Posted on No Comments on OKAY

OKAY

It’s like if you worked at the mall. Like, for 3 1/2 years or so, with very little time off.

But you liked the job, so you didn’t mind. And you worked hard at the job, and you liked everybody you worked with.

And you used to hang out at the mall for fun, like before you got the job, but pretty soon you figured out that working at the mall put money in your bank account, and just hanging out there didn’t.

And you liked the job, like I said, but sometimes it could be a lot of work. Which wasn’t a problem since you liked the work.

And you worked so hard and were so reliable as a worker that you ended up doing way more than you were hired for. Like, way more.

And some of what you ended up doing required a decent amount of skill. Skills that people who had worked there longer than you (and got paid more than you) didn’t have.

And it wasn’t just skilled labor you ended up doing. When you got done doing the skilled labor most of your coworkers didn’t know how to do, you also had to do relatively unskilled tasks your coworkers didn’t want to do.

Such as standing outside the store, holding a sign, inviting people into the store, telling them about specials in the store. Or sweeping up, taking out the trash, stuff like that.

Then one day, the owner of the store announces that they’re gonna buy this really expensive coffee machine for the break room. It’s just like the one at Starbucks, except better. Any kind of fancy schmancy coffee you want, this thing can make it at the touch of a button.

Which is gonna be great, you think, as you’re standing out in the mall in front of the store, dog-tired from being there every day, for like the past two months.

Like every day, you’re working weekends now too. But that super-deluxe ultra-badass coffee machine is gonna make it all worthwhile, you think.

And I do mean badass. You look the thing up on the internet, and it’s wicked expensive. Like, this coffee machine costs more than you’re going to make for the next four or five months.

Not four or five days, not four or five weeks, not four or five paychecks. Four or five months of what you’re getting paid, that’s what this thing is gonna cost. Nearly half of what the store paid you last year, that’s what this coffee machine is going to cost.

But it’s going to be sweet, you imagine, being able to get all those fancy schmancy coffees any time you want, at the touch of a button.

You think about what kind of coffee you’re going to try first, as you close up the store for the night. You go home genuinely excited, and that night you dream of mocha lattes, frappuccinos, and all sorts of fancy shit like that.

You get up the next morning and go to the mall, like you’ve been doing most every day (weekends included) for the past 3 1/2 years. And you insert your key to open up the pull-down security door… but the key doesn’t work.

You stand there confused for a couple minutes, making sure you didn’t insert the wrong key.

Then you see the owner of the store through the bars of the security door. They’re sipping an orange mocha frappuccino, smiling, holding an envelope.

“Hey buddy!” the owner says to you. “Sorry to have to tell you like this, but you’re fired.”

You stand there, dumbfounded. “What for?” you ask them.

“Don’t worry,” the owner says. “It’s not because of poor job performance, and it’s not because of anything you did.”

“Okay,” you reply. “Then why have I been fired?”

“It was a strictly financial decision,” the owner tells you. “Everybody here likes you, and we appreciate all your hard work, but profits are down, and we just can’t afford to keep paying you anymore.”

“Okay,” you reply.

The owner sticks the envelope through the bars of the security door. “Here’s your last paycheck,” the owner says, and takes a big slurping sip of fancy-schmancy coffee.

“Thanks,” you say. You stand there like a dope for about 30 seconds, then go home.

That’s what it’s like, pretty much.

And it’s not like you don’t want your former coworkers to have fancy-schmancy coffee on their breaks. They work hard too, and they deserve fancy-schmancy coffee as much as anybody.

But you’re probably not going to hang out at the flipping mall again for a long-ass time, if at all.

That’s what it’s like.

Posted on No Comments on THE WURLITZER PRIZE

THE WURLITZER PRIZE

They ought to give me the Wurlitzer prize
For all the silver I let slide down the slot
Playing those songs sung blue
To help me remember you
I don’t want to get over you

That’s the chorus to “The Wurlitzer Prize (I Don’t Want To Get Over You)” by Waylon Jennings, written by Chips Moman and Bobby Emmons. The song is from the 1978 album “Waylon & Willie,” Willie of course being Willie Nelson.

The song is from the point of view of someone who is holding on to a relationship that has ended. The song doesn’t say specifically how the relationship ended, it’s just over, and the singer doesn’t want it to be over.

So, he (or she, Kacey Musgraves did a version of the song a few years back) goes to places he went with his old flame, back when they were still together. He plays sad songs on the jukebox (“Wurlitzer” is a brand of jukebox) and sits there remembering the good times, feeling sorry for himself and crying into his beer.

To be clear: this is one of my favorite songs, from any genre. I’m not poking fun at it, I am just telling you what it’s about.

I like the song because it’s catchy, it’s fun to sing along with, and it’s not that hard to play on the guitar. And at just over 2 minutes long, whoever happens to be around when I’m playing and singing it won’t have to endure the torture of listening to me sing for very long, ha ha.

