False vacuum decay

A guest post from one of my favorite writers

I don’t have guest writers on the ACBN often, but today I’m proud to bring you a piece I absolutely loved from one of my oldest and dearest friends, Lee Reamsnyder, who I have known since… [whispers] I’m sorry, this paper says 1997? That can’t be right.

I hope you appreciate it as much I did.

—Scott

(tw: discussion of suicide)

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In October of 2019 I went to a Wilco concert, finally checking off one of the big unfinished items on my bucket list.

I am not by nature a concert-goer. For me, listening to music has historically been done either (a) at ear-splitting volume alone in the car or (b) at ear-splitting volume alone with headphones. It's a single player game. I don't need other people around to enjoy it, and I can do it from the comfort of my home. Why go out?

But Wilco is a top five—depending on the day, maybe top two—all-time band for me. I have devoured all of their catalog. I squealed like the entire February 1964 Ed Sullivan Show audience when lead singer Jeff Tweedy showed up for like a 2-minute cameo on Parks and Recreation. Exceptions must be made.

Also, Wilco is a kick-ass concert band. After some early turbulence, their lineup hasn't changed since the 2004 additions of acid jazz freak guitarist Nels Cline and polyglot composer Pat Sansone. They are a tight ensemble. For evidence, check out the 2005 double live album Kicking Television: Live In Chicago. I particularly enjoy that album's re-interpretation of “One By One” from humble mumbler to a mountain-moving guitar solo showcase.

As expected, they kicked ass. It was a perfect autumn evening. I sat on a lawn chair, had a few beers, and watched one of my favorite bands play a lot of my favorite songs. I went with a friend, but they might as well have not even existed for a few hours. I was locked in.

I have only one criticism: that night, they didn’t play "Jesus Etc.", arguably their best song and arguably the best song.

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Verse 1:

Jesus, don’t cry
You can rely on me honey
You can combine anything you want
I’ll be around
You were right about the stars
Each one is a setting sun

Tall buildings shake
Voices escape singing sad sad songs
Tuned to chords strung down your cheeks
Bitter melodies turning your orbit around

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I just finished up The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) by Dr. Katie Mack. Excellent book: it’s an informative and surprisingly breezy tour of all the theoretical ways our universe might end, whether it’s a reversal of our current expansion (bad), heat death (also bad), dark energy stripping matter apart (very bad), a collision with a parallel universe from another dimension (head-exploding-emoji) or, my favorite, a charming theory called false vacuum decay. 

I am butchering the science, but it roughly goes like this: in the opening moments after the Big Bang, we know that something about the fundamental forces of the universe was… different. Specifically, electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force were, for the briefest of moments, the same single force. Once they separated into the two forces we know and appreciate today, that’s allowed most of our existence to, uh, be. Quantum particles can form into protons and neutrons, combine into atoms, team up with other atoms to form stars and molecules and galaxies and people, and on and on for billions of years of apparent stability.

But! If these fundamental forces were able to rearrange themselves once before, what if it happened again?

The theory goes that maybe at some point in the universe, something will shift that causes the fundamental forces to reconfigure themselves in a new, novel way. At that point, physics as we understand it will no longer exist. Likewise, energy and matter as we know them can no longer exist and would be ripped apart into some new, unknowable form that conforms to the new fundamental forces.

Then from this initial point of "new physics", a bubble of released energy will expand outward in all directions at the speed of light and everything it touches will immediately just be—gone. Canceled entirely. And you thought “new math” was rough!

It gets worse! Unlike the definitely-in-the-far-future heat death of the universe, this could happen at any time. Maybe this has happened already, and the bubble of doom just hasn’t gotten to us yet. Why, you could wake up dead tomorrow! Well, good night!

If it’s any consolation, we can’t see it coming (speed of light and all that), and we wouldn’t feel any pain when it gets here. And the broad consensus among very smart astrophysicists is that the chances of this really happening are vanishingly small.

I—not a smart astrophysicist—am not so sure about that.

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On Wednesday, I learned that Heather Armstrong had died.

If you, like me, were extremely online in the early 2000s, you might better know her as the bracing, thoughtful, hilarious author of Dooce.com.

From the opening of the obituary in the New York Times:

Heather Armstrong, the breakout star behind the website Dooce, who was hailed as the queen of the so-called mommy bloggers for giving millions of readers intimate daily glimpses of her odyssey through parenthood and marriage, as well as her harrowing struggles with depression, died on Tuesday at her home in Salt Lake City. She was 47.

Ooof. Barely older than me! This can’t get worse.

Pete Ashdown, her longtime partner, who found her body in the home, said the cause was suicide.

Ah, goddamnit.

Can you even imagine finding that? If there’s anything that could tear your whole universe apart in a blink, it’s that.

My thoughts are with her children, family, and friends.

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Hoo boy this has gotten dark. Let’s lighten the mood?

My friend’s grandmother died last year.

OK, rough start. Hang in there.

While they’re going through her belongings, my friend snags a bunch of vintage coats for his children. One of them was a particularly snazzy green jacket that wouldn’t look out of place on Mad Men. His 7-year-old daughter was thrilled about this, because now she would be the only kid in her class with a cool jacket “from the nineteen-hundreds.”

Instantly, my friend’s body was ripped from existence and replaced with a pile of dusty Werther’s Originals.

