Down here in the everyday
If you give up looking
Down below for paid subscribers an updated version of an older piece about watching devastating storms play out on your television (which I've been thinking about for obvious reasons) that will appear in my next book. I've got a couple publishers interested already so that is exciting news. Plus a story about my favorite coffee mug. In a shocking twist I managed to make it about dying.
First some music talk.
I highly recommend buying this 136 song compilation to benefit hurricane victims in North Carolina. The lineup is insane: R.E.M., The War on Drugs, Drive-By Truckers, Wednesday, Jason Isbell, Phish, The Mountain Goats, and MJ Lenderman to name just a handful.
Wanderlust2021
I also cannot recommend this new EP by Young Jesus enough. It's also a benefit. I'm especially beguiled by the song Jesus Christ in Hell. I am telling you something has been done here. Something has been built. An entire world. Even if that world is Hell. Or California. Maybe the border where the two so often overlap. I got a feeling hearing it for the first time this week something like the first time I heard Farewell Transmission. It's quiet then discordant then quiet and keeps throwing things on top of the uncanny musical pyre it's building – or rather into the pit it's digging – as the song itself builds and builds and digs and digs. An infernal orchestra is warming up in the periphery. A man is screaming out for a catharsis that doesn't come. Is purposefully being withheld. This is Hell after all.
John Rossiter sings:
There is a Jesus Christ in Hell
but he's just like everybody else
He gets roasted all day long
There is a PCH hell
but the water's boiling
and what about the smell?
Nobody cleans up all that fish
shriekingspectre
This will certainly be on my top 10 songs of the year. (Follow my ongoing playlist here of the best of the year if you like). Although a couple of songs on their album The Fool – also released this year – including Sunrise and God's Plan are contenders as well.
It's been so long since I heard a new to me act and immediately had to go look up the lyrics. To see if they could stand on their own like I suspected they could. Stripped of the arrangements of what I can only describe as Americana troubadour rock cut with ambient and experimental jazz embellishments.
He sings on Sunrise:
Man, I swear I had a big job
Yeah man, I talked to God
But God was so damn dark
I had to light God’s hеart
So I watched the sun rise
It was likе a balloon
Sent from Hell
Straight to the moon
You're probably detecting a preoccupation with God and Hell here and if you're familiar with my Catholic brain damage that's obviously a big part of why the music compels me. And probably why it will have the same effect on 75% of my readers who as best as I can tell are people who once believed in God and are furious that he didn't end up existing or else people who do still believe in God and are furious that he is absent.
There's also something of David Berman in here. He of course falls into one or both of those categories. No new word... as the song goes. And so one also has to find the joke amidst the crises of faith. Like on the album closer God's Plan:
I met a priest
At the pearly gates
He said, “I should be excited
But I don’t feel that great”
I made a joke about communion
How it must have been something he ate
And then after nothing is funny about it anymore we resolve to find God where we can. Down here in the everyday.
So we walked up
To Saint Peter to say
“Is there a god in Heaven?”
“No God’s down there in the everyday
If you give up looking
God’s beneath that thing you can’t explain”
Maybe in a piece of music.
While I'm talking about music that has floored me this week please also see this video of Nilüfer Yanya covering Rid of Me by PJ Harvey. Holy shit.
All of you lapsed believers I was just talking about will understand this feeling because it's time to pass the offering plate around again. Hell World much like the Catholic Church relies on your giving. It costs money to talk this much bullshit.
Seriously though things have been real slow of late and anything you can give is appreciated.
Something else I want to highly recommend is the series Kevin Can F**k Himself which we just finished the other day. I think it might be an extraordinary achievement. I liked it so much the fake Worcester accents didn't even annoy me. The premise seems kind of hacky – what is life actually like for the constantly put-upon sitcom wife outside the framing of the studio audience – but they handle it in such a slow-burning and surprising way that you start to feel the suffocation yourself. One of the best psychological horrors I've seen in a long time all done through deconstructing the tired old sitcom format.
Stick around below for a story about storms. It goes in part like this:
I went for a run the other day back on Cape Cod back where my grandfather watched TV and I followed a path I was unfamiliar with along the tall reeds down by the unblown still river and stumbled across some horses standing there in their little horse area and the smell knocked me back into fifty different episodes of my life.
Can you imagine if our sense of smell was as powerful as it is for dogs and other animals while our human brains stayed as complicated as they are? Just constantly being hammered with memories of every moment we’ve ever lived all at once every day forever. We'd be cutting our noses off like a man driven insane by the visage of untold horrors gouges out his eyes for relief from the maddening sensory onslaught.
At Flaming Hydra we each take a turn showing off our favorite mug. Here was my offering in a recent issue.
The Editors
Paid subscribers can read it in full below. Thanks for being here.
My Mug
I don’t have A Mug as I don’t really drink out of mugs. I am from Massachusetts so I drink ice coffee year round and then use the emptied large Dunkies (milk one sugar) as an ashtray until it gets disgusting enough that even I can’t look at it anymore. This mug here though I have had for something like 25 years. I finally broke it the other day unloading the dishwasher (which I do by the way).
My mother gave it to me all those years ago so I texted her to tell her it had broken and she said this: