Dispatches from the Underground: Deloused at the Touch of Grey
Agitation, evisceration, survival, and dividends. Stocks and bonds.
We seem to have turned a corner this week; I can feel something shifting, and I’m not just talking about the fact that the weather is breaking. Today in particular I felt a lot better. But the last three weeks or so, I’ve been very agitated. Not in an uncontrolled way. Not in a way that pervades my mood all the time or spills into every area in my life, but it’s been a real strain.
Contrary to what the people who may have known me in high school (and several other periods of my life) might think, I really don’t enjoy being in an aggravated state. Granted, I do like a small measure of agitation for health purposes, keeps the pipes clean, blood flowing, instincts fresh, all that. Unfortunately, that’s not what I’m talking about here. I mean thoroughly unpleasant events and circumstances that have little to no underlying personal or social benefit. You know — “why the Jesus Christ do I have to deal with this?” — that sort of thing.
I also want to be precise about this and not make it more than it is. I am fine and things are fine. I have suffered no major personal calamities or defeats and the source of my irritation has been neither my home life nor my creative life nor my friends. Quite the contrary. All of those things are going extremely well. This has mainly to do with some really unpleasant times in my day job. Even this I need to be careful not to exaggerate — I am not in any trouble, and neither is the company I work for nor the department I work for. None of these things are catastrophic. Just irritating. Just day after day of unpleasantness, a lot of it unexpected, and at times coming from multiple directions. Couple that with — or attribute it to — the usual Mercury Retrograde “shit isn’t working” thing that’s been going on and it can seem a bit pervasive, at least for eight hours a day. That’s long enough for it to seep into your night just a little bit. Enough to kinda discourage you from getting up in the morning.
Nothing I haven’t seen before, of course. It started right after I did a weekly I Ching/Tarot reading that came up just horribly. “This is going to be a shit-ass week,” the yarrow stalks and symbolic cards screamed at me. Sure enough, starting the very next day, everything was a disaster. It continued that way for a week. Then that subsided and the following week was a complete disaster for entirely different reasons. I was a raving madman by the end of it.
And now this week we are coming out of it. Once more, we endured it. Here’s the thing with little periods like this, with irritation in general — think of it as a phenomenon that is occurring, a necessary and brief little blip on the cycle that will pass, and sometimes even in the midst of it, you can laugh — if only maniacally. At least some of the time. I think it helps. That and weed.
When I walked out of work many of those days, the first song I put on was “Touch of Grey,” the studio version. I would play it several times through and have a cigarette and by the end of that it at least had the effect of a giant cosmic deep breath inside me. I could chill out a little bit.
“Touch of Grey,” the Dead’s only hit single, is a pretty bizarre song. It’s got a really upbeat, almost-poppy vibe to it — almost certainly why it was successful — but the words (themselves written brilliantly with hilarious wordplay after hilarious wordplay) are pretty much a total bummer. Yes, the chorus is “I will get by,” undoubtedly another reason for its success, but every verse describes a situation in which absolutely nothing is right, things are backwards and failing, everyone a victim of Big Entropy. In that fuller context, the chorus is not particularly triumphant or exuberant. It’s a shrug. It’s “Fuck it, it doesn’t matter, I’ll survive anyway.”
Still helpful when going through a little period in which things during the day seemed to match very nicely to what is going on in the song. The third line, “Paint-by-number morning sky looks so phony,” is like the dark flip side to many of the band’s other lyrics that celebrate the natural beauty of this world. The scene described is one in which the morning sunrise itself now holds no real sway, no power to move the narrator. I never got that bad — but I do know the feeling.
Peter Richardson, in his book No Simple Highway, which presents itself as a cultural history of the Dead, contends very convincingly that the song represented the spiritual beating the band had taken by the early 80s. He points out the shift in tone Robert Hunter’s lyrics had taken; though they’d never been overtly optimistic, they’d had ambition and wonder and definitely a certain pinch of hope, but by the 80s his songs — still brilliantly written — were clearly ones written by someone who had lost a lot of that ambition, wonder, and hope. He points out how tepid and resigned the refrain of “I will survive” is in comparison with basically everything written a decade and a half before.
There were many good reasons for this, of course — and I could write for days about that subject alone. Interestingly, Hunter had envisioned it as a slow, dreary tune, and it was Jerry who recognized how wrong that was and turned it into a pop song. And indeed, there were absolutely times when the band did perform it as a triumphant song. Below is an absolutely exuberant and defiant version Sethbag sent me this morning by coincidence, a recording from one of the first times the tune was played after Jerry’s diabetic coma the year before. It’s worth a listen even if you are not feeling irritated — and I hope you aren’t. Use your headphones and dig that crowd.
Also, can we talk for just a second about this: How the hell was Beto O’Rourke in a band with Cedric Bixler-Zavala? I mean, that empty-headed dweeb (with an awesome haircut — props where props are due) shared a stage with the Mars Volta guy?
2019 is so fucking weird. I mean there were actual headlines about the fact that O’Rourke has “promised” to reunite the Volta if elected president.
What?
Anyway, one day, after hearing this news, instead of putting on “Touch of Grey,” I put on Deloused at the Comatorium. I’m not sure I can recommend this album broadly because at best it will only appeal to a narrow slice of you dear readers, and even for those in that slice, it’s going to be an acquired taste for many.
BUT.
Man, is that album brilliant. It was a really huge and significant part of my brief college experience, but I don’t praise it out of nostalgia. There’s a lot I listened to in those days that I just CAN’T with anymore (seriously, Led Zeppelin is for teenagers). No, this still has it. Nobody has any idea what half the words mean (although they are all real words except for one), but man that music, including those batshit vocals coming from Beto’s buddy, really shows you things and takes you places and GETS you.
If you let it.
A couple weeks back, I teased this crazy Lent program I invented in order to sign myself up for it, apparently because I like punishment, and now I’m gonna tease about it some more.
Kidding about the punishment part, although it is not always easy. It’s actually brewing something very powerful — it’s working, in other words — and I know for sure at this point that the full effects of it will not be seen until the months after Lent is already over.
That said, I have failed partially or completely on at least 40% of the things I set out to include in this program. As usual, I tried to pack too much in. That’s okay. I’ve kept up with the things that are working and, boy, are they working.
I swear I will get into details on this eventually — maybe when it’s over — but I definitely just want to endorse the concept of taking periods of time and dedicating them to a certain EXTRA spiritual practice. I don’t mean asceticism or even serious sacrifice, because I’m honestly not much capable of either. But in order for a thing like this to work, it does require…well, WORK. You have to put more in than you normally would, which is not even always fun. But it’s worth it when you get back a big fat dividend.
I’m headed for that.