I’m going to sound like a broken record, but it hasn’t been a good day.
It hasn’t been that great a week, really, and there are some who would go as far as to say it hasn’t been a particularly flash couple of years, but since I seem to have blocked a large portion of the time since March 13th 2019 from my memory, I’ll have to take your word for it.
But look at this shit – I’m writing again. I can feel my throat chakra blowing dust off itself. Is that my voice I hear?
I want to talk about a lot of things, and I am half toying with starting a new blog and retiring this one, but this has always been where I told my truth from my real face so I guess I’ll just see where it leads. This might well be the last thing I write for another two years.
I’m four sessions in to my fifth round of therapy in 20 years, after eight months of fighting to obtain access to a psychologist, who despite being young enough to be my own child has turned out to be somewhat of a miracle worker. Although I can’t help thinking she has to go and debrief with her supervisor after spending an hour listening to me ramble and watching me bawl my eyes out over Zoom.
Anyway, after a particularly difficult session today where she managed to get me to talk about five or six of the ten most traumatic aspects of my life to date, I’m on the hunt for something to soothe my frayed nerves. And I’m home alone.
I’ve got half a bottle of rose in the fridge, but my new NutriBullet has the power to obliterate ice cubes, so I made myself a big glass of iced chocolate goat milk and searched Spotify for the Live album Throwing Copper, which I have had kicking around on my desk for a while in CD form.
Throwing Copper was one of the most influential albums of the 90s. Everyone my age had it, either a bootleg cassette version from a friend (thanks Kath) or the actual CD from Brashs or JB HiFi. There were entire cover bands dedicated to it. Yet for some reason it didn’t provoke the level of nostalgia that the likes of Nirvana’s Nevermind or Pearl Jam’s Vs did on their 25th anniversaries. Which is odd, because it has probably aged better than either of those albums.
It was an album that spoke of discovering the double edged sword of newly-found adulthood, searching for something to believe in among a proliferation of false prophets and finding your calling in the shadow of a capitalist world that just wants your for your labour. Of what happens when our teachers leave us there by ourselves, chained to fate. Of course, I didn’t pick up on all that until well after I needed it
Warm bodies are not machines that can only make money. It hits very differently now, at 44yo, than what it did when I was 19. But the imagery and the poetry are still strikingly moving.
The cycle of birth and death that always made Lightning Crashes bring a tear to my eye is now a lot more personal. Finding your purpose, finding your place, finding something to connect to, never really got any easier. Realising that the system will exploit you if you don’t fight it is a moment you can’t go back from. But the microcosm that Throwing Copper created at a time when I was already discovering that living in my world wasn’t going to be a walk in the park seemed like a reachable goal. Get a grip on your own backyard before attempting to take on the world. And if that backyard doesn’t work for you, find another one. If the things you were taught to believe in as a child no longer ring true, keep searching until you find something that does.
So we get out of Shit Towne, and search for our Stage, or our Pillar of Davidson. Who are we going to be? What are we going to do? How many times are we going to have to let go of everything we’ve built and start again? And what damage is going to be done along the way? Who will walk with us, who will disappear from view, and how do we spot Hitler in a robe of truth?
It’s all so overwhelming. Trying to do right by a world that barely registers our existence. There is passion, there is pain, triumph, desolation, inevitability. Words for a feeling in all I’ve discovered. Everybody’s good enough for some change. Just don’t call the waitress a bitch.
The familiarity is comforting, and knowing that your struggles are pretty much universal and someone else already articulated them better than you ever could, in a key you can sing along to, is itself oddly soothing.
But like all journeys, it has a beginning, a middle and an end. And a lesson. It’s not enough to be a passenger on this emotional rollercoaster. Even when it feels futile, we have to lock horns with the stallion. We have to act, to do what we can. Otherwise, when final sunset rolls behind the Earth, and the clock is finally dead, I’ll look at you, you’ll look at me, we’ll cry a lot, and this will be what we said…
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
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