It’s 2026. Saturn has left my sign. Mercury is retrograde in Pisces and a girl is finally allowed to dream.
So I’m manifesting me a Jimmy Laird. He is imperfect, he’s a teddy bear, he’s the full package. I must have him. Besides, we both share the same Nightswimming fantasy.
Agreed, he’s not real. A minor inconvenience.
(Also agreed no one will ever out-Nightswimming Michael Stipe. But Jimmy comes close, within a lover’s whisper.)
Nightswimming, remembering that night September’s coming soon I’m pining for the moon And what if there were two Side by side in orbit Around the fairest sun? That bright, tight forever drum Could not describe nightswimming
I can’t listen to it too often. It makes me drop down into another dimension and I can’t breathe anymore.
Pray to God you can cope I stand outside This woman’s work This woman’s world Oooh, it’s hard on the man Now his part is over Now starts the craft of the father
I know you have a little life in you yet I know you have a lot of strength left I know you have a little life in you yet I know you have a lot of strength left
I should be crying but I just can’t let it show I should be hoping but I can’t stop thinking All the things I should’ve said that I never said All the things we should of done that we never did All the things I should’ve given but I didn’t
Oh darling make it go Make it go away Give me them back to me Give that little kiss Give me your hand
First let’s get this out of the way: I’m OBSESSED with Jason Segel’s ‘Shrinking’. I’m also obsessed with Jason Segel.
If there ever were a song that describes this season of my life, it’s this song from the Shrinking soundtrack. And just like that, we’re back to the good old days of soundtrack-hunting and wallowing. Having said that, when this track first popped up, I was doing the dishes, having freshly sent out a bunch of screenplay notes to another writer and having stilled my racing, normcore anxiety. The sun was out after torrential early morning rain and I was beginning to feel for the first time since this godawful year began, that I could breathe and everything sucked and it was ok. It felt less like a trap today and thank god because I’m done.
Get more sun. Eliminate toxic shit from your life – food, beverages, cigarettes, people.
Get more sun, not less. Soothe yourself with kindness. Reconnect with your body and love on your skin. Pet yourself like a child. Hold yourself strong.
You are safe, just as you are. You are alright.
This will end. And when it does, you’ll be someone you always knew you could be but didn’t know how.
This disease, this urgent call issued by your body, will teach you.
For many months now I have been depressed. And I have felt in my gut that this depression is here for a reason. Today my depression spoke to me.
It said the same thing a friend told me all those years ago when I was helping with her physio – Purni, it’s obvious you’re putting in so much effort, but it’s not translating to strength. More recently, someone else told me that my hatred and disappointment in myself is holding me back. It wasn’t said to help me, more to tell me that I deserved to feel like a piece of shit. But I took it as constructive criticism.
Today my depression told me that my soul is tired. I’m putting so much effort in but nothing is translating into strength. I am not growing stronger in spirit. People are coming by, knocking me over for sport and moving on. And I’m letting them, thinking this is the ‘work’ one does when one commits mind, body and soul to a mission, to a love.
Oh hell now, my depression tells me, oh HELL NO. Be done with this behaviour NOW. Sit with yourself and listen to what the voices are saying to you. Are they saying you’re too ugly, too fat, too old, too boring to be loved? Are they saying you’re too dumb, too weak, too full of shit to be a leader? Are they saying you don’t deserve money & stability? Are they saying you must suffer for the sake of your history? Are they saying that your trying doesn’t matter, that you’re exactly where you deserve to be, in this hole?
My depression tells me that it’s here because it’s SICK of these voices and these ridiculous statements. It’s here to tell me that I may die without certain things, but not alone, not loveless. It’s here to tell me that if I won’t, then it will render me helpless – so that I can’t move and make more damage. My depression says it will hold me down until I learn to yell & scream – LET ME GO, FUCKER, I HAVE THINGS TO DO, PLACES TO BE AND PEOPLE TO BE LOVED BY.
Young women are making such tremendous music nowadays. How do they know the things they do? I love their bravery. I love that they’re letting art flow through them with a force that no one can stop. I love that they’re turning pain into gold. Maybe, they’re tortured – who knows? But they reach my ears, my soul. And if music – and my soul – is all I’ll be left with at the end of the day, then that’s pretty damn good. Pretty damn good.
On this cold January day, Dolores has died. In her death she comes to me once more, like she did when I was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. Thrown into the swirling chaos of adolescence, trying to find something to hold on to in my miserable awakening to womanhood, I found myself in the presence of Dolores.
There I was, 16 years old, studying in an elite New Delhi school, as far from Belfast as one could imagine. Singing songs in an American accent because that’s how cool music went. There we were, making cruel fun of classmates from poorer homes, who spoke English so thickly it fell on our prejudiced ears like a foreign language. Here she was Dolores, Irish as Irish came, singing in brogue so un-American it was as alien as the kids we ridiculed. But we didn’t mock her. No we couldn’t mock Dolores.
