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Some days listening to Pandora can be a destructive exercise. Beautiful songs of longing or emotional impact turn into excuses for self-pity and a loathing of what the world has done to you. It’s never a reminder of the mistakes you make and the situations that you either passed up or botched, it is ALWAYS the world’s fault for your current predicament.
Depression is an evil condition particularly when it is coupled with the irrational delusion that somehow you have no control over the things happening around you. Heartbreak, unemployment, empty bank accounts are horrible things to deal with (especially all at once) but lying around listening to sad music and feeling bad for yourself won’t change anything.
Unfortunately this has been my stock response to trouble for as long as I can remember. I imagine that even as a baby in my crib that instead of crying or screaming when I had crapped my diaper I instead lay in my own excrement blaming the world for my upcoming rash. Why put up a fight and try to improve things? Then I would lose the power of being a martyr. Suddenly I wouldn’t have other things to blame it on but rather have to accept that maybe I had a hand in my own downfall and then my situation would lack the proper context to draw sympathy from those around me.
Over the years I have gained the wisdom to recognize this behavior in myself, although unfortunately not the wisdom to prevent it or stop it, which requires a much higher level of enlightenment than I’ve yet mustered.
In many respects this type of apathy and cynicism made me the perfect pre-2004 Red Sox fan. I expected failure because the world would never allow me the joy of seeing my team come up victorious and in fact would force me to lose in diabolical and heart-rending situations. This perfectly suited my negative outlook and gave me one more reason to continue down my path of mediocrity. The end result was always going to be a loss no matter what so don’t try too hard.
The Red Sox found a way to turn things around and created a situation where the future was always a bright one. Personally I thought I had as well. This September ripped the optimism back out of my psyche and brought it back to 2003 levels. Strangely there is some comfort in this situation as at least I can point to specific reasons why my current outlook on things is so bleak, but after feeling good for a little while it is very difficult to consider going back to a prolonged run of feeling miserable.
Back to the Pandora. Much like the Red Sox have been, music is always tied into certain memories that create the conditions on whether or not I like a song. Nostalgia and music is covered brilliantly by Chuck Klosterman for Grantland. I try to listen to the AvettBrothers channel and each song that once was full of intrinsic heartwarming melodies is now a hand holding my head underwater until the bubbles finally stop. Dramatic I know. These were songs that helped define a new outlook on where my life was headed and without changing a single word are now painful reminders of failure.
This Red Sox season held a similar fate. The team was rolling and everyone knew this was the team to beat despite injuries, and apparently drunken binges in the clubhouse, and the fans trusted that the team would give us a collective happy ending. Then it all dropped off a cliff. Suddenly we watched with horror as an entire month of ineptitude led into the worst/best night of baseball ever.
Now we’re left to pick up the empty beer cans and cardboard Popeye’s containers and try to remember the good times while Ray Lamontagne and A FineFrenzy urge us to shed some tears and move on.
*Just to make it clearer these were all songs that came on Pandora while I was working on this post today, all of them are particularly poignant to the past year, none of them were the songs that originally prompted me to write. Pandora is scary in its cruelty...
