There are a lot of good reasons to believe the people who subscribe to the Mayan calendar end-of-the-world theories are too stupid to operate can openers without a football helmet and a court-appointed supervisor. The ending of a calendar does not necessarily equate the ending of actual time. If that shit worked, every employee in the world would be taking hammers to clocks by 10 am. And even if the Mayans did mean to signal the end of the world with the end of their calendar, why in Hulk's name would they know any better than the rest of us? Particularly since they were apparently unable to predict their own demise at the hands of us sadistic Europeans?
But I don't need logic. I don't need brains. I know the world is not going to end in 2012, and I know it because 2011 was such a tower of neverending SHIT, that if the world was going to end, it would have ended then.
For Christmas, my girlfriend ordered custom t-shirts from Cafe Press announcing "I SURVIVED 2011" for me and her family. It was a joke, but it wasn't. She lost her father in 2011 and her mother less than a year before.
By the end of 2011 I would lose two members of my own extended family and an old friend from college. I spent all of May 2011 as a juror in a locally prominent murder trial that filled my nights with horrific images and infected me with an irrational fear for my life and those of my loved ones. A few months later, I was laid off from a job after seven and a half years of employment. 2011 sucked and sucked hard.
So far, 2012 is looking a lot better. I'm organizing a reunion of my old college friends. My girlfriend and I are moving into a new, bigger apartment. I have a new civil service position that pays more than the 7.5 with the bastards who gave me the boot. New year, new job, new home. If 2012 is the end of the world, at least I'll die with a smile.
I rekindled my love for music in 2011. In part, it was necessity. After the lay off I got a data entry job, and without music data entry can be too boring for words. Well, scratch that, with music, it's too boring for words; but it's endurable. And the murder trial necessitated long, lonely bus trips with nothing to do.
Much like my angsty teenage years, music helped sustain my spirits in 2011. But unlike the anger that fueled me and my writing in those days, the music I listened to in 2011 was music of hope. Every once in a while I listened to the old, angry stuff. In fact, somewhere in the middle of 2011 I recall briefly but fiercely reigniting my love for '80s speed metal.
But for the most part, the songs I listened to in 2011 said the same thing: "Things suck now, but they're going to get better." Really, in spirit, they're mostly more modern versions of Journey's "Don't Stop Believing."
10. "We Want A Rock" by They Might Be Giants from Flood
New music was never so important as it was when I got a data entry job a month after the lay off. I began by listening exclusively to my favorites, and soon my favorites became ho-hum. You never realize how long 8 hours is and how short your albums are until you need the latter to survive the former.
Data entry made me not only find as much new music as I could, but explore old albums deeper. Flood is an album I've owned, it seems, forever, but never really listened to the whole way through. I would leapfrog around the album, never really listening to anything past "Particle Man." Data entry changed that, and I'm glad it did. "We Want A Rock," was one of the first of the undiscovered songs to catch my attention. Though I have to say the stark weirdness of "Whistling in the Dark" was very fitting in a data entry environment, in a this-is-the-song-that-will-be-playing-when-the-final-drop-of-your-soul-leaks-out kind of way. I also think the prominence of prosthetic foreheads in "We Want A Rock" struck a chord, as it was around this time I started getting into Star Trek.
9. "The Good Life" by Weezer from Pinkerton
This list will probably a bit more serious than most of my lists, though "The Good Life" is one of the few songs that helped sustain me in more of a humorous way. Around the time I learned about the passing of my friend from college, nostalgia took over. I started seeing the good old days back in college as a glorious, untouched, Camelot-inspired time of happiness and rainbows, and everything after was the result of a steep, dark descent into the pee-stained corner of the men's room of whatever cheap dive Tom Waits's soul will go to if/when he kicks the bucket.
On my morning drive, when I would blast "The Good Life" and scream along to it, I was making fun of myself. I was laughing at my own nostalgic horseshit.
