Facebook Archives: I can’t sleep. Who can these days, amiright?

This is a Facebook post from June 4th, 2020. This was written during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. I wrote a lot on Facebook during that time, I like a lot of what was written here and wanted to save it here for posterity as Facebook slowly smothers the life out of it’s platform. -Damian June 2024

I can’t sleep. Who can these days, amiright?

I told the lady I was going to stay up and read, and sure…I did a little of that, but mostly I sat in the chair and thought about the future. I felt good about those thoughts, but then I sat down here and started reading Facebook and instantly regretted feeling good.

Because, let’s face it. We’re all doomed aren’t we?

I just finished the book Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins. It was a gift from the lady, her favorite book. She was irritated that I didn’t read it right after Christmas, when she gave it to me. But books have a life and a mind of their own. They come to you when you least expect them, and when they open up to you…. When they truly open up to you… it’s magic. This book came to me and opened up at the right place and time.

Jitterbug Perfume is about an ancient king who finds his first white hair in his beard. It’s decreed by the law of his land that he is to die of “old age.” Old Alobar isn’t ready to die and decides to run from death. He continues to run from death and somehow discovers the secrets to an everlasting life. The secrets are wonderful, but lonely.

Towards the end of the book, I don’t think I’m spoiling this for anyone, but a random black character is murdered by police in New Orleans and there are violent protests and vigils for this character. But it’s a book about living forever and does this character really die? They don’t talk about him too much in the book. It’s a white book and made for liberal white people, but it has been on my mind for the last few days.

Reading the chapters about this character’s death, while simultaneously watching the news was…. I don’t have the words for those feelings. Incredible is not a large enough word. His character was just a token. Created by a white man to die after a few humble sentences or paragraphs.

I’m not a smart man. I’ve never been good at looking at the metaphors in novels. Maybe his death was represented in that way on purpose, and it’s the times we are living in that makes me evaluate what that character means. ya know?

But that’s not what sticks with me about the book. The book is about how Alobar decides to change his world. He does so by breaking the chains of his oppressors, which are DEATH and the rules.

It’s an interesting and fun book and I can’t wait to read more of Tom Robbins. But I keep thinking about how the book says Alobar learns to become immortal because he shirks his role in the greater scheme of life and rebirth. He decides not to be a part of the SYSTEM, but to be an individual.

AN INDIVIDUAL.

That’s his first step to immortality. Becoming an individual.

But isn’t that the problem we have in AMERICA right now? Isn’t’ that the virus we are spreading to the whole world?

ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME.
instead of….
WE WE WE WE WE WE WE WE WE WE.

They’re the same letters. Just upside down.

No longer do we live in the country of “We the People…” We live in a country of “ME!!!!!! The People!!!!”
We’re a country of people who want what’s best for US, but when we say us… we mean… “Me. ME! MEEEEEE!!!!!!!”

Me the people. Me the People. Me the People. Me the People.

Look, I know I’m telling almost all of you reading everything you already know. But we’ve been living “Me the people” our entire lives and it’s not really working is it?

The rich get richer, and the poor keep dying when they don’t have too. Who cares who can live forever, if the masses are dying in our streets.

I see the “All lives Matter” posts and comments, and hell, I thought the same thing at first. All lives do matter, but WHY IS MY LIFE WORTH MORE THAN OTHERS?

WHY?!?!

I struggled with these ideas when my sister died some ten/eleven years ago. Why her and not me? Why George Floyd and not me? Why? Why? Why?

Why?

What is a life worth? How much? How many tears? I wonder how many people have seen a dead body. I wonder how many people have watched a person die in-front of their own eyes. How would that change their world?

When I think of the “ALL LIVES MATTER!!!!” People I’ve been thinking of Jitterbug Perfume and the individualism it either taught or warned against. These are ignorant people, not bad people. Just fucking ignorant. They are just as much a product of the system as the dead black men laying in our streets.

It’s been hammered into our collective heads since birth that we should be looking out for number one. You know why? Because communism is EVIL. Caring for other people is EVIL.

I just know that we can not keep looking at the world and think that we belong as individuals. We have to start looking at the world from a place of WE.

Or, I dunno…. Here’s another half brained metaphor: The earth is a symbiotic organism. We have to work together, or cancer seeps into those cells and destroys it. Each of us carry that cancer inside us. So when we do not work to form a more cohesive unit, we die and we destroy others. And WE! AMERICANS! are doing it every day.

Dying.

America is dying and Americans are killing it.

It’s not just BLACK lives, it’s all lives. They have just taken the largest toil, for us. Man, They die every single fucking day for us. For what? FOR WHAT?!?!

Why are we taught from the day we are born that other people don’t fucking matter? Why is it okay for our culture to teach us and other cultures, because we influence the world… that no one matters except ourselves.

I mean, look at the god damned grocery store parking lot. Look at all those carts strewn across the parking lot. Some right next to the fucking cart corrals. Look at the tables of restaurants. Look at the grass in our parks. Look at the world. We can’t take care of what we’ve got. We can’t put on a fucking cloth mask to help save the world…..

We fucking destroy it every single day and think “I DESERVE BETTER.”

I dunno what to do.
I’m not a smart man.

I’m a 38, almost 39, year old man, who battles some weird depression he doesn’t understand. I struggle everyday to keep my head above water.

