SOMETHING CAN.

Because we're young we think nothing can hurt us. Sara McH., Chicago, IL heypais.com

[adhduck]

Does the “I’m gonna get a good grade in” person know the impact they’ve had. Do they know they did in fact got a good grade in post, something that’s both normal to want and possible to achieve,

[yellowcardigan]

I do! It makes me feel really good that my tweet connected with so many people!

Furthermore, I have things you can BUY, if you'd like. https://www.etsy.com/shop/YourMcHenries

[yellowcardigan]

Resurfacing here to announce that I've made my most popular viral tweet into handsome stickers and patches, which are available for sale in my Etsy shop:

YourMcHenries - Etsy

Shop Comics, zines, and projects by Tom & Sara McHenry. by YourMcHenries located in Chicago, Illinois. Smooth shipping! Has a history of shi

If you've used and enjoyed this joke template, consider sharing with your friends!

[yellowcardigan]

We Will Get There When We Get There, Don’t You Worry: On Mountain Goats songs that take place in cars

illustration by John Keogh

The Mountain Goats have a lot of songs about places. There’s a whole series of “Going To…” songs about Going To A Place. They’re also, necessarily, often about leaving a place. “Going to Japan,” for example, is not about Japan. It’s about saying goodbye. “Going to Maine” isn’t about Maine: it’s about running away together, escaping the problems you’ve made wherever you are, and going somewhere you aren’t. The problems will always follow you, and that’s the beauty and contradiction of the Going To songs.

The Mountain Goats have a lot of songs about houses, too. A house is a place where feelings and memories collect, grow, and decay. A house is both a structure and a way of living in that structure, both shelter and prison, both the family and the dysfunction.

The car, then, may be the ultimate symbol in Mountain Goats songs, because it represents both travel and home. Motion and stasis. I’ve never owned a car--I’ve never even had my driver’s license--but I’ve been on a lot of road trips. My husband and I dated long distance for three years. And what I know is that a car is a crucible, an incubator of feelings. When you ride in a car with someone for some hours, you’re hotboxing those emotions, and whether you express them or not, they build up.

On The Coroner’s Gambit, there’s a brilliant three-song run: “Scotch Grove,” “Horseradish Road,” and “Family Happiness.” In each of these songs, the narrator hates the other person in the car. Maybe also loves them? But definitely hates them. In “Scotch Grove” and “Family Happiness,” the narrator hopes an act of nature will kill them both (“wished [the rain] would wash us both away” and “I hope we both freeze to death”). In “Horseradish Road,” he hopes for a more karmic settling of accounts:

You're gonna get yours and i'm gonna get mine. 'Cause in this car, in this car, Somebody's bound to get burned. I know. I know. Because i've been watching the road turn.

The narrator and the second person are trapped together until they reach their destination, which may be a place, an event, or the ultimate destination of the grave.

Sometimes the two people in the car are in love. In “Twin Human Highway Flares,” they’re taking a trip together, and the narrator is so happy to be with the second person he can hardly stand it. In this song, too, he wishes for death, but only as a potential self-reproach. Only if he forgets this moment of bliss will he wish for his heart to explode. In “The Recognition Scene,” the two characters have burglarized a candy store and the narrator uses this moment, eating their loot on a joyride, to reflect on how much he’ll miss the other person when they’re gone. Like Emily Dickinson before him, John Darnielle writes about cars where the narrator, Death, and Immortality all ride together.

It’s not always love that binds the people in the car: sometimes it’s a solidarity of purpose, a shared grim determination. Sometimes they’ve decided to light out for the territories together. In “Home Again Garden Grove,” the narrator and second person are alone together against the world: “don’t let anyone see that you’re bleeding … don’t speak unless someone speaks to you.” They’re going to Garden Grove, where “the jackals are breeding,” and in this case the car is the protection between them and the rest of the world. We’re in here, and they’re out there. In “Psalms 40:2,” the narrator and friend(s) are going on a crime spree, and he assures his companions: “we will get there when we get there, don’t you worry.” It’s about going there, not getting there.

There’s also a category of song where the narrator is alone in the car, and the vehicle functions as his method of interacting with the world. When you’re on the highway, you’re both alone and surrounded by people. You’re moving, but you’re bringing yourself--your fast food wrappers, your cup of old change, your regrettable odors--with you wherever you go. On All Hail West Texas, both “Jeff Davis County Blues” and “Source Decay” feature narrators taking long trips alone. In the first, the narrator has “no place to go,” so decides to come home to Midland, where he doesn’t know whether he’ll be welcomed. He has his memories with him, in the form of polaroids on the passenger seat, tangible reminders of a past he’s hoping to regain. In “Source Decay,” the narrator makes a long drive to the post office to pick up postcards from a former lover. In the old neighborhood, he sees “Chevy Impalas in their front yards up on blocks”--both a class signifier and a symbol of people who have settled down and made a permanent home. The cars are immobile because the owners aren’t going anywhere, or don’t require the cars’ protection. They can move through the world as themselves. The narrator wishes he never had to stop driving, that the highway were a Mobius strip and he could “ride it out forever.” The car offers both the illusion of forward movement and insulation from the world. If he stops moving, he has to confront his life as it is, not as a transition state between what was and what will be.

All of these characters think they’re going somewhere, but it’s an illusion. It’s always an illusion. The dark thing that demands confrontation will still be waiting when they get there. Here are some songs about being in a car with your worst self in hot pursuit. Recommended activities for this playlist: crimes.

The Recognition Scene Twin Human Highway Flares Scotch Grove San Bernardino So Desperate Jeff Davis County Blues New Chevrolet in Flames Source Decay Ezekiel 7 and the Permanent Efficacy of Grace Southwestern Territory Psalms 40:2 Home Again Garden Grove Family Happiness Going to Port Washington Pure Milk* Horseradish Road This Year The Grey King and the Silver Flame Attunement Alibi* See America Right

Hear this playlist on Spotify: http://spoti.fi/2zGyGQS

*These aren’t on Spotify, but you can find them on YouTube (I added the links to this Tumblr post). As always, please support artists, and especially support the Mountain Goats. Thank you.

*******

This essay is from Hard to Love #4, a Patreon-supported zine. Buy it on Gumroad here, or become a patron and get instant access to this issue and all the back issues. 

[yellowcardigan]

Advice for Exhibiting at SPX

Hi everyone. I’m in pre-SPX anxiety mode (known in my journal as “StressPX”) and Rich basically dared me to write this, so. 

Advice for First-Time Exhibitors at SPX! 

I’ve been coming to SPX since 2005, and exhibiting since 2006. Here are a few tips, many of which may seem obvious, but some of which may be helpful.

