11 Jul 2026 3 min read Field Notes

And It Stoned Me

Photo by S. Rolling

Content note: childhood abuse, early substance use.

I heard that song for the first time when I was six or seven. Mid-'70s. I didn't know yet that I'd spend the next fifty years finding out what it actually meant.

At the time, I just knew it made something in me go quiet. A song about being a kid, about a kind of ease I didn't have. I didn't have the words for why I loved it. I just knew it was the sound of something I was supposed to have, to be allowed.

I was already learning to disappear on more than one front. Both parents gave the reasons to. Brother J gave me a way to.

He wasn't the first one to do harm in that house. It just landed on him before it landed on me. By the time it got to me, he'd already learned exactly what to do with it. He handed it forward the way it was handed to him. Cigarettes first, when I was six. Weed, then drink, by the time I was ten. I hated it, then I didn't. That was the whole design.

The song and the substance arrived close enough together that I can't fully separate them now. Both were something to disappear into and both worked. One of them just didn't leave a mark you could see.

For years, that's all the song was to me. A door to something I could hear but not stand inside. Longing dressed up as a melody.

At seventeen, I stopped having a place to live. I finished high school out of a car, working before and after. Showering when I could, sleeping wherever didn't draw attention. Nobody was regulating anything for me. I had to build whatever steadiness I had out of nothing.

Once I had enough stability to do anything but survive it, I started hiking. Obsessively, alone mostly and I didn't quite know what I was doing yet.

I think I was looking for the thing the song had been describing the whole time. Not the words, the state under them. A place nothing was being asked of me.

I didn't make that connection then, I just kept going back.

It took decades to close the loop, not on stability. I never got that in the way most people mean it. It took a body that finally ran out of road to perform on. Illness, flare, years of negotiating what a single mile would cost before I paid it.

Somewhere in there, I found the thing the song had been pointing at. Not peace or resolution. Grief and gratitude in the same breath. Joy sitting right next to what it costs to still be here. Everything, unfiltered, at once.

It showed up when there was nothing left to hold it closed.

I loved that song for fifty years before I understood why. As a kid, it was longing for something I didn't have. At seventeen, it was a door I didn't know I was walking through.

Same four and half minutes of music the whole time. It just took me most of a life to catch up to what it already knew.

Now it's just an accurate description of a place I've actually been.

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Connective Tissue:

→ Everything at Once
→ Before There Were Practices
→ On Arrival: Without a Map