Frank Hightower, the character in the song, I Think, Therefore… from the new Native mini-album December Roses, is a man who has done what most of us only dream of doing — he’s completely run away from reality and gone to live in a hole in the ground. He’s hunkered, bunkered, cut-off, and removed. His cynicism has peaked, and his answer to that cynicism is to hide away.
But, cynicism is oft-times merely a result of misreading the message of events.
When something bad happens to us we want to blame something, point fingers, shout, look defiant. We swathe ourselves in piety, wallowing in the luxurious agony of being so greatly misunderstood. We seek sanctuary, solitude, aloneness. We seek a lonely mountaintop on which, there and only there, can we reflect, assimilate, attain the higher fruits of existence, find true meaning, reach Godhead.
But, rather than a mountaintop, we settle for a hole. Not even a cellar, but a cold, dirty place in which to drill down into the furthest recesses of our darkest side.
Fortunately, we are creatures that like comfort, and before long we emerge from the gravelly depths. Sometimes renewed, sometimes regressed, and sometimes enlightened.
Frank Hightower is not exactly the emergent hermit triumphant at the precise moment in his life this song occupies. Far from it.
The hole he’s dug himself into has reached that most paradoxical of happy places — rock bottom.
He’s starting to ponder whether maybe, he might just have misread events.
He’s considering the question of his own thought processes, his powers of judgement, his criteria. Is he, or is he not the ultimate arbiter of what fate bestows?
Native 