YOUR TABLE:

Plan out how you’ll have things arranged. You don’t have to have it exactly figured out, but have some idea of what goes in the front, in the back, on the left, right, etc. Plan things to make your table eye-catching: different heights, a nice tablecloth/banner, pre-made price signs so you’re not scribbling them on scrap paper as you set up. 

Have things like scissors, tape, rubber bands, safety pins. I don’t know, I always end up needing something. Bring tubes or envelopes if you’re selling prints. I sell catnip mice and I bring ziploc baggies to put them in for people so the catnip stays fresh.

Have a business card or something people can take for free. Attendees are really wary of the hard sell, so when someone is standing at my table but starting to walk away but not sure but doesn’t want to engage me in a pitch, I say “take a card if you like!” and smile and they usually do and smile back and that feels nice. People don’t want to hear your spiel, they want to look at your stuff and they’ll ask questions if they have any.

Here’s a thing I did for the first time last year and it was awesome: make a chart ahead of time of all the things you’ll have for sale and how much each costs. Mine was a table with about 12 boxes. (“Minicomic, $5” is all one, for example.) Then as people buy things, you can just check them off, and at the end of the day it’s super easy to run a total and see how much you made. This is especially good if you’re sharing a cashbox with anyone else. It also helps you track inventory and decide what your best sellers are when you plan for next year.

Get a picture of yourself sitting behind your table with all your wares and text it to your mom. Moms love that shit.

WHAT TO WEAR AND DO AND EAT

It gets cold in that exhibit hall. Bring layers. If you tend to run cold, bring a scarf in addition to a hoodie or sweater. The perfect temperature for flitting about and meeting cartoonists and buying things and carrying a backpack is COLD to a person sitting idly behind a table.

Speaking of sitting idly: get up and move around when you can, or you’ll experience Con Time, where a minute lasts an hour and then suddenly two hours have gone by. Go visit your friends’ tables, or get up and stand outside and look at the sky (the “fake smoke break” is very calming). 

Drink a lot of water. A lot. No, drink even more than that. No, you’re still dehydrated–keep going. Okay. Okay NOW maybe you’re not dehydrated. Bring a refillable water bottle and refill as necessary. Today I learned that they’ll have water coolers for refilling, so BOOM. Easy. 

Bring some healthy-ish snacks if you can; there will be a lot of garbage available and it will be tempting, but if you eat garbage you’ll feel like garbage. I know that’s regular life advice, but basically treat your body as if you’re coming down with the flu. Go real easy. People will come around with delicious homemade cookies, which aren’t garbage, but are still a lot of sugar, so watch out. Also watch your caffeine intake. I’m saying pay a lot of attention to what goes inside your mouth. 

By the way, have you washed your hands? Wash your hands. You’re touching filthy, disgusting money. Wash them again. 

Wash them again.

Don’t drink too much ha ha okay well not TOO much. 

SOCIAL

Not everyone can go to dinner together all the time. If you wait for everyone, you’ll wait forever. Cut and run. Cap your group size or you’ll never find a restaurant.

Try to have a funny, handsome husband to take with you so people will want to hang out with you (this may only apply to me)

Don’t be afraid to give a mini-comic to someone you admire, but be quick and gracious and get out of there. 

Spend as much time as you can with your friends that you love and give them lots of hugs and when you leave be sure to tell them how much you love them. This one may also apply only to me but one time I didn’t tell Jess and Eric I loved them and I felt sad for like an hour afterward. This is some Last Lecture shit, I know, sorry. It’s true though.

IF YOU PANIC (YOU WILL PANIC)

If you’re a cartoonist, you probably get anxiety. SPX is gonna give you a big ol’ puffertail. I learned long ago to reconcile the two facts that SPX is one of my favorite things ever but that I also will panic at least once during the weekend and want to die. Crowds, loud noise, bright lights, famous artists, money, trying to sell stuff you worked on in the solitude of your house to strangers–these things are terrifying when put all together. If you get nervous, you get nervous! Remember that it’s just a thing that’s happening, like allergies or rain. It’s not wrong and you aren’t failing. Go up to your hotel room if you can, or go somewhere quiet, and think some nice thoughts. Take deep breaths. Remember how much fun you’re having. Drink more water. Hide out for like 15 minutes and you’ll calm down. 

If you get scared, drink less, not more. You’ll want to cover by getting drunk, but hoo boy does that ever not work. If you’re worried you won’t look social, remember you’re a PROFESSIONAL. You think Jay-Z gets drunk on the job? No, he’s a business, man, and so are you. No one notices you’re not drinking anyway, they’re too busy worrying about their own shit, I promise. 

GUILT TOTEMS

If someone gives or trades you a shitty mini-comic or postcard, and you know you’ll never look at it again, throw it away in your hotel room. People think that’s mean, but when I unpack after a con and find something in my suitcase that I’m just going to throw away anyway, it makes me super sad. Just toss that shit, they’ll never know. Be nice when they hand it to you, though. That’s the part they’ll know. EDIT: I wrote more on minicomics here and here. 

This is four times longer than it needs to be. I hope you learned something. I will now take questions, thank you. 

[yellowcardigan]

Almost time for SPX, so here's this again.

[yellowcardigan]

“Remain open to hard questions”: Notes from John Darnielle’s Universal Harvester reading and book signing

Lincoln Hall, Chicago, March 1st, 2017

Scrivener’s note: I took a lot of notes, scribbling as fast as I could in the dark, but dude talks fast. I try to use quotation marks only when I’m sure it’s a direct quote or as close as possible to a direct quote; the rest is close paraphrasing. If you were also there and have any corrections or additions, please get at me.

He introduced himself by saying that he’s been joking about making the other guys in the Mountain Goats refer to him as “Two-Time New York Times Best-Selling Author and National Book Award Nominee John Darnielle,” so that he could hear sentences like “Two-Time New York Times Best-Selling Author and National Book Award Nominee John Darnielle, would you please stop farting in the van?”

There was no moderator or interviewer. It went straight from reading to audience questions, which I thought was going to be a shitshow, but actually it was great. He referenced seeing Ian MacKaye give a talk where he said “I could do a lecture or we could just, you know, get into it” and that he wanted to get into it. He sat on the edge of the stage and people came up one by one to ask questions. Part of what made this setup work, I think, is there was only one microphone. The person had to physically take the mic from JD’s hand and ask their question while he looked into their eyes and waited for the mic to be returned to his hand. Thus people were quicker than the “I have a three-part question and each section has five subsections” thing you often see at Q&As.

As a result, the topics meandered; here I’ve tried to organize them by general theme.

