sotd – MOIRARTS

Ice Cream

It’s hot here. I wish I had a better reason for months of radio silence, but all I have is heat and pandemic fatigue. The briefest of updates: the last couple of months of school were awful, the first couple of months of summer were bearable, and now we wait (again) to see where it all goes from here. This time of year is hard for we of low heat tolerance every year, with the water at the local pool becoming more like a warm bath and the noise from our window a/c units turning us into Poe characters. Typically we hunker down and wait for fall, but on top of 16 months of hunkering down and waiting for vaccines for children, our grasp on that plan is tenuous at best.

There are positives. The puppy is delightful. Exhausting, an early riser, tricksy and muleheaded, as much work as a particularly recalcitrant toddler. Also soft, friendly, playful, and adorable. Our math is wonky but we are pretty sure it’s coming up in the dog’s favor. Another year of swim team is in the books, with some private lessons from our child’s original swim instructor helping make the leap to dives and flip turns. There is nothing quite like seeing the person who taught your baby to love the water and be proud of doing underwater “sea lion swimming” now help them lose their fear of belly flops and water up their nose a full decade later. Thanks to our location in a regional hub of medical research, two of our child’s friends have been vaccinated early through participation in vaccine trials which opens up small windows of opportunity for unmasked indoor play and a general diminishment of our worry around socializing.

What more is there to say about the dog days of summer. It’s Leo season. I’ve known so many thickheaded, big-hearted, hilarious, aggravating, sociable, intense people born in this month over the years. Fire signs stick together, so while this time of year is exhausting and flattening for me, it also gave the world some of the people I’ve loved the most in my life. I wish your love really were ice cream, though. It’s hot here.

Video of Sarah McLachlan performing “Ice Cream” live at a 90s concert.

Here I Go Again

RIP, Tawny Kitaen.

You were hashtag goals for this 80s kid. So much gorgeous hair, those endless legs, that effortless laughing smile. Hanging out with classic cars, guitars, and boys (in that order). I’m sure you were so much more than the music video icon we idolized, and I’m bummed life handed you a raw deal.

I know what it means to walk along the lonely street of dreams.

If You Wanna

Fully. Vaccinated.

Seeing our closest friends again, in the house, without masks. Eating a meal with more than the same three faces around our table. Holding the people I love, whom I’ve had to cross my arms over my chest to keep myself from reaching for, for a year.

Nothing much more will change in our behavior beyond that. We are riding out the rest of the school year at home, unwilling to take on the additional risk of group interaction and expend the energy to make such a major change in routine this close to the last stage of both this pandemic and the summer. We won’t be doing anything unmasked indoors nor spending any length of time in groups, masked or not, indoors or out. We might get takeout. We might visit more or different stores.

What will change is the level of stress and worry we feel while we continue the best practices for keeping ourselves and others safe. Our child will ride bikes and play with kids whose parents are also fully vaccinated, and they will still wear masks and I will not worry about how close they get to each other. I will walk with my fully vaccinated friends and we won’t wear masks and I won’t worry about how close we veer to each other. We will sit in the yard and enjoy a distanced meal with fully vaccinated friends, and we might pull our chairs closer so we don’t have to boom quite as much. We will walk our new puppy and not worry about how close our masked neighbors get when they bend in to experience his excitable softness.

We will begin to shake off the dust of anxiety, grief, and feral introversion and begin to live together again. We will laugh together and forgive our wide and varied weirdnesses.

If you wanna come back, it’s alright.

Temptation

The past couple of months have been chaotic, to say the least. Chaotic good? Maybe, but we won’t know until the next few weeks play out. We sold our second car, which required a lot of trips and phone calls to many different offices. We got our first vaccine shots, but my paperwork is lost in the county health system. We seem to have finally sorted out the aftershocks of refinancing our house last fall. We have not been told that we definitely don’t have a puppy, but we have not received any firm confirmation about the puppy we have been told we might have. I finally did some medical testing for my doctor, part of which got lost by FedEx. Every single meeting and appointment got rescheduled at least once for weeks on end. You get the idea.

Today the sun came out, it warmed up, and it might be spring. (It might not. Like I said: chaotic.) I had a telehealth appointment with my doctor, which was both bad (enduring health problem endures) and good (we are not out of treatment options and my doctor is a stubborn mule in the way you want in a doctor treating your chronic health condition). We received a package from our friends in Germany that took 3 1/2 months to arrive, but we didn’t know it was coming so were able to be wholly and pleasantly surprised and delighted when it arrived. I found myself feeling weirdly optimistic. Like, in a few weeks, things could be very different. We could both of be fully vaccinated. We could have a puppy. I could be through another round of treatment for what ails me. Of course, none of that could come to pass; Mercury retrograde during February in a pandemic really lets you know that nothing can be relied on beyond right this very minute.

