Seeing Live Music Is An Act Of Self Care. Kind Of.

I got a little time to think and what I came up with hurt my feelings.

Like most people who bred during the height of the pandemic, my husband’s and my experience with babysitters has been limited. Recently, though, we’ve been testing the waters, as the threat of exposing our lil bbs to ACTUAL DEATH subsides, along with that new parent need to control every element of The Bedtime Routine. Isn’t it funny how your first kid feels like the bus in Speed? How you’re convinced that if you drive it below 60 mph (ie feed it after 5:30pm/don’t bathe it at 6:45pm/get it in bed a minute past 7:45pm) it will burst into flames, torching the house, the neighborhood, the state and possibly all of North America? We cannot have babies bursting into flames bitch it is WILD FIRE SEASON! Anyway, now that we have two kids who are still very young but no longer babies, I find this inclination toward a strict bedtime routine a little sad. Isn’t it just another attempt to control the completely lawless experience of parenthood, another feckless gesture to appeal to an apathetic universe who has no humanity, and therefore can’t be moved by your “birth plans” or “sleep training”? That said, I’m not an effective parent. And I could see how my fuck it approach is perhaps the cause, and not the result, of the chaos under my roof. Either way, at this point, I no longer care how a stranger I’m paying gets my kid to sleep, as long as it’s not against the law. So…. who wants to babysit?!

Me trying to get a baby to bed before 8pm.

With this self-imposed restriction on our freedom newly lifted, we’ve been seeing a lot of live music. (A lot as in relative to none.) I used to get bored seeing live music, unless someone famous was playing songs I could sing all the words to. But I also used to be able to do whatever the fuck I wanted, and thus felt entitled to “preferences” about the way I took my live music. Now I see that live music, and free time itself, is like food. When you have plenty of it, you’re allowed to hate mushrooms. When you’re starving, you better eat those fucking mushrooms. But it’s more than that. These days it feels good just to stand next to other people, to ponder the tiny mystery of each one of them, to appreciate the musician who, whether good or bad, actually made something, which — experience has shown me — is very hard to do. All to say, I am no longer bored listening to random live music, which is more than I can say for parenting!

A few weeks ago, we saw Tyler Ballgame. My husband had gone to his shows before, and insisted that witnessing him live was kind of transcendent. Since my husband generally approaches life with the stoicism of a soviet-era house wife raising 19 children in a gulag, hearing him talk earnestly about anything is an endorsement I take seriously. Halfway through Tyler Ballgame’s first song, I could tell that my husband had not oversold him. It was like seeing Roy Orbison perform if no one knew who the hell Roy Orbison was. Or like watching an electrical conductor for something pure or holy in human form, like watching beauty speak through a person. I know it sounds corny, but it was remarkable. There was no self-consciousness in his performance, because how could there be without a self? He was just a vessel for great music! After a while, I couldn’t help thinking about the rest of his band, or the band that followed, all made up of people with their own significant talents, but marked by the very effort of trying. So many of us want to express something through art, but very VERY few people can do it without the clumsiness of inserting our desire for it to be understood and admired bleeding through into the expression. How brutal that we have to resign ourselves to our own insurmountable shortcomings and make imperfect things anyway. The world may not need imperfect things, but we human beings do need to make them. Even if the gap between what they are and what we want them to be is so cavernous, it hurts our feelings. Anyway, that night, my husband told me Roy Orbison was a huge cuck in the literal sense, but after doing some research it turns out his wife only cheated on him after she found out he was cheating on her. Just goes to show, even in the throes of an almost religious experience, sexist micro-aggressions abound.

A mere two weeks later — this past Monday, in fact — we were back at it, leaving our children in the care of others to seek pleasure for ourselves. Who were we? Rich people?! My mother-in-law, visiting from out of town, mercifully insisted on babysitting. So with no plan to speak of, we stumbled into the night and happened upon another live music show. This time we saw two bands whose names I do not know and were not so good now but given the right amount of industry attention or independent wealth could definitely develop into being very good over time. I stood there in my Brooks running shoes with custom orthotics for my plantar fasciitis and marveled at how impossibly young the audience was. I asked myself, why do young people get such ugly haircuts? Does this have anything to do with the obsolescence of the gender binary? Probably these haircuts aren’t ugly, and my inability to see them as anything but exposes my age more than my huge forehead wrinkle. Then I honed in on my forehead wrinkle, dwelling on how if I just got botox it would shave off at least ten years but I feel bad wasting money on injectables when I should be using it to feed my children, plus older women in Swedish films have faces like baseball mitts and they still look cool so why can’t I just get the fuck over it? The strange thing about being in my forties is that no longer being young feels like a constant revelation. Like I’m a mermaid looking down at my new legs for the first time, over and over and over. And then I thought about how the people I’ve always considered old aren’t much older than me anymore, in eyes of younger people. What’s the difference between 42 and 60 to a 20-year-old? Probably the difference between dyeing your gray hair and growing it out.

Much like you may be feeling right now, I started getting bored, but not with the music. With MYSELF. Because what good does it do to keep gawking at the manifestations of your own mortality? I seem to be doing it every week in this very newsletter. And each time I remark incredulously to my husband about how I’ve known his 30-year-old sister almost half her life, or how I’m only six years younger than his mom was when his parents got divorced, he looks at me as if to say, so what? RUDE! But also, so what? There’s only so many times you can remind people, I used to be a mermaid! before it’s time to walk your new ass to the DMV and get a driver’s license, secure a health plan, and invest in your 401k. You’re not getting your tail back, so Move. The Fuck. Forward. “Forward” in this case being in the general direction of death. That’s what older people are constantly reminding you of: you’re never gonna be any younger than you are today. Last week, my 82-year-old father asked me how I felt turning 42. I said “old.” “Oh please,” he scoffed. “You’re a puppy.”

I may not be contributing much to the overall discipline of philosophy, but these meditations with a soundtrack felt like revelations. Maybe because I never studied philosophy. Once I thought I invented Maslow’s hierarchy of needs until I described it to someone and they said, “yeah, that’s Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.” My point being, people need time to think, and it’s hard to do that when you’re responding to the demands of two tiny dictators who want apple juice NOW. So this week I’m grateful for live music and babysitters, even if all they do is give me the space to ponder weaknesses I may never overcome during my brief time on Earth.