The Wisdom Of Jimmy Buffett

At some point during my deflowering in Whistler the other week, an earworm became lodged in my brain and in spite of vigorous and repeated jarring impacts served up by the bike park, the damn thing stayed stuck in my head for a couple days. When it’s a song that I like, I am pretty cool with this happening. In this case, it was a Jimmy Buffett song. I do not like the music of Jimmy Buffett.

This cannot be overstated.

Once upon a very long time ago, I was dating the sister of a guy I was working construction with, and both she and her brother, my coworker, got pretty rowdy once they had a few drinks in them. And a few drinks was always a given. Then things would proceed to ramp up from there. They both also happened to be pretty big into Jimmy Buffett. It was the late 80s, and finding things to hate about pop culture at that time was a target rich environment, but still, that’s not really an excuse. Jimmy Buffett is the sort of thing that our parents listened to, if we were raised in a house full of drunks trying to booze the edges off that cocaine binge they’d been on for several days. The soundtrack for that particular circle of hell will invariably be the Eagles or Jimmy Buffett. Pretty sure that my coworker and his sister, or my girlfriend and her brother, the guy I worked with, came from a comfortable, nurturing, non-Jimmy Buffett kind of upbringing.

Nature versus nurture aside, these two managed to drag me to a Jimmy Buffett concert at Shoreline Ampitheatre. I have tried pretty hard not to think about this with much specificity over the ensuing years, but let’s put the timeline at somewhere right around 1990. I was no longer working construction, and no longer dating my coworker’s sister, but she and I had decided to become housemates because we got along real well in all other regards, Jimmy Buffett notwithstanding. I also had another coworker who was a full-on Parrothead a few years before that. New country, Parrotheads, talk radio, and if we were lucky, KFOG; thus rang the soundtrack of my hammer swinging years.

So anyway, there we were at this gathering of the Parrotheads, tens of thousands strong. And I don’t know if it was the booze, or the hours out in the sun at a concert venue built upon an old landfill that was still so actively outgassing methane you could put a lighter to the grass and watch it go “foop” in a tiny mushroom cloud of flame with a high degree of repeatability, but shit got weird. And then shit got dark. These giant conga lines of sunburned middle aged white folk in Hawaiian shirts would spontaneously form and begin snaking through the massive crowds. People wearing headgear in the form of rubber sharks, performing dance moves that may have had something to do with whatever was happening on stage, but might also have been telegraphing the onset of delirium tremens. So much chaotic motion, but nothing was happening in time with the music. Devolution in action, conga lines stumbling and collapsing upon themselves, hundreds of people going down at once. The shambling messy exact definitive opposite of a mosh pit degenerating into something that can only be described as a clumsy orgy, well before sunset.

The voyeuristic among us might think we want to witness an orgy. But that’s because the voyeuristic among us who think we might want to witness such a thing are probably not picturing it involving hordes of sunburned middle aged white folk, hammered out of their gourds, well before sunset. AND IF THAT IS WHAT YOU ARE IMAGINING STOP RIGHT NOW. Like I said, shit got dark, well before the sun went down. Safe to say, I’ve never really made my peace with the music of Jimmy Buffett since that day.

There’s a scene in the cinematic masterpiece known as “Austin Powers In Goldmember” where Michael Caine, playing Austin Powers’ father, utters the line; “There’s only two things I can’t stand in this world – people who are intolerant of other people’s cultures… and the Dutch.”

You could supplant "Jimmy Buffett fans" in there instead of “the Dutch”, and that would about sum up my feelings. Or, to take it a giant step weirder, one need only reference episode 11 of the beyond awesome Yacht Rock saga.

“Yamo murdered a lot of people out there…”

“Those weren’t people, James Ingram, they were Jimmy Buffett fans.”

So it felt a bit off, 34 years later, to have “Changes in latitude, changes in attitude” stuck in my head for two whole days. But at the same time, it kinda fit. That’s the curse of Jimmy Buffett.

I was having my pinhole aperture view of riding blown wide open. This is always unsettling, but I believe it is also necessary. Still, it can do a number on one’s head. Fortunately, bike parks have this whole cosmos of rider ability flowing through them at all times. So, it is possible to be in a state of awe seeing Darren Berrecloth hanging out right next to Ed Masters and a whole gaggle of insanely talented, gloveless, questionably mustached Kiwi rippers and feeling like you just do not have the chops to do any single run on this mountain justice, but at the same time, right next to that very scenario, there will almost certainly be a family of eight on matching rental DH bikes inching tentatively down the hill.

And right then you realize we all exist on a spectrum and that there is no top, and maybe no bottom, and we are all just somewhere on this giant celestial/evolutionary curve and it’s all gonna be okay and “changes in latitude, changes in attitude, nothing remains quite the same. All of our running and all of our cunning, if we couldn’t laugh we would all go insane…”

Fuck I hate this song, but damned if the guy didn’t speak some high proof troof. Even still, ESPECIALLY with that embed, I feel like I am committing some sort of crime against humanity. Ah well...

I came home from the trip broken down and humbled. Already went through that in the previous column, so no need to repeat too much detail. But it should be stated that there was a moment somewhere uphill from the dumpsters where Pete and Deniz and Karin were all eating huckleberries and pretending that I wasn’t walking down some section of rideable trail behind them, that I had a quiet little pity party all of my own. The latitude had changed, but my attitude still needed some work, and yet, even though I did not know it, I was learning things.

1800 or so miles and several cheap hotels later, finally back on the home dirt, all the kitty litter packed smooth after an overnight rain, I railed two drops on the local trails that had been crowding my head ever since I moved here. Rolled them like they weren't even there. Zero hesitation. Now I am thinking that maybe I ought to overfork a couple of these test bikes. Just a little bit, mind you. Not so much about the increase of travel, more a matter of packing a few added millimeters of stanchion girth, because now it doesn’t seem like nearly as big an ask to stuff the fork into whatever crater I see in front of me. But, as a result, the slender forks that I have been so used to suddenly feel kinda willowy. Kinda reminds me of when I took my old dog Lena Toast to Moab, and she for the first time got to rip trails without trees to define her parameters, but that’s another story.

Changes in latitude, changes in attitude… Or, as James Ingram said, "It's mellow, but not smooth. Kinda shitty." Get Out Of My Head Jimmy Buffett!