Sleater-Kinney, "Words and Guitar"

A year ago I challenged myself to get back to writing—and more specifically, to adhere to a strict discipline of producing a standalone short work, publication-worthy by my not-so-exacting standards, to post on Substack every Monday by 3:12 PM. Over the course of the year I’ve missed two or three of those 3:12 PM deadlines, but by God I have never missed a Monday.

If it feels like I’m running a victory lap here, it’s because I am. That’s not because I think what I’ve accomplished here is especially noteworthy against the backdrop of the wider world. The Internet says some 600 people summitted Mount Everest over the past year, and my friends tell me Evan Dando even managed to release a Lemonheads single (though I hear it’s not very good). No—I’m running a victory lap because for me, the prospect of writing 52 posts in 52 weeks was actually daunting, and delivering on it has been hard. Over the last three decades, my relationship with writing has been extremely casual. Like, if it happens, it happens casual. I have never been someone to get up in the morning, get in The Chair, stare at The Blank Page, flip the bird to That Blinking Dickhead of a Cursor, and will myself into productivity. In fact, my sense of how all this is supposed to work has been that forced writing is uninspired writing, and uninspired writing is lousy.

And I have subscribed to that philosophy for as long as I can remember. I can’t remember if I adopted it to rationalize away laziness and lack of commitment, or if my sporadic writing habits are in fact the natural and defensible result of right-thinking. Most likely this is a chicken-and-egg proposition, and one I had never reckoned with, at least in any meaningful way, before literally the moment I started writing this paragraph. Which goes to show that good things can come from slamming yourself in The Chair, with or without advance or present inspiration, and trying to write. It’s not just that through this exercise I have proved the concept that if you just keep priming the pump, eventually something will flow, even on a Death Valley day. More than this, it turns out occupying The Chair can position you to confront long-held belief systems that actually don’t make any damned sense.

The truth is, I don’t need to be visited by My Muse to write something passable. I just need to care and try and have faith in myself.

This is not to say there aren’t weeks, plenty of them, in fact, where a post falls fully-formed out of the sky, or seems to. As best I can explain those occasions, my subconscious mind has cooked up an outline on the Dark Side of the Moon and needs only to wait for a moment of relative quiet—say, my walk from the parking garage to the office, or that sliver of time after I turn out the light and before I drift off to sleep—to lift the cloche and reveal what it’s made. When that moment of revelation comes, I will run to the nearest keyboard, to jot down these notes. Then later, when I have a block of time set aside for graduating the notes into prose, my post all but writes itself. Every bullet point is loaded with potential energy that it surrenders to me on sight, with a bow or (as applicable) a curtsy.

Problem is I haven’t yet cracked the code on how this works, so that I might cause it to happen on a regular timeline. Accordingly, there are weeks when I’ll struggle even to find a song worth writing about, still others when I know exactly what the song is but am hurting for anything to say about it. So I brute-force it. Try and try and try again, until I have something. It’s my fervent hope that when you all read these entries, you aren’t able to tell which posts came free and easy and which were extracted through the compositional equivalent of the Battle of the Somme. I know that in many cases, when I go back and read what I’ve posted here—which I confess I do too much, and finding too many typographical errors—I usually don’t remember what was a slog and what wasn’t. Which is either good news to me as a writer or bad news regarding my medium-term memory.

In any case, there are 52 of these posts now—fifty-two—and when I think about that particular number I understand and accept that scattered across this year’s cumulus of work there will be aces, deuces, and all manner of gradations in between.

I could have stuck with fiction, when I made this resolution last January. I had (have?) a work in progress, 23 chapters deep. It’s a sci-fi project, set a half-century from now, when it’s possible to have your consciousness copied online at the point of death. It’s called 101ers,¹ and you can read it here. My plan is to continue dragging out writing it until the calendar has actually turned to 2075, at which point I won’t need to extrapolate the future anymore and can just write what I see, presumably from my home on a secure file server 50 miles outside of Palo Alto.

Now I don’t need to log on and chat with the digitized neural connectome of Sigmund Freud to understand what all this is about. I have a real problem with mortality: like, I can’t get my head around it at all. Accordingly, constructing a techno-historically plausible world where for the most part mortality can be overcome—even if that world is fraught and complicated and carries forward too many of the faults of this one—holds real, enduring appeal for me. Now having read that last sentence, you might be inclined to ask:

If writing about digital immortality is so restorative and useful for you, why are you stuck on 23 chapters and not even halfway up the narrative arc, six years into the project?

