annoyances aside and found empathy and understanding for these amazing creatures.
The story of the cicada is rich with allegory. The insects we are now hearing spent 13 long, dark years underground, waiting for these five short, glorious weeks to sing, to fly, to make love. And then, they are gone. Their eggs will lie in the ground, and this explosion of sound will happen again 13 years from now.(4)
I can relate to a creature who has had to wait such a very long time for love, for freedom, for life to get better. And then only to see it change, to die after a very short time. I’ve had to start over, again and again, to emerge out of a shell so slowly, it seemed like I might never crawl out. And I’ve done all of this recently, opened my wings and my heart to new love, to a new dawn after a long, measureless night, underground, unseen.
“I’ll be darned,” I thought, as I stood there among the noise. “I’m a cicada!”
I took my phone to my studio, opened my recording software and added the cicadas to a new session. The drone created by these competing cicadas just so happened to be in the key of E — not even a little flat, not even a little sharp — it was a solid E major.
I picked up my guitar, put on my headphones, closed my eyes and, well, just played along.
Some 20 minutes later, I had a song. The words and music came so easily, like pulling a favorite old sweater over my head and sliding my arms in.
I’m fortunate to have had more than a few muses in my life. They’ve always been women. This is a first.
I think I might enjoy this apocalypse thing after all.
Footnotes for your enlightenment and education. It cannot be overstated how enlightening these footnotes are.
1. Stan Winston is the genius behind such monstrous wonders as “Aliens,” “The Terminator” and “Edward Scissorhands.” My personal favorite,”Dracula’s Dog” (1977), should be watched late on a Friday night with a roomful of “nerdy” friends, thin crust pizza, Fritos, adult beverages and — I’m spitballing here — Creamsicles.1a Along with his countless film credits, Winston answered the question on the minds of so many: “If Dracula had a dog, what kind of dog would it be?” And I, for one, am eternally grateful.
1a. My movie/food-pairing skills are well known within my social circle. I have to say the night we watched “Little Big Man” (Dustin Hoffman, 1970) while enjoying buffalo hot wings, corn liquor and fry bread is perhaps my personal best. A close second would be watching “Donnie Darko” (Jake Gyllenhaal, 2001) while foraging through small, variety bags of chips like a pack of raccoons.
2. ”They” are a largely anonymous group who get referred to anytime a writer doesn’t want to take the time to do actual research.
3. The Beatles have “The White Album,” Metallica has “The Black Album,” and I felt the color beige was a long-neglected color in rock ’n’ roll. Plus, I was simply running out of names for my albums.
4. Experts have told us the reason this year is so loud is that another species of cicada, the 17-year incubating cicada, is also emerging at the same time, so it’s as if the Oscars and Golden Globes were scheduled on the same night, and we all have a red carpet.