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A little over 20 years ago, Wilco released Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

The creation of this album is now the stuff of legends: Wilco was under contract with Warner/Reprise records, the label hated this album and dropped the band, Wilco released it online for free, then Nonesuch Records—a different division of Warner!—signed the band and officially released the album to big sales and universal acclaim.

It could have gone so many other ways, as Stephen M. Deusner wrote in his review of the 20th anniversary Super Deluxe Edition:

In retrospect, everything about Yankee Hotel Foxtrot feels astonishingly precarious. It’s an album that inspires endless what-ifs: What if it hadn’t been very good, or what if it had been extremely good but not in a way that captured the imaginations of so many listeners? What if Jim O’Rourke had been too busy to take Tweedy’s phone call and never connected them with Glenn Kotche or mixed the final album? What if Nonesuch had passed on the record, robbing us of the satisfying narrative that Wilco made Warner pay for the album twice? What if streaming it on their website had depleted sales rather than boosted them? What if a national tragedy hadn’t immediately given the music more gravity and relevance than even Wilco could have dreamed? Every hypothetical represents a new universe, a new world of possibilities.

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About 25 years ago, a friend died from suicide. Her name was Jenny. We had been in marching band together. We both played alto sax; she was older than me and was our section leader. She was funny, personable, and charming. Everyone liked Jenny.

She went off to college; then she was truly gone.

When we found out, I don’t think I said much at all. I felt numb. I was probably in shock. Definitely also I was angry. What a thoughtless thing to do!

Megan, another saxophonist in my grade who had been close with Jenny, wept.

I had an interesting relationship over the course of high school with Megan. We were together all the time, in all the same honors classes, in the same bands, played the same instrument. I was first chair; she was second. I would get an A+++ on a project; she’d get merely an A++. She studied hard; I studied some. She could sing; I absolutely could not. When she spoke, she was quiet, thoughtful, and sharp; meanwhile I talk like a rubber mallet canoodling with a bicycle horn. Come to think of it, I sing like that too.

I knew, deep down, she was smarter than me even if the grades didn’t reflect it, and it ate at me a little. Both of us quickly figured out how to drive each other just a little bit nuts. We needled each other relentlessly. I wouldn’t say it was ever outright malicious, but I was definitely a little mean.

So, I might be misremembering a bit here—see: shock, anger above—but if we had any truly awful honest-to-god fights, it was when I announced that I didn’t want to go to the wake or the funeral. Megan thought I was being a selfish prick and these things weren’t about me. I was being a selfish prick and I hated that she was right about it. But I went. It sucked, but I went.

(For the record, I still believe that there oughta be a permanent ban on the deaths of anyone and anything that I personally care about, please and thank you!)

After high school, Megan and I went our separate ways.

A few years into college we happened to be back in our hometown for Spring Break and met for coffee to catch up. A little distance was, I think, good for us. We chatted warmly, easily, without a trace of antagonism. She was funnier than I remembered.

When the conversation flowed to music that we had been listening to, we discovered that we had both recently gotten very into Over The Rhine, a soulful husband-wife duo from Cincinnati. Also: Wilco.

After coffee, we drove around aimlessly to listen to some Over The Rhine. We listened to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in its entirety.

We listened together in reverence. In those moments, the physics underpinning our relationship were irrevocably altered.

I wish I hadn’t been such an asshole back in the day.

It was so nice to not listen alone.

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Second verse:

Don’t cry
You can rely on me honey
You can come by any time you want
I’ll be around
You were right about the stars
Each one is a setting sun

Tall buildings shake
Voices escape singing sad sad songs
Tuned to chords strung down your cheeks
Bitter melodies turning your orbit around

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(Just to be clear, this was not a romantic connection. Not in this universe!)

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When the 20th anniversary reissue of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot came out last year I happily dove down a Wilco rabbit hole and discovered a new-to-me box set of rarities called Alpha Mike Foxtrot with a staggering 77 tracks.

Five hours in at #71 is a concert recording of “Jesus Etc.” featuring Andrew Bird! One of my favorite bands playing one of my favorite songs with another one of my favorite artists??! And this is one of the songs I’ve never heard them play live! I was ready for a treat.

It’s a nice enough recording in the beginning. It’s not a stirring reinterpretation, nor does it have to be.

But when they hit the third verse, well, I didn’t see it coming.

It’s around 2:20 in the video above. Jeff Tweedy doesn’t start singing the verse immediately. At first it feels like an awkward half second of silence, like something has gone wrong with the recording.

Then, you can hear them. You might have to strain; they’re deep in the mix. You haven’t really been able to hear them before, but now the audience is singing the third verse:

Our love
Our love
Our love is all we have
Our love
Our love is all of God’s money
Everyone is a burning sun

Thousands of voices in unison, thousands of astonishingly precarious, beautiful sunsets converging.

It’s the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard.

I felt so close to every single one of them. Their energy—their love for this band, this song, this moment, each other—previously unknown to me, ripped through me with such violence that I fell to my knees, and I wept.

When I could stand again, I hit rewind.

This time, I sang along.

I was alone. But also, I knew that I wasn’t.

—Lee Reamsnyder

(If you are in crisis, please call, text, or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988. You, too, are not alone.)

Getty Images / ru3apr