I suffer from terrible insomnia.  Unless I am really jet lagged or physically worn out, getting to sleep is a struggle.  Simply, I can't turn my brain off.  I think about this, about that, about things that matter, about things that really don't matter, over and over and over and over.  When I am eventually able to sleep, my brain keeps right on churning. Enter dreams.

You might think this topic is just an excuse to reference songs about dreams... and well, you wouldn't be 100% wrong...

Let's keep this first installment musical.  Sometimes, I dream lyrics.  Here are some that I wrote down after waking up at a crazy early hour:

wrap me up in the rabble of the crowd that's had enough

I have no idea what that means.  I am certain there were other words around these, but when I woke up in that not-quite-coherent state, these are the only ones I could focus on enough to actually write down.  Good enough to keep, yes.  Good enough to write around, maybe.  Maybe another dream will bring me more lyrics to finish out this idea.

Sometimes I dream complete songs.  I mean, completely written and arranged.  Intro, verse, chorus, bridge, chord progressions, cool bass lines.  The conscious version of me who is typing this blog entry right now wonders how many of these are just popular songs that we all know, but recycled.  There is a part of me that thinks there might actually be something in there though.  Sadly, I generally never remember enough of the music upon waking to do anything with it... I say "generally", because there is an exception.  It's a song that is now called "Never Let Go".  I'll hold back additional commentary on that for a future blog post.

When I think about this further, I think that I might actually write better songs in my sleep than I do when I'm awake.  Yeah, that sounds like a pithy hyperbole, but I am afraid it may be true.  That part of me that is overly self-critical, the part of me that never thinks anything is ever good enough, the part of me that writes with chord charts handy... those parts aren't there when I'm sleeping.  Maybe the music I hear in my dreams is where my true creativity is?

Hey, here’s another new theme for a series of blog entries.  This is the first Songwriting Story, in which I open the curtain and let you peek into my songwriting process.  Now, I won’t do this for every song, as some artistic ambiguity is sometimes something desirable, but on occasion I’ll share some information about how a song came to be.  Today we start with “North of Sixteen”, which is track 7 on Echo in the Crevices. 

This is a song I wrote a dozen times, several dozen times.  I had words, I would discard the words. I had music, I would discard the music.  I wrote this song over and over again, year after year, and eventually, this particular iteration stuck.  I tried to write a bass line cool enough to obscure the sadness of the lyrics… indeed, this is my favorite bass line on the album.  Do people even pay attention to the lyrics anyway? 

March 1995.  My junior year of high school.  I was 17. Like many high schoolers my age, I had a part-time job… I worked at a grocery store.  The store wasn’t in my hometown, so many of the teenagers who worked there attended different high schools in the area.  At that age, you spend a great deal of time with your coworkers… four or five days a week, a few hours a day… longer on weekends… it’s natural that you develop some camaraderie and bond with them.  As I recall, I got along well with all of the other high schoolers who worked with me… the public school kids, the private school kids… we all spent plenty of time socializing at work. 

Susan went to a high school in a neighboring town.  Cheerleader. Honor Roll. Student Council. Exemplary. Intelligent. Talkative. Friendly. Sixteen. She was part of a group of coworkers who I was especially fond of… we’d take the 15 minute work breaks together when we could… there would be laughing and stories and jokes… sometimes about school, sometimes about life.  I think one of the interesting things for all of us was the chance to interact with a bunch of peers that you wouldn’t see the next day at school. Below is a picture of her that I found online. Mind you, this is not necessarily the way I remember her, at least not this particular dress… but the smile is exactly the way I remember her.  She always had that smile. 

For safety reasons, one of the male employees would walk the female employees to their car if the shift ended at night.  We all did this for all of the young (and not so young) ladies that we worked with, but I seemed to end up walking out with Susan somewhat regularly… in fact, it was often enough that if she arrived at work after I did, she would try to park next to me, or at least tell me that she tried to park next to me.  She would tell me “I parked next to you again, guess you have to walk me out”. 

You came to me on a cool March night like any other 

I don’t remember what day of the week it was.  I remember it was March, and it was before the suicide, and I was at work.  I was, specifically, outside at work. See this particular grocery store had a carport where the customer’s groceries would get sent through a conveyor.  We young guys liked to work in the carport loading groceries into cars, because we got tips that way. This particular day, it was my turn to be outside. It was late enough to be kind of dark outside, this was before daylight saving time started back up.  Susan came to the store with her folks… they were going shopping. She walked over to where I was standing outside to chat. 

