My wife found this song recently called “Bubble of my Gum” by a Minneapolis band called Durry that is the sweetest little indie rock love song and it’s quickly become a hit around our household. I’ve been learning it on uke and the kids are even walking around humming it. It’s sweet and simple and catchy.
There’s one line in the song that hit me hard the other day and sent me off into a hell of a tailspin.
You’re like old Mr. Rogers / saying “It’ll be alright”
So because my brain works like Cockney rhyming slang, here’s how it played out:
I dropped my oldest off at school, and told them I love them because here in America school might be where your kid dies and every morning I think of that and make sure I tell my kids I love them when I drop them off.
Saying “I love you” as they got out of the car reminded me of the song. I started singing it to myself but couldn’t remember part of a verse.
I played the song on my phone to figure out the verse.
I heard the line You’re like old Mr. Rogers / saying “It’ll be alright” and I immediately recalled a scene in the 2019 film “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”, a film about Mr. Rogers and his impact on people, where the protagonist is arguing with his dying, estranged father at his bedside
This set me off thinking about the last fight I had with my late father
Which then pivoted quickly to me pulling into a stranger’s driveway and bawling my fuckin’ eyes out for a solid 10 minutes
My brain is a sack of wet cats, it is a nightmare in there and if I ever meet someone who can legitimately read minds I am so, so sorry for what they will find.
I got home and told Jenni about this and we talked about how we are both more prone to wild emotional swings like this, especially towards sadness. We’re both vaguely sure that being a parent really does some wild shit to your brain chemistry, and that the pandemic has totally rewired us (and not for the better). My friend Dan is a hell of a writer and a tremendous human being, and in a recent Esquire article he wrote after the Uvalde shooting, he dropped this:
Being a parent is a lot of things: This week it was heartbreaking, others it is tiring, frustrating, funny, surprising. Above all, it is an act of hope. Hope that the world will be better for your child than it was for you, that their opportunities will be boundless. Hope has been hard to find lately.
I’m bad at hope. I can usually talk my way into it, if I’m willing and feeling especially stubborn, but most days I see a never-ending tapestry of how awful our species is and I just stand in a shallow puddle of despair that soaks my feet with a chill that never seems to go away. I think about how we faced a worldwide, existential threat and our response was to whine about our convenience and comfort and then eventually just throw our hands up in resignation and go about our business while it kills us, like every other threat of this magnitude. We’ve become so reliant on our cockroach-like ability to more or less kinda survive anything that we’ve completely quit giving a shit about the quality of that existence. Long COVID is destroying us quietly, our kids are still getting shot at school, personal bankruptcy rates are up 19%, and a brief glance at r/antiwork will tell you everything you need to know about working class life in America and elsewhere. I dwell on things.
So I look around at all this shit and I desperately cling to any decent bit of anything that comes my way, like a cute little song with Mario Kart references, speculation about the next season of Ted Lasso, eating way the fuck too many paczkis, or tear-jerker movies about Mr. Rogers.
A younger Steve used to refer to this kind of stuff as “guilty pleasures” but I am many, many years away from feeling guilty about a brief moment of pleasure in this life. I am anxious by nature, and anyone who knows me well knows that it’s super fucking obvious that I hide my anxiety behind a thick layer of what I’ve come to refer to as The Steve Show™. I’ve got jokes! I’ve got anecdotes! I’ve got pithy pop culture references! I’ve got tricks! I’ve got everything except the desire to shut up for a moment and face the yawning maw of endless horror that I’m positive is standing directly behind me at all times!
One thing the pandemic did was kill my audience for The Steve Show™. Which meant a lot less time facing forward and smiling and a lot more time spent facing the maw. And as that shitbag Nietschze once said, “...and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you”.
I have always spent too much time in my own head, but it’s definitely wayyyy worse than it used to be. The seismic shift in thinking, in every day life, over the past few years has not done me well.
All of which to say….I’m glad I’m writing again. It helps me sort through my thoughts, it helps me parse my own feelings better, and it helps give me a place to say things instead of muttering to myself as I wander from room to room of my house trying to remember what I was supposed to be doing.
I’m a mess, most days, and I just wanted to let you know that I’m grateful for every subscription, every mail click, every single one of you giving me a place to speak any anything and be heard. I’m grateful for those of you who have reached out to tell me something I wrote particularly resonated or that you want to talk more about something I touched on or just to check in on me and see how I’m doing.
The last few years have been really hard on me, on all of us really, and I’m finding that by giving voice to the tangled web of chaos in my head it quiets me, and helps me focus.
So thanks for being here. Appreciate you.
Cute song. It’s the little things in every day that help me through like they sing about. It doesn’t fix things, remove inequities, make us safe, keep us well, or change for the better. Just helps redirect the thoughts and rediscover what is or can be good in my world. Like watering a plant and the leaves perk up… maybe the plant trusts me. Discovering the local place that makes pasta and sauces for the restaurant and I can buy directly from them.
You're the mint chocolate chip, baby!