When I am in a good mood, my mental radio gets turned up to 11. All day this tune has been blasting through my brain. If you were to try to characterize my wide-ranging taste in music under one sweeping label, it would be peppy morose. It has to all be there: lyrics, guitars, beat. Usually the weirder the better. (Yes New Order, no Depeche Mode. Yes REM, no U2. Yes Cure, no Smiths. Yes Modest Mouse, no National. Yes Pink Floyd, no other 70s bands. Yes punk rock.) I recently tried to read Peter Hook’s book about New Order. I couldn’t, but from skimming 700 pages, I learned that they all did an excessive amount of coke and Peter and Barney couldn’t stand each other. You can see that in their live performances, but they still made all this amazing music together. “Temptation,” which wasn’t originally on an album but has so many versions and releases you could mail order vinyl for your whole entire life and not collect them all, is possibly my favorite New Order song. As a bridge out of Joy Division and from the pain of losing Ian, it’s all there. I’m devastated and alone, I’m upbeat. I’m obsessed with you, I don’t know what color your eyes are. I miss you, I don’t need you. It’s the first time, it’s the last time.

As we emerge from the hostage situation that was 2020 and continue to grieve our innumerable losses, let’s remember together how to live.

Miss Atomic Bomb

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.

5 More Minutes

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!

She’s Out of Her Mind

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.

Caution

Yesterday I learned that a new Killers album came out 41 whole entire days ago and nobody on the entire internet told me. Sometimes I don’t even know.

I suppose you could call me a Killers superfan. Not in a creepy stalker way. I don’t know all the band members’ names, and I probably wouldn’t even remember Brandon’s if his last name weren’t Flowers and he didn’t have side projects. I have a terrible brain for names and dates–of actors, band members, b-sides–so I couldn’t tell you a single thing about them as people, but I haven’t heard anything by the Killers that I don’t love.

I’ve found over the years that a lot of people get resentful when a band doesn’t sound the same on later albums. People get hooked on what a debut sounds and feels like, and I get it. I love debut albums: so many years of writing, refining, and feeling get concentrated into those first songs. Debut albums are gifts from the heart, and many of my all-time favorite albums are a band’s debut, a subject definitely worthy of more posts.

No matter how much I love a band’s sound, I eventually get tired of hearing more of the same. Therefore I love it when I find artists that can put out great sounds that defy categorization, where each album has its own vibe that isn’t bound to previous sounds. The Killers is one of those bands and I can’t get enough of how each album has its own internal coherence that doesn’t GAF about what came before or what people expect from them. (Sidebar: Jets to Brazil and Amy Ray both have this talent and I also adore them for it.) This new album is just the uplift I needed 6 months into a pandemic; sorry, not sorry if you can’t get past the fact that it’s not one hundred percent the new new wave electronica of their early days.

Besides my addiction to guitars and growly tenors, the thing I love most about the Killers is the strong impression that their experiences growing up in Nevada were very much like mine growing up in Indiana. Not since Live’s songs about York, PA, have I felt so much like a musician knows so well what it’s like to grow up among trailers, fields, meth heads, diners and roads to nowhere. These are the songs for those of us who did everything we could to leave where we were, and I’m always here for it.

If I don’t get out of this town, I just might be the one who finally burns it down.

Do You Realize?

Ten years ago, I went into labor three weeks early and twenty-four hours later, my heart was living outside my body. My child was born at 11:58 at night; once, I suggested maybe we should have had their birthday be the next day and my partner said, “Absolutely NOT, you were in labor literally the entire day, that is their birthday!” So. That is their birthday.

It is the most bizarre thing to grow another human being, to look upon someone and know that they once were just a group of cells inside you, and that you had to generate an entire additional organ solely to sustain their growth. So much growing, and then those cells become a being capable of independent life, which is maybe the most bizarre part of all. It only gets more surreal as that life that is initially so dependent grows and changes, walks and runs and bikes and swims, becomes truly an actual whole different person whom it is a joy to get to know.

I’ve had a decade to get used to having grown a whole entire person and I still marvel at it sometimes. Look at what my unreliable and prematurely aged body did! In the old stories that our child’s Waldorf preschool told, children wait in the spirit world until they spot the people they want to be their parents and then cross the Rainbow Bridge to join them once they’ve made their choice. I love this story, because it makes me reach for whatever there could possibly be inside me that called this lovely amazing beautiful surprising spirit who is my child into being.

Ten days after giving birth, I sat on the side of our bed and cried my eyes out because I realized that this tiny baby, whom I had just barely gotten to meet, would one day grow up and leave me. Which is, of course, exactly what every parent wants, a healthy well-adjusted independent child, but it was devastating to imagine then. My partner said, “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves: they’ve only been here for ten days. We have time.” Ten years have gone by in the blink of an eye and it’s true that it’s a little easier each day to raise them to be ready to leave me, as doing so means we are privileged to witness them grow into who they are, a little bit more deeply each day. And who they are is absolutely perfect. I may have brought this child into the world, but I am only along for the ride.