ON WRITING

He starts a new project by looking at his last project and seeing what it lacked. He noticed that Wolf in White Van only barely passes the Bechdel test--here an aside about how the Bechdel test is only one metric and it’s a low bar and he doesn’t deserve applause for clearing it--and he’s proud that Universal Harvester has many scenes of women talking to each other about lots of topics.

There was a lot of discussion about capturing the way people talk in the Midwest--particularly the way “Iowan men talk to each other in the workplace.” He observed that “out here in the Midwest for whatever reason--Lutherans?--people tend to be more guarded.” He described the “heavy quiet way” of farmers at an auction, which he observed when he lived in Iowa. He told a story about one time at said auction, some John Deere miniatures came on the auction block, and no one said anything but everyone could feel the shift in the air because they had all gotten excited. “They were stoked, even if they didn’t know the word ‘stoked;’ no one could miss what was happening.” He did an impression of an Iowan man getting hooked on a conversational bait, how they quietly stand up a bit straighter, that was so true to my experience of stoic Indiana men that my heart pounded a little.

He talked about how he’s tired of book characters that have something special and chosen about them, that he wanted to write a book about ordinary people that don’t have a destiny. “The idea of direction is a shared narrative myth. We’re not going anywhere. We’re going one place: the grave.” He said “I don’t want my characters to sound like MFA students” and then quickly added that there’s nothing wrong with MFA students. Ha.

ON HORROR AS A GENRE

Someone asked if the plot of Universal Harvester will become more clear upon a second reading, if the reader’s questions would be answered. “I’m not trying to tell a throughline story that answers questions, I’m trying to raise questions.” He notes that it’s like therapy, where you go to an uncomfortable place and see how long you can stay there and see that you emerged unharmed.

[This is where my brain started lighting up in several places at once and my enthusiasm for horror started to come into focus. It’s about sitting with the uncomfortable thing! That makes perfect sense! I personally wish we could have stayed in that vein of discussion for like, a full hour.]

He talked about his favorite pieces of horror, including Tod Brown’s 1932 Dracula, and how the single picture from Edison’s Frankenstein, which for years was the only thing to survive of that project, captured his imagination. “Things that don’t survive, of which there are only traces, are my favorite thing.”

He was asked about Christianity and I don’t remember everything he said, but I wrote down: “Many things that happen in horror directly challenge the existence of God” and “Jeremy’s unwillingness to be angry at Lisa is how I think about Jesus and religion.”

ON MOUNTAIN GOATS MUSIC

Someone asked if he’s thought about overlapping subject matter for his songs and his books. He quoted Revelation 3:16, “So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth,” saying that people who don’t like the Mountain Goats REALLY don’t like the Mountain Goats, and he wanted people who aren’t into his band to be able to enjoy his books. He told the question-asker, “If I wrote a book based on Tallahassee, you’d buy it, right?” Here the question-asker enthusiastically assented. “You’d buy it because you like the album, and I’d be capitalizing on your goodwill.”

The other members of the band--he continually refers to them as “the dudes”--didn’t know a thing about Universal Harvester until he had a galley. He says they don’t need to read his books because they get enough of his thoughts in the tour van. He also talked about sending demos to the dudes as soon as he has them done; he didn’t always work this way but now he does, because “it’s about trust” and he trusts them now.

He scrolled through his phone to look for snippets of demos he’s recorded and played us a song he wrote for his friend’s RPG character. The song was called Secret Pig. While scrolling, he remarked to himself, “Hill of the Seven Jackals? Sounds pretty good!”

ON SURVIVING:

He referred to his art as “useful” if it helps someone get through a tough time. He rejects the idea that he’s special because his art has been useful, and said “You don’t do that with hammers, and hammers are incredible. You don’t go to the guy who made it and say, ‘it broke everything in the house!’” He added later, “I think of art as labor and not magic.”

Someone told him they were also a survivor of abuse and wanted to know if he had any advice on getting over it. “I don’t think there’s anything you need to get over,” he said, “but if you want to feel better, there are things you can do.” He talked a lot about therapy, how important it’s been for him but how he recognizes that it’s not an option for everyone due to access, cost, etc. The thing about being a survivor is “there’s something in it that means you were elected,” and when you find out that it’s not about you, it’s about the abuser, it makes you both less and more angry. It means you didn’t bring it on yourself, but then again, “why me?”

Talking about therapy and introspection, he said “remain open to hard questions” and if that’s not my favorite summation of my goal of life on this planet in the year 2017 I don’t know what is

MISCELLANEOUS:

He got on the topic of self-promotion and said “it feels humiliating, but that’s narcissism talking--you assume everyone’s been looking at you the whole time. You have to jump up and down and hope that someone’s coming by during the jumping. It never looks as bad as it feels.”

This caramelized garlic tart from Yotam Ottolenghi’s book Plenty is one of his favorite meals; it uses forty cloves of garlic.

“Originality is vastly overrated in metal.”

“There is infinite variety in the mundane. ‘Mundane’ just means worldly.”

Thank you for reading, I hope you found something interesting or useful. 

[yellowcardigan]

DVD Organization Project

Tom and I recently organized our DVD (and blu-ray, but we can all agree to say “DVD” to mean “disc with media on it,” right?) collection, including throwing out all the jewel cases so it takes up less room. This is a post about how we did it and what things to buy if you want to do it, too. 

1. Buy sleeves: These are the sleeves we bought.

2. Put movies in em: Just go to town. Put the disc(s) in there, slide the paper cover out, fold it in half, and put that in there too. Each sleeve holds two discs, so for movies that have a special features disc, it can stay together. I also found that you can slide two disc-holder pieces into one plastic sleeve, fitting four discs in one sleeve. This helps TV show collections take up less space. Some DVD cases are built different and don’t have a cover you can slide out. You can either cut something off of it to use as a cover or leave it be. The cover isn’t super important, it just looks nice. 

Look how much less room the notorious shelf-hog Lord of the Rings trilogy takes up:

3. Get rid of any duplicates. Did you know Tom and I have had two copies of Mr. Show seasons one through three for the entire 12 years we’ve lived together? Get rid of anything you don’t want anymore (still-shrinkwrapped well-meaning present from Christmas 2009? GET OUT OF HERE!). 

3a. Laugh at how some of these cases have coupons in them for like, tickets to see a Batman movie in 2005. Can you believe this has been in your house for so long? 

4. Throw those jewel cases away, baby. Breathe a sigh of relief. We ended up with five garbage bags full. ***EDITED 06.23.23 TO ADD: My lovely friend Lauren told me that when she did this project, she listed the jewel cases for free on Craigslist and someone took them! So you might try that; I imagine it feels even better than throwing them away.***

5. Put the newly-sleeved DVDs in boxes. We used these, and they’re nice, but make sure it will fit in whatever cabinet you want to put these in. There are shallower ones if you want to put them in a TV console. You can also use pretty wicker baskets or something if you’re a Pinterest person.

