A Song in Your Head

Sometimes the recipe for a love story is as simple as a Beatles song. Or maybe it’s a Queen song, or The Misfits. Hell, if it floats your boat, maybe it’s a Taylor Swift song. Really, it’s all based on the individual’s merit and their environment.

Everyone’s different, and there’s probably some mathematical formula that could predict a songs success according to it’s beat per minute or something incredibly complicated like that, but then you’re just soaking the fun out of it. Yes, that may be true, maybe there’s some magical line connecting every human to what they will inevitably find catchy, but sometimes, you just want to turn on the radio and sing a shitty pop song at the top of your lungs. Math has no place in music. Math has no place anywhere, really, math is difficult and it is a leading cause of hysterical crying. Math should just be completely abolished and replaced with the guitar solo from Stairway to Heaven. No one would complain.

The point is that music has a way of bringing people together. It’s not necessarily because of some higher power pushing you towards people, unless you want to believe that. Mainly, it’s just because people are attracted to people who share their same interests. This doesn’t have to be in a romantic sense, but come on, who are we kidding? Everyone wants to date someone who has the same iPod as themselves. They may deny it and they may say that they want to find someone with diverse interests, but what the hell are you going to talk about? If you can’t discuss the arch of David Bowie’s eyebrows with your mate, than what else are you going to talk about? Politics? No thank you.

There is something magical in music. Those words have been said before, and they will be said again, but sometimes it’s okay to repeat a phrase over and over again, because their words have lost no validity in the thousands of times they’ve been put on repeat. Also, it’s vital that everyone can understand this, as it’s one of the things that make humans human. It’ll never stop being true, so it should never stop being celebrated. Music is beyond a feeling. It’s beyond an emotion, and it’s pretty much beyond any worldly form altogether. Music is celestial, in a way, in the way that it brings people together and also makes people want to tear each other apart sometimes. But nothing else has that power. Except maybe Girl Scout Cookies.

It could be said that music is a reminder that the world isn’t all bad. Even in the darkest days, there’s something to be felt. There’s always something, someone, on the other end of a song who knows precisely what you’re feeling. To some, that’s all the relief that you need. To others, it’s the extra kick to get you out the door. To some, however, it can be lost, and these people are worth pity to the extreme.

The best way to describe music is that it provides a balance. It provides a comfort that can help to balance out the bad and the good. It’s sort of a lull that some don’t appreciate enough, and some appreciate just enough, but it’s an entity that we all crave at our bedside.

If there’s one thing that you spend your entire life chasing after, it’s the perfect balance of things. That’s a broad concept to take on alone, but that’s the short version of what everyone wants. You want a balance between your job, your family, your loves, your dislikes, and all the little things that you never notice. The little things are what wrap up the canvas. Like the extra splash of cover, and the little things consist of the sound of the birds when you wake up in the morning, to the smell of a neighbor starting a bonfire.

Really, what we all want is a balance in those things. You need that balance, that’s what keeps you sane. A balance can’t be made with the tone of a song, but it can be aided. Every emotion there is to feel has been felt before, and that’s one thing that does bind us all together.

The sad thing is that we’re never given that opportunity. No one is ever handed the opportunity for balance on a silver platter the way they should be. You’re instead trimmed and put in the hurdle of a straightjacket. And you can’t see the damn straightjacket until it’s too late to take back all the years you’ve lost. Because you will lose years, oh will you lose them. You lose years like you do hair from atop your head, and you have no choice. No one is ever given a choice. In every facet of life, no matter where you’re from, this is inescapable. That doesn’t make it okay, but it makes it mandatory.

On one end of the earth your straightjacket is school and work. On another side it’s money. A few doors down from you it’s disease, and to your immediate left, it’s the noose of anxiety. Everyone has a straightjacket and recognizing that is something that’s also inevitable, but that doesn’t mean you let your dream of balance become lesser, because dreaming truly is the only way for you to get anywhere. Hard work, yes, but you can’t achieve hard work without the dream to back it up.

