Five Song Friday: Someday We Be Dead
Episode #113: Sweet Spoonfuls, Avocado Crimes and Lukewarm Cowboys
Stop fighting. It’s pointless to resist.
Someday, the spark in our eyes will leave and all the juices in our bodies will dry up and then we’ll all just be like “ungghh” and fall over and turn into dust.
It’s a bummer, I know.
But you can also choose to see it as liberating.
Knowing death is coming gives you license to act with abandon during the precious few decades, years or weeks that you have left. It can release inhibitions. Open doors.
It can give you the inspiration to, as my favorite decorative wooden sign from Target says, “Live Out Loud.”
But embracing the cold blackness of eternity isn’t always easy.
We spend so much of our time feeling entitled and invulnerable, wrapped up in the illusion that living forever is a possibility.
There are long stretches where it feels like we will always be here.
That empty space far off on the horizon? It’s just a dip where the land shifts.
No way that the road just ENDS.
No way that’s a sheer cliff without warning signs.
No way my movie ends with a Thelma and Louise into the great unknown.
Way.
It happens. It’s going to happen. You need to get ready for it.
And you need to understand that people will be left with your stuff. All of your clothes and books and notebooks and that business card collection.
Your power cords and office supplies and that random shoebox of precious ephemera.
They will inherit your email inbox and your Google drive. Your chat history and your browser cache. They will be left with your entire digital slime trail and every dumb sentence you ever saved to the cloud.
And while that may sound terrifying to some, the good news is that nobody cares.
Your deepest thoughts and darkest secrets are safe because not a single soul is interested in the nonsense that fell out of your head, onto the keyboard and into a file named “Self Exploration May 2021.”
Take a deep breath. You can relax.
Now, I don’t know if this applies to you at all. Maybe it doesn’t. That’s fine.
Because I’m really writing this to remind myself that the silly stuff I have spewed and squirreled away is not the buried literary treasure I like to believe it is.
My rantings and ravings will not be dug up by some digital Indiana Jones one thousand years from now. He/she will not decode the file and look awestruck into the faint white glow of the futuristic screen.
There will not be the swell of a John Williams score accompanied by the sounds of angels.
Nobody will ever say, “This is important. This means something.”
And I’m okay with that.
Would I have liked something that I wrote offhandedly years ago to be revered and celebrated and committed to a granite monument in some futuristic city center?
Of course.
Do I want it to be this paragraph, typed out in February of 2001:
“The things I like most about coffee? Great question. Thank you so much for asking. I love the hotness and the wetness. I like that it keeps me company here on my desk like a dog, if a dog was a hot beverage. So if I have to sum up my favorite thing about coffee in two words? I’d say LIQUIDY COMPANIONSHIP!”
Absolutely, yes.
But I’m also okay with the idea that these words, along with everything else, will be lost in the random chaos of zeroes and ones forever.
My work will fade along with all electronic media in a single fiery pulse of electromagnetic radiation from the sun.
All of my doodles and scribblings will burn when our star implodes and fire fills the sky in eight billion years.
Thankfully, I will be gone long before then.
We’ll all be gone.
Nothing will matter then. Nothing really matters now.
We’re just meat sacks that are mostly made of water.
Have a great weekend!
Five Song Friday #113
“I Got to Be Free” - The Highfields
You can’t always start the day with an egg white omelet and avocado toast. There are some mornings that beg to begin with a big, bad bowl of technicolor sugar shapes. And as you spoon that sweet, silly stuff into your mouth, you feel a buzz. A buzz that begins in your brainstem and travels all the way downstairs to your butt cheeks. It’s the buzz of whimsy and whee and I don’t know what I just ate but it tasted like fun!
“She’s My Woman” - Star Slinger
I’m disappointed that Star Slinger is not from outer space. He is a DJ based in Manchester, England. Oh well.
“Hot Guacamole” - MC Paul Barman, Doom, Prince Paul
Before you get mad that the very idea of “hot guacamole” sounds like a crime against humanity, you should know that this song is nothing but delightful, lyrical loopyness, set to what sounds likes “Down on the Corner” by CCR. It means you no harm. And once it kicks off with “I’m old school, this mic is my ProTool / I’m three apples high, I live in a toadstool,” your small heart will grow three sizes.
“Say What!” - Tolliver
My history has already been written. It’s impossible for me to claim that I am the “shimmering sequin-loving son of a cowboy-obsessed pastor and a gospel choir singer.” My dad was lukewarm on cowboys and I never heard my mother break out into a chorus of “Oh Happy Day.” Besides, that line is already being used by Tolliver for his bio and if I started using it, he might take issue. And right now, I just want him to like me.
“Inside Looking Out” - Ndidi O
You can’t accuse Ndidi O of phoning it in. This song sounds like she’s using her diaphragm and every other internal organ to force out the fierceness like a fire-breathing dragon. If you thought that Canadian jazz and blues singers were supposed to be polite? You just haven’t made one mad.
“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I don’t think music should be free.” - Trent Reznor (Born May 17, 1965)
Thanks for reading!
Sincerely,
DJ CrankyPete