I should be looking upon foreign shores right now. I should be sipping a coffee looking out on the inlet of of the *&^%$ River and the Atlantic Ocean. I shouldn’t be in my home office sipping whiskey asking why none of the songs that have emanated from my iPod thus far have yet to make me weep. Why my lower back is hurting with such an intense pain because I had the audacity to bend down and greet my cat when I got home from the supermarket. Why I’ve trained my tongue to accept that the CostCo brand Irish Whiskey is perhaps better than Jameson’s. Why I have no motivation to do anything.
I chose to write because of the first ask: why I want music to move me to weep. I think I want to cry, not because I’m particularly sad but because I think it’s a healthier response to the *gestures vaguely at everything* than anything else I’ve been doing. The German have a word, Weltschmerz, which essentially means melancholy and weariness of the world’s harsh imperfections. A few weeks ago I read a headline that made me sad deep in my soul, and what’s funny about that is that it wasn’t anything especially sad; I think it was just some general update on policymakers, but it just struck as me intensely dystopian and dismal and I felt an immediate and disproportionate sting of sadness.
A few days later I read a statistic that said that teenage suicide is down in America and my first, terrible thought was “well, then they’re all stupid” because who the fuck would look out their window and think “yeah, let’s stick around and watch where this is going?” What a horrible way to accept what should be good news! Why am I like this? I need therapy.
So then, to music I turn. Fear Factory’s “Cars” is fading out while I type and is now succeeded by Longwave’s “Tidal Wave,” a song that I have been quoted as saying should be marketed as an antidepressant. However, since I made that declaration I also made it my alarm tone, so now I associate its opening guitar line with having to haul my old fat ass out of bed and tend to obligations.
Music changes for every person with time. Lewis Black has a great bit about this, referring to a song that you may have once associated with a new love that loses its luster as the love sours, twisting its connotations into a need for stronger liquor. Some songs transcend the limitations we put upon them, however, and those are the ones we turn to when we want to forcibly dial in an emotion from our subconscious mind. Like the lute the bard plays to lure the dragon from its hoard, VAST’s “One More Day” brings me back to San Diego, working in the music cage at Borders Books & Music, geeking out over the new releases as I place them in increasingly difficult finger-traps of exoskeletons to deter thievery. And, now, just like the kids who were thinking about offing themselves when the darkening cloud of their future blooms above them, I’m siding with the would-be thieves of 2007-era Borders.
Music, film, literature, art – they’re beauty incarnate, and they’re your birthright. You were born into bipartisan politics, taxes, gun violence, and Glenn Beck, goddamnit – you deserve art. You deserve whimsy. You deserve to believe that your time is valuable because it can be filled with pleasure and pleasant things. You deserve to believe that every moment you have to yourself is an opportunity for something amazing to happen. You have to work to afford to live; we can’t do much about that, so I insist that every moment that you’re not actively working to afford your life, you actively live the fuck out of it. You deserve to believe that you have the agency to reach for things.
Audacious things. Untouchable things. Unachievable things. Every record broken was a limitation, a wall, a precipice, before someone leapt past it, through it, over it. Reach for things. I’ve been reaching for things all my life. I haven’t grasped it all but I’ve done more than many I know who sat on their hands or just decided to sit out the participation portion of life. I enter drawings I don’t win. I occasionally pick numbers for the lottery. I drop business cards in fishbowls. I send things I wrote to people so they can throw them away for me. I don’t always win.
But sometimes I do.
I wrote plays and poetry in high school. They weren’t good but some people read them. Some people put the poems in stapled ‘zines and some people performed the plays I wrote. I sang with some like-minded idiots in a garage band at a restaurant job after high school. I saw every band I could afford to see play live.
I moved to San Diego with $40 and a dying car and started a new life on a friend’s couch. I wrote and performed poetry on stage. I sang in a band. I acted then wrote then directed plays at a repertory theater. I sang in two more bands. I made short films and a feature film. I kept writing. I dared to fall in love and get married.
