1–3 Stanford Hospital, 500 Pasteur Drive, Palo Alto (April 21). A few days after a third open-heart surgery—the last two in 2022—I needed to feel more than I could manage on my own hooked up in a bed: to feel more alive and more in touch with morbidity. I needed to hear Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song,” but not his and the Wailers’ original—I wasn’t up to that. Not Joe Strummer’s; for all my affection for him, whenever I tried to play it, I could only feel him falling short of the song. So that left Johnny Cash. Three people who didn’t live much past singing the same song. I looked for it on my phone, and what came up was a Cash-Strummer mashup, and this time Joe made it through the song. They were pitted against each other, trading lines, and it wasn’t exactly a conversation. I saw two people in a small room on either side of a desk: an interrogation room, though I couldn’t tell who was the cop and who was the suspect. They went back and forth, neither giving an inch, until there was some kind of stalemate: you have your version of what happened, I have mine. You’re free to go, but come back tomorrow. And then I could listen to Bob Marley, and get lost in that crystal palace video, a slave ship escaping history into a whole cosmology.
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