One line. Eight words. One of my all time favorite lyrics in a song. Ever.

It was written by a guy from Evanston, Illinois who traveled to San Diego before settling in Seattle to play in a band that has been together for close to 30 years and has toured the globe numerous times. That’s some wave for him. Several waves, literal and metaphorical.

Some songs just get under your skin and stay there. You hear them through your ears, but feel them with your whole body. The music reaches out and grabs you by the chest and raises you off the ground and takes you to a place somewhere else for a few minutes until it’s over and drops you back onto the ground and into your mind. This is one of those songs for me.

Eddie once said before introducing the song before a crowd in Philadelphia (emphasis mine):

Just before we start this next one, been thinking a lot about it and as we’ve traveling there’s been a lot of requests from a lot of good folks who are going through some pain and needed a bit of healing maybe with a song or maybe a dedication to a lost loved one something like that.


And it’s no surprise because it’s part of life. We can not avoid the grave. We can prolong it the best we can but you never know if it’s going to be something sudden, something senseless… you might be able to expect it but that’s probably not going to help the sadness. I know some of us out there we’ve lost brothers, we’ve lost fathers, we’ve lost sisters and kids. This song was about losing a Pop, and this song was one of those healing songs.


It’s not going to lessen the blow of any kind of tragedy, but at loud volumes or alone or with a lot of other people, some times it just helps you get through because you don’t get around it, you don’t get over it, you don’t get under it. You gotta get through it. Or else it never goes away.


So this one goes out to two brothers in the audience who lost their brother Colin McCovern and we just want to send this out to your friend Dear Colin.

Eddie Vedder, Philadelphia 4/29/2016

My connection with this song wasn’t with a loss of any one person close to me but it was more of a mental or spiritual healing. When I heard this song the first time, the last song on an angst-filled album during the angst-filled time of the early 90s, that lyric stuck in my head immediately. I was about to graduate from high school and enter college at the time. Decisions about what to do with the rest of my life were weighing on me because I really had no idea at the time what to do. Childhood was over. Time to “grow up”. But where do I go from here?

I went to college, because that’s what kids did after high school. I got a job, because that’s what people did after college. It was like living according to a script or following instructions step by step in the manual of progressing through life as a good consumer in a capitalist society. Was I riding the wave, or was the wave pushing me where I didn’t want to go?

I’m not a surfer, so I don’t know the mechanics and the philosophy of it all to truly understand it. Just from someone observing from afar, it seems rather insane for a small human to paddle out into the massive ocean on a piece of wood or polystyrene only to have this large body of water repeatedly push them back to shore. When the art is mastered though, it’s a beautiful thing to watch. Sure the human looks like it’s in control, but really, how much control do they have? They’re not going anywhere the wave doesn’t want them to go. Eventually, they all come back to shore. Each wave a new situation, a new force of nature to deal with and the only question is how well you ride it out.

In life you have to do a lot of things you don’t fucking want to do. Many times, that’s what the fuck life is… one vile fucking task after another.

Al Swearengen, Deadwood

There were many times I felt alone with outside forces pushing me in directions I wasn’t sure if that was the way to go or not. Some choices are more easily made than others, and all of them have consequences. Often times decisions were made out of pure need for survival, in the sense that someone who has certain privileges in the late 20th early 21st century sees survival in the capitalist society — paying bills, paying taxes, maintaining food and shelter, saving up to buy stuff and go places. Other decisions were just because I knew this was the only life I have and I’m going to make as much of it as I can.

It wasn’t easy for someone with low self esteem to make those choices, nor one driven by greed. The only way to avoid drowning with seemingly basic life decisions was to stand up, use whatever mental or physical tools were available, and ride it out. Stay balanced and upright. Get back to solid ground and get ready for the next wave. It was coming whether I wanted it to or not. Sometimes there are just forces larger than you that you can’t control, but you don’t have to let them knock you over either.

Ride the wave where it takes you.

And this is what I’m thinking about after one month of working from home during the time of COVID-19 in 2020. Just trying to ride it out.