Standing Was Never the Issue
Parallel Warnings in Plain Sight
I was offered an “I Stand for the Flag” bumper sticker once.
My father-in-law meant it kindly. It wasn’t a challenge or a provocation. Just an offer. A shared symbol. A small adhesive declaration of values.
I declined.
Not because I don’t stand for the flag. I do. I stand for it in stadiums and gymnasiums and dusty fields where kids fidget and hands go to hearts a half beat late. I stand without irony.
I declined because I understood that the sticker wasn’t actually about standing.
It was about ending the conversation.
THE LONG BRIDGE HOME
An Essay About Music, Place, and the Quiet Work of Becoming
If you had asked the younger version of me who I was meant to be, I would have said something confident, rehearsed, and completely wrong.
I was a Boulder kid who went to Boston to major in music — the kind of student who imagined himself under stage lights, whatever success was supposed to look like back then. I believed, without ever articulating it, that real art lived in big cities, in big scenes, in places with reputations.