I also like it because I can relate to it. Years and years ago, I had a relationship end that I didn’t want to end. But it ended anyway, and I was sad about it.

I moved on then, many long years ago, but then something terrible happened. And “terrible” doesn’t even begin to describe what happened. There isn’t a word or series of words that can describe how awful this was: she committed suicide.

The aftereffects of that event haunt me to this day. I mean, it was 14 years ago now, and here I am blogging about it. It’s not something that gets me down or anything nowadays, but I do still think about it.

Here’s a visual analogy: imagine that my mind is a swimming pool, and the waves that gently reverberate back and forth across the water are my thoughts.

Now imagine that someone dropped a boulder into the middle of that pool, from a very great height: there’s such a huge splash that the pool is now half empty, and the water that’s still in there is crashing violently against the sides of the pool.

Over the years, I tried to heft the boulder out of the pool (so to speak) but it kept falling back in, creating more waves.

Now, all these years later, the boulder is still there, on the bottom of the pool. The pool itself has been refilled, and somehow the boulder has shrunk quite a bit. And sometimes when I am treading water in the pool (so to speak) I might stump my toe on the boulder’s jagged edges. And when I do that, it hurts pretty damn bad.

That’s how it is, all these years later. And either the pool is getting deeper or the boulder is still shrinking, because I don’t stump my toe on it nearly as often now.

Here’s how all this relates to the song quoted at the beginning of this post: for a good long while after this huge jagged boulder was dropped into the swimming pool of my mind, I would periodically swim out to the boulder and kick it on purpose.

So to speak.

I would do what the singer of the song is doing, except in my case there was no jukebox. I just used my phone or computer to listen to sad songs and cry into my beer.

I would sit there and get drunk, and play a certain set of songs that reminded me of the event, and just cry and cry and cry.

To be clear: I am not bragging about this. But I don’t feel particularly ashamed of it either, at least not anymore.

I am writing this to tell you that late one night, if memory serves on a work night, meaning I had to work the next morning, I found myself with my head down on my computer desk, forehead resting on my crossed hands, which were wet from all the tears, snot pouring out of my nose, silently sobbing, feeling horrible, head starting to hurt…

And I realized: I was enjoying this.

To be clear, there were times when I honestly believe that I needed to do that. I needed to just sit down and cry about it for a while. There’s nothing wrong with that, and I can tell you from experience: repressing negative emotions only makes things worse, in almost any situation.

But I went way past the point of it being healthy. The first few times I did that – stay up late listening to sad songs, drinking my face off, and crying like a baby, I mean – it was cathartic. The last few times, it was no longer cathartic, it was just me crying and snotting all over the place, clinging to the strong emotions it made me feel.

And maybe someday I will be able to explain what I mean more clearly, but for today I will just say that this one night (which was several years ago now) I realized that on some level, I was making myself feel horrible for the simple reason that I enjoyed it.

And when I realized that I was enjoying this strange torture I was putting myself through, I couldn’t enjoy it anymore.

It wasn’t that I became ashamed of what I was doing. I was ashamed of it already, that’s why I only did it late at night, by myself.

What happened was, I became conscious of the fact that I was enjoying it.

There was nobody making me do that. There was no rational reason to do that. Going back to the swimming pool analogy, the jagged boulder of the suicide was underwater, in the deep end of the pool, sticking up just enough so I might accidentally stub my toe on it every now and then.

And entirely of my own volition, on my own, with nobody telling me to do this, I would swim out to the middle of the deep end and kick that jagged boulder as hard as I could. Then I would sit on the edge of the pool, crying because my toe hurt.

To be clear, grief is a much more serious thing than stumping a toe. And I am not writing this to make anyone feel guilty about their grief.

I am writing this because somewhere out there in internet land, there might be somebody out there doing what I used to do, swimming out to the deep end of their pool and kicking the boulder (or boulders) that sit on the bottom.

And I just wanted to tell you: you don’t have to do that.

Thank you for reading. 🙂

Posted on No Comments on The Upside Down

The Upside Down

There are spoilers for the Netflix show “Stranger Things” in this post.

Be warned: this post is my own wonky interpretation of the show, based entirely on my subjective viewing of the show.

I am not arguing that what I am about to write is what the show is “really about” or that this interpretation will even enhance your viewing of the show in any meaningful way.

But anyways, here goes:

The world of “Stranger Things” is immersed in nostalgia. Everywhere, the viewer sees nostalgic images, hears nostalgic music, and is presented with scenes and plot devices that are themselves nostalgic, in that they mimic scenes from blockbuster movies like the original “Jurassic Park” (raptors = demidogs) or “The Exorcist” (when Will is possessed by The Mind Flayer) or many other such scenes.

