The Damned, "Smash It Up"
It’s 3:46 AM on Thursday, and I’m here in The Chair writing. I just woke up from a dream. I rarely remember my dreams, and hardly ever any of the juicy details. If my waking mind takes anything at all from the night’s work, it’s usually just a vague impression or overarching theme. King Kong has climbed on top of my grandfather’s Italian restaurant again. Or I’ve figured out how to fly, but only at low altitude and walking speed, and to do it I have to flap my arms in an undignified way. What ultimately comes of the Big Ape invasion, where my ho-hum flights take me—ordinarily these particulars are scrubbed from memory right when I wake up.
But this dream tonight landed and stuck. I remember everything. Or at least I remember all the details that were revealed to me. The gist of it was that something was expected of me, but because I had landed in medias res, with next to no understanding of my situation, I was poorly positioned to deliver on the obligation. Complicating matters further still, much—arguably most—of the picture was obscured from me. It was as if there was some agency out there, some Dream Programmer, flipping switches and pushing buttons to jerk essential expositional background out of view, specifically to keep me adrift and confused. And if that alone weren’t super-frustrating, the Programmer had still more tricks up his sleeve, to ensure that, try as I might to make the best of my situation, I would be thwarted at every turn.
A fair description of this is that it was a Frustration Dream. When I awoke from it just now, as I was passing through that liminal half-unconscious/ half-conscious phase where I am able both to remember the dream and process its contents—much, much more on this below—it occurred to me that lately I have been having a lot of dreams like this. I don’t remember anything about these others, but somehow I know to a certainty that tonight’s wasn’t the first, fifth, or even the fifteenth dream to go down this pitted road. The Frustration Dream is an offshoot of the more familiar and common Anxiety Dream I’ve been having throughout my adult life. But now it seems like it’s the alpha dog on the block. Is my subconscious mind transitioning away from its three-nights-per-week, Bad things could happen programming schedule to one where the hammered-home lesson is instead, You have no ability to affect what happens? And if so, what conclusion should I draw from this? That I am trapped? I am liberated?
In any case, the dream started with me studying for a final examination. This is ordinary. Over the decades my Anxiety Dreams have almost always manifested as end-of-term cram crises. Usually it’s an English Lit class, I’ll shortly be sitting for an essay test, and I haven’t done any of the readings. Common variations on this theme are “I never went to the classes” and “I swear to God I dropped this course.” Nothing about any of these predicaments is especially interesting. Dreams of unpreparedness are a staple of modern life.
The particulars of this dream are vaguer and (I hope) more interesting. For example, I didn’t during the dream, and don’t know now, what the class was. There was no stack of uncracked Victorian novels on my desk. I had a clear mandate to study, and there was a reckoning coming, but there was no syllabus or even course title for me to consider. My daughter Lila was either in the same class or a similar one. She had watched dozens of TV episodes on the streamers, and she was fully prepared. I didn’t know what to do with that information: should I be watching Netflix? Was that the course material? What the course was about, what we had or should have learned, what I should study—this was all too much to figure in the wee hours of the morning before the test. The better bet, it seemed to me, was just to sit and think in advance about what pre-fab, adaptable theses I could deploy in response to the essay prompts, when they were revealed to me.
Then the sun was up and I was in a large classroom. It had old, scratched wooden decks and may not have been wired for electricity. Natural light filled the room from windows on all sides. This classroom must have taken up an entire floor of the building. Kate wasn’t there, but the kids were with me, along with several of my close friends, scattered around the room. We were all taking exams, possibly the same one, but in variable forms. It would turn out that none of the tests were the same.
The teaching assistant was the mother of one of Florian’s preschool classmates, a woman I haven’t seen for years. (Florian is eighteen.) The TA called me out specifically, announcing that for the first essay question I could—or should—write “nonsense.” She didn’t say as much out loud, but I took this to mean that she understood I hadn’t been properly or completely enrolled in the class, or I might have missed time due to illness or other commitments. My “nonsense” instruction was an allowance of some kind, for not having been exposed to the course materials that others were being testing on. That was a relief.
