TALK DIRTY TO ME.
There’s not a a lot that the world seems to agree upon most days. Rifts and chasms in ideology. Polar opposite cliffs people choose to die on. If you’ve here and participating though, there’s one thing we can all agree upon. I should give myself a fucking break.
A friend sent me a message about my latest post and pointed this out to me just yesterday, and I had to go back and see what I had done. The documenting of my lack of grace is many posts thick. Mostly because it’s the pressure I steep myself in at all times. Veiled as wanting to succeed and or some sort of peak performance, my level of self expectation is high. I couple this with self deprecation to keep things light. Hammering myself so it doesn’t look/feel like I am some sort of narcissist. A study in modern self loathing to show you that all of us, mostly me, have a PhD in it.
This morning’s muse. Does it make the points any better? Is it disarming and helpful or does it look pathetic and whiny?
I imagine it started as a stylistic expression. Something I started somewhere along the way to better make a point, but as time and posts progressed, it almost has become some sort of overarching theme, not so hidden, less woven into the greater points than becoming the main point. Those among us with psyche degrees would say it needs to be addressed, some of the rest of us recognize it as just how it is. Whichever side you fall on it can be seen as a lack of grace for oneself.
Barf.
The complicity of it makes my skin crawl a little bit. I’m an avid disliker about the overuse of catchwords and themes in today’s world. “Mental health, self care, grace, it takes a village, life seasons”, and on and on. The irony isn’t lost on me. I, through constant self deprecation, am becoming that which I hate. “Why things gotta be so hard?” Asks me in choppy English.
500 words about being nicer to myself can’t be anything other than me not being nice to myself, right? It’s the long form of not giving myself a fucking break. Yet here we are. As I make the rules here I’ll just tell myself that by drawing attention to it that I am at the least paying attention to the suggestions of the group. That I need to step back and find another outlet for the “woe is me”, not so adeptly veiled within these words. That I need to give myself some....gag.
Grace.
And so, with that, I’ll give you an 80’s story. Because, well, they’re the greatest.
//
When forced to on demand, conjuring memories can be hard. I’m very old and the details of the greatest decade of all time aren’t just sitting on the cusp of my brain, ready to be regaled upon you at the push of my mental writer button. Alas, I shall try.
Sifting through the mess that lives up top, the things that came to mind this morning are in no certain order, windsurfing halfway to Mexico, that cop in high school everyone knew was out there looking for you, my 1983 Datsun 510 with one black fender, and a short list of albums that seemed to dominate my cassette player from 1986-1988. When in doubt. You always go music.
My high school was 11 miles from my high school home, 15 mins if you were leisurely obeying the speed limit, less than 10 if the need arose. The path was simple 300yds to Highway 90, take right, 10 miles, take a left, 1 mile on your right. It feels like though, that I spent collective days driving that stretch, mostly in part to it feeling like I listened to hours of music on my daily commute. Time and place and music, intertwined forever.
It also feels like I had that Datsun 510 for a decade, when in reality it may have been for a little over 2 years. Like the rebuying of guitars I once owned that I am experiencing, I’d love to find that car and buy it back, snatching my youth from the vinyl seats, rolling down the windows and playing tapes over and over.
For a lot of us “from the 80’s” (or any other subpar decade) time and place were marked by the sounds and smells of the time. Sea Breeze face astringent or Pert Plus shampoo, Licensed to Ill and U2 War, the contradictions of 80’s music fandom blurred by the emergence of almost weekly new sounds. You could love them all as the silos of fandom were looser. I remember a stretch of time where RUN DMC, Hank Williams Jr. and Whitesnake may have been played back to back to back along the pine soaked streets of Pass Christian, MS. A little bit of red neck sprinkled into the sounds of NYC.
My 80’s were spent all over the Mississippi Coast, and I mean all over. Never a slave to belonging to just one group, I lived in Long Beach, went to school in Bay St. Louis, swam almost daily in Ocean Springs and my biggest friend group was in Gulfport. To this end, I find I relate different albums and music styles to each place.
Early 80’s radio and mix tapes belong to Long Beach, Dexy’s Midnight Runners, Joan Jett, Billy Idol, Quiet Riot. The trips to and from school in Bay St. Louis conjure early U2, the Beastie Boys, Poison (fucking Poison for chrissakes!), Ocean Springs is definitely Tears for Fears and the one hit wonder Icicle Works’ Whisper to a Scream and Gulfport ranges from Duran Duran, Purple Rain, The Smiths, REM and Guadalcanal Diary. Sound and place. Place and sound. Memory and nostalgia.
We all have these connections and I think they are incredible. I grasp onto these memories and so many others as placeholders for my youth. The waves of nostalgia washing over and over and over. Whoever first described nostalgia as a wave gets a gold star from me, as there doesn’t seem to be a greater fit than that.
As I’m giving myself a break today and recognizing I am too hard on myself I think I’ll spend some time celebrating the music of my youth. I’ll roll down the windows and find a street with some pine trees on it and at noon or so when the heat is mixing with the asphalt and piney smells, I’ll close my eyes and breathe in some 1987, the neighbors wondering if that’s really Talk Dirty to Me, blaring out of that creeper van.
#hugsandhi5s
