Is It Like Today?

This song has been playing in my head all week. When a song is in my head for several days in a row, I imagine it is trying to tell me something, so I try to focus on it and let it speak to me.

Once I had "Footloose" on repeat in my brain for about a year and a half. I listened to it, I read the lyrics, I watched the movie, all in hopes that its message would become clear and so would my head. I guess it just gave up and went away by itself eventually. Maybe I was not the chosen one.

Today's song is from 1993, when most of my music feelings were born. In this World Party tune, the lyrics tell of someone who seems to have a lot of anxiety about the world and eventually gets the hell out and ends up on the moon, where he continues to have anxiety and some existential angst.

But he's not just escaping, he's seeking answers: first by measuring the stars, then by hanging out in Greece, and finally by meeting God in space. But this knowledge doesn't help him feel any better about life:

And sometimes it was faith, power, or reason as the cornerstone
But the furrowed brow has never left his face

I suspect the whole "sad intellectual" trope was invented by intellectuals who thought they were better than everyone else but also wanted to be pitied for their moodiness. Like, "Being gifted is a curse, why can't I be ignorant and content like these poor assholes, etc." But I like this song and its protagonist, and I don't want it to be about a tortured genius. That's boring.

So because this song is catchy as hell and I really enjoy the piano bits, I will imagine that this song's message is more about the search for answers being a lifelong process that doesn't need to wrap up neatly. That maybe being really worried about everything is itself the gift if it keeps you questioning "kings and empires" and looking for solutions to problems.

Maybe I'm thinking too hard.



Also please enjoy this bonus cheesy-effects VH1 version:

Offering

In a lot of the horror movies I like, which are mostly of the supernatural variety, there is a spirit that haunts places and people, that terrifies them and kills them in nasty ways. It attaches itself to specific situations and objects--the ring of the telephone, a mirror, a song. And there is a protagonist who has to figure out what that spirit needs, what it can't let go of, how to bring it peace. It's more a riddle to be solved than a villain to be defeated. Solving it requires empathizing with a grotesque, disembodied entity that is terrorizing them.

Certain situations call up a version of my former self which takes over my body and has me feel its feelings, think its thoughts. It's bewildering and excruciating and terrifying. I don't see it coming, and I feel powerless against it. This has gone on for all of my adult life. As a young adult, I thought I was possessed by something that would eventually kill me.

However, lately I feel like I'm in the part of the ghost story where the protagonist begins to see the patterns, is putting together the pieces and clues in order to set the monster free, to help it transform into its benign self, while learning a piece of history from it, often some hidden injustice. I'm learning to love my shrieking nightmare selves and ask them what happened, what they need.

In every horror movie, the cast thins out, falling one by one to the terror, leaving the hero to face the thing alone in the end. I've seen a lot of people come and go in my life, but in these last few years I've felt less alone than ever. I'm supported by a whole cast of characters who help me identify and listen to the ghosts, gather clues, stay alive. Like all the best ghost stories, mine is also a love story.

Also I'm really excited to see Loone next week.

"Every place I've ever lived is full of ghosts / Every time I leave I make another one / Everyone I've ever loved is full of ghosts / Every time they leave they make another one"

OK I guess this might not qualify as a pop song. Note the first two tags on bandcamp are "devotional" and "emo." LOL yep.

Friday, I'm In Love

Let's face it, I'm always in love. At least, when I feel like myself, when I am the person I want to be, I am falling in love constantly. With the moon, a song, a tree, my friends, a poem, someone I just met, someone I've never met.

It's been a very long time since I was falling in love with someone who was also falling in love with me. And it's magical and precious and devastating and raw. It feels like there is a constellation of stars in my chest expanding in all directions. It reminds me of every love I've had and lost, and it makes me feel like nothing is ever really lost, it just breaks apart and comes back in another form, each one more beautiful.

At the same time, I have a heartbreaking job, and my workload and the intensity of my work have ramped up lately to the point where I'm just barely keeping it together. I know it won't stay at this pitch forever, but for now it's taking all I have.

It's Friday, and there are people out there who I'm working with who are in really tough situations and will wait until Monday until the professionals in their lives--including me--can offer support.

It's Friday, I'm in love.

Holding all these things at the same time is making me think and feel a lot of things about work, capitalism, romance, individualism, privilege, magic, and beauty. You're smart, you can probably guess what a lot of those things are.

Anyway, here's a cover of The Cure by Yo La Tengo, whom I'm seeing in April. It features Georgia Hubley walking expressionless around some really white-looking neighborhoods, oblivious to the twee, hipster apocalypse she has somehow wrought.