For the second essay question, the TA gave me a prompt. It had something to do with Led Zeppelin. The prompt was on a sheet of paper. I was holding it in my hands, and I couldn’t read it. It was a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, etc.—iterating back to the days of typewritten text and hand-crank mimeograph machines. The words were generally blurred and smeared, but from time to time one of them would snap into visibility, like the faintest stars in the night sky sometimes do, when you really concentrating on seeing them.
After catching one of these jumping, twinkling words, I would look straightaway to another word on the page. As a matter of strategy, I was targeting big words: if by happenstance I should cast my eyes over a word at a moment when it made itself legible, I didn’t want to have wasted that luck on a small-potatoes article, conjunction, or preposition. My best bet for wresting some meaning from the page was to key on a multisyllabic barnburner of a proper noun. The problem was that by the time I was able to make out a new word, the last word I’d read was already wiped from memory. So I was never able to string even two words together from the prompt.
Fuck it, I decided. I had an idea for a piece of fiction about Jimmy Page and a ghost haunting that mansion where they recorded Led Zeppelin IV. I would write this up in a hurry, and I’d be sure to get at least a passing grade. I just needed something to write with. Here, too, I was Frustrated. My pockets were empty. The room was filled with long tables and chairs—work stations for the exam takers. The table had cups placed at regular intervals, with pens and pencils in them. I shopped around and checked all these cups for something I could use. Again and again and again I came up empty. The pencils had broken tips or were worn down to the nubs, or they had that manufacturing defect where however you sharpen them, there’s always wood running up flush on the lead point so you can’t write with it. Some of the pencils were flat, fat carpenter’s pencils with tips as wide as their erasers. I knew all the pens were hopeless and didn’t even try them.
I made a run at several electric pencil sharpeners, but these failed for various reasons: hole too small, motor not working, etc. Through all this searching and sharpening I was multitasking, trying to compose the essays in my head so that when I finally sat down with working pencil and paper, I could write them out fully-formed from memory. The Zeppelin ghost idea came and went from my head. It occurred to me that I’d rather write my essay about the Damned: you know, prompt be Damned (and pun intended). I would pick a Damned song—an obvious choice was “I Just Can’t Be Happy Today” (Apple Music, Spotify)—and I’d write at least one of my two no-nonsense essays about it. If I played this right, I could even repurpose the work for next Monday’s Substack post.
Still, I was conflicted about this approach. The prompt, or at least as much as I could ascertain about it, was about Led Zeppelin. And then I had “Over the Hills and Far Away” (Apple Music, Spotify) in my head. From nowhere—from over the hills and far away?—it landed, pushing aside the Damned song, to my considerable dismay. (I like that Damned song a lot.) Then, almost as quickly, I was hearing a third song: Ultravox!’s “The Wild, The Beautiful, and the Damned” (Apple Music, Spotify. I tried to clear the decks between my ears. You should go back to the prompt here, I was telling myself. You had something about Zeppelin and ghosts.
The problem with the pencils wasn’t going away. I circled back with the TA to negotiate. I expected she’d be reasonable about this. She’d already given me the write nonsense allowance for the first essay. I asked her how long I had left on the exam. Twenty minutes, she said. My kids were standing by. They had finished their exams already. Lila expressed incredulity about my situation—that I had accomplished nothing and had only twenty minutes left. I asked the TA if I could just use a computer. Fine, she said. There were a handful of old Macs in the room, relics of the 1990s that weren’t booted up. They had mechanical typewriter keyboards attached to them. These didn’t seem like a viable option. The better bet was to go back to my dorm and get my laptop. That would be at least ten minutes round trip. Hm.
I was certain that if I had even ten minutes I could ace this test. To sum up:
I had two, maybe three essays to write;
I had a prompt for only one of them, and it was illegible; and
I had nothing functional with or on which to write Word One.
You’ve got this, I said to myself. And then I woke up.
They say that the brain does important work while you sleep, and REM-stage dream activity is an important and essential part of that. To be clear, I’m not a neurologist, and not especially well-read about any of this stuff. But this is the Internet, so I’m free to submit lazy offhand speculation. I suppose the brain does a lot of sorting and organizing work, like the defrag utility on a rebooted computer. Some of that work has to do with memory optimization and assigning priority of retention to information, I expect based on the intensity of emotion you logged when you last engaged with it. And there’s what I’ll call emotional baggage handling, too: your subconscious working through the joys and shocks, the frustrations and discomfitures of the day, major and minor. Let’s have a look at these bags, sir. Are you carrying any hazardous materials? Wild animals, rare-earth elements, lithium-ion batteries?
