Talking Heads – Making Flippy Floppy

A couple of weeks ago my best friend and I were talking about expressions one could use when you’re asked how you’re doing. Most of the time people say good, whether they mean it or not. It’s a reflex. But in the times we find ourselves, I feel like it rings hollow to just say good, fine, or, ok.

This was brought on by something in Patti Smith’s Substack. It was her daughter, Jesse Smith, retelling a story about the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald and the captain of the ship had said, “We are holding our own.” as his last radio message. Jesse said she finds those words to be “grounding during times of struggle, when all odds are against us, when it maybe just isn’t looking good.”

My issue with this expression is that I don’t feel like I’m holding my own, I feel very much like I’ve dropped the ball and, you know, the ship sank and everyone died. So I think that’s not really going to work for me. Listening to this song I thought about, “trying to do my best.” It’s kind of admitting that things are hard, but you’re trying. I’ve never really known what making flippy floppy means but I always took it as things being tossed around, upside down and back again. That feels like what we are heading into with our crazy president returning and the absolute insane shit he says.

When I started this NaBloPoMo I thought about doing this challenge I saw on Instagram; 20 albums that influenced your taste in music. I thought we would prevail in the election and I’d be able to put some attention to really nailing down that list of albums. 20 was always going to be hard but the way things turned out just destroyed my ability to focus on fun and frivolous things. Not that I think my blog posts are riveting reading but the posts I like writing most are ones where I can spend some time really trying to articulate something about why a song/album/band has meant something to me. Maybe I can come back to this idea later but for now, this NaBloPoMo has been brought to you by me, trying to do my best.