How many songs about young love and heartbreak am I going to find unbearably poignant? I don’t know. How many is Brandon Flowers planning to write? Desert cowboy in skinny jeans writes my life, a memoir.
Just over here filling in the gaps of my Killers collection with a Christmas CD or two, because I’m an oldster from the late 1900s.
This morning I woke up from a dream involving Royal Crescent Mob, a bunch of old photos that hadn’t stayed in the fixer long enough and were blotchily faded, and a haircut I’ve never had (chin length with bangs).
The haircut was unfortunate and the photos were an entirely typical result of our slapdash approach to the darkroom, but Royal Crescent Mob sent me down a rabbit hole to my 16-year-old self. “An American four-piece punk funk/funk rock band from Columbus, Ohio,” Royal Crescent Mob was a band I adored 30 years ago. I lived in Indiana and was a RHCP superfan (yes, I was Jason Mendoza and I am absolutely going to The Bad Place); there was no chance I was not going to be into RCM. I had a t-shirt that I wore constantly and a signed promo photo given to me somewhat as a joke that I still treasured. (Sidebar: At least once a month now I regret getting rid of my collection of high school t-shirts. Shocking the neighbors with the Mother’s Milk album cover is very much my 2020 mood.)
What else did I learn from Wikipedia? That one of the members of R.C. Mob was a touring manager for the Goo Goo Dolls, possibly at the same time that my oldest friend was their merch guy. That was last fall when my back had enough functionality for one event and that event was a trip to North Carolina for my brother’s wedding, not an overnight trip to Richmond to hang out for a night selling stickers for a 90s alternapop band, as much as I absolutely would have loved that.
Thank you, little brother, for the holiday gift card that you probably thought I’d spend on some antiracist literature or a biography of an obscure feminist artist. I bought a CD of ridiculous songs from my youth!
Would I normally have had a party for an unremarkable birthday in my mid-40s? Highly unlikely. This year, when all the parties were cancelled, we needed them more than ever.
Thirty years ago, I accidentally threw a great party for my 16th birthday. It was meant to be a low key “sit around and talk about nerd stuff under the unwelcome eagle eye of your parents while being gifted the entire discography of the Cure dubbed on cassette by the drummer of your boyfriend’s band who probably had a secret crush on you” kind of event. But then my skater friends turned up, and since we all traveled with music on us at all times back then, they threw the punk on the stereo and turned our dining room into a mosh pit and that was that. Nineteen years ago, I accidentally threw another great party for the last birthday I’d celebrate in Ann Arbor, which started off in the same “sit around the living room drinking too much whiskey and gossiping about your grad school professors” vibe, and ended up with my brother and a local illusionist called SuperWayne, whom I’d met at our bar earlier that year, juggling flaming torches out in the snow in the front yard while we all cheered like we were teenagers in an 80s movie watching someone do their first keg stand.
It’s not that I never try to throw great parties, they just tend to be for other occasions and they usually happen because we invite literally everyone we know to attend them and that ends up being an extremely eclectic mix. Our Halloween parties in grad school, our holiday parties here. I’m missing them like crazy this year, when both Halloween and Boxing Day are on Saturdays and they were going to be a helluva lot of fun.
Instead of all that, I convinced the DJ whose sanity-saving music streams I’ve been listening to for the past few months to let me sponsor a NIN-themed industrial and dark wave night for my birthday, complete with a mostly-all-punk hour long set of my favorites in the middle, starting with “Burn” and continuing on with “Burn.” It was more fun than I imagined I’d be able to have in the midst of all this, particularly the part where everyone fielded wild guesses about what would be in my birthday set. “These guesses are cracking me up,” said my old friend from high school. “They’re going to be really disappointed when they find out it’s Blink-182.” “I never know when you’re kidding.” “THAT’S WHAT’S SO GREAT ABOUT ME,” said I, a Sagittarius.
It wasn’t them, but it could have been! Happy pandemic birthday to me. She’s got a black shirt, black skirt, and Bauhaus stuck in her head.
School started in earnest. Autumn came. Autumn went. I got completely overwhelmed by the horror playing out across the country. There was a hellish election that went on for ages as a cap to a hellish campaign cycle that went on for ages. Half the country thinks the results mean everything will be fine! great! normal! in a month and the other half think we’re now in a civil war. We adopted a dog. We had to give the dog back because it only tolerated one family member and charged and snarled at the other two. We agreed to get a puppy instead. There are no puppies. Every time I thought about returning to writing I could only focus on how long it had been and how little anything had changed except for the worse.
This week it’s been nine months since we started staying home and I’m starting to lose my shit. I hurt my back (neck? shoulder?) and it’s grinding at me. I forgot what it’s like to be in constant acute pain, forgot how irritable I am. Forgot how tender my child is when I’m irritable. I might be taking too much onto myself, but it did seem like we were doing okay until this rough patch. Which coincided with having to return a dog, the onset of gray winter days, and the complete lack of the usual holiday festivities at school, in the neighborhood, or with our families. Okay, so maybe it’s not all me. Still. We all failed to appreciate how much better I’d gotten until I got bad again.
I don’t have anything good to say about anything. My friends are teachers and they’re afraid of getting sick and deathly afraid of getting a family member sick. Same for my friends are who are doctors, nurses, social workers, restaurant workers, hairdressers. Same for all of us with chronic illnesses, disabilities, health risks that were typical but are now potentially deadly. It’s all terrible.
Here is something good: it snowed one half of an inch and my child was delighted and played outside for hours. Another thing: we successfully executed an allergen-free snickerdoodle. (Not a cookie I ever ate or made growing up, but I hear they’re popular among certain crowds.) One more: tomorrow I’m going in to get my neck patched up, the tree people are coming to take down the leaning cherry that’s been looming ever lower over the yard since we moved in, and as of noon we will have watched a virtual holiday show and be on winter break for the next 18 days. During which time we will eat cookies, read books, build Legos, watch for snow, and sleep as much as we can get away with.
Dig deep, winter ones. There’s no other way but through.