OPTIONAL STEPS if you have the librarian bug:

6. Make labels for each sleeve. I use Avery size 5167 labels (teeny tiny) and ran a mail merge on the list of titles we had (Tom typed it up after we got everything alphabetized). 

7. Make alphabet dividers. I couldn’t find any that fit, so I made some myself. I bought this chipboard and cut it (using my industrial paper cutter and huge muscles) into pieces 5.5″ wide and 9″ tall. I used Avery 5162 labels, cut down to squares, to make letters to put on them. All the labels are in Futura and I think? it looks very nice. 

This is our movie collection now: 

Again, this was like five bags of jewel cases. The TV collection is in another box, but I haven’t made those dividers yet. 

Thank you for reading! Let’s get organizized! 

[yellowcardigan]

The gifts of 2016

1. In the final days of 2015, my husband Tom left his job and started attending a code bootcamp. It changed our life in so many ways. For three months, I was home by myself for at least twelve hours most days. Some nights Tom would come home with just enough energy to eat dinner and get in bed. We were on financial lockdown: we didn’t go to restaurants, we didn’t see movies, we didn’t buy things except code books and groceries. He finished the program and got a new job, one where they value him and treat him with respect. But more than that, he learned some things about himself that I’ve always known, namely that he’s a likable natural leader that people enjoy being around. He brings out other people’s best selves, and people love being their best selves. Seeing him come to this realization, and the way that new knowledge shapes his decisions, has been interesting and lovely. 

2. I started seeing a new therapist, and I’m doing some really hard work digging into who I am, why I’m like this, who I want to be. It’s scary stuff, because it’s always easier to leave your issues under the rug, but it’s also been gratifying. It’s led to more confidence in my decision-making and in my relationships. A big component is trying to be kinder to myself and to trust other people’s kindness towards me. 

3. On that note, it’s been a good year for friendship. Five of my friends and I started a Slack team called Blood Moon Coven, and it’s been so valuable to have five smart, creative, funny women around to support me and amuse me through the rough parts of this year. In July, we all got together in Atlanta for a long weekend of swimming, drinking, and dark magicks. It was a beautiful time.

4. I also went to Western Massachusetts four times this year: March, June, August, November/December. I went there to work, but also for friendship. This summer, especially, was an opportunity for me to test out my newfound understanding that my friends don’t spend time with me grudgingly. They’re not rolling their eyes and doing the jerk-off motion every time I turn my back. And if they are, that’s their problem for hanging out with people they don’t like! So I allowed myself to open up and trust a bit more, and as a result I’m much closer to some of my comics friends than ever before. Of particular importance is my friendship with John, who over the course of this year went from “talented artist who I desperately hope thinks I’m smart” to “one of my very best dudes who I would kill and die for if necessary." I feel lucky to know so many wonderful people, and grateful for the work I’ve done that’s made me able to accept their love. 

5. In February, we said goodbye to our boy cat Boo Radley. It was sudden: one day he started acting weird, I took him to the vet, and that was the end. It was obviously hard, and made harder by the fact that it happened while Tom was in code bootcamp, so I was home alone for long days of crying and not doing anything. The overwhelming guilt I felt was actually what got me to go back to therapy and start examining why I assume every bad thing that happens is my fault. Nine months later, just before the election, Tom and I brought home a little black cat from the same shelter where we got Boo. We named him Loomis, and he’s a delight. He and Paisley aren’t quite friends yet, but I think they will be someday. This is related to the work of self-knowledge and confidence that I mentioned above: I’m confident that I’m a great cat mom and that Loomis is lucky to have found us. I also believe that the care and love of another creature, one who is smaller and weaker than I am, makes me a better person. I’ve learned a lot about who I am and who I want to be during times I’ve sat in silence with Paisley or Boo Radley, and I look forward to what I’ll learn from Loomis. 

Onward to 2017, and here’s hoping I work and learn as much or more next year as I did this year. 

[yellowcardigan]

Sara in 2016

Some ways I am loving myself lately:

*I don’t use the UHT shelf-stable fake creamer they put out at restaurants. If I’m paying for coffee, I want real dairy for it, and I’ll ask for it (politely).

*I don’t follow Serious Favstar Guys on Twitter. I only want to read people who are willing to be vulnerable, and that means sharing something personal as well as “have you ever noticed” relatability humor. “Never @ replies anyone” is a bad look.

*I’ll say “do you want to get out of here?” when I want to get out of here. Might text you from the bathroom at a party where I’m antsy.

*I send sincere thank you notes. Have you ever gotten a thank you note and thought it was too sincere? Me neither. I hope mine makes you cry, because I’m also a sociopath. 

*I wear shorts and I know my body is Less Than Ideal and I don’t care. I like to feel a summer breeze through my leg hair and know that I’m alive.

In conclusion, please love yourself. 

[yellowcardigan]

Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them. You simply say, "Here are the perimeters of our attention. If you prowl around under the windows till the crickets go silent, we will pull the shades. If you wish us to suffer your envious curiosity, you must permit us not to notice it." Anyone with one solid human bond is that smug, and it is the smugness as much as the comfort and safety that lonely people covet and admire.

Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

[yellowcardigan]

Feminine rhyme in the lyrics of The Mountain Goats

John Darnielle has been called, in a much-quoted honorific from New York magazine, America’s “best non-hip-hop lyricist.” A fair point, but I think such praise indicates a misapprehension of both rock lyrics and hip-hop lyrics. They have different goals, different conventions, and ultimately they’re entirely different art forms.

(I’m using the term “rock” loosely here to indicate “guitar-driven melodic pop music,” not “rock” as in “your dad’s ripped jeans and men with blonde highlights”)

To wit: rock lyrics don’t have to rhyme. They often do, but it’s not actually a requirement. I’ve seen JD mention on Twitter and at shows how much he hates a lazy rhyme, and I agree. A lazy rhyme is worse than a non-rhyme, to me. Have you ever heard a song on the radio that you’ve never heard before, and you know what the next lyric will be because they’ve telegraphed the rhyme? That’s not only annoying, it also weakens the emotional impact, because it gives the impression that they words were chosen for the easy rhyme, not because they were the best word for that line.

Most rhymes in the aforementioned non-hip-hop music are masculine rhymes, as opposed to feminine rhymes. (These terms come to us from the linguistic idea of gender, not human gender.) Masculine rhyme is when the lines end on stressed syllables that rhyme, like: Poetry is for nerds/Who cares about words. Both lines end in stresses, and they rhyme.