For our purposes now, we’ll focus on the straightjacket of the middleclass. This is one of the most common hitches for a person to have, but that doesn’t make it any less stifling. A middleclass straightjacket is the kind where you’re shipped to school at the age of five. From there you will spend your next thirteen to twenty one years also in school. At this point, it’s likely you’ll have three months, if that, of peace, and then you are thrust into finding employment. Maybe you’ve settled down with someone by now, but it’s not all that likely, and it may have shattered by now as well. From here you will spend the rest of your life in a likely incredibly repetitive state known by very few as zombie syndrome. Zombie syndrome is the act of doing the same thing every goddamn day for so long that you’re worn out to a point where you can no longer be classifiable as human. Zombie syndrome, though not necessarily inexorable, is a fate that some might consider worse than death. It’s common amongst cubicle workers, and should be abolished completely as it benefits no one.

The thing about humans is that we are a very persistent bunch. That’s probably our best trait, come to think of it. We keep going. We keep pushing through it, looking for that balance. We can laugh, or smile, or maybe even be happy, but the balanced life we were put on this earth to look for is now nothing but a distant memory. We’re a very hungry bunch though, because we keep moving forward.

But hey, that’s life. It’s messy, it’s boring, it’s commonly mindless, and it’s terminal. And it is fucking fantastic.

But the thing is that when you spend your entire life focused on one thing, one tiny little thing that really isn’t all that important when it comes down to it, you forget to think about other things. Basically, you get so caught up in the drama that you’re supposed to be thinking about that you let half of your life float by you and pay no mind to most of what’s going on around you.

This is precisely the reason why Frank dropped out of school. He’d realized a few months into his second year at university that he hadn’t done anything. He’s never seen the world, he’s never been in a serious relationship, and he’s never gotten drunk off his tits and been unable to recall what happened the next day. He’s never lived by himself, nor has he ever actually supported himself, and really, the job he had at Wendy’s in Junior year of high school didn’t provide much of an income or much work experience, so it could be argued that he never really had a job.

Honestly, now’s not that much better. He still has never lived on his own, he has a pretty shitty job that barely pays more than that god-awful Wendy’s, but at least he’s got a life that isn’t controlled by the insistent shrill voices of his parents, and the judgmental society that conditioned him to believe that the only important thing in the world was education.

Fuck education though. Fuck it to hell, and let it rot where it is. Frank hates school. He hates condescending professors who think they’re better than you because they have an expensive leather briefcase with those loud brass clasps. Fuck their mentality that the only thing that matters is their paycheck which they can use to buy fancy liquors imported from France or fucking Luxembourg. Frank’s knowledge of fine liquors is basically confined to what he’s learned from Jeopardy, as that’s really his only source of new information these days.

At least he can say that he’s got somewhat of a life now. It’s not a great life, and it’s not even really all that good, but it’s a life all the same, and that’s what counts. True, he is living on the couch of the old high school punk that he used to idolize for some reason, but at least he isn’t stuck in that lame bedroom at home where he wasn’t allowed to put posters on the walls because it would damage the paint and lower the price of future resale. Like he fucking cares.

To be fair, Pete isn’t a bad roommate, but he’s also not really a roommate either, because Frank is living on a couch. A couch isn’t really a room, so to say he’s a roommate would not be entirely accurate. He’s the guy who makes sure Frank isn’t homeless and also the guy who sometimes makes toast at three in the morning because his work hours are fucked up, but that’s what happens when you have literally no money at all whatsoever. You end up on a guy’s couch listening to the sound of the tenants upstairs having loud sex. You also end up playing that scratched up Cranberries CD, because your roommate accidentally spilled orange juice on your iPod dock, and you both sold the majority of your CD collections on EBay because you needed money for Easy Mac. Then you’re forced to question why your roommate has a Cranberries CD in the first place, because that seems really out of place in the home of a man who once threw a bra his ex-girlfriend left in his apartment at Billy Corgan.

Frank’s days have all made a habit of melting together though. At least when he was in school he had the ability to tell you what day it was based on what assignments he had due, but now, days have very little room for change. He wakes up, he eats a handful of cereal, he checks to make sure that his clothes don’t smell too awful, he goes to work for most of the day, he comes back to Pete’s apartment and they play a ping pong tournament of comparing who’s had a worse day. Pete will come out with this shitty thing that happened, and Frank will combat it with that shitty thing that happened. The day ends with someone passing out due to lack of sleep, and then you press repeat. Frank’s absolutely horrified that he’s devolving into a life of zombie syndrome, but he refuses to ever let it get that far. So what if the only toothbrush he owns is the Buzz Lightyear one that was on clearance at Walmart? It still beats school.

