Yearlong Song Challenge, Day 170: Joe

Prompt: "A song about..... um, I don't know. You tell me. Pick something funny that should have been included in this prompt. 'A song about ____.' Make it a good one."

Joe's Prompt: "A song about a time in your life when you accidentally hurt someone. Or maybe just a song that reminds you of that time, or that incident. It doesn't necessarily have to be a song from that era, whenever it happened in your life. It can be maybe a song that is thematically appropriate as well. Or maybe just one that has a title that works really well for something that you've been wanting to write about in this regard, a title that describes the key component of the incident that you've been dying to get off your chest.

It should be a song that reminds you of a moment in your life that you regret. That moment that the song reminds you of should specifically take place in the Poconos. It would be one of your annual winter weekend vacations with a few other families comprised of peers whom you call cousins. And their parents, who were originally your parents' friends. A chosen family for you, there in the Poconos. Maybe you've already written about that a little bit, but you neglected to mention something specific that happened. This song should spur you into writing about it.

The song should refer to an incident that happens on the ski slopes. Well, you didn't go skiing back then. You most went tubing, which is the kiddie winter activity on snowy hills, you know, but you're also very bad at skiing, and that shit scares you, so tubing was just fine, overall. It was still fun. Fun going fast down the slick slopes in polished vinyl tubes. Fun linking up the tubes and seeing how much faster the extra weight makes you go, and then pretending that you're gonna go so fast that you'd fly right off the tiny bunny hill at the bottom that is designed to slow down errant tubes. Laughing and goofing off with your pals, and so on. This song should bring you back to this place.

And the song should home in on one specific incident, of course. The year doesn't matter. Early teenage years for you, maybe. Your eighth-grade year, approximately. You're still young but you're not a toddler or anything. You have agency. You are old enough to make choices in life. You choose to be a jokester a lot of the time, especially when you're with your cousins-not-related. Because this is what y'all do. Joke around. All in good fun. It's all very innocent. No malintent for literally anything that happens on those Pocono vacations.

The song puts you back in your snow boots. The song follows you as you find yourself outside of the snack bar, probably emerging from the bathroom. The song sees you get the idea to pack a snowball in the palms of your gloves and the song wants to see how far you can throw it. There are your family-members-related and -not-related on the slope. Sisters, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins. Wouldn't it be funny, you think, if you could hit one of those guys with a snowball as they hit the base of the slope and start to slow down. A lighthearted surprise, to have a snowball rain down from the sky and hit the snow near you as you are traveling in your tube so that you can look around and say something like 'hey, who threw that?!' in an exaggerated fashion. You get what you're trying to say.

The song measures the distance, though, and sees that it's pretty far from where you stand to the base of the hill. You're not known for being athletic. You probably won't even be able to get anywhere near the base of the hill even if you throw this snowball. The joke will land as flat as the snowball will. No one will even notice. But fuck it, you say, and you pack a snowball anyway, and you wind up, and you throw it as far as you can, and see what fate has in store.

The song you choose should follow that snowball as it leaves your gloved right hand. It should follow the snowball as it gets launched farther than you ever thought your scrawny arms could handle. It should follow the snowball as it arches through the air, peaking at least a mile high, and then begins its descent. It should follow too the progress of the tubes, and the family members inside those tubes. Watch how the trajectories seem to line up. It should watch helplessly as the snowball, packed with ice, too much ice, falls sharply, the distance shortening every millisecond, the tubes rushing in, the aunt in one of those tubes blissfully unaware for one more second that the snowball is headed directly toward her body, her face, her left eye.

And the song should soundtrack that moment, so brief that it goes by in a flash, as the snowball collides with your aunt-not-related's eye, smashes and explodes and your aunt's own mittened gloves snap toward the eye and cover it as she cries out in pain. The confusion that ensues. No one having any fucking clue what just happened. No one besides you, of course, because you threw the snowball. You threw it farther than you've ever thrown a snowball before or since. You threw it with such wild accuracy that you can't even believe it. If you had 100,000 additional chances to throw the snowball under the same circumstances and hit the same target, you wouldn't be able to do it a single additional time. Not once. Not fucking once.

The song should then soundtrack what happens after that, the memories all jumbled for you after all those years. You're crying. You're crying because you hurt someone you cared about and there's the associated guilt from that accident. You're crying because you know that you didn't actually mean to hurt anyone and you did anyway, so there's shock, you're crying from shock, no way you should've landed that shot, so you're crying because you're subconsciously convinced that the world is set against you, that the hand of motherfucking god has set these events in motion, and you feel so small. You're crying because it's disconcerting to see an adult cry, and your aunt, she's crying, wildly, in the ski lodge women's bathroom, you can hear her clearly. Her eye is all bruised and bloody. You're probably crying because you know you're going to be punished, or at least reprimanded, for the snowball that you chose to throw and the snowball that the hand of fate chose to use to hurt someone else.

You can't forget that incident because of how strange it was, how unlikely it was that something like that would happen to either one of you. But you also can't forget the incident because the victim, and also the victim's son, seem oddly concerned with never letting you forget it. The song should cut in the same way, by making you remember. You get the feeling, over time, that it becomes less a funny anecdote about an accident from a prank gone wrong, and more a reminder of your flaws. Almost like the victim's family needs to recount this story to feel better about themselves. You don't know where the line is or how it was crossed or why; it's just a gut feeling you have, every time you are reminded about the snowball and what happened when you threw it.

It—the story, the song—remind you about all the times in grade school when peers were cruel by relishing the times you fucked up. And you fucked up just as much as anyone else, but the quarterly report cards and their general comparative success gave them permission to really lay it on thick. Cruelty as if to say 'you are not better than us' even though you never said that you were. And how you got that same sinking feeling later on, past your teenage years and into adulthood, into goddamn parenthood yourself for christ sake, when the snowball story was repeated, in mocking tones. You assume that this is done to make people feel better about themselves. You like life currently and you did indeed throw the snowball back then, so you let the subtly mean-hearted mocking slide right off, most of the time. But you remember it. And you let it curdle a little bit, inside. That's what the song should be about.

The song should also be about how maybe you don't know when you're also crossing the line sometimes, being the jokester that you still are, despite the snowball incident. You're the type to hone the quip and make it sharp, make it bite. You say it's all in good fun, but you don't have a good enough handle on where the line is and you can't truthfully say that you've never overstepped it. You make fun out loud or in writing and you say it's lighthearted but occasionally you see the crumpled look on someone else's face when you take it just a bit too far and you know in that moment that you are emulating your own worst enemy, that you've become the thing that's always hurt you yourself so badly.

It should be a reminder. The song, the snowball, the story, all of it. It should be a guide on how to tell a story. You tell tales because it's important to pass down our history from one generation to the next. But there's a responsibility in the storyteller to make it rich, detailed, expressive, but above all, kind. Or at the very least objective. Because if a myth is designed to tear down, then the story is less likely to be passed on, and that part of us dies. 

The song should be about that. But it doesn't have to be contemporaneous to the incident's time period. It can be a song that reminds you of that. Or something like that. Whatever. A song about whatever. You get it."

"Snowball"

Forests

Get In Losers, We​'​re Going to Eternal Damnation, 2022

I chose this song today because it was the first thing that came to my head when I saw the prompt! I haven't heard this song in forever! Wow, it's a really great song. Weird prompt though, I have no idea if this is what EiC was looking for when he came up with this prompt. Anyways, I don't have much to say about it, I'm just trying to get to 100 words. It's been tough coming up with stuff to write for these blog posts. I'm not that good at this! Well, I think that's 100 words. Okay then.