Flotsam

Did anyone else have a full-blown existential crisis prompted by last night’s series finale of Six Feet Under? Don’t worry, no spoilers here, though I will say that the end credits found The Nearly Fiance and I clutching each other and sobbing. In between moaning that I didn’t want to die I managed to get some Ativan into me and I am fully recovered now, thank you for asking.
What it reminded me of, though, was the time I went to see Brian Dennehy in Death of A Salesman. It was summer, and my mother and I were in New York, where I would be starting college in the fall. My mother wanted to see a show, and somehow taking a panic-attack-prone emotionally fragile teen on the verge of major life change to an Arthur Miller play was determined to be an excellent idea. Throughout the performance I was transfixed—no theater I had seen had ever seemed so relentlessly, horribly real. We were that distance from the stage where you are far enough not to have the illusion shattered by garish makeup, but so close you feel sucked in, floating on the wall in someone else’s life. After the show I stumbled out onto the street, crying, turning my ankles in my new heels on the way back to the hotel. My mother patiently held onto my arm as I stared searchingly at passers-by and murmured about Biff and the meaninglessness of it all.
“Maybe I shouldn’t go to college,” I wavered as we entered the lobby, “What’s the point?” My mother wisely steered me upstairs and emptied half a bottle of Sangiovese down my throat, after which I fell asleep with my shoes on and mascara blackening my hands where I had wiped my streaming eyes. By morning whatever terrible truth I thought I had glimpsed had mercifully receded.

Back in Minnesota, as I packed everything important to me and prepared to move 1000 miles from home, my anxiety remounted. The weekend before my departure, my best friend Caroline was making her secret-recipe Bloody Marys for our farewell party, and I pulled myself together and called a taxi to take me to her house. My cab driver was a 50-ish black man with a small and exquisitely formed afro wearing (no, really) a black leather beret. Halfway through the ride a song came on the stereo, a song that seemed within the fist few moments to force my muscles to relax and make my eyelids droop with pleasure.
There is something about really good bass that causes me to grow several inches taller—It seems to work by managing to bypass my messy, rational brain and appealing directly to the blood thrumming in my ears, by taking me forcibly out of my own head*.
“This,” I said to my cab driver, “is the best song I have ever heard.”
That song was She’s A Bad Mama Jama, by Carl Carlton, and it is today’s prescription. Interestingly enough, Bad Mama Jama was written by Leon Haywood, the man who wrote a song I will have to post about, eventually.

*My parents hated that I loved funk, which they decreed “soulless” because the lyrics weren’t “meaningful”—Sly Stone is no Dylan or Simon, they would argue. I think this misses the point entirely. Funk may not have a lot of mind, but it is nothing but soul. And when Otis Redding says “Shake it Like a Bowl of Soup,” we may not know what the fuck he is talking about, but we know exactly what he means.