Frank has the worst job probably known to man though. Or at least, he likes to think so. No one ever considers that there is someone in the world who has that job that you can never imagine anyone having. There is someone out there whose life revolves around the job that you never think anyone has, but someone’s got to have it, otherwise it wouldn’t get done. That is how Frank ended up working at a vitamin store. A vitamin store. A store whose sole purpose is to sell vitamins. It’s probably the stupidest job known to man, and Frank detests it with that much vehemence.

First of all, the place is really white. That can be taken in both meanings of the phrase. For one, the store has white walls, white floors, white shelves full of white bottles with white vitamins inside. The price tags on the shelves are white, the uniforms are white, and the ceiling lights are a bright white reminiscent of the kind you would find in a surgical operating room.

The other meaning that can be extracted from ‘white’ would be the fact that only white people buy vitamins. And, yes, it’s the white people kind of white people. The ones who have names like ‘Deborah’ and ‘Barbara’ and ‘Debra’ who coach soccer teams and feed their children orange slices. That kind of white people. Suburban moms who drill heteronormativity into the minds of their toddlers so furiously that the only hope those kids have is to runaway to join a circus. That kind of white people. The kind of white people who call any form of rap music filth. That kind of white people. The kind of white people that have at least four sculptures or paintings of Jesus Christ in their living room. That kind of white people.

It’s only women who shop there too, because no ‘self-respecting male’ would ever be caught dead buying fish oil and calcium. Technically that’s not actually true, because there is one other class of people who go into a vitamin store. The hulks. That’s what Frank calls them. The hulks are the guys who spend three fourths of their life inside of gyms, bulking themselves up until they look like the cartoons from the wet dreams of overcompensating misogynists in the sixties. These men have been formally dubbed ‘comic book artists.’ Frank’s not a cynic, he’s not, he just knows that the portrayal of these such hulks is wrung from the minds of men who grew up making sandwich jokes towards half of the world’s population. It’s an industry that was predominately plagued with chauvinists in its early years. It should also be noted that Frank has double standards because he still eats comic books up like they’re the air he breathes.

The hulks buy just about anything that they can fit into their big meaty hands, which are always slick with perspiration from the workout they’ve been having for the last six and a half days. The hulks always saunter into that store, refuse any form of eye contact with their petite soccer mom counterparts, and they buy their shit as quickly as they can. Frank’s theory is that they can’t spend too much time buying vitamins because they’re losing valuable time that could be spent under a barbell. If you ask Frank, their time would be better spent under an anvil.

Those are the only two classes of people who go to vitamin shops. Occasionally you’ll get the uncomfortable looking people who have surely just come from the doctor’s office after being diagnosed with some minor disorder that requires vitamins. Frank can’t count the number of vampires who have come in, bought iron and left. If there was one disease he would most easily be able to prescribe, it’d be anemia. Frank’s an expert on it almost. The paler you are, the easier it is to predict what vitamins you’re there to buy.

Frank hates his job with a fiery passion equal to that as his hate for the shrill sound of Deborah’s voice as she asks what the best vitamin for weight loss is. Frank will casually tell her that he doesn’t know, he only works there, he doesn’t have an encyclopedia of knowledge about the products. She and her clones will always give him that same bad smell under their nose look, and huff before buying a lifetime supply of whatever it is that comes in those weird little brown bottles that they keep near the back of the store.

A lot of his life Frank hates. He likes it better than his old life, though, which was filled with school assignments, tests, studying, stress, panic attacks, sleeplessness, pressure, and, most of all, self-loathing. At least he’s finally trying. That’s what really matters.

Frank sighs, looking around the apartment, that isn’t big enough for one person let alone two, and the occasional drifter from Pete’s past whose names have all drifted together. Frank is not good with names. He’s good with people, he can get along with anyone for at least a few minutes, but he just can’t remember names. He sat next to this kid in class once and they talked all the time between lectures, but he didn’t know his name, and eventually, he decided it was too late to ask. This was the reason for why Frank avoided that guy whenever he called to him in the library, and the reason for why he eventually decided Frank was a complete bitch and started to sit on the other side of the classroom.