To say that the show “Stranger Things” is immersed in nostalgia is an understatement.

But there is one recurring part of the show that is not nostalgic, that does not evoke warm, fuzzy feelings: “The Upside Down.”

The Upside Down is a parallel dimension where faceless monsters prowl around, looking for prey. The Upside Down is also inhabited (and possibly created) by a shadowy monster called The Mind Flayer who appears in visions over the sky of the town.

The Upside Down is just like Hawkins, Indiana (the show’s fictional middle class, midwestern setting), in that landmarks from Hawkins appear in The Upside Down, but they are all dilapidated, covered with dust, broken down and so on.

Here is my interpretation of what I have written about so far:

Hawkins, Indiana (as well as the California town in Season 4), as mentioned, is immersed in nostalgia.

When the various characters in the show enter The Upside Down, they are leaving this nostalgic bubble that they exist in.

Similarly, when viewers finish watching an episode of “Stranger Things,” they are leaving the nostalgic bubble that the show creates for them.

Before I continue, I want to make clear that I am a huge fan of the show. I am not trying to denigrate the show or its viewership by pointing this stuff out, I am just offering my wonky interpretation of the show.

Here it is, for real this time:

“The Mind Flayer,” the dark entity that kidnaps and later possesses Will Byers, is itself representative of the nostalgia that the show is immersed in.

And when characters from the show go into The Upside Down, they are leaving the nostalgic bubble and entering the world of the present day, in which all of the nostalgic elements of Hawkins, Indiana are long dead and gone.

(Madonna’s “This Used To Be My Playground” plays softly, inside your head.)

Nostalgia, in addition to giving us the warm and fuzzies, can also become an incredibly destructive force in our lives. When we as humans indulge in nostalgia, we deceive ourselves into thinking that “the good old days” – whenever they were for us as individuals – were actually better than the present day.

Here’s another spoiler for you: the good old days weren’t as idyllic as you remember them. Bad things happened then, too. People weren’t any more or less “good” back then, whenever “back then” was for you.

To be clear, hopefully: remembering “the good old days” can be a very positive thing, for a million different reasons.

But at the same time, it can very easily become a trap, in that it makes the present day seem like The Upside Down, where everything is old and used up and dilapidated.

If a person spends all their time immersed in nostalgia, it becomes more and more difficult to appreciate the positive aspects of life in the present day.

And this perspective-skewing (and highly addictive) manifestation of nostalgic thinking is what The Mind Flayer represents.

Think about it: in Season 2, as Will and his friends go trick or treating in their matching Ghostbusters outfits, with all kinds of nostalgic images and sounds bombarding the viewer, Will goes into a trance and finds himself in The Upside Down.

All the nostalgic Halloween-themed stuff is gone, and Will is left alone with the massive Mind Flayer, who is towering above him in the sky, with its various limbs dug into the ground.

Later, Will sees The Mind Flayer again and is possessed by it. And the way in which he is possessed is key: The Mind Flayer becomes a cloud of dust (or something) and enters Will through his eyes, ears, mouth, and nose.

Think about how we experience nostalgia: when we see something that reminds us of childhood, we feel warm and fuzzy. When we hear a song from years ago, memories can be triggered. When we taste or smell food we haven’t eaten in decades, our minds can involuntarily drift away to another time and place.

And no matter how great our lives are in the present day, when we awake from these momentary lapses into nostalgia, we as humans have the tendency to tell ourselves that “back then” was better than now, when that quite simply is not the case, in any meaningful sense.

Of course there are exceptions. For some people, the past may have been more pleasant.

But even then, too much nostalgia can make the present day seem worse than it is. What was can (and often does) blind us to what is.

And this negative aspect of nostalgia is what The Mind Flayer represents, in my interpretation.

In season 2, as mentioned, The Mind Flayer possesses Will Byers by turning into a cloud of dust (or smoke, or something like that) and going into his sense organs.

After the possession is over, in Season 3, Will’s friends have girlfriends, and they don’t want to play Dungeons and Dragons with him any more.

There is a painfully emotional scene in Season 3 where Will dresses up in his Will The Wise dungeon master outfit, and tries to get Mike and Lucas to engage in his Dungeons and Dragons campaign, one which he spent a lot of time preparing for them.

But Mike and Lucas are more concerned about a recent fight with their girlfriends. They mock Will’s game, and Will leaves.

Mike follows Will outside, and asks him, did you really think we would never get girlfriends and just play games for the rest of our lives?

And Will – who was possessed by The Mind Flayer, representing negative, backward-looking aspects of nostalgia – answers “Yeah, I guess I did.”

Watch the show if you haven’t, it’s pretty awesome. It’s a nostalgic thrill ride that will press psychological buttons you forgot you had.

But don’t get so involved in it that everything outside of your TV starts looking like The Upside Down.

Thanks for reading. 🙂