Prozac and Whimsy

I found a glove while walking the dog today, I picked it up and stuck it onto a spike of the fence surrounding the park and a line from a song came charging to me from out of nowhere – “What good is one glove without the other?” – Pretty apt, but given I have spent the last 24 hours listening to a different album by a different band that I wanted to write about it’s kind of annoying as well.

The song in question is Gentlemen by mewithoutYou and can be found on their excellent 2002 debut [A→B] Life. It’s album I keep coming back to and the first thing that I wrote as a fully grown ass man was called Stories I Shouldn’t Tell, which I stole from a slightly mangled line from Nice and Blue, a song I was absolutely obsessed with at the time.

Stories I Shouldn’t Tell was a blog, much like this one, where I just sat down and let whatever fell out of my brain hit the screen. Much like now I was going through a somewhat turbulent time mentally as my world was falling apart. The main difference was I was angry back then. So, so fucking angry, with everyone and everything. I let loose stories I hadn’t told anyone ever. I spoke about my parents infidelities, the worst times of my childhood that I had buried away deep inside of me, and all of the abuse and humiliations I faced and fared with my ex wife. I aired all of my, and many other people’s, dirty laundry publicly with little to no regard of the repercussions.

I hadn’t written since school and as a result at the times the blind rage and often blind drunk diatribes were crude. Attempts to protect peoples identities failed miserably as I’d forget to change their name halfway through an entry. But it all softened a little as they went on. I was learning how to write “properly”, was finding my voice and I was experiencing my first proper dabbling with therapy. I was starting to realise that I maybe wasn’t to blame for everything that had ever happened. That maybe I wasn’t such a worthless bag of shit. A waste of skin and oxygen. I don’t like me now and I doubt I ever will fully. But I can  just about, look myself in the eye in the mirror. If I force myself to. Back then I loathed me with a frankly worrying passion.

Given Songs For The Deaf, Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, Original Pirate Material and Audioslave all came out in 2002 it’s hard to claim [A→B] Life as album of the year but as a debut it’s one hell of an opening gambit. It is the sound of a band who knew who they were immediately. Again as mentioned in a previous post they are a religious band and again it is important to stress that they are not preachy. The music is about their relationship with God, the influence this has on them as well as the influence of people like Kurt Vonnegut who is given a nod with the track Everything Was Beautiful And Nothing Hurt.

Everything Was Beautiful And Nothing Hurt felt like the polar opposite to my life then and while I am a lot closer to it now, a lot of things hurt. I’m not going to whinge again about how so very tired I am or how I am constantly right on the edge of being overwhelmed at any minute. Tears are seconds away at any given moment be it because the snowdrops are out and their beauty and fragility is too much to bear or I just can’t cope with the noise in my head anymore.

I’m jittery today, my brain is going a million miles an hour and I can’t concentrate on anything for longer than a few seconds before the next thing comes along. But I can feel the crash coming in over the horizon.

I have opened an Etsy store selling mugs and I could sit and draw up designs for them all day, currently there are 18 listed, I have sold 7 and have at least 2 more I definitely want to print out and put up for sale. The store can be found here Prozac and Whimsy It was almost called The Moon Isn’t Real but I have my brand now and I’m sticking with it.

The line I stole and mangled all those years ago was “You were a song I couldn’t sing, you were a story I couldn’t tell” A more apt one for these times is “I’m not the boy that I once was, but I’m not the man I’ll be.”

I have mentioned a few times on here that I don’t know who or what I am anymore but I think I’m starting to figure it all out. I know what I need to do. Who I need to be. And how I need to do it. Doing it all is another thing because life is hard but as I once wrote myself, life is beautiful.