The answer to that is, some aspects of mind and identity are more powerful than others. It turns out that as hard-wired and propulsive as my psychological drive to triumph over death may be, it makes barely a dent in the wall of my lack of artistic discipline. Writing fiction is exhilarating for me. Creating worlds, populating them with characters, setting them up to interact with one another? This is as good at it gets. The flipside is I can’t write plot for shit. I absolutely detest it. To be sure, there are instances when the immediate plot writes itself, just like with a Substack post. You put two characters in a room, introduce a catalyst—a lion, or a bomb, or the fact that these two are engaged to be married and one of them just lost her body in a car accident—and then events unfold with all the speed and inevitability of a chemical reaction. But you catch that break 20% of the time, at best.

And then there are the demands of Big-Picture Plot. Nagging questions, nipping at the edges of your consciousness all the damn time: Where is all this going? How will it resolve? Mustering answers calls for high-level—really, God-level—thinking and decisiveness. My mind runs screaming from this work. So as desperate as I am to overcome my own mortality, by leaving behind some work of art bearing the definitive stamp of me for others to find, improbably, like any of 100 million bottled messages (Apple Music, Spotify) cast off into the dwarfing expanse of the Internet; and as desperate as I may be to argue logically to the conclusion that when my body fails I might not die—

I’m not so desperate as to put myself into The Chair to brute-force my way through the hard questions of 101ers novel-plotting.

And so I’m led back here to Substack, to one-off posts about rock songs I can chart from beginning to end over the course of a single week. As motivating as that 3:12 PM Monday deadline is, it also provides sweet relief: when the time comes, you’ll have done all that you can do, and there’s nothing left but to cut the cord and let it go. As for the overarching plot, that elusive tie-it-all-together proposition that so often sits just beyond my grasp when I’m writing novels—well, here it’s pre-fabbed and pre-set.

THESIS: I’ve spent five decades finding joy, meaning, identify, and occupation—maybe even preoccupation—in music.

And that’s quite enough to bring me back to The Chair, again and again, every week.

America’s Best Rock Band Sleater-Kinney—per Greil Marcus, but I don’t disagree—recorded their third record, Dig Me Out, over a two-month period in December 1996 and January 1997. I first heard this album four years too late, in 2001, when Bruce Hickey got fed up and slapped the CD into my hands. You will go straight home and listen to this, he instructed, because it was ludicrous that I hadn’t already.

Dig Me Out is ordered thunder, rendered to tape. Precision, intensity, provocation, and reaction. Squalling guitars, Corin Tucker’s voice. Dig Me Out is a perfect record, top to bottom. And dig me out is exactly the cry for help I have gathering in my throat around this time every year, when the holidays have swung around into the rear-view; when the world outside has turned into a striated sludge of grey, brown, and black; when the sky goes dark starting at 4 PM. So it doesn’t surprise me in the least that Corin, Carrie, and Janet were up against precisely this time of year when they dropped these lines in the LP’s title track (Apple Music, Spotify):

Dig me out, dig me in. Out of this mess, baby, out of my head. Dig me out, dig me in. Out of my body, out of my skin.

Cathartic and important, this message, but thankfully Sleater-Kinney don’t just leave it there. Five doors down the hall from “Dig Me Out,” “Words and Guitar” (Apple Music, Spotify) is waiting with some greater consolation. For sure, we’re all still wracked and addled here. Take take the noise in my head, Corin Tucker is asking. She is crying out for relief, and I am, too. There’s a reason I started this Substack in January, and have you seen the title I gave it? Now it’s goddam January again, and 2024 already isn’t doing us—or me, anyway—any favors. But here’s the thing: “Words and Guitar” has more to offer than a half-full glass of nihilism, neat. Amid all the swirling drama and dreck, while we grapple with the noise in our heads, there’s still a mixer in the cocktail. In the Pandora’s Box in the corner of this room, there’s still Hope. Or as Corin, Carrie, and I call it, music.

Words and guitar, I got it. Words and guitar, I want it. Can’t take this away from me. Music is the air I breathe.

1. Name-checking Joe Strummer’s first band? You bet. But also coining a term for sentient beings who have traded in their DNA for ones and zeroes.