03/03/2023

Hard Reset

Throughout February, I found myself carrying a bit of damp misery around. Like a bit of lint stuck in your pocket, I’d pick at it, rolling it into a little ball between my fingers. 

It would spring up during my days, like when you wash a tissue by accident and it gets stuck to your sleeve or pants. A glum bit of hopelessness sat like a lazy devil on my shoulder, quietly whispering bullshit in my ear. The silence of the weekdays only made the podgy prick louder. By the time the weekend would roll around I’d quietly plead to the universe “please let me have a good rest this weekend, please let things be better next week.” It never occurred to me that I could flick the little bastard off my shoulder entirely.

In the last week of February, Justice and I ventured up to Ybor City. I bought tickets to see The Wonder Years (the pop-punk band from Philadelphia, not the sitcom from the 80s) back in November. When my husband and I first met, we quickly bonded over our similar taste in music, but one band had us divided. He liked the old-school stuff by The Wonder Years, I preferred their newer stuff. 

When we lived in Preston, we’d drive back to my hometown on weekends for dinners with the family. At first, we’d listen to the band’s old stuff. The lead singer, Dan Campbell (affectionately nicknamed Soupy) would chant and scratch over Captain Crunch and anti-suburbia stories. Then a more recent song would come on and I’d tell Justice to give it a chance. After a few drives, he was on board with the whole discography. The Wonder Years were no longer a bunch of high school kids singing about coming-of-age problems, they were men calling out the establishment and writing great riffs to thrash to. 

Over the eight years of our relationship, The Wonder Years have inevitably become a family favourite. So when their latest album The Hum Goes On Forever was released last year, it was no surprise that it was the soundtrack to our evacuation from Hurricane Ian as much as it was to mundane errands months later. 

On the day of the concert, everything that could go wrong did. The car was having issues, the traffic was bad, and the supporting acts we had been excited to see had pulled out. Due to poor planning, we’d failed to eat dinner before we got to the venue. We were tired, crabby, and keen for the replacement supporting acts to bugger off. 

When The Wonder Years made it onto the stage, we were ecstatic. Soupy was in a sling, they were a band member short, but they seemed as stoked as we were to be there. Justice and I clearly weren’t the only ones having an off day. We screamed and danced around to tracks old and new. Circle pits started, hands flung up along with the lyrics and people were crowd surfing. Then halfway through the show, Soupy cut the music. The lights of the club came on, and he announced that one of the crowd surfers had taken a nasty fall behind the barrier. He asked everyone to take a break while the audience member got the appropriate medical attention they needed. 

As we grabbed a couple of overpriced water bottles and caught our breath, you could feel a general understanding across the crowd. Nobody took issue with a break, in fact, most people were pretty pleased they could grab another beer without missing anything. When the band returned to the stage they announced the guy was okay and that they were ready to kick on with the show. The crowd was enraptured in thrashing and singing along, and by the end of the night we were all bouncing around to an encore performance. 

On the drive home, hoarse and partially deaf, Justice and I talked about how Soupy had stopped the show. We agreed that it was a great move and that we were in good company with like-minded people at the concert. By the time we made it back to sleepy Port Charlotte, it was almost 2 am. We flopped into bed donning merch and hoping our hearing would return to normal by the morning. 

In the days after the concert, Justice came down with the flu and I quickly followed. We resigned ourselves to the couch for the weekend, drinking honey and lemon concoctions and cranberry juice. By Sunday night fevers set in and my immaculate plan for the week ahead went out the window. The porky devil on my shoulder got louder, screeching that I wasn’t doing enough to get better or change my circumstances. He told me I’d miss my upcoming deadline, that I was a bad friend for not replying to messages from my mates and that I was a bad wife for not instinctively having a gallon of chicken noodle soup on-hand in the freezer in preparation for times like this. 

As my husband and I sniffed and coughed-laughed our way through every season of Travels with my Father, I thought about Soupy stopping the show again. I thought about the way he didn’t even question it and how he valued an individual fan’s welfare. On an objective level, why couldn’t I do that for myself? Why couldn’t I see the insipid crap that the plump little devil was spitting at me was untrue? That the thinking patterns and actions I’d developed to cope with negative self-talk were unhelpful?

As the week wore on, we both slowly got better, somewhere in between the exhaustion and fevers, I leaned into the disruption of it all. The resistance I had been carrying towards changing my thinking and actions had built a little throne for that plucky devil, but the chaos of being sick had disarmed him. On the road to recovery, I made it to my deadline and even smash out a few other goals on the way. The negative thinking got quieter, and the reality that I can manage myself into feeling okay became palpable. Sometimes, a hard reset can come in the form of a little chaos, and sometimes that’s all you need. As Soupy sings in I Just Want To Sell Out My Funeral:  

“There's no devil on my shoulder

He's got a rocking chair on my front porch

But I won't let him in.

No, I won't let him in.”

Don’t ask me why, but it also helped to picture my negative voice as the Red Guy from Cow and Chicken.

This month, I urge you to find something to believe in. It doesn’t matter if it’s a God, a celebrity, Saturn moving into Pisces or even a pop-punk band from Pennsylvania. Find something that shifts your perspective and helps you believe in yourself. 

Food For Thought

Who is your favourite band? Why?

Email me your answer.

“And I'm writing songs to tell everyone/That I love them.”
―Laura and the Beehive, The Wonder Years