8. "The Cave" by Mumford & Sons from Sigh No More
Mumford & Sons specializes in "Things suck now, but they're going to get better" songs, though I can only take them in small doses.
7. "Letterbomb" by Green Day from American Idiot
I'm not sure why, but I've found the music I enjoy most during data entry is music from soundtracks or so-called "concept" albums. I don't enjoy shuffling, and you can't really stop to pick and choose every few minutes because you risk the ire of the
Because of this, I finally broke down and listened to American Idiot, and fell in love.
6. "The Crane Wife Part 1 & 2" by The Decemberists from The Crane Wife
The Decemberists's more recent album, The King Is Dead, was often my very first listen of the morning during data entry. Most of the songs are upbeat, but they don't rock particularly hard so my brain didn't get jostled too early. The tune "Rox in the Box," about hard labor in a mine, is not necessarily the best song to listen to at work, however.
I honestly have mixed feelings about the music. I was introduced to the band by one of the few people from my old job who I both considered a friend and who subsequently treated me like I was a phantom as soon as I got my walking papers, so it sometimes serves as an unpleasant reminder. But whatever. At least the music is good.
After enjoying The King Is Dead I took The Crane Wife and The Hazards of Love out of the library. I loved The Crane Wife, which kind of seems like one half of a concept album, while The Hazards of Love gave me a headache. There's a song in there that's nothing but a conversation between a son and his mother, and it seemed about 80,000 hours longer than it needed to be.
5. "Dog Days Are Over" by Florence + The Machine from Lungs
The first time I heard this song, it made me want to change my life.
4. "All These Things That I've Done" by The Killers from Hot Fuss
Of the things I feel qualified to critique, music is not one of them. There was a time when I read Rolling Stone and Spin regularly, when I felt I had a hold on the music critic lingo, when I could understand when they just slapped two half-words together like "alterna-core," but I am way the hell out of practice. It seems so cliche to say but it's true; when Cobain died I lost interest. I didn't lose interest in music, but in the music "news," the gossip, the critics, the celebrity, and everything else.
But if I were ever called upon to name the best goddamned rock song ever, I think this would be a contender, if not the no-brainer champion. Everything I love about rock 'n' roll is in this song.
3. "This Too Shall Pass" by Ok Go from Of the Blue Colour of the Sky
At my previous job, the one where I was eventually laid off, I'd had a bad day. I don't know what in particular happened on that day and it's not important. I just remember waiting at a red light in Arbor Hill on the way to the entrance ramp to I-90, and crying as I heard the words I desperately needed to hear: "Let it go. This too shall pass." And thank Hulk, it did.
2. "Wake Up" by Arcade Fire from Funeral
A college friend (not the one, thankfully, who passed) suggested I check out Arcade Fire. I took their albums Funeral and Neon Bible out of the library while I was on jury duty. One morning, while I waited for the bus and tried not to look at the bus stop's newspaper vending machines (both of which featured front page stories of the trial, which you're supposed to avoid if you're on a jury, in case you didn't know), I randomly chose "Wake Up."
I'd probably heard it before, in the trailer for Where the Wild Things Are if nowhere else, but I didn't remember it.
It was exactly what I needed to hear. I wouldn't say the trial left me in any deep despair, but it was difficult. I felt the responsibility on my shoulders, and I'll never get the images from the crime scene video out of my head. I would have to look up some of the lyrics to the song later, but I understood enough of them to relate them to what I was going through. When I heard "We're just a million little gods causin' rainstorms, turnin' every good thing to rust," I thought of the images from the crime scene video and wondered what little god turned those good things to rust. When the song started with "Somethin' filled up my heart with nothin'" I knew what my "somethin'" was and I wanted it to end so I could go back to my life.
1. "Fix You" by Coldplay from X & Y
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm gay because I like Coldplay. Yep that's funny. If you haven't seen another movie in 10 years. Dick.
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