Here we were, us girls in 1990s India, taught that men rocked while girls fawned. Believing that only a Robert Plant or Axl Rose could screech, grunt and orgasm on the microphone. Girls made for pretty popstars, Brittanys with baby voices. But not Dolores. Not never-in-a-good-mood Dolores. She wasn’t going to smile on demand or give a damn about pretty. Here she was, Dolores, full-throated and growling, sometimes guttural and on rare occasions off-key. Other worldly perhaps. Intimate always. These were the sounds of no one but Dolores.
Dolores helped me build a bridge to my best friend. We would gather to try out her songs at break time or over nights spent at each other’s homes. My friend could yodel like she did. I did some cool harmonies. We would go on to win competitions with Dolores. At night, I would listen to her on my Walkman, clicking the cassette into place and burying myself under sheets so that no one witnessed the rollercoaster of emotions I was about to experience.
On this day that Dolores has died, I plug her voice into my ears once again. I’m now at a safe distance from my past. I allow myself to feel it all again – rage, loneliness & fear. If I could, I would tell Dolores I’m a different person now. I am grown.
Nevertheless, there are memories still hidden in the nooks of her songs, not always in the obvious places. They’re hidden in background strains of ‘Ode To My Family’ that I once mistook for vocal harmonies. They’re tucked into the transformative break in ‘Daffodil’s Lament’ as dark plaint turns to soft decision: ‘I have decided to leave you forever, I have decided to start things from here.’ They’re embedded in the longing of ‘When You’re Gone’ once reserved for a boy, now shockingly, for Dolores.
But it’s not just memories that are hidden, there are notes of love & solidarity. Women, after all, have a way of breaching all kinds of boundaries to embrace each other. We form chains of empathy that link across vast oceans to prop up a sister. There she is Dolores, as she always was, in gentle whispers and hi-octave clarion calls, pointing me to the truth in my heart. Staying now as then, when everyone is gone. Even she.
I try not to cry as I raise the volume up a notch. There she goes now, Dolores, deep into her cosmos, her time with us over. I remind myself to keep an ear open, just in case her voice rings out again. Unmistakable in Irish trill & yodel, recognizable on the darkest of nights, Dolores will not die.
This doesn’t look like much (and Youtube police please don’t put me in jail for copyright infringement) but it’s meaningful to me. It’s me returning from an evening walk as the rain picks up, conspires with Apple Music to knock the wind out of me, then plants the seed for an idea.
It’s me taking a shitty cracked-up mobile phone (that tends to overheat at the slightest) with a wobbly tripod and recording a video where the focus goes in and out because I have NO sense of how optics work. It’s me matching music to cut to subtitle so that the timing works.
In the end, it’s a bit boring and visually flawed but it works. Because I made it. Because the words hit page & screen just *so*. Because, R.E.M and Automatic For The People.
Even the focus going in and out ends up looking nice to me. Next time I’ll angle and light the shot better.
It is my personal view that no one sings love quite like Bjork does. So it’s weird that I came to this song not through her but through Thom Yorke and Radiohead. This was in the days before the internet was everywhere (it was there but only on a desktop, where we downloaded audio tracks and never have enough bandwidth to look at Youtube videos). For the longest time I thought it was their song. Not hers.
“while you are away
my heart comes undone
slowly unravels
in a ball of yarn
the devil collects it
with a grin
our love
in a ball of yarn
he’ll never return it
so when you come back
we’ll have to make new love”
In her songs, Bjork loves like a little girl and a tall woman. This is something I am learning to do everyday. Love doesn’t work if you won’t do it with a child’s heart. Love doesn’t work if you don’t possess a warrior’s courage. Time happens. Change is constant. Things unravel. We say goodbye. We find someone else. We find ourselves. The devil keeps all these balls of yarn. We let him have his spoils. He grins. We make new love.
Sorry Thom, well tried, but it takes a woman like Bjork to write and sing this song for me to find peace with where I am – somewhere between letting go and holding love close.
In the last three months, I’ve divested myself of most of my mindless addictions. It’s just happened without an extraordinary struggle of will power.
I’ve quit smoking, I’ve stopped drinking alone every other night, I’ve become celibate(ish), stopped ordering so much takeout, stopped eating out much, become more vegetarian than before (this might have something to do with the weather) and I haven’t bought a frivolous piece of clothing in ages. There are of course some addictions that have only gotten stronger as a result. Like binge-watching computer-tv & being miserable a lot. But there are some fascinating upsides.
Like this morning, when I replaced my cooking-time music with sacred Tibetan chants – you know the kind, right?
When the mind & body has been vice-less for a while, incredible things begin to happen. One is cleansed, one attains, if you will, a certain purity. One begins to see, hear and experience things like never before. Such as arcane messages embedded in sacred Tibetan chants.
From this morning:
“Joy joy joy joy
George George by George Boy George,
Gay George, Yay George,
Oy Boy Soy Boy
Toy Boy Joy Boy
BOY BOY BOY JOY
OOOOOHHHHH”
I gotta tell you, it was enlightening as fuck. And now I’m horny.
The Other Blog
Somewhere deep in the blogosphere, floating in the infinite cloud of random words, rants & ramblings is the blog that started it all.
