Parenting

The Catastrophe (Good Luck With That, Man)

Car Seat Headrest – The Catastrophe (Good Luck With That, Man)

I am sure you all are right there with me, trying to figure out what to say about the Catastrophe we find ourselves in without just sputtering a string of expletives. Not exactly at a loss for words though words seem inadequate most days.

That might be why I’ve been trying to get to more concerts this year. For those couple of hours in a dark, crowded, sweaty room surrounded by like-minded people looking for some community, I feel a tiny bit of strength.

At the end of September, my son and I headed up to Boston to see Car Seat Headrest together again. This time I got GA floor tickets. We were not going to miss out on the action from the balcony like last time. A veteran of the mosh pit from my 9:30 Club days in the early 90s, I was ready. Yeah, good luck with that, man. When they played this song and the pit got going, I was transported a good 15 feet away from where I started, nowhere near my (20 year-old) kid, my phone – missing. A quick collective search for my phone, found even further away from where I had wound up, returned it to me unscathed. I decided to hit the bar.

I wandered around the back of the floor, unbelievably overpriced beer in hand, looking for pockets where I might be able to get closer to the space I had left without getting back in the thick of it. I tried to work my way in, weaving past furries and people in masks, eventually making it over to my son near the front for the last few songs. I might not be in top form anymore but there is nothing like being in the middle of that energy. Needless to say, my son had the time of his life and declared it his best show ever.

I’m not suggesting you have to get bounced around by a bunch of people half your age but I do encourage you to find some opportunities to remove yourself from the daily onslaught of bad news, if just for a few hours. Recharging is important.

With that in mind, here I am again. Does this recharge me? Sometimes no, sometimes yes. When it clicks, it’s worth it. We shall see.

Until the End of the World

U2 – Until the End of the World

Friends, I am kind of freaking out. This Muskolini takeover of the Treasury is going unchecked and has the potential to wreck the economy, far beyond what the tariffs will do. It’s been two weeks. Not even. I don’t have a fat bank account or a bunch of assets to lose, but I also need every dollar I have.

I am thinking about that scene in the Wim Wenders film Until the End of the World, when Claire is someplace with sacks of money and it’s all worth nothing. I haven’t seen the movie in a super long time but that’s the way I remember it. And I know being online is NOT helping, but I kept looking to see if someone, anyone, was going to do something about it. Obviously the Democrats in Congress are useless, not that they could actually do much in the minority, but for fuck’s sake they could at least say they have a plan of attack.

How does this end? With the US becoming an authoritarian country with a tin pot dictator? I mean, duh. But really, what happens when the world’s largest economy collapses? If we go down, everyone’s taking a hit. What can the states do, anything? Withhold federal taxes? I wish the blue states could just say fuck off, we’re done. This isn’t what we voted for and you hate us anyway so we’ll just leave and let you sit in your own pile of shit.

I saw someone use the phrase “avalanche of idiocy” today and I think it perfectly describes our situation. Dullard is too much of a simpleton to see what he’s unleashed but we are all going to be buried soon, thanks to the egos of the broligarchy. They don’t even need him now that they’ve got the keys to the vault.

There are people who have it way worse than I do. People whose lives are at risk from this administration. Literally. At the current moment, nothing in my life has actually changed, yet.

I so desperately don’t want to be here. Here, meaning at this juncture, and also here, in this country. Here, the mother of two young adults who have already watched their futures implode multiple times over the past 10 years. I will get up in the morning and go to work and sit in meetings and try to keep it together, all the while thinking about the end of the world.

Watching the Credits

The Beth’s – Watching the Credits

Thanksgiving break is over. I dropped my son off at his college and made my way into the office for the afternoon. That first day back from a holiday is always kind of a shock to the system but today was a little extra.

So it was nice to get home and have it be quiet. It was lovely having my son home and seeing my daughter over the break but it is not like they are far away or I haven’t seen them in months. I like talking with them and hearing about their jobs and classes, friends, etc., but I also like quiet.