Your laugh for me was just a mask to hide the maelstrom 

At the time, I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary.  Ah, the power and clarity of hindsight. We had a nice conversation.  She smiled the same smile as always, and laughed at my occasional awful joke (usually of the self-deprecating variety).  I asked if she had to take care of anything work-related, and she said she might run into the store for a few moments, but that she had come specifically to see me.  I remember being quite flattered, because teenage boys feel flattered when intelligent, pretty young ladies say nice things to them. We talked about an upcoming Cranberries show that I was planning to attend… the show would be in April.  She expressed interest in joining my group. When I balked at that - not knowing how exactly to set that up - she made an offhand comment about maybe not seeing me ever again. Again, I didn’t attach any significance to this… until… you know. 

Didn’t hear what you meant to say 

She talked about feeling sick… like a cold was coming on.  I told her to keep her chin up and repeated the old adage about chicken soup.  She said that was probably a good idea. Looking back, this conversation was her way of saying goodbye… but it was also a cry for help.  I would like to think that I would notice that something was wrong if we were to have a similar conversation today. I would like to think that I’ve learned a bit more about reading people and empathy.  This is not to say that I wasn’t empathetic then, but I was 17, I was surely not emotionally equipped to do what I have always thought should have been done. Anyway, when she had to run into the store, she gave me a hug… she came out a few minutes later with her parents, and I ended up loading groceries into their car.  As they were pulling away, she turned and waved to me from the back, and I shouted “chicken soup!” in the general direction of the car. She flashed that smile in response. This was the last time I saw Susan alive. 

Bathed in exhaust / closed your eyes and went to sleep 

I found what I think is an archive of a newspaper article online… 1995 was so long ago that there isn’t much on the Internet about these kinds of things from that time period.  It’s not like I need any of the personal details, I remember all of those, and don’t think I could ever forget. It’s haunting. No, I wanted to look up some of the facts… find something official.  The article I found is here. This is an excerpt: 

The vibrant and popular Fenter, an honor roll student herself, placed frozen shrimp on the counter to thaw, fed her cat Dusty and walked into the garage. She then climbed into her car, turned the ignition and read a suicide prevention pamphlet she received at school. Three hours later, Barbara Fenter pulled into the driveway, opened the garage door and smoke billowed out. She found her daughter slumped in the driver's seat, dead of carbon monoxide poisoning - the pamphlet by her side. On her bed, next to a list of "final things to do," Susan left a suicide note. 

Since I didn’t go to the same high school as Susan, I didn’t hear the news during my day.  I found out when I got to work. I was actually up in the upstairs break area, early for my shift, and about to start.  My dad found me (he worked in management there at the time) and asked me “did you hear about Susan?”, but he had THAT look on his face… the one that speaks of no good.  If you read the article I linked to, you’ll notice that there was another suicide of a student in her school earlier in the week, and that story had gotten plenty of local media coverage, so it was on everyone’s mind, and when dad asked me that question with that look on his face, that conversation Susan and I had came flooding back and I KNEW.  I knew. I said “suicide”? Dad nodded and left the room. It’s hard to describe what that felt like… punch in the gut, kick to the ribs… something like that. My first reaction was angry. Anger at her for not asking for help, then quickly anger at myself for not realizing that she asked for help and also said goodbye. I punched a wall. My hand hurt for a few days afterwards. 

Somber day at work.  Grocery store where much of the staff was kids.  Everyone knew. It was on the news. Work was so perfunctory.  The customers noticed. The really regular customers knew she had worked with us.  Several of my coworkers spent most of their shift in tears.  I can’t describe how work itself felt for my coworkers, but for me, work felt completely pointless.  I wanted to scream with rage, I wanted to break things, I wanted to cry… but no, I went ahead and bagged those groceries and mopped those floors and faced those shelves and was polite to the customers.  As I talked to my coworkers, it became clear that Susan had carefully planned this. For instance, she had called someone earlier in the week to cover her weekend shift. She didn’t plan on being alive when the weekend came around.  Several of my coworkers had similar stories about getting visits… and when we compared our stories, the thing they all had in common was that air of finality. 

The article I mentioned previously has a sample from her journal. 