Something interrupted this work. My conscious mind elbowed its way into the checkpoint. Step aside, son. I’ll be doing this inspection. My subconscious pinched the bill of its cap, possibly rolled its eyes, and gave way. And suddenly I was sitting up in bed, really thinking. Rooting through all the luggage compartments, pulling out the wadded-up clothes and personal effects, sorting and folding them for repacking. The elements of the dream somehow stayed front of mind, while I gathered the needed lucidity to glean insights from them. There came a saturation point when I decided this was too good: I should get in front of the computer and take down notes. Later on I could take stock, to see if there was enough here that I could refine into a post—all this being Noise in My Head, after all, and something I wouldn’t mind pulling out and giving away. So take, take this, Readers.
Earlier in the evening, before I went to bed in a snit, I was seated in this very chair, fretting that I had no plan for my next Monday post. It was goddam Wednesday night, I had five days ahead of me, and I was stuck on a work call that, try as I might, I couldn’t shake my way out of. I was Frustrated. My phone had rung promptly after dinner. The call had to do with a client’s draft letter. Off I slogged up the stairs into the guest room here, to read the draft and contribute what few ideas I might have to make it .00001% better. There was a considerable excess of dread, sweat, and angst hanging over this exercise, and I thought I’d done good work leaving it to others over the course of the afternoon. Yet here I was.
Pinhead angels sucker-punching each other in the mosh. This has been my work life for the past eight months.
All I wanted was to get off the phone, wall my job out of the rest of my evening, and think instead about writing. I wasn’t plugged enough into the motivations or concerns of either party to this draft communication, nor for that matter the tangled wad of background facts, to be weighing in with any confidence on the choice of any one word or turn of phrase over another. Participating in this call was like—I dunno—walking into an essay exam for a course on an undisclosed subject that you have zero memory of ever signing up for. Okay, so there’s that.
The illegible essay prompt element likely had something to do with the sudden-onset farsightedness that lately has been wreaking havoc on my life. This all started a while ago, during the COVID lockdown, but I thought I had this fixed. Then three weeks ago I talked my optometrist into making a change to my contact lens prescription. It’s a multi-focal lens that is supposed to solve for both nearsightedness and farsightedness. The adjustment considerably improved my sight over distance, but now I’m back needing a selfie stick to decipher text on my phone.
This isn’t to mention the more generalized anxiety I’ve been feeling lately about my memory and cognition as I advance in age (see “Atari Baby”), which surely itself played more than a bit part in rustling up the subplot where I can’t read and process written words on a page. I don’t see, think, or remember as well as I could even a year ago. I’m on the downslope, and there’s precious little I can do about it. Frustration.
I know exactly where the Zeppelin references came from. A few days earlier, my friend Mike sent me this YouTube clip of Beavis and Butthead watching and talking over Led Zep’s video for “Over the Hills.”
This was one of those strange coincidences, because Carla had referenced the same song just the other day, too, when we were recording our last episode of the Krautrock podcast. She and I have both been busy lately, so that we’re making very little progress on the next episode, which has been a source of mild Frustration for me. Also, earlier tonight I showed SNL’s recent Beavis and Butthead skit to the kids, which they couldn’t fully appreciate because they didn’t know who Beavis and Butthead were. So then I showed them Mike’s YouTube video, which fell completely flat. They’re annoying, Florian said. Lila, too: Yeah, this isn’t funny, Papa. Generation gap = failed connection with my children = Frustration.
Of course, the Damned couldn’t be more different from Led Zeppelin. What brought them into the dream? Probably easier to say what didn’t. Let’s start with damned if you do, damned if you don’t, which is my work life in a nutshell. And two months ago I named my fantasy baseball team “The Wild, the Beautiful, and the Damned,” after the very Ultravox! song that struck up in my head while I was pencil-hunting in the dream. I thought it was clever at the time, but now I see I’ve condemned what was a formidable roster to mediocrity. Try as I might, I can’t get out of second place. My players will light up the box score night after night, but I’m always one notch behind Jeff’s team, which has held the lead basically from the jump. This is Frustrating.