I know people who really struggled to find their place once their kids went off to college. That empty nest hit them hard. I think partly because I was not home during after school hours for their whole lives, and as teenagers they would be busy in the evenings with friends, clubs, or homework, I didn’t feel like I was suddenly missing something. Also, after all of those years of working all day, driving for over an hour, then getting home and having to fix dinner and attend to whatever things the kids’ needed in those few remaining hours, I am glad that I no longer need to be constantly on. I can sit quietly and just read a book, or watch something, zone out, whatever I feel like doing. It’s not bad.

I feel like this fall has seen a lot of transitions for my family: son off to college, daughter starting a job, my husband also got a part time gig, so things were shifting around for all of us. I think the new year will be when it all starts to fall into place a bit, fingers crossed.

Desire Lines

Deerhunter – Desire Lines

Not sure what it is about this song that has me hitting the repeat button. It’s closing in on seven minutes long, when I usually find that to be much too long.

It’s been nice having my son home but it means I am staying up later than I want to and unlike him, I can no longer sleep all that late in the morning. So this is all you get today.

Stick Season

Noah Kahan – Stick Season

My husband, son, and I drove up to my daughter’s for Thanksgiving today. She is cat sitting and didn’t want to leave the cat overnight so it just made more sense for the three of us to go up there. We brought most of the food with us and cooked it there, which worked out fine. I did have a new appreciation for my mom during all those years when we would drive an hour and a half up to my grandma’s and then my mom would get busy cooking for the giant crowd. My grandma might peel and chop potatoes but she was not a great cook and I think it was just an unspoken arrangement that my mom took over when we got there.

We had a storm blow through on Tuesday night. The wind was so strong that the sound woke me up in the early hours on Wednesday. There are two pine trees in our neighbor’s yard that hang over our driveway and there were hundreds of pine cones (and the pine needles, a never-ending battle) littering the driveway and the street. The street sweeper even came by and made several passes to try and get them off the road. Before the storm there were still leaves on some of the trees but as we got on the road today it was clear that stick season is upon us. It’s just gray-brown barren branches, with some pine trees sprinkled here and there, as far as the eye can see.

My daughter is a huge Noah Kahan fan. I went with her to his concert back in September because she needed a ride. She had been playing his music in the car pretty much anytime we were driving together so I was already very familiar with it all. She had first described him to me as this guy who writes songs about living in New England, which is certainly true. But the more you listen, the more you come to learn that it’s also depressed, heartbroken guy who is suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder because he’s living in northern New England songs. My daughter used my phone to stream her playlists while driving and now Spotify suggests playlists to me with titles like, Sad Girl Indie. It’s not really my jam but I appreciate the scene he paints with this song. There’s another one called “Northern Attitude” (now with Hozier joining in to the delight of all the sad indie girls) where he sings about being raised out in the cold and on little light, and I find myself nodding along.

At the end of September, tickets for the two Noah Kahan shows at Fenway Park next July sold out as soon as they went on sale. My daughter had one in her cart but when she went to purchase it, it disappeared. She was crushed and was sure she had screwed up somehow but someone I know at work had the same thing happen to her. I think the Red Sox site was not really set up to handle the kind of demand it got that day. I felt sorry for her and did my usual thing of looking for other cities where he might not be as well known and where tickets might still be available. It basically came down to some places in Canada. She is only half joking when she talks about going to Quebec in April to see him. I would love to go to Quebec again but in April? That is still stick season for sure.

Vote, Baby Vote

Deee-lite – Vote, Baby Vote

Yesterday we got a text from my son, who is off at college, wondering if there was a plan to get him home to vote today. Um, no? I had meant to remind both kids to send in for absentee ballots but I kept not remembering and then it was too late. My son registered in school last spring and turned 18 over the summer so this was going to be his first election.

I am always hammering home the importance of voting, in every election, so I didn’t feel like I could say, it’s just the municipal election. There should be no “just” when it comes to voting. And your first time voting is important, plus it’s like a practice run before next year’s critical don’t-even-want-to-think-about-it election. That’s why I drove 45 minutes out of the way after work to pick him up and bring him home for the night. We made the polls our first stop then came home. As a bonus I made his favorite dinner and he can sleep in his own bed.

I am happy to report that our candidates won. It’s nice to have that satisfaction for your first voting experience. Let’s hope there are more days like this in the future!

