This is the first in a series of drafts about the stuff I’m watching, listening to, playing. I did these now and then when I was keeping my journal online, and what better time to bring this habit back than when all my friends are bored? (And I need to start with this topic because I’m embarrassed at how pretentious my last blog post was.)
One of my guilty pleasures out of the last five years is a synth-rock comedy band called Ninja Sex Party. Their original songs are…not clean. (“Heart Boner” though, is beautiful and probably their cleanest song despite the title. It’s that joke I love called “songs that are absolutely filthy yet technically wholesome”.)
Where I really got hooked on NSP, though, was their (family-safe!) album of cover songs “Under the Covers” in 2016.
This is one of my top ten albums ever, and it’s a cover album by a comedy band. Seems like a joke answer, but, okay, what other band is out there covering the theme song from “The Last Unicorn” and absolutely slamming it out of the park?
(Note: I have just discovered that the answer is “Kenny Loggins”. Of course it is.)
I’m alive; I’m alive
In December, I was at a wedding. The reception had an amazing live band, and over dinner they performed a cover of “We Belong” with Pat Benatar. My winter depression was gone for three beautiful minutes as several tables of English teachers and summer camp counselors serenaded each other, dramatic arms in the air.
I decided I needed an entire playlist of songs that made me feel like this, and maybe you need it too?
This playlist has brought me so much joy while cleaning up, while exercising, while trying to distract myself from doomsurfing on social media.
To bring this disjointed entry together: this spirit is exactly what I love about the NSP cover albums. Danny is half of the on-air talent for the comedy gaming channel Game Grumps (like NSP, it is not work safe, and absolutely not to everyone’s taste), and in some of their longer runs he tells stories about being a little kid who loved singing, even if people thought he was annoying, and I can really connect with that. It’s about the fact that he loves the music, he loves making it, and he makes something beautiful out of harmonizing with himself. That’s rad.
Anyway, in this time of isolation, please enjoy “Orgy for One”. Maybe not with kids in the room, though.
Junior year of high school was Brit Lit, one of my favorite classes in all of high school, and I adored my teacher, who was basically what you’d get if Oscar Wilde had come out of 1950s Bridgeport. He had an annual assignment for the Chaucer unit: each of us was to write an intro for a new character who was also on that trip to Canterbury. It could be anachronistic, it could be silly, it just had to be 24 lines of heroic couplets. He had a gallery of his favorites over the years that he read aloud to the class, delighted he had so many clever students’ poems to share with us.
when I first read this scene I yelled “I HAVE KNOWN THIS TEACHER”
I wanted to be in that gallery so badly. There was one problem: I couldn’t think of anything funny. Not just “I thought of a joke but it sucked,” but, at the time, I was in a dark place and couldn’t think of anything at all other than sadness and futility. I ended up writing lines about a woman with a sinful past who was going to Canterbury to find absolution, and it got me a good grade, but certainly it wasn’t a gallery hit. It was a bummer to write, a bummer to read, and I was really down on myself about it. It was a total failure of the person I wanted to be: Carrie the comedienne who could write something funny for any occasion. It was baffling to me that I just stone cold couldn’t do what I’ve done before with a bit of hard work any time it was necessary. It was like a light in my brain had turned off entirely.
Well…it probably had. As we’d later learn, when you’re depressed or going through trauma, the electrical activity in your brain changes. I wasn’t well for most of my teens, and when in junior year I lost my ability to even joke about what was going on around me, I didn’t honestly know what to do with myself or if there was any hope for me going forward. It was a cruel lesson that one of the only things about myself that I liked could just…not show up for me when I needed it.
The long road of learning to like myself, as someone who grew up only valuing grades and spiritual purity, has meant cultivating a heart that’s kind. It gives me something that I can appreciate even when my skills aren’t the best, or I’ve done things wrong that have hurt people. That’s a lot of words for saying “stop trying to prove you know it all, and just get better at being a decent human being already” but I’m assured this later statement is still a bit judgy for how I need to be speaking to myself.
So! Present day. Last week I’m trying to figure out why I’m having such a hostile internal response to seeing people making parody songs about life in quarantine. I’m just not finding any of it funny, or clever, or witty, and I don’t know why I’m being such an unsporting ass about it all. It wasn’t until I saw a headline that it all fell into focus for me:
And my internal voice is going “if you were really a writer worth anything, that could have been you. After all, you quit your job to be a writer, and you’ve had nothing but time, so where’s your writing already? You could be out there providing hope to people and all you can do is shitpost on Twitter.”
Yes! I’ve had more time these days! But these days are traumatic, and as we’ve established: trauma changes the patterns in your brain. (Believe me I’m STOKED to have something new inhibiting my prefrontal cortex immediately after I just had the damn thing fixed.)
I am also grieving a delay to being able to start that shiny new life I wanted to create for myself. Grief, too, does a number on your entire body, not just your brain. With all that going on physically and mentally, it truly is understandable if anyone can’t create, or get dressed every day, or follow a schedule to prove you still are a valuable worker, so you’re spared when the capitalistic death cult that is the current US executive branch decides if your pitiful contribution to the labor pool is going to be worth hooking you up to a precious ventilator.
(Rage also messes with your cognitive ability, by the way. But please never stop being mad when people are suffering and those in power are proving they do not care to help in any meaningful way.)
What’s important now? For me it’s important to be kind wherever I can be kind, and that means I have to be nice to myself too. Heaven knows I’m spending more time with myself than anybody else these days! I have to respect the truth of my own situation, that it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Yesterday I set the table for writing, turned on my keyboard and tablet, and managed to crank out the three-line joke at the top of this blog post here. It’s not much but it’s what I could do yesterday, and it helps to cut to the core of an attitude that keeps me stuck. I’ll take it.
We’re surviving. We’re getting through this, and this too shall pass. No matter what may be “wrong” with us, we are worthy of dignity and safety and love. If I help somebody feel that in a given day, maybe that’s all that’s in my control right now.
One thing at a time, one day at a time, we keep going. ✌️💖