Feminine rhyme, also known as double rhyme, is when the words rhyme by their stressed penultimate syllable and unstressed final syllable. Examples include: Keeping/weeping or power/tower. It can spread over multiple words, too: see me/free me, or nowhere/go there.

Presented herewith are some of my favorite uses of feminine rhyme in Mountain Goats songs, and what I think they accomplish in the music. To me, feminine rhyme always sounds like something inevitable happening. The long-stacked dominoes finally falling into place, the lens snapping into focus and everything coming clear. It’s so satisfying, even when the words are bleak, and it thematically links to the doom in a lot of Mountain Goats songs: our undoing has already been set in motion, by our prior actions or by a vengeful god, and nothing we can do will prevent it. There’s a pattern to the universe that we often can’t see, but when we can, it brings a terrible clarity.

1. Alpha Incipiens, from Zopilote Machine:

We lean back and we clink our glasses Raise the drinks to our thirsty mouths And thick as molasses Ice cold vodka eases in As the low pressure system Brings the breezes in They sashay and pirouette above you The only thing I know is that I love you And I'm holding on, yeah

According to this quote on the Mountain Goats wikia (an invaluable resource, by the way), and as can be inferred from the title, this song is the earliest recorded point in the Alpha Couple’s history. Like in the seed of a tree, the entire blueprint of their relationship is encoded in this small moment, when they look at each other and decide to drink each other to death.

Note also this rhyme scheme: ABA, CDC, EEF. It’s like a messed-up sonnet, and if that doesn’t describe the Alpha Couple’s whole deal, I don’t know what to tell you.

There are a lot of good feminine rhymes in Alpha Couple songs; another example is See America Right, which includes corner/warmer, Greyhound/way down, and (again) love you/above you. No Children uses save us/forgave us and over/sober (a slant rhyme, and a brilliant one).

2. Family Happiness, from The Coroner’s Gambit:

As we cruised across The Canadian border You reached into your handbag Pulled out a micro-cassette recorder

Family Happiness is one of my favorite songs, and I want to talk for a second about that micro-cassette recorder. I often think of this Sylvia Plath essay about how one difference between writing a poem and writing a novel is that every object in a poem has to justify its existence there, because the limited length puts a lot of attention on each thing.

Mountain Goats lyrics often use this to great effect, evoking whole worlds and attitudes with their specificity. I don’t just write down good reasons to freeze to death, I write them in my spiral-ring notebook. We don’t just go to the convenience store or the car dealership: we go to Plaid Pantry and Pete Brown’s Chevrolet.

Family Happiness is about two people who just despise each other, stuck in a car together, speeding along a highway, headed toward--what? Besides doom? We don’t know. But the feminine rhymes emphasize the impression that their fate has already been sealed.

3. The Young Thousands, from We Shall All Be Healed:

The ghosts that haunt your building are prepared to take on substance And the dull pain that you live with isn't getting any duller There's a closet full of almost-pristine videotape Documenting sordid little scenes in living color

[...]

You drive east from the ocean with both hands tied on the wheel And you go past Garden Grove as the pleasure index rises The things that you've got coming will do things that you're afraid to There is someone waiting out there with a mouthful of surprises

A fact about me, your friend Sara: in my personal, bullshit, cobbled-together belief system, the person waiting out there with a mouthful of surprises (as well as the person in the first verse, in an alley with a chain) is basically a god. Not because any one person is has god-like power, but because the accumulated things we don’t know are so cosmically huge that we can’t even comprehend their vastness, and one person can change your life with a sentence. And so here’s another song about all the things you can’t control, you can’t stop, and you can’t outrun. The ghosts are preparing, the young thousands are coming, and all you can do is hope you survive. The rhyme scheme is written, and the words are just falling into place with awful inevitability.

4. Home Again Garden Grove, Ibid.:

Wipe down the windshields and roll down the windows Let's go where the jackals are breeding Wrap this bandana around your head Don't let anyone see that you're bleeding Fire up the scanner and keep your eyes on it Don't speak unless someone speaks to you Hands in your pockets and sun on your face The warm love of God coursing through you

[...]

I can remember when we were in high school Our dreams were like fugitive warlords Plotting triumphant returns to the city Keeping TEC-9's tucked under the floorboards

It may be cheating to include two from We Shall All Be Healed, an album that is entirely about sealed fates, uncertain inescapable future doom, and learning to accept the past for what it is. (Even the title--for some of these characters, fitting into a perfect rhyme scheme is the most complete healing they’ll ever get.) But it’s here for an important reason: warlords/floorboards is my favorite rhyme in all of recorded music.

5. The Day The Aliens Came, from Come, Come to the Sunset Tree

I will wake up at six a.m. again And I will find my way to the front door Like a soldier crawling through the smoking carnage Smoldering bodies at my feet I'd love to stick around but I've got someone to meet And I will put my best foot forward And I'll thank God I made it out of there On the day when my new friends come

I will present myself in my nice white tuxedo jacket And I will look out at the day through my dark sunglasses And take in the scenes The house behind me and the people in it Will all go up like steam in just a minute There's gonna be a redefining of some borders And I will receive my orders On the day when my new friends come

The rooftops and the sidewalks Will all melt like plastic And old friends, old friends, dear friends I'm gonna look fantastic

There won’t be any reason left to cry Because there wont be any people left to cry for My memory's gonna vaporize itself And my Italian shoes, well, they will be to die for I believe I can fly While you look up at me and wave goodbye On the day when my new friends come

The Day The Aliens Came is a demo for a song that wasn’t included on The Sunset Tree, and the entire song takes place in the future tense. The narrator describes a post-apocalyptic scenario where he’s stoked to get dressed up and meet aliens, because everyone he knows will be dead. It’s an interesting, dark escapism--it sounds like a fun lark, but the lines about there being no one left to cry for and having one’s memory erased show that it comes from a place of pain. This is actually a kind of inverse suicidal ideation: maybe the world wouldn’t be better off without me, but maybe I’d be better off if the entire world were gone.

The other songs on this list are in the past tense or a sort of static present tense, a captured moment. This one, though, all takes place in the imagination, and the feminine rhymes in this case illustrate how the world will make sense again to the narrator. It will all fall into place, finally, with all of those complicated other people out of the way.

Some honorable mentions that I didn’t include here for brevity:

The Best Ever Death Metal Band In Denton: forgive you/outlive you Maybe Sprout Wings: sweating/forgetting Palmcorder Yajna: by a minute/everybody in it Papagallo: behind you/remind you Twin Human Highway Flares: motel office/benediction on us Weekend In Western Illinois: endless/friendless West Country Dream: contraction/reaction Your Belgian Things: fluorescent/crescent

I know I’m leaving a bunch out, maybe even your favorites, and I would love to hear them. As previously stated, I am literally always down to talk about the Mountain Goats. 