Welcome to the Working Week

Elvis Costello – Welcome to the Working Week

It’s the first Monday since we set the clocks back and it’s always such a shock to my system to walk out the office and discover it’s nighttime. I was able to get outside during the day for a little bit but I don’t have a window in my office so I forgot that it was going to be truly dark.

I told myself yesterday that I was finally going to see the advantage of the return to standard time because I have this early meeting on Mondays and I’m forever racing to get there on time. I thought now it will be easier to get up because it will be lighter in the morning and I won’t be as tired because my body will still be on the old clock. Uh, not so much. I made it in ten minutes before the meeting, instead of zero minutes or being a hair late.

My daughter graduated from college this summer and now she has a “real” job, 9:00-5:00. Even though she was working full-time over the summer, it was just an extension of the student job she had had for the past three years so it didn’t feel as serious. It has been a rough transition for her. The job itself is fine but adjusting to the fact that now this is what your life will be like – get up, go to a job, come home, eat, repeat – that part is hard. We talked to her on the phone this evening and she joked, “Can’t I be a stay-at-home daughter?” I did not say, “Welcome to the working week, oh I know it don’t thrill you, I hope it don’t kill you,” but I sure as hell heard that in my head.

The Numbers
Radiohead – The Numbers

My son and I went to see The Smile tonight, the side project of Jonny Greenwood and Thom Yorke. I couldn’t believe they were starting the North American leg of their tour in Providence. Providence! Amazing! Someone that well-known I would expect to start in New York, maybe Boston, but I was more than happy to reward their fine decision by splurging on the tickets back in the spring.

The show was great, though not for the uninitiated, and lots of Dudes with a capital D. That’s always a drag, except for if you want to hit the ladies’ room before leaving the venue. Thankfully, after the first song, Thom encouraged those of us who wanted to get up by saying, “just because there are chairs doesn’t mean you have to sit in them,” so we stood for the rest of the time. It’s much easier to ignore douchey bros when people are standing.

Angelica
Wet Leg – Angelica

In case you somehow missed the debut full-length album from Wet Leg, I’m here to tell you that it’s really good and lots of fun. Another missed opportunity concert in Boston (taking my son to see his favorite, the Microphones, up the road a piece in Somerville on the same night) but someone I know caught it and said they lived up to the hype.

Expert in a Dying Field

The Beths – Expert in a Dying Field

This past February I was supposed to go see The Beths up in Boston. I’d bought the ticket as soon as I heard they were coming to the US because it’s not every day a band will make the trek from New Zealand. The show sold out and I hatched a plan to make a weekend out of it. Three or so weeks before the show, The Beths added a show at one of my usual venues, closer to home, but as I’d spent the money on the Boston show and had this whole plan, I stuck with my original Boston ticket.

My daughter had a concert she had bought tickets for, also in Boston on the night before the Beths show. The friend she was going to go with wound up having a conflict so I said I would go with her. She had been having a rough start to the semester and I was trying to give her a fun break, get a hotel room and have a girls weekend. But then a big snow storm pushed the Dodie concert my daughter had been waiting and waiting for to the same night as my Beths show. The two venues were probably a distance that you could have walked in the summer but in the snowy, below freezing streets of Boston in February, there wasn’t a viable way to do both. Dodie is my daughter’s favorite so I had to forego The Beths.

I could have probably made it to the closer to me Beths show that happened a couple of days later but by that point I’d already driven well over 500 miles in just two days and I was wiped.

So when I saw The Beths were already coming back, almost exactly a year later, I was torn. Again, just Boston or New York for the options and again, there is actually a perfectly timed hole in the tour dates when they could swing through and play that same venue. But I knew it would sell out! Risk it and end up missing it again or buy the ticket and possibly go twice if they add the date? Argh! Not to mention it will again be February in New England. The whole thing could be upended just like last year.

My Music League friend texted me and said, hey, did you see The Beths are coming back to Boston? She’d gone to that show at our regular place and encouraged me to get a ticket for the upcoming Boston show, she and two other people I know would also be going. So I bit the bullet and got a ticket. Here’s hoping my third chance to see them will be the charm.