I write this at 3 am at night. Insomnia seems to happen every other night now to me. I’m listening to one of my mixtapes of acoustic rock in order to soothe me. I don’t know when it will succeed in getting me to sleep. My back pain became severe last month, after a chiropractor screwed it up. I have scoliosis, I was supposed to have an MRI last Friday but the insurance decided to fuck around as usual. Maybe it will happen this Thursday now, but I’m not holding my breath. I’m 36 years old, halfway to 72, but I feel like I’m already experiencing physical deterioration. This is my life now. Pain. From the moment I wake up to whenever I’m lucky enough to sleep. I can’t even get on the ground to play with my son. Simple outings have become excruciating because the longer I’m standing upright the worse the pain gets. I can’t get through the day without being medicated. And I can hardly get a full night of sleep. You know, I realize how fortunate I am in a lot of respects. A wife, a kid, a house, food at least most of the time. But I can’t help but be depressed, I feel like my body is falling apart. I feel the bony hand of Death on my shoulder, whispering in my ear that he is coming. Is this a midlife crisis? I never got over my quarter life crisis, back when I realized my entire education was a scam. I could have started writing this blog entry a lot sooner. I usually like to give myself at least a few days to do these. But it was supposed to go up today. I barely have the motivation for my webcomic let alone anything else. I’m back to being right up against the deadline on those pages.
What music has been getting me through these rather dark times? Here are a few songs. I don’t know how much I will write about each song. Probably going to try to get some sleep and write a little bit during the day, got to work on my comic page though, top priority besides parenting and such.
((Update: I fell asleep finally around 4ish, woke up just before 8, with another groggy, painful day ahead of me. Gonna have to compensate with a lot of coffee, and some jazz cabbage for the pain if you catch my drift.))
Another thing keeping me in a black place mentally is Armenian news. As Azerbaijan continues to attack Armenia and commit heinous war atrocities while the rest of the world largely doesn’t care in the slightest, I see the writing on the wall for my little country. 4,500 years was a good run at least. Every country gets wiped off the map and forgotten by history eventually. Humanity is headed for extinction anyway. The abyss consumes all. It’s like how no one is going to remember me 200 years from now. So yeah, it’s like I’m reliving the 2020 Artsakh war while being in excruciating pain. Fun times huh? I mean it’s not like I can do anything to change it personally, especially being flat broke. Maybe I should use my “fame” to raise awareness about it, eh? Hah. Not even Serj Tankian or Kim Kardashian can do anything of substance about it. Best I can do is try to avoid looking at the news. I’ve unjoined the Armenia subreddit again.
So, here we go.
Desmond Doom ~ The Dissociation Song
Slow Danse with the Dead ~ Happy Lies
Slow Danse with the Dead’s new EP is awesome, no lie. No happy lie. “Strangers in the Dark” topped my charts last month and it’s still a favorite of mine right now. But lets have a look at this one. It’s saying that happy people only stay happy by lying to themselves. “Happy lives tell happy lies.” I would add that it’s a combination of that and ignorance being bliss. The more you learn about the world the worse it is. I was happiest right before Middle School, age 10 to 11 or so, right before I started to figure out what an awful place this planet is. I was at the perfect balance of intelligence and ignorance at that age. I would binge on books about dinosaurs and ancient Egyptian mythology, the world seemed like a fascinating place, not a terrible place. I didn’t know what the hell a genocide was, back then. I was being told happy lies as a child, and I believed them whole-heartedly until life proved them false. Anyway I’m not good at happy lies. I embrace uncomfortable truths. That’s why I’m not very religious anymore either. You can’t look around this world and believe in the good of a God who rules it. War, famine, pestilence, disease and death, they rule this world. That’s a quote, from Vincent Price in Masque of the Red Death. I don’t see any way to refute it.
Ovmorth ~ Kletka (acoustic Molchat Doma cover)
Ssshhhiiittt! ~ Восемь
Nirvana ~ Pennyroyal Tea (Acoustic demo, 1990)
This version specifically is the one I’ve been feeling lately. “Pennyroyal Tea” is a song about being in chronic pain on a bunch of different medications, and having bad posture, among other things. Yes there’s the heroin withdrawal element to the song too, but since I am in chronic pain I’ve felt like gravitating toward the song anyway (trust me, I’m not self-medicating on anything that hardcore). Another song kind of like that is “Falling Apart” by Insane Clown Posse, where it’s a song about drug withdrawals but I relate to it through physically feeling like shit for all different reasons. Anyway I dug this particular demo version of the song up when I was working on my acoustic rock mixtapes. It’s more raw than the album version, and Kurt Cobain sings in this uncharacteristically low voice that he almost never sings in. He sounds like he’s suffering. “I’m so tired, I can’t sleep.” Love that line. Kurt Cobain should have made post-punk music. He would have made a great goth. Anyway, this song sounds like a mess, I feel like a mess.
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