[yellowcardigan]

Five Favorite Mountain Goats Songs, Completed

A while back, my dear friend Tony Breed challenged me to a Facebook thing where you write about five of your favorite songs. He said, teasing me, “they can be five Mountain Goats songs,” and I took that bait. My years of analyzing poetry for school have prepared me for few things in this life, but this is certainly one of them. 

Presented here are all five songs I wrote about, edited slightly, with links to YouTube videos containing the songs. Of course, if you like the songs, please buy the albums. You won’t regret it. 

Note that my use of hetero relationship pronouns reflects only my lived experience and thus personal interpretations; the songs almost never indicate a gender of the speaker or the second person. 

1. Flight 717: Going To Denmark, 1995

“Flight 717: Going to Denmark” ticks a lot of my Favorite Mountain Goats Moves boxes: lyrically, it contains an inventory, a prophecy of doom, and that thing where the same information is conveyed more than once with slightly different words. Musically, it ends with a shouted “yeah!” as punctuation and with a single chord strummed repeatedly (I read JD say once that he went through a phase where that was how he liked to end songs, and I think it’s really effective). The desire for escape is a common thread through the Mountain Goats’ music, either with or without the second person (the “you” in the song). This one is romantic to me, because the singer wants to go to this red brick building in Denmark. What will happen there? What about when they get back? None of it matters. This song is perfect.

Video link: Flight 717: Going to Denmark

2. Chinese House Flowers, 1997

I believe this song is about the experience of loving someone with severe depression. I hear, in this song, the desperation that I’ve never personally felt but have seen or imagined on Tom’s face. When an episode is descending, I feel like he’d do anything to help, even jump down in the hole with me. Because of this song, I refer to my depression as The Winged Shadow, because I like imagining it as a huge bird of prey, circling overhead, looking for me. Maybe I can hide or outrun it. Maybe it’ll break my neck in one chomp and I’ll never have to watch the sky for it again.

The threat in this song is so immediate! Something’s up there in the trees. The singer is afraid, not so much of the nameless animal, but of the person he loves. Of what she could be capable of, what she could become. I choose to interpret the line “I used to love you so much/that I was sure it would kill me” to mean: I still love you that much, but now I know it won’t kill me. One of the hardest lessons of growing up, I’ve found, is learning what you can live through: everything, so far. The winged shadow will always chase you, but it will never catch you.

Musically, I LIVE for the vocal delivery of “just then the gleam in your eye.” The word itself gleams in his voice. You hear how terrified and exhilarated he is. I love the way the chord progression repeats, and you think there’s going to be another verse, but then it just. Starts to slow. Down. To nothing. To me it represents a loss of urgency, a loss of determination. He wants to follow her all the way down, but realizes he can’t. He’ll just have to wait for her to come back.

Pair with Ontario, the next song on the album, which is from the point of view of a person coming OUT of a depressive episode. Percolating in my brain is an essay about that song and Louise Glück’s poem Nostos, but literally no one wants that.

Video link: Chinese House Flowers

3. See America Right, 2003

See America right is from 2003′s Tallahassee, an entire album about a pair of alcoholics known to Mountain Goats fans as the Alpha Couple. These two unlucky souls are locked in a dysfunctional, poisonous marriage that’s equal parts desperation and stalemate.

This is the first song I’ve chosen from the current full-band era, and boy does it make use of the fuller sound. The music is relentless, all verse, no chorus, and for nearly two minutes it never lets up. It tells a brief story, a snippet in this character’s life, and it’s so full of rich details. Two things I want to mention specifically:

1. The hard cut between the first and second verses. The singer doesn’t need to tell you about how he got arrested, or how long he spent in jail, or what happened with the children on the corner. You’ll fill in those details yourself, imagining the worst. That verse break has the timing of a joke; it’s a perfect use of elision. (This is a technique used in other Mountain Goats songs, perhaps most notably This Year–tMG fans, please note others you love, if you feel like discussing!)

2. The rhyme of “love you/above you” in the last two lines. “Love” and “above” are two commonly-rhymed words in pop songs, and here Darnielle plays with that expectation by moving from the specific to the general, and from the past tense to the present. He addresses the second person directly to say: I’ll always love you, just try and stop me. It’s part of an overall theme on this album (and elsewhere) that love may conquer all, but that’s not always for the best. Love can be as destructive as it can be uplifting. Telling someone you love them can be a curse. A promise is just a threat without a plan.

Can you tell part of my MFA thesis was about the concept of implicit threats in poems?

Video link: See America Right

Bonus Extremely Good Live Version

4. Cotton, 2004

I had trouble picking a song from 2004’s We Shall All Be Healed, because it’s my favorite album. Like, VERY favorite. If I were taking five records to a deserted island, I might bring five copies of We Shall All Be Healed so I could wear them out one by one. As Phil Redmon once said about Master of Reality, “that album is one of my ingredients.”

We Shall All Be Healed is a collection of songs about a group of lowlife meth addicts in the Pacific Northwest in the 1990s. I’ve never done any kind of speed, due to growing up square, but I feel a kinship with these characters. The experiences described sound a lot like my head when I’m in an anxiety spiral: staying up late, making lists and plans in notebooks, fevered and sweaty and chewing my own tongue. Shaking and scared and angry and paranoid. (I had this correlation further deepened a couple of years ago, when I first took steroids for asthma and learned what a demon hell ride THAT is.)

The album is sequenced perfectly. I considered writing about Against Pollution, but I think it doesn’t have the same impact when you hear it alone versus when you hear it near the end of the album.

So: Cotton. This is a song about the necessity and impossibility of leaving your past behind. The chorus instructs “let it all go,” while the verses indicate that it’s not going to happen, or at least hasn’t yet. You have to try to let go, but you’re never going to forget about the things you left in that desk you’ll never see again.

I was telling Tom about what I planned to write about this song, and he added that he thinks the image of dropping seeds in infertile ground is a metaphor for making art for just yourself, and it was so true that I was mad I never thought of it. Tom is always the one to notice when something is an ars poetica; it’s one of his powers.

The lines “people who tell their families that they’re sorry/for things they can’t and won’t feel sorry for” are, to me, a perfect summation of addicts. People ask me where to start with the Mountain Goats’ extensive discography, and I never know what to say. It’s a tall order, introducing someone to your favorite band. But I don’t think you can go wrong with We Shall All Be Healed, so: highest recommendation.

