Yearlong Song Challenge, Day 140: Joe

Prompt: "Is it even a song? It's... yes, it's a song. Maybe."

Selected by Joe

The Deejoy Crawling Crab Song

Dejoy Green Crawling Crab

single, unknown year

So much of my life is just withstanding the chaos. Cacophony with no rhyme or rhythm, just noise, noise, noise. I think—retroactively, maybe because I just need a hook for today's blog post—that I was attracted to the drums as an instrument because I have a pathological need to categorize and organize the sounds in my life. It's like the whole world has this natural pulse to it, underlining everything, and when there are sounds that don't match that pulse's rhythm, it throws me into disarray. I sit here with the windows open to my right and hear the crickets and can feel the way that those crickets slot into the spaces in between the notes on a Guster song that's playing on the iPod speakers to my left (quarter notes of rest as a symbol of the silence from upstairs, post-bedtime). This is good. I feel at peace, right now.

But then rewind to earlier moments in the day. That same Guster album but with a peppier song from it, being drowned out by the battery-powered magnetic toy on the fridge that hollers the ABCs, a scream from the middle child as the cat takes a swipe, stomp-stomp-stomp of the youngest as she takes the toy microphone and hisses and growls, the oldest's tablet shouting obscenities from a Barbie makeover game, a voice note text from a friend that might as well be on mute for as much as I can hear it, everything piling on top of one another, none of it making sense, none of it fitting together, jarring my senses and making sit there, sweating, not angry because I'm not a fucking child and I have control over my emotions, but I feel it, still, the gooseflesh from life's rhythms being torn to shreds.

I try to count out the beats. 1, 2, 3, 4. Or something more complicated. Bluey's been great but it never truly, fully clicked for me until I got the intro song down pat. Now I'm sitting in the baby's room, rocking her to sleep as her head tilts, milk-induced stupor, and she's got a new one on her noise machine (Pam didn't want 'em addicted to the staticky white noise that they'd had previously). It's like a rural backyard sound, crickets to match the real ones, but with a few stately gongs of a large windchime, and I'm sitting in there for a while. It's not a true rhythm, but there's a loop, and so I try to count it out anyway. The chimes are on 1, 2, 3 + 4, +a5, with rests on beats 6 through 9, and then... maybe a half note of silence more? So 9.5 quarter notes per measure, or, more accurately, 19/8 time. I'm trying not to look at my phone while I'm holding the baby, even when it buzzes with a new email, so this is where my mind wanders as I close my eyes in the darkness of the middle bedroom.

But, so, the cacophony: enter the crab. I don't know how this thing entered our lives, but apparently it's here to stay. If I had to attempt to trace it back, I'd say that at some point, Jenny and Bob brought one to Wildwood, and then our kids got one under the tree that following Christmas, or maybe Martha's autumn birthday or some shit. It blasts a techno beat as it scuttles back and forth, causing much joy in the mayhem of a child's life, a safe thrill that the youngins can yelp about as they attempt to avoid this toy that really does seem like it's chasing them, and they know it ain't gonna pinch if it ever catches up but the idea of crab = pinch is hard to shake off, the equation being drilled into one's brain at a very early age.

And the music, holy hell. Let not the above embedded video fool you—it doesn't seem loud there due to the audio-capturing capabilities of my video camera, not because the crab is actually in any measurable way quiet. It is LOUD. It is fucking obnoxious. It has a way of making any room louder threefold (the music, the kids yelling over the music, the adults yelling at the kids to turn the music down). And worse, it took so fucking long for me to figure out the time signature of this fucking thing.

But this is something I needed to do, because worse than unconscionable volume would be nonchalant arrythmia. It's one thing to cause chaos. It's another to feel like that chaos it making the whole goddamn universe rip down the middle.

I don't know, man. I was expecting to have to sit here for like a half hour to figure it out, making hash marks on a piece of paper with a blunt-tip pencil to count it out. Make a sacrifice, for the blog. But I'm watching the video that I took now, and all of a sudden it comes to me: 9/4, or a combo of 5/4 + 4/4 alternating. I don't know why it abruptly makes sense to me. Possibly something to do with being a step removed from the chaos, only watching film footage of the crab instead of watching Uncle Bob yell from the couch to turn the crab off her five girls under seven start going bonkers over the eardrum-wrecking Eurodance thump of a plastic toy crab that moves on its own. Or maybe the blogging gods didn't want me tearing my hair out tonight, I don't know.

All I know is that the world makes a little more sense now. I hear the crab now, and I feel how it fits into the great rhythm of the universe. I am at ease. The day is ending. The beat of the conscious world begins its transition into an unconscious beat, the soft snores and the pitter-patter of kitten paws and a clanking pipe or two and the soft hush of distance car wheels on wet asphalt.