Also, I was in a terrible mood Wednesday night. I had scheduled a long weekend trip to New Orleans with Florian, and we had to cancel it. Not only was this disappointing (heartbreaking?—this is his last summer at home, and how many more shots do I get at this?), but it was hard, too. Like, the work of it. It’s a lousy thing to push the cancel button on something you were excited to do. So I’d put it off, just in case some circumstance changed that could rescue the trip. At long last I was off the interminable work call, and I had a free minute to settle in the family room with Kate. We were going to start Season 3 of Hacks. Together, finally: we’ve been ships passing in the night for going on two weeks now. But then I realized I needed to get on the computer and cancel the flights, the hotel stay, all that jazz, before I forgot, missed the refund/ credit deadlines, and forfeited all the money.
Fine. I would run upstairs, cancel all the commitments, eat the one-day Kimpton hotel penalty, and blah blah blah. Five minutes and I’d be back seated beside Kate. Except it turned out our return flights couldn’t be canceled online. I had to call the Orbitz 1-800 number and sit quietly for 40 minutes while the lovely—no, really: actually lovely—customer service rep read, reread, and three-read the cancelation policy for our JetBlue flights. Finally he reported back that I needed to go to JetBlue’s website to knock out these NOLA-to-Boston legs. Even that project failed twice before it finally went through. Frustration. I just can’t be happy today …
They’re closing the schools. They’re burning the books. The church is in ruins. The priests hang on hooks.
By the time I’d finished with this, Kate had slipped off the hook. She was calling her father, checking her work email, going to bed. I had landed back on the family room couch by myself, finishing another New York Times crossword. The Times puzzles are something I’m good at. Since the lay-up in Park City over Christmas (see “Saturday Night in the City of the Dead”), I’ve been working Friday- and Saturday-level puzzles in the NYT Games app archive all the way back to March 2022, just so I can prove to myself that my brain isn’t failing me. But what’s actually happening is I’m getting really, really good at the specific task of filling in New York Times crosswords at the same time I’m slipping at literally everything else that matters. Also, this activity involves staring at my phone with the new contact lenses, putting the eyesight issue front and center again while I struggled to make out the puzzle clues.
So most definitely all this freight was loaded up in my head before I went to bed. I had hoped just to sit with Kate and watch Hacks. Instead I’d lost the whole of the evening to work impositions and the project of wiping four days’ time with my kid off the map. Frustration. Also, and again: I just can’t be happy today. Damned damned damned:
The radio’s on ice. The telly’s been banned. The army’s in power. The devil commands.
I wrote earlier that Kate wasn’t in the dream. And I think this is why: I’d missed her again. The proverbial ships passing each other, again, except today we had semaphores thrown in the air, radio contact made, and there was even an opportunity to drop boats in the water and row up close. Then the currents changed and the opportunity was lost. It’ll be fine: we’ll try again tomorrow. But tonight my subconscious made a point of absenting her from the story—just another shot across the bow.
That said, my children were on hand: striving, thriving, kicking ass. That’s good news. This is my brain telling me that increasingly they don’t need me, that they’re out in the world, learning and growing, without my help, or at least exercising greater independence. On the particular matter of my studying, and feeling like Lila’s TV shows may have prepared her for the test—there’s a Netflix series she’s been watching all week, including when Florian and I brought home wings from Buff’s Tuesday night. The show aggravated us, so we ate down in the basement, in front of the old TV. Florian put on the Japanese anime show, One Piece. He wants me to be as into it as he is. I do like it a lot. The problem is he’s watched every one of the show’s 1100+ episodes, and I’ve seen around fifteen. On Tuesday night he jumped me ahead to an arc of episodes in the late 400s, where Whitebeard fights the Marines in the hope of rescuing Ace from his scheduled execution. Talk about in medias res. That’s the feeling I had when I was “studying” for the exam.
Except when I was studying, it was Lila’s shows that I anticipated might be on the test. I hadn’t watched any of these, yet they were part of the literary canon. They were course materials. This is my brain asking me how I should feel about the world passing me by.