I moved to Texas. I started writing about movies for a website, then I started interviewing the creative people who made them. I’ve interviewed over 230 of them since. I moved to New Jersey. I go to New York City just to bask in its celebrity. I still reach out for more. I audition for stuff. I sing for people. I try because I have to believe that my time is valuable.
Which is why it is so disencouraging that I am not looking upon foreign shores right now, because I was told that I would be. Not might. Not tentatively. No, I was told that I would be elsewhere right now and I’m not and I’m angry. Angry enough to “Blow Up the Outside World.” (Yes, my iPod is much, much cooler than yours.)
I was disproven. My time is not valuable. It’s another commodity to be flushed away for no reason at all. My time means nothing, which means no one’s time means anything because nothing good can happen. And, to be frank, it’s not the worst thing. I don’t want to blow up the outside world and I don’t want to end it all to prove to the kids how easy it is and I don’t want to ransack a Barnes & Noble or a… fuck, there isn’t really much else, is there? Shit, it’s bleak out there!
Regardless, it’s such a minor thing; the epitome of a first-world problem. I don’t want to overreact but I also don’t want to ignore my anger. When you’re told you’re disposable or your time is worthless, you should get angry. Because it’s not. You’re not worthless, and every moment you give over to your own pursuit of happiness is precious.
This isn’t just hedonism. This isn’t just whimsy. This is your birthright. You were born into a world that ends, so take your moments. All of them. I’m not going to Tony Robbins you into squeezing the last drop out of every minute of your day, because I’m not a hypocrite. I doomscroll, play mobile games that offer no enrichment, stare in the corner of the room trying to will ghosts into existence. I listen to The Forecast’s “These Lights” then replay it as soon as it ends because it didn’t hurt enough the first time. Take those moments, too.
But, I beg you – I beseech ye – I plead with wild gesticulations: reach for things. Ask for things you have no business asking for. At least once in your life I want you to be doing something that makes you stop and say “Man, I shouldn’t be allowed to do this.” Do something that is so beyond your station that you feel like you’ve pulled the wool over the eyes of Fate or the Status Quo. Take it from Somebody who’s a Nobody – you’ll surprise yourself with the things you can do.
Kids, don’t rush to the end of your life – you’ll get there without trying. It’ll come sooner than you expect, and I don’t want you to miss what tomorrow offers. And don’t steal art – there are too many ways to enjoy it for free. At the same time, don’t pay these unreasonable prices TicketMaster is charging for concerts these days. If we all decide at once not to pay those inflated prices then they’ll go down. It’s called economics, supply and demand, and if we all say, with one voice, “no thank you” to these ridiculous prices then they’ll hear us. But do go see as many musical artists as you can afford because music is the most immediate medium we have with which to scream into the void and ask it to not be so vacant. It’s how we say “we want to feel because we’re alive and that’s supposed to feel like something.”
Go to a museum and look at art. Sculptures, instruments, paintings. Lean in closer than you should and see the paint heaped upon the canvas. Know that a person stood before that same canvas and applied that paint. Maybe they were looking for a paycheck, maybe they wanted to capture something gorgeous so that it could exist forever, maybe they were trying to impress a lover or a stranger. Why art begins isn’t nearly as important as what it means to you. Go to that play that is only running for one weekend and is disturbingly affordable. Go see that band that is playing in that basement for the insulting price of a can of vegetables they’ll donate to the local food bank. Read that writer’s SubStack (or a more reasonable alternative) and leave them a like. Go see a poet cry into a microphone at your local coffeeshop or bar.
And, I can’t stress this enough, reach out. Ask for free shit, ask for attention, ask for help. Pick up a guitar. Pick up a pen. Pick up a brush. Pick up a megaphone and scream your pain, your anger, your love, your hopes. Don’t minimize your anger, your pain, your love, your hopes. Hold your whimsy. Don’t ever give a single second to Imposter Syndrome because the only imposter you’ll ever know intimately is yourself if you deny who you are and what you feel. Everything about you is valid and your time is worth every possibility of pleasure or pleasantry.
“Try to figure out what all this is for.” – Pinch Me. The Barenaked Ladies
Eric McClanahan 
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