The front door slams closed, prompting Frank to look around when he sees a very drowsy, and possibly hungover Pete walking into the apartment.

“You look a mess,” Frank states.

“You can talk. Your face is all blurry,” Pete says, stopping when he enters the kitchen. He looks around for a second, then walks over to the fridge. He opens it and Frank watches him as he stares at the contents of the refrigerator, his back turned to Frank.

“You drunk?”

“I’m tipsy.”

“That’s what a drunk person would say,” Frank says.

“I’m only a little tipsy,” Pete says, “but go ahead, call the fire marshals, alert the sheriff. Make me walk in a straight line.”

“I don’t think that’s what those jobs are for.”

“Yeah, well whatever,” Pete says, finally deciding not to get anything from the fridge, so he turns around, letting it close by itself. “Going to bed.”

“It’s nine in the morning.”

“Going to bed,” Pete repeats, walking over to the door to the right of where Frank sits on the couch. He watches Pete enter, turn around, and he starts to yawn when the door is closed. Frank just shrugs, looking around.

Frank’s work schedule is irregular. He doesn’t have a normal one, he usually works five days a week, but there’s really no telling what those days will be. It’s slightly erratic, very confusing, and it keeps Frank on the brink of pissed more often than not.

Today though, he doesn’t have work. That’s good for him. He has the entire day to do what he does best. Nothing.

Frank’s very good at nothing. He’s very good at consuming a colossal number of potato chips, watching a massive amount of shit TV, and standing up fewer than two times in seven hours. He could stay sitting for all of that time if he didn’t have a bladder the size of a walnut.

He looks around him for a shirt that he can wear that doesn’t smell like it hasn’t been washed in six months. There’s a laundry room in the basement, which would be really nice if it weren’t the most horrific laundry room in the world. Frank is absolutely positive he saw a rat skeleton down there once. It’s the place where all your nightmares come alive, and he’s not sure that there isn’t a secret sewer entrance to some underground scummy parallel universe. Then again, most of the crap television that Frank watches is on the sci-fi channel so this suspicion is probably the result of his twisted imagination as well as the many episodes of Warehouse 13 he has consumed. Nevertheless, Frank refuses to use that laundry room, and instead walks the three blocks to the laundromat by the drugstore.

Frank spots a shirt, one of the ones he’s pretty sure he paid less than five bucks for at a flea market, and picks it up. He does the sniff check which is never a very good idea. It smells like a twenty year old, technically homeless boy’s shirt, which is, in a sense, good, because that’s precisely what it is. Frank’s not really homeless, he has a roof over his head, but he doesn’t have a home, which is what makes him technically homeless.

He frowns, looking at the shirt that’s beyond help with the way that it’s so wrought with deodorant stains, as well as the way it’s faded from the wash that it’s almost got a different design to the one it had when he purchased it. It’s not that he intentionally ruins things, he’s just not good at anything to do with numbers. Quantity is something that is virtually lost on him. He never knows how much laundry detergent is too much, and the same applies to deodorant.

He looks around, wondering what he’s going to do today. He doesn’t have any friends that he has an obligation to hang out with anytime soon, Pete’s asleep, he really doesn’t want to just watch TV, but he has no money. Frank doesn’t know what there is to do with the day, and he’s wary of the prospect of trying to figure something out.

He settles on pulling out his ear buds from where they’re lying under a stack of books on the kitchen counter, and pressing them into his somewhat reluctant ears because he’s too poor to buy headphones and his ears are too small to wear earbuds. He keeps telling himself that he’ll buy a cheap pair of earphones next paycheck, but he hasn’t done it yet. His life is just a continued example of ‘I’ll do that someday in the future.’

Frank’s a grab bag kind of guy. He likes to throw things blindly and see where they land. He likes to take different routes to see how lost he can get himself. He likes to take a stab in the dark with what music he’s about to hear, and today is no different. He turns his iPod to shuffle, jumps over the couch to sit down, and lets Eleanor Rigby overtake him.

And his life itself is as simple as a Beatles song.