Musings, Meanderings, & Loops · Essay
September 3, 2026
There is a song that has been sitting at the top of the charts for months now — twenty weeks at number one, off and on, which almost nothing achieves anymore — and it has been quietly working on me the whole time.
"Choosin' Texas," by Ella Langley, is a heartbreak song with an unusual villain. The singer is losing her man, and the rival is not another woman. It is a state. Texas is personified as the old flame he cannot quit — the one whose claim predates hers and outranks it — and the song's grief is the particular kind you feel when you lose to something you cannot compete with, because it is not competing. It just is, and his heart already lives there.
I have listened to it more times than I am going to admit, and it took me longer than it should have to figure out why. I am not the singer in that song.
I am the man. Seen from the other side, thirty years downstream, in the timeline where he did not go back.
I grew up in Texas from the age of four. Not the Texas of the postcards — the specific one, on the rural edge of Houston, at the exact cultural moment when Urban Cowboy was being filmed at Gilley's down the road in Pasadena. My high school's biggest club was FFA. Neighbors had horses and property, because that was not an eccentric luxury; it was how people lived. The uniform was Justin Ropers and Red Wings, starched Wranglers with a crease, and nobody called it a style. The kids who wore it were Kikkers — spelled with the double k, a word that meant nothing outside a few hundred miles and everything inside them.
And a true confession, since this essay is going to be about honest audits: I was not quite one of them. I wore the boots sometimes — enough to pass, not enough to claim the word, which belonged to others. Even at seventeen, it turns out, I was already standing slightly east of the thing I loved. Hold that thought.
Summers meant the Hill Country: dropping into the Frio's shocking cold under the cypresses at Garner State Park, and boots on the old floorboards at Gruene Hall with George Strait coming through the speakers. "Amarillo by Morning" is not a song to me. It is a place I have physically been.
I left at twenty-two for the East Coast, came back for law school, and then left for good. Since 2003 the answer has been Wilmington, Arlington, Washington, Miami, Jacksonville — one long eastbound answer to a question Texas apparently never stopped asking.
Here is the strange part, and it is the reason this became an essay instead of a playlist entry.
That life does not feel far away. It feels fictional. When I try to hold that boy and the man writing this sentence in the same thought, they do not read as chapters of one story. They read as different genres. Decades in courtrooms and conference rooms and airports will do that — the earlier existence goes cinematic, like a film I watched with unusual attention rather than a life I occupied. I have caught myself thinking of it, without meaning to, as a past life.
And then three minutes of pedal steel undoes the whole arrangement. The song comes on and I am not remembering that world — I am briefly in it, with a completeness no photograph has ever managed. The distance that felt geological collapses to nothing, instantly, and then the song ends and the thirty years snap back into place.
What is that? I have been reading a book that offers one answer, and it is a beautiful one, and I want to be honest about what kind of answer it is.
Itzhak Bentov was a biomedical engineer with a mystic's imagination, and his 1977 book Stalking the Wild Pendulum proposes, roughly, this: that linear time is an artifact of our narrow sensory focus; that memory is not filed away in the brain like documents in a cabinet but distributed the way an image is distributed in a hologram, where every fragment contains the whole; and that a sufficiently precise stimulus works like the reference beam that reconstructs a hologram — hit the stored pattern at the right frequency and the entire scene reassembles, not as recollection but as presence. In his picture, the past is not gone. It is encoded at an address, and consciousness, properly tuned, can visit. He liked the image of a pendulum at the top of its swing: for one instant, at the apex, it is perfectly still — and in that stillness, he thought, we slip time's grip.
By that account, the boy on the dance floor at Gruene is not a memory. He is a standing wave, and Ella Langley found his frequency.
I want that to be true. It is elegant, it is generous, and it matches the felt experience with eerie precision — because the song genuinely does not feel like recall. It feels like relocation.
But I have spent a month insisting that frameworks be audited, and this one does not pass. Bentov's metaphysics — consciousness exiting spacetime, the universe as a navigable hologram — has never been validated by anyone with a lab. The honest classification is speculative poetry wearing physics' vocabulary. I wrote recently about Dalí, whose soft watches were wrong as science and right as experience, and Bentov belongs to the same genus: a man who mistook a perfect description for an explanation.
Here is what survives the audit, and it turns out to be plenty.
One piece of Bentov's tower is solid physics, and I owe you a second confession about it. Last month I published an essay about entrainment — Huygens watching his pendulum clocks fall into rhythm through a shared beam in 1665, coupled oscillation, as verified as gravity. What I did not say, because I genuinely could not remember it, is where I first met the idea. It was this book. Bentov's chapter on resonance had been sitting in me for years, filed under somewhere, and it surfaced as my own thought wearing my own clothes. I spent last week writing about Dalí absorbing the physics of his century without knowing it, and it turns out I cannot even absorb my own bedside reading with attribution intact. The joke is entirely at my expense, and it is also the essay's point arriving early: what goes in does not leave, and it does not always sign its work.
Bentov's error, in any case, was not the resonance; it was the leap from oscillators synchronize to souls traverse spacetime. The foundation was real. The tower was wishful.
And the neuroscience of what the song does is nearly as astonishing as the metaphysics, with better paperwork. Researchers — Petr Janata's lab at UC Davis is the landmark — have mapped where music-evoked memories live, and the answer is the medial prefrontal cortex: the same region that maintains your autobiographical self, the ongoing narrative of who you are. Music does not knock on memory's door from outside. It has a direct line into the building where your identity is maintained. And crucially, hearing the song does not retrieve a stored file — it re-fires ensembles of neurons that fired in the original scenes. As far as your emotional circuitry is concerned, the past is not being described. It is briefly being run.
Which explains the thing Bentov was reaching for, without the hologram. The boy is not at a vibratory address in the cosmos. He is closer than that. He is wired into the exact structure that generates the person I call me — not a file in the archive but part of the architecture, load-bearing, live. The reason the song does not feel like remembering is that, neurologically, it is not remembering. It is the original circuitry, briefly given the floor.
So: the man in the song chose Texas, and I did not, and for a long time I filed that as a fork — one taken road, one lost.
I no longer think the fork is real, and the neuroscience is what changed my mind. The self is not a series of replacements, each version discarding the last. It accumulates the way a hologram accumulates — new patterns laid over old ones, nothing overwritten, everything still contributing to the image. The kid in the sometimes-boots did not lose the vote in 2003 and leave the building. He is the substrate. Everything the East Coast built, it built on him — and a lifetime of courtrooms and boardrooms never managed to smooth away what he laid down first, which I can prove, because a steel guitar finds him in under four bars.
Texas has changed too, of course. The rural edge I grew up on is largely subdivisions and toll roads now; going back would not return me to the place, because the place has also not chosen Texas, exactly. The song is not really an invitation and I am not really weighing one. What it is, I think, is a verification — three minutes of evidence, delivered at number one so the whole country can run the same experiment on whatever their own Texas is, that the first life is still installed and still warm.
I did not choose Texas. I have lived one long eastbound answer for more than twenty years, and I would probably give it again.
But the choosing, it turns out, ran one layer deeper than geography, and it was not mine. That boy — the one who loved the world he never fully joined — chose everything that came after him: the standards, the stubbornness, the ear for a true note in a room full of false ones. I left the state. Nobody left the substrate.
Which may be all the song is saying, underneath the heartbreak: you can spend thirty years not choosing Texas, and lose nothing but the miles.
Texas, apparently, chooses back.