Video link: Cotton

5. Steal Smoked Fish, 2012

Steal Smoked Fish is a lovely song, simply produced, and its demo-like quality contributes to its intimate feeling. I’m not as skilled at talking about how things sound as I am talking about how the words are put together, but this song sounds immediate and intimate, like someone calling you on their way home to tell you something they just realized.

The subject matter is familiar, as we re-visit an old topic: a bunch of young junkies. But I don’t think I’m only reading the year written when I say that this song has more distance between singer and subject than the songs on We Shall All Be Healed. Compare the line in Cotton, “you didn’t know that I was watching/now you know” to the line in Steal Smoked Fish, “some of you will be dead next year.” The singer is looking back, speaking to the past, and knows that the people there can’t hear him. The friends from his past, both alive and dead, are ghosts now, memories, and the “I” and the “you” in the song are the same.

[When I die they’ll find hidden in my body several short theses on poetic techniques in Mountain Goats songs, one of which is the use of future tense and conditional future tense; maybe someday I’ll get to them but until then just imagine how brilliant they must be.]

I love the tenderness of this song. The distance has softened the singer, and the attitude toward the subjects is loving, empathetic, affectionate. He knows what’s going to happen, and he can’t stop it. But he can remember the things that went right. The fun. The camaraderie. The thrill of stealing oysters from a gas station on a cold, rainy day.

I want to point out that the “above you/love you” rhyme is used here again: “I see your destinies above you/like angels who don’t love you.” It’s another threat, but a pointless one: we already know what’s going to happen,and  the doom is almost reassuring in its inevitability. It also informs through omission: the angels don’t love you, the singer is saying, but I do.

Other details: the specificity of Plaid Pantry, the aspirated H in “whipping rain,” and the singer’s admission that he is, indeed, addressing himself: “god bless me, too, why pretend?”

Video link: Steal Smoked Fish

Thank you for reading and, as always, if anyone wants to talk about Mountain Goats songs I am always down.

[yellowcardigan]

Five Favorite Mountain Goats Songs, #5: Steal Smoked Fish

My fifth and final of these Five Favorite Mountain Goats Songs is Steal Smoked Fish, a b-side from 2012. 

It’s a lovely song, simply produced, and its demo-like quality contributes to its intimate feeling. I’m not as skilled at talking about how things sound as I am talking about how the words are put together, but this song sounds immediate and intimate, like someone calling you on their way home to tell you something they just realized.

The subject matter is familiar, as we re-visit an old topic: a bunch of young junkies. But I don’t think I’m only reading the year written when I say that this song has more distance between singer and subject than the songs on We Shall All Be Healed. Compare the line in Cotton, “you didn’t know that I was watching/now you know” to the line in Steal Smoked Fish, “some of you will be dead next year.” The singer is looking back, speaking to the past, and knows that the people there can’t hear him. The friends from his past, both alive and dead, are ghosts now, memories, and the “I” and the “you” in the song are the same. 

[When I die they’ll find hidden in my body several short theses on poetic techniques in Mountain Goats songs, one of which is the use of future tense and conditional future tense; maybe someday I’ll get to them but until then just imagine how brilliant they must be.]

I love the tenderness of this song. The distance has softened the singer, and the attitude toward the subjects is loving, empathetic, affectionate. He knows what’s going to happen, and he can’t stop it. But he can remember the things that went right. The fun. The camaraderie. The thrill of stealing oysters from a gas station on a cold, rainy day. 

I want to point out that the “above you/love you” rhyme is used here again: “I see your destinies above you/like angels who don’t love you.” It’s another threat, but a pointless one: we already know what’s going to happen,and  the doom is almost reassuring in its inevitability. It also informs through omission: the angels don’t love you, the singer is saying, but I do. 

Other details: the specificity of Plaid Pantry, the aspirated H in “whipping rain,” and the singer’s admission that he is, indeed, addressing himself: “god bless me, too, why pretend?” 

This concludes the Five Mountain Goats Songs series. There was a long break because my life got really bad for a few weeks, but I’m back to finish it! Thank you for reading and, as always, if anyone wants to talk about Mountain Goats songs I am always down. 

Video link: Steal Smoked Fish 

[yellowcardigan]

Five Favorite Mountain Goats Songs, #4: Cotton

I had trouble picking a song from 2004's We Shall All Be Healed, because it's my favorite album. Like, VERY favorite. If I were taking five records to a deserted island, I might bring five copies of We Shall All Be Healed so I could wear them out one by one. As Phil Redmon once said about Master of Reality, "that album is one of my ingredients."

We Shall All Be Healed is a collection of songs about a group of lowlife meth addicts in the Pacific Northwest in the 1990s. I've never done any kind of speed, due to growing up square, but I feel a kinship with these characters. The experiences described sound a lot like my head when I'm in an anxiety spiral: staying up late, making lists and plans in notebooks, fevered and sweaty and chewing my own tongue. Shaking and scared and angry and paranoid. (I had this correlation further deepened a couple of years ago, when I first took steroids for asthma and learned what a demon hell ride that is.)

The album is sequenced perfectly. I considered writing about Against Pollution, but I think it doesn't have the same impact when you hear it alone versus when you hear it near the end of the album.

So: Cotton. This is a song about the necessity and impossibility of leaving your past behind. The chorus instructs "let it all go," while the verses indicate that it's not going to happen, or at least hasn't yet. You have to try to let go, but you're never going to forget about the things you left in that desk you'll never see again. 

I was telling Tom about what I planned to write about this song, and he added that he thinks the image of dropping seeds in infertile ground is a metaphor for making art for just yourself, and it was so true that I was mad I never thought of it. Tom is always the one to notice when something is an ars poetica; it's one of his powers. 

The lines "people who tell their families that they're sorry/for things they can't and won't feel sorry for" are, to me, a perfect summation of addicts. People ask me where to start with the Mountain Goats' extensive discography, and I never know what to say. It's a tall order, introducing someone to your favorite band. But I don't think you can go wrong with We Shall All Be Healed, so: highest recommendation. 

Thank you for reading my posts about my favorite songs! This is fun to do, I encourage anyone who feels like it to try it and tag me in it so I don't miss it. Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyDD0PNmE2o

[yellowcardigan]

Five favorite Mountain Goats songs #3: See America Right

Song #3 of the Play It Forward challenge, where I write about five of my favorite Mountain Goats songs.

Today's song, See America Right, is from 2003's Tallahassee. The entire album is about a pair of alcoholics, known to Mountain Goats fans as the Alpha Couple, who are locked in a dysfunctional, booze-filled marriage that's equal parts desperation and stalemate.

