How Tom Waits Saved My Marriage
The first and only time I’ve heard the storytelling recording by Tom Waits called “What’s He Building?” was at Saguaro Man (a local off-shoot of the Burning Man festival).
For those who haven’t heard it, the recording is a narrated story of paranoia, suspicion, and fear. It’s voiced from the perspective of someone who hears hammering and odd noises coming from a neighbor’s house late at night. They notice ‘suspicious’ vibes about him: the man lives alone, and doesn’t interact with anyone. They observe such things as him being out on his roof one night with a flashlight, and wonder if he isn’t trying to contact or connect with space aliens.
As I listened, I increasingly understood that, in reality, very benign things could be happening. He could be doing home renovations, and in order to do the work it has to be at night to fit his schedule. I understood how just being out on his roof with a flashlight at night could look strange to others, and misinterpreted.
You see, I’d been urging my husband to act a certain way for years, and it always irritated him. Because there was a time in which we regularly stayed in different RV parks and campgrounds, I always coached him to be conscious of what others could see on his big TV computer screen (through the window or screen door).
My husband loved (and still does) looking things up on google maps to get a look at the land from above. The things he researches can include odd points of interest, including historical or significant current event locations. One day, he paired this with looking up RV screen door latches (ours had broken). It was remarkable to me how much the latches looked like guns as they were presented on the computer screen.
Add into the mix the fact that he also had a long call with an international friend in which he completely spoke another language, well, I knew that was a potent mix for neighbor’s paranoia. Someone could easily jump to a negative assumption based on prejudices. And I would say as such to my husband.
He thought I was the one who was paranoid, thinking the worst of the people around us. He’s against living in a state of always being fearful of what other people think; he believes to truly live free is to be free of such worries. It was a point of contention with us—until we heard the Tom Waits recording. We looked at each other as we listened to it, and I knew that there was a new acceptance and understanding of what I was trying to convey all along.
The teaching in all of this is that it’s never all one way or all the other; Life is a balance of things. It’s helpful to view one’s own life through the lens of others’ eyes, but we ultimately cannot let it dictate who we are and what we do. All we can do is live as happy, healthy and whole as possible, always choosing Divine Love, and the chips will fall as they may.