I took a minute just now to reflect on why my subconscious cast the preschool mother as the Teaching Assistant. I realized she was similar in certain ways to a lawyer I had talked with on the phone earlier in the day. Same age, similar background and speaking accents—these two are hardly doppelgängers, but with enough in common that it’s at least plausible the TA was standing in for this lawyer. I have an ambivalent relationship with this lawyer: we’re on opposite sides of a contentious lawsuit, and we strive to be friendly and respectful to one another, while at the same time we circle each other warily, we posture a great deal, and we don’t seem to be making any progress resolving the case. So it was with the TA: I was somewhat at her mercy, but at the same time I felt confident in my dealings with her, to the point where I was ready to set aside her inscrutable prompt and play by my own rules, if someone would just give me a goddam pencil.
The confidence I felt in the dream was interesting to me. Work has been difficult these last eight months, but not because it is especially taxing or beyond my capacity. It’s more that there is always more blowback, more resistance, more trouble waiting around the next corner. External politics, internal politics, everybody fried and frayed, and me acting the happy warrior, which sometimes I am and sometimes I am not. Over the past year my confidence on the job and in life has ebbed and flowed more than is usual and more than I like. It’s not a crisis, just a source of Frustration. Circumstances beyond my control. I keep looking for pencils with tips, working computers: ways to get things done. What I need to find in me is in me. The rest is what’s lacking.
Now here’s something: a package was delivered yesterday. It was sitting in the front hall last night. The markings on the box indicated there was a carry-on suitcase inside. Kate saw me look over at it and told me it was my Father’s Day present. She said that since I could tell what it was, I might as well open it. Which I did. It’s a nice piece of luggage. Kate said it would last me twenty years. Because I was in a dark mood, I said that would likely suffice for me. Lila called out from the kitchen that this was unnecessarily morbid. Which it was. I don’t usually talk this way. Like, I’m committed never to speak this way, not so much because of superstition but because Death has no place in this house, this house meaning our property on Pearl Street and my brain.
Jump now to the dream, with me asking the TA for a time check. Twenty minutes left in the test I hadn’t started. Twenty years left in life—or so I’d suggested—and I don’t know what I’m doing. Oof.
… Aaaaaaaaand that’s all we’ll be covering tonight, Ladies and Gentlemen. Thank you for your attention, and more importantly your patience. Back to bed we go, perhaps with a baseball podcast played over the Bluetooth sleep headphones, to settle the mind.
Now it’s Thursday night, and I’m taking my notes from the middle of the night and trying to make sense of them. I’m stealing a few minutes to start writing in earnest. Florian calls me downstairs. His girlfriend is here, and Lila is on hand, too. They want to have a Family Game Night. It used to be terribly difficult for me to engage with writing—just to get into The Chair. Now that I’m on this weekly program, the Power of the Deadline compels me, and once I’m sat in front of the screen, it’s disengaging that is hard. I buy some time, I push ahead with the writing, and the kids confront me about it. They’re of course right: yesterday I was indignant that I had to give up planned time with Florian. Now my eighteen-year-old is asking me to hang with him, and I’m dragging my feet.
Down the stairs I go, offering lame excuses. There follows a fifteen-minute discussion between Florian and Lila re what tabletop game we should play, during the course of which I remember my other computer—my personal laptop—is in the laundry basket in the family room. I go fetch it, crack it open, and continue working, pending their decision. I don’t have a strong view either way. Splendor is my favorite, and I have a long winning streak against the family, long enough that it’s never the choice anymore for Family Game Night. I know that’s a losing vote, so I don’t cast it. I take the opportunity to bang away a little more at this post. I fill in the post title, as earlier decided:
The Damned, “I Just Can’t Be Happy Today”
Florian comes to the table with a game called Smash Up. We’ve played it before and I have enjoyed it. I don’t stand a chance of winning. This might be another occasion for Frustration to set in. But then it occurs to me: there’s another song the Damned do, and it’s call “Smash It Up.” It’s on Machine Gun Etiquette, the same virtually perfect record that features “Can’t Be Happy.” In fact, the album ends with “Smash It Up Pts. 1 & 2” (Apple Music, Spotify). This seems like too much of a coincidence not to take note of and act on. The other song smacks of defeatism. “Smash It Up” is about fighting back.
We’ve been crying now for much too long. And now we’re gonna dance to a different song. I’m gonna scream and shout ’til my dying breath. I’m gonna smash it up ’til there’s nothing left.
Yeah, that’s good. That’s very good. Let’s see what The Old Subconscious does with that.