As promised, this is the first song I've chosen from the current full-band era, and boy does it make use of the fuller sound. The music is relentless, all verse, no chorus, and for nearly two minutes it never lets up. It tells a brief story, a snippet in this character's life, and it's so full of rich details. Two things I want to mention specifically:

1. The hard cut between the first and second verses. The singer doesn't need to tell you about how he got arrested, or how long he spent in jail, or what happened with the children on the corner. You'll fill in those details yourself, imagining the worst. That verse break has the timing of a joke; it's a perfect use of elision. (This is a technique used in other Mountain Goats songs, perhaps most notably This Year--tMG fans, please note others you love, if you feel like discussing!)

2. The rhyme of "love you/above you" in the last two lines. "Love" and "above" are two commonly-rhymed words in pop songs, and here Darnielle plays with that expectation by moving from the specific to the general, and from the past tense to the present. He addresses the second person directly to say: I'll always love you, just try and stop me. It's part of an overall theme on this album (and elsewhere) that love may conquer all, but that's not always for the best. Love can be as destructive as it can be uplifting. Telling someone you love them can be a curse. A promise is just a threat without a plan.

Can you tell part of my MFA thesis was about the concept of implicit threats in poems?

I hope you're enjoying these posts! I can't tell if they're fun for anyone to read? Please let me know if there's anything else you want to discuss about any of these songs, I am ADTTATMG (Always Down To Talk About The Mountain Goats).

Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lxSItjgY-w

Bonus Extremely Good live version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ly8zfkVpqlc

[yellowcardigan]

Five favorite Mountain Goats songs, #2: Chinese House Flowers

Song #2 of the Play It Forward challenge, where I write about five of my favorite songs, and I chose five by the same band because my tastes are deeper than they are wide.

Today's Mountain Goats song is Chinese House Flowers, from 1997's excellent album Full Force Galesburg.

I believe this song is about the experience of loving someone with severe depression. I hear, in this song, the desperation that I've never personally felt but have seen or imagined on Tom's face. When an episode is descending I feel like he'd do anything to help, even jump down in the hole with me. Because of this song, I refer to my depression as The Winged Shadow, because I like imagining it as a huge bird of prey, circling overhead, looking for me. Maybe I can hide or outrun it. Maybe it'll break my neck in one chomp and I'll never have to watch the sky for it again.

The threat in this song is so immediate! Something's up there in the trees. The singer is afraid, not so much of the nameless animal, but of the person he loves. Of what she could be capable of, what she could become.* I choose to interpret the line "I used to love you so much/that I was sure it would kill me" to mean: I still love you that much, but now I know it won't kill me. One of the hardest lessons of growing up, I've found, is learning what you can live through: everything, so far. The winged shadow will always chase you, but it will never catch you.

Musically, I LIVE for the vocal delivery of "just then the gleam in your eye." The word itself gleams in his voice. You hear how terrified and exhilarated he is. I love the way the chord progression repeats, and you think there's going to be another verse, but then it just. Starts to slow. Down. To nothing. To me it represents a loss of urgency, a loss of determination. He wants to follow her all the way down, but realizes he can't. He'll just have to wait for her to come back.

Pair with Ontario, the next song on the album, which is from the point of view of a person coming OUT of a depressive episode. Percolating in my brain is an essay about that song and Louise Gluck's Nostos, but literally no one wants that.

If you aren't into the boombox/eight-track recording era, good news! Tomorrow we enter the studio album era. Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0B7uCOu1E8

*Using heteronormative pronouns to reflect my own lived experience, not anything reflected in the song.

[yellowcardigan]

Five favorite Mountain Goats songs, #1: Flight 717: Going to Denmark

A few days ago, Tony Breed tagged me to do an exercise called Play It Forward, where you post five favorite songs. I think he meant to tease me a little bit when he said "they can be five Mountain Goats songs," but guess what: I'm going to post five Mountain Goats songs.

Know that this picking of five songs took me literal hours.

This is the earliest song on my list; I believe it's from 1995. I plan go chronologically.

"Flight 717: Going to Denmark" ticks a lot of my Favorite Mountain Goats Moves boxes: lyrically, it contains an inventory, a prophecy of doom, and that thing where the same information is conveyed more than once with slightly different words. Musically, it ends with a shouted "yeah!" as punctuation and with a single chord strummed repeatedly (I read JD say once that he went through a phase where that was how he liked to end songs, and I think it's really effective). The desire for escape is a common thread through the Mountain Goats' music, either with or without the second person (the "you" in the song). This one is romantic to me, because the singer wants to go to this red brick building in Denmark. What will happen there? What about when they get back? None of it matters. This song is perfect.

Video link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9i_AwS-M0o8

[yellowcardigan]

McHenry Power-Ups

Earlier this month, Tom quit his job of ten years. He wasn’t on a good career path: there were no more opportunities for advancement, and the work only somewhat related to his interests and skills. He had been quietly looking around for something else, but nothing was promising. 

So he decided, back in the fall, to enroll in something called Dev Boot Camp. Today is the first day. It’s a short, intensive education program in web development. When he’s done, in March, he’ll be more qualified for the types of positions he’s interested in. He’ll be more likely to get a better job, with higher pay and better opportunities. We’re really excited. This time next year, our lives should be measurably better. 

The next few months, though, will be rough. We’re going to be a one-income household for a while, and due to Economic Circumstances, the income we’re living on (mine) is about 1/3 of what we’re used to. We have savings for just this situation, but it’s still scary. 

It’s also going to be a little rough emotionally. It’s the darkest, coldest time of year, and Tom is going to be putting in long hours, including some late nights. I, who already work from home with only our cats for company, am going to be on my own some evenings and weekends, too. I expect I’ll be doing most of the cooking and cleaning, when we’re accustomed to a much more egalitarian split. That’s going to be hard because I’m exceptionally lazy! 

We don’t really need money. We’ll be okay with the savings we have, barring disaster. (And for those of you who worry about these things, yes, we signed Tom up for ACA health insurance.) 

But some of you might want to help us out anyway. I know this because people have already offered, and because the internet is a magical place that connects me with the greatest people on earth. So I had this idea to make a registry of some household items we could use, and if you want to support our dreams, you could send us some dish soap or cat food or flour. It would be a way to cheer us on, to send us little power-ups as we race toward Our Future. It would help financially and emotionally, little reminders that we’re not alone in this world. 

So if you want to help, here’s our list: McHenry Power-Ups. 

Thank you for reading this. I’m trying to keep it short-ish, but if you have any questions about the program Tom’s in, or what kind of pizza we like to make, or what our cats eat (did you know cats can be allergic to chicken? They can!), just hit me up. 

I love you all.