Yearlong Song Challenge, Day 159: Zach

Prompt: "A song about keeping warm"

Selected by Zach

"Appointments"

Julien Baker

Turn Out the Lights, 2017

This song doesn't specifically mention anything about warmth, but if you want to know why I picked it, go watch the music video. It starts with Julien Baker lighting a candle, and carefully holding it as she walks to a chair in the middle of a room in her house, so as to keep it from going out. The flame flickers and reflects in her eyes. She then lays down on the floor, puts the candle next to her, and wraps herself with a blanket, ostensibly to stay warm, but also to manage something deeper, heavier that she's dealing with that day. The candle eventually goes out as dancers float around her.

"Maybe it's all gonna turn out alright / and I know that it's not / but I have to believe that it is." This is such a powerful lyric. And the video is super powerful in its own right. It's an illustration of depression and the things we do to try and manage such a powerful feeling. Julien goes about her day. Her energy seems low. She tries to keep warm, tries to stay happy. She goes outside to try to get herself out of her funk. The funk clearly stays with her, though, even as she goes to get gas for her car and takes a trip to the ocean. And yet the dancers continue to follow her around, floating around her, an expression of her soul that can't really be put out by all the dust and dirt that life covers us with, every single day.

And then sometimes you go through day in and day out and you just manage, manage, manage. It's not so bad. Life is not so bad. Life is good. You're doing ok, you're happy enough. You drank coffee this morning and you had a burst of inspiration. And then it's 1 PM and you realize another day is at its tipping point. Where will it end up? And you continue to bang away at the computer. And you're feeling fine but you're not feeling 100 percent. And then you made yourself a snack, combining the instant oats you keep in the fridge with the lukewarm water that's free and available from the water machine in the office kitchen. You flavor the oats with apricots and peanut butter. You start eating it. You don't know how—maybe the end of the spoon somehow found its way into the edge of the peanut butter jar—but you realize that your hands feel sticky, and you look down, and there's peanut butter on the U key on your keyboard, on your mouse and covering your ring finger.

"FUCK!" you scream. "FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!"

And you break. People stop what they're doing and look out their windows. What was that loud banging from the office across the hall, the one where the nice sweet happy boy sits?

And you clean up the peanut butter. It's gone, and it's in the trash. You don't explain to them what happened. How could you? 

Because there's nothing to explain. 

Because it's about everything, and the heavy weight, and the problems you feel bad about calling problems because they're problems of the first world, and you have plenty to eat and a bed to sleep in and your health and a supportive and engaged family. Why can't you just be like everyone else, and accept your mediocre lot?

The peanut butter is long gone from your keyboard. Tomorrow, you'll make yourself the same afternoon snack. Maybe tomorrow you'll run up a hill, screaming like an animal. You'll feel the land and the sun. And you'll still scream when something goes wrong, but this time, you'll be screaming because you're alive, not because you're dying a slow death.