This little journal entry is my way of bloodletting my sickness out of me. I’ve got all this shit inside me, poisoning me and I have to let it out. I have to put it somewhere, so why not here…..

I don’t deserve to live on this planet any more than George Floyd and the lifetime of other people who have died unjustly. But here I am and I’m still here.

He entrusted us with this place. We should take care of it, and the only way we’re going to make this place better is if we work together.

However, there are things keeping that working together just out of reach and we have to destroy those things. We have to burn it all down. We have to set it all on fire. Then on those ashes, maybe… Just maybe instead of building a castle for ME, we can build a castle for US.

I have a message to myself I wrote on the back of a sticker sitting here on my desk and it says on it,
“How can I make the world a better place.”

It’s a thing I struggle with and struggle with often. Can I make the world a better place, no. But I think if i can get just a few other people to listen. Maybe if we can get a lot of people to listen… maybe…. just maybe…

And I think we are getting closer. We just need to keep asking the question WHY? Each and every day.

WHY? WHY? WHY?

And one last insomniatic thought from Jitterbug perfume by way of my brain:

We’re just soup. We’re born from soup. We live our lives. We go back to the soup. Why not make the best soup we can? Why not make everything the best for everyone?

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Off With Their Heads Interview // Ryan Young on In Desolation (New Noise Magazine Issue #1 – March 2013)

July 23, 2022 No Comments

Editor’s Note: This is the raw draft of the interview published by New Noise Magazine. This draft has not been seen by an editor. There will be errors. You’ve got a new record, HOME, coming out into the world in March. After all the hard work and effort, how does it feel to be putting this thing out into the world? Good. It’s been finished since the end of July. I honestly thought it would be released in the fall, but I guess their deadline was too close to Xmas. I was told it’s a bad idea to release records around that time. I was pretty bummed at first (knowing we would have to wait so long), but I realize that the label certainly knows more than I do about putting out records. It’s a deeper, darker and ever more personal record than the already incredibly personal records that preceded it. Yet, you do it so effortlessly and fearlessly. Do you get nervous putting so much of yourself out there? I wouldn’t say it’s effortless or fearless at all. I hate going in to make records. I know that the only way to make it powerful and meaningful to myself is to dig way into all the shit that I put off dealing with since the last record. I was always afraid that I would run out of things to write about as I got older. It turns out that there seems to be an entirely new set of worries and problems that come with getting older. Back when we did Hospitals, I felt like I could do whatever I wanted and there were no consequences. There weren’t, really. I was 24 and couldn’t die (believe me, we tried!). Now I’m 31 and a full grown man. The problem is that I don’t feel like one or even want to be one! I’m watching all of my friends and old band mates get married and have children, and I just want to get back to 24, you know? I think that’s been my new problem, and that’s obviously not going away. The actual making of the records is stressful in the lyric sense because I’m writing until the minute I record vocals. I might have something, but I usually change it to the most pressing thoughts I have right before they hit record. It’s also pretty embarrassing singing some of the shit I write to an engineer for the first time. I still haven’t gotten over that. It’s the ability of a true artist to make work look effortless!Then I must be a true artist, because that shit is hard! I’m 31 too and I’m in the same boat. I don’t want to grow up, I don’t want to have kids. I want to go out 5 nights a week and go see bands play each and every night. I don’t want to stop. I’m afraid to stop. What I really like and what really grabs me about HOME, is many of the themes hit home for me and hit home hard. I might have made this idea up, but the ideas of feeling alone in a room full of people. The ideas and feelings that I’m in a hole I’ll never get out of. And here’s another guy with the same shit going on in his head, but he can kind of play guitar and can sing. The honesty hits home. How important is honesty, or am I making that up in my head? haha It’s super important. That’s why it takes me so long to write. I procrastinate because to be perfectly honest about it, I’m not a very honest person publicly. If I go out to a show, or hang out at a show that I’m playing, I don’t want to talk about this shit. I want to have fun. The switch flips when I get home though. It’s kinda like that episode of It’s Always Sunny where Charlie is explaining that they have to huff glue and eat the cat food to fall asleep as fast as possible. I have a similar routine. I think Home is kind of a deeper explanation of why I feel the way I do all the time, and less about the specific shittiness like the previous records. So when someone like me comes up to you at a show and tells you that they understand how you feel and feel that way too, that maybe your honesty has helped them through some dark times as well, Does that freak you out? Not at all. I think it’s cool when people say stuff like that. It happens more often these days than it used to. It just depends how that conversation goes down. I think you should use music like this as therapy or an escape. Same goes for the show. People just have to keep in mind that I am not a therapist. I can’t help anyone on a personal level. I can give you some music, but I have no good advice. That’s where the title for the song “Seek Advice Elsewhere” comes into play. When you are at an OWTH show and are having a good time, roll with it. Don’t dwell on whatever problem you have while there, and please don’t put me in the position of feeling bad about it. I’m there doing the same thing! Let’s move in and talk more about that album, entitled HOME. It’s a simple, but loaded title for a loaded album. What does HOME mean to you? I never really have an idea for a theme when doing a record. I think this one stemmed from us touring for 5 years straight. It’s about all the different places that I’ve called home over the years, and why each of them has never clicked and felt right. I still don’t feel like I’ve found the “home” that everyone who is content with their lives has. I guess right now, my

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