Prompt: "A song about being sick"
Selected by Joe
"Routine Pain"
Spanish Love Songs
Brave Faces Everyone, 2020
You could say "sick" in the way that I think is implied in this prompt, as in like medically ill, either of the body or the mind. You could affix "of" to it to signify annoyance, like "I am sick of writing about a song every day this summer." You could even use it ironically, like a skateboarder, usually exclamatory—"sick!"—meaning cool, awesome, etc. "Routine Pain" by Spanish Love Songs could be any of these. There's sickness in the traditional, physical sense—"it hurts to stand up straight" and so on—but mostly in the mental, emotional, behavioral sense—"I'm so sick of sayin' sorry when I cry"—plus annoyance, the "of" implied—"Can't take another summer in this place," ain't that the fucking truth—and maybe even a dash of the extreme sports lingo—"On any given day, I'm a six of ten" is a quote from an interview with the late Scott Hutchison (of Frightened Rabbit), a deep cut that's pretty sick in its "hey I recognize this" quality.
Plenty of weird sicknesses in my youth, all brief and temporary but still memorable in their quirkiness: my entire face blowing up in some type of rash or boils from what was speculated to be large wooden crates covered in poison ivy or sumac and then burned at a haunted hayride adjacent hot chocolate bonfire, inhaled, or smoke covering the face or something, resulting in a physiognomy resembling the worst fighter in Fight Club; a large pink bubble on the bottom of my left foot, maybe infected during a naked midnight sojourn in the Ocean City ocean during a blotto New Year's Eve of many years past, maybe not, still forcing me to hobble around serving tables at the retirement home, until a patient young podiatrist sliced it open and practically filled a pint glass up with the expelled goo; what the doctor on Christmas Eve at Jeanes Hospital described as "an infected acne lesion" but which all my friends callously described as "herpes" based on my alcohol- and teenage-horniness-fueled (and very public) actions the previous weekend on the trampoline; plus, not that this is weird, but mono was a thing too, back then, and it hit just around the same time I was experimenting with alcohol, and, man, I did some stuff and attended some events I probably should not have with an extremely contagious disease.
I talked a big game in 2020 about relating to Brave Faces Everyone and really getting into the music, and that was true. I still listen to this album all the time (Spanish Love Songs have a brand new album as of last week, called No Joy, that is more of the same, for better and for worse). But I think there might be something wrong if I actually relate to these lyrics, which are purposefully heightened. Every slight inflicted upon our generation from those before us is taken gravely seriously and expounded upon gruffly over top of loud guitars. I like it a lot, but I don't actually feel this way, as far as my own personal mental health goes. "I wanna ruin my guts tonight!" is a fucking amazing chorus, but even before the sobriety thing (sorry, sorry), I was never the type of person to sincerely think that way. I was drinking while I was happy, not when I was sad. My lowest moments over the past sixteen years resulted in abstinence, absent of any sharp dives off steep cliffs. (Actually... not to go down this line of thinking too far, I know it's annoying, but I do think that there were a few moments at the end there where I found myself carving a path the bar even while hungover and sad and anxious, and maybe that was the truest signal of all that things had reached their apotheosis, the bona fide shit-or-get-off-the-pot moment of my life... sorry, I'm digressing, I know, but this is what happens when you start writing and you don't know what you're gonna write about. Should I end the blog post now? Can I do that? That's something people do, right? Wait, aren't we still in parentheses? Shit.)
Plenty of weird sicknesses in my youth, all brief and temporary but still memorable in their quirkiness: my entire face blowing up in some type of rash or boils from what was speculated to be large wooden crates covered in poison ivy or sumac and then burned at a haunted hayride adjacent hot chocolate bonfire, inhaled, or smoke covering the face or something, resulting in a physiognomy resembling the worst fighter in Fight Club; a large pink bubble on the bottom of my left foot, maybe infected during a naked midnight sojourn in the Ocean City ocean during a blotto New Year's Eve of many years past, maybe not, still forcing me to hobble around serving tables at the retirement home, until a patient young podiatrist sliced it open and practically filled a pint glass up with the expelled goo; what the doctor on Christmas Eve at Jeanes Hospital described as "an infected acne lesion" but which all my friends callously described as "herpes" based on my alcohol- and teenage-horniness-fueled (and very public) actions the previous weekend on the trampoline; plus, not that this is weird, but mono was a thing too, back then, and it hit just around the same time I was experimenting with alcohol, and, man, I did some stuff and attended some events I probably should not have with an extremely contagious disease.
I talked a big game in 2020 about relating to Brave Faces Everyone and really getting into the music, and that was true. I still listen to this album all the time (Spanish Love Songs have a brand new album as of last week, called No Joy, that is more of the same, for better and for worse). But I think there might be something wrong if I actually relate to these lyrics, which are purposefully heightened. Every slight inflicted upon our generation from those before us is taken gravely seriously and expounded upon gruffly over top of loud guitars. I like it a lot, but I don't actually feel this way, as far as my own personal mental health goes. "I wanna ruin my guts tonight!" is a fucking amazing chorus, but even before the sobriety thing (sorry, sorry), I was never the type of person to sincerely think that way. I was drinking while I was happy, not when I was sad. My lowest moments over the past sixteen years resulted in abstinence, absent of any sharp dives off steep cliffs. (Actually... not to go down this line of thinking too far, I know it's annoying, but I do think that there were a few moments at the end there where I found myself carving a path the bar even while hungover and sad and anxious, and maybe that was the truest signal of all that things had reached their apotheosis, the bona fide shit-or-get-off-the-pot moment of my life... sorry, I'm digressing, I know, but this is what happens when you start writing and you don't know what you're gonna write about. Should I end the blog post now? Can I do that? That's something people do, right? Wait, aren't we still in parentheses? Shit.)
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