Summer Song Challenge, Day 23: Joe

Prompt: "A song from an artist/band with more than four words in their name"

Selected by Joe

"January 10, 2014"

The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die

Harmlessness, 2015

The date doesn't seem all that important to the song, though maybe I'm missing something. "January 10, 2014" is, according to co-frontman Dave Bello, about "retaliation against predators." It's based on the true story of a woman, calling herself Diana, who was murdering rapist bus drivers in Mexico in 2013ish. I'm not 100% sure what the date in the title of the song signifies. It's probably either the date of one of those murders, or the date in which Bello read the article in NY Magazine that spoke to the still-unsolved crimes.

I love when specific dates are mentioned in music, because it sends me on a dive into my own past, in attempt to rediscover what I was up to on that particular date. I know that sounds corny, but I can't help it. This is how my mind works. I feel a certain sense of comfort in being able to build a bridge between my life and someone else's life. If I could say what exactly I was doing on January 10, 2014, then I could find some thematic relevance in that pair of events, together in time and totally separated in space.

I have several methods of going about finding the information I need. I have not kept great records of my life, but there has been sporadic diary-keeping over the years. The best case scenario is that the date occurs in either 2017 or sometime between January 2019 and October 2020, time periods in which I committed to writing down what I did every single day. I have those lists around here somewhere, but it's not relevant to this World Is Beautiful song. I'm looking for 2014.

Puke on Your Birthday is also very little help around this time. The blog was more or less asleep from 2011 through 2016. There are some diary entries from 2012 that have since been ported over to PoYB, from when we lived in Vegas, so that's helpful for those six months. Otherwise, not much. And it's not even like '08-'10 or '17-present are that helpful either. It's not like I'm sitting on here writing about what I do each day. Occasionally that shit will find its way into an album review, but that's more of a mark of how terrible I am at writing album reviews, as opposed to how good I am at maintaining the archive.

I kept records of my life on my Xanga, Shelter from the Storm, from March 2005 until 2008ish. Again, it's not like I set out to write a diary, it was just that I was a shitty writer then (like now, but exponentially worse), and "writing a Xanga post" basically meant listing what I was up to that week. So, ironically, the more terrible my writing was at any particular time in my life, the more helpful it is in determining what I was actually doing on any given day during that time.

There was another Xanga prior to Shelter from the Storm, by the way. It was called Spinnerooni2001, and it is long gone. I think at a certain point in late 2004, one or more parents made themselves known that they were reading it? Or maybe someone took offense to something that I wrote? I forget the details. But I deleted all that shit, which is a shame, because it was probably hilariously terrible in only the way a fifteen-year-old's public journal entries could be.

Then, if you wanna go really deep, which I very rarely do, then you can take a radioactive gander at the private Xanga journal that I kept regularly from like 2004 through 2010 and then semi-regularly until maybe 2018 and also saved in a life raft during the Xanga exodus and nestled gently in a private Wordpress account to look at and to cringe at for the rest of my life, when needed. Reading what one wrote privately as a young teenager is an exercise in extreme humility. Every viewpoint is so angry and so shortsighted, in makes me sincerely uncomfortable whenever I am scrolling through looking for something specific. Like, the entry closest to 1/10/14—which is dated 1/24 so about two weeks off—is about how angsty I was getting about having to buy things for the house we had just bought a month and a half prior, since money was tight, and I had trained myself to be pretty tightfisted over the previous couple years, since I didn't have a well-paying job and I had a wedding and a mortgage and an addiction to alcohol to pay for (my solution to that last one was occasionally "fill a water bottle up with wine and alternate paid pints and free wine at the bar").

So I know where my headspace was at during that time period, but I still don't know what I was doing on that day, January 10. Plus now I'm shaking my head at how much emotional stress I wasted at that age, since I know now that money does and does not buy happiness, simultaneously, and you gotta balance the two instead of Scrooging your way through life.

Oh, and there are plenty of photos from the back half of my life so far, but they rarely tell the whole story. When the dismissal of Facebook from my life was imminent, I did a good job of saving all the pictures I could, and backing them up in a couple ways. On Google Photos, I even attempted to label them with dates. But those aren't necessarily accurate. I didn't copy them from Facebook, I just did my best with the ones I couldn't prove either way. Plus, it's not like Facebook pictures were accurately dated anyway. It could be that Saturday's pictures weren't uploaded until the following Wednesday, and thus it would be affixed with that Wednesday's date. So even if I'm looking at a picture that has the date January 10, 2014, it's not like the event in that picture actually took place on January 10, 2014. Close, but not exactly.

I started keeping a google calendar probably around the time I started working as a police dispatcher, since my schedule there was a byzantine pattern of x-days-on and y-days-off. But that's mostly through the phone, and my history with cheap breakable phones is equally byzantine. So when I look at the phone I have now (which, truth be told, is on its last legs, since it has this like weird black hole thing right in the middle of the screen, where I can still touch and effect change on the screen but can't see what I'm touching), and I scroll backward, I can only see back to June 2021, since I guess syncing doesn't work in reverse.

Even when I go to the calendar on my desktop computer, I... wait. Holy shit. This works. I never knew this. Everything is saved on here. Everything I've ever input into the calendar doohickey is on here since November 2013. Wow. This is fucking insane. I'm finding this out in real time. This blog post is about to go in a completely different direction than I intended. I thought I was going to end on a note of mystery and speculation, but no. We have a definite answer to what I did on January 10, 2014. Maybe my life has been archived a little too much. Nevertheless.

It's a little anticlimactic. I had work from 3 PM until 11 PM. The funny part is that I also have "9 PM — Science Club" notated on here for that date. I definitely attended a Science Club concert at some point in my life, but I am 99% sure it wasn't this night, since I made a habit of not calling out too often from work, at least toward the beginning of my year at that nightmarish job. 

Which is probably for the best, all things considered. Then I would've had to attempt to convince myself that seeing a Science Club concert was profound and thematically relevant to my present-day experience with this random emo song from 2015, and then the Science Club frontman Nate would've felt compelled to say something pithy in the comments, and then I would feel pressure to say something similarly pithy and sarcastic in the comment under his, in order to undercut the whole thing, and that's not what I want to do here. References to other blogs in a Puke on Your Birthday blog post only work when the piece is in conversation with the other blog, and rather than being about the other blog. I'd be curious to hear what Mr. Science Club has to say about "January 10, 2014." Maybe there's some profundity to be found by the author of Fatter, Older, like maybe he's happy he was playing "Free Pimp C" to a room of hundreds on 1/10/14 rather than being murdered on a bus in Ciudad Juarez.

I do think that it's important to keep track of your life in some fashion. Keep a journal, save calendars, tag your photos with dates, whatever you gotta do to not let your life pass you by. It's really easy to let the days start to meld together into one long endless day. No: each day is a story. Tell your story, if only to yourself.

What did you do on January 10, 2014? Are you Diane the Hunter? Were you at Kung Fu Necktie or wherever? Were you calling 911 about a disturbance on the highway? Were you writing a song about a series of revenge murders for the most ridiculously named emo band of the 21st century?

And what are you doing today? Will you remember, when someone writes a song about this day, years from now? It is time to start recording history as you know it.