"My life is just one big nightmare. I can't get over how stupid I am," Susan wrote five months before the suicide. "Maybe I'm book smart, but I sure can't handle the things I feel inside....I think I'm going to die of a broken heart....No one can understand how I'm feeling...I can't deal with this anymore, with this pain and hurting I feel." 

That’s not the Susan I knew.  Ok, that is the Susan I knew, I just didn’t pay enough attention.  We were teenagers, we were all broken and messed up in our own ways.  Some of us still are.  I always thought that she had stuff figured out.  It happens that she apparently thought the same of the rest of us. 

I wrote “North of Sixteen” so many times… so many words, so many names.  This song you hear today is the one that made it, a testament to the profound and crushing guilt I have felt for more than 24 years now.  What could I have done? What should I have done? What if? This song comes from a dark and painful place.  Lyrically, it is as honest as anything I’ve ever written. Musically, it’s in a minor key… that’s appropriate. 

Never could you find your way north of sixteen.

The last time I went to Sri Lanka was 2014.  This was, like all of my visits to that lovely island, a work trip… long days in the office, then more work from the hotel later at night once the United States had woken up and gotten to work and started sending emails.  I worked hard. Too hard, it turns out. I came home… kept working… drinking a couple of liters of coffee a day, fighting the jet lag, trying to keep up with things, and not sleeping enough… then one day, it would appear that my mind and/or body decided that it couldn’t do this anymore. 

I remember having felt strange for a couple of days, but no more than strange.  On one particular day however, “strange” went to a completely different place. Chest pain.  The shakes. Racing heartbeat. I broke out in a sweat. I felt dizzy. I was convinced that I was having a heart attack, and asked my wife to drive me to the hospital.  We hadn’t even gotten a mile down the road when it got worse… shortness of breath… left arm pain… more chest pain… the feeling of impending doom… more shakes. I implored her to pull over, and we called 911.  I made sure to tell her that I love her, you know, because I was surely going to die. The ambulance shows up, I get on the bed with the wheels, I get loaded in, and away we go. The medic gives me nitroglycerin in pill form, immediately starts an IV, and then runs an EKG.  We’re not even to the hospital yet when he tells me that I definitely did NOT have a heart attack. He says that since he’s not a doctor, he can’t give me an “official” diagnosis, but he says that what I have had is a panic attack caused by stress. I ask him how I would be able to tell the difference… he says that I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, and calling 911 was the right thing to do. 

Overnight in the hospital.  Lots of tests.  IV in each arm… and I hate hate hate needles.  Lots of EKG. One of those CAT scans where they put dye in you that makes you feel like you have wet yourself, then wheel you into a machine head first.  A stress test, where you run on the treadmill. It turns out that I’m fine. Sure, I definitely need to lose weight, but my blood pressure is great. Blood sugar is fine.  Cholesterol levels are fine. Everything’s fine. Welcome to having anxiety. 

Starting from that day, panic attacks are a part of my life now.  They were most intense the first couple of months after the diagnosis.  It is most unsettling if I am driving. Usually these days when I get a panic attack, I am at home by myself, but I recently had one in a rather public setting with a lot of people watching, and that wasn’t any fun.  I guess this is part of my new normal… or maybe, this is something that I’ve always been dealing with, and now I’m old enough that my mind/body can’t suppress it anymore? 

After this - and I don’t remember when exactly, but it happened at some point - the suicidal thoughts returned.  I say “returned”, because I’ve had them before, but it’s not something I generally talk about. Maybe that’s genetic, as I know my dad had them too.  Anyway, here’s a secret… my first speeding ticket, back when I was 19… that was a suicide attempt gone wrong. I was having a particularly angsty time as a late teen.  I had recently lost someone who I was very close to. Work was particularly frustrating. I remember feeling that I couldn’t deal with it anymore. To get home from where I was working at the time, I had to make about a 25 minute drive, and much of it was on one of those two lane roads that cuts through the country bits connecting the Dayton suburbs.  I decided I was going to get going up to around 90 mph, take off my seatbelt, and jerk the wheel left as soon as I saw a car that looked big enough to make the destruction instantaneous. I never made it quite to 90, and I never got the seatbelt off, because I got pulled over for speeding. Of course, being a young black man, at that point, I was 100% frightened of the police officer, and all of the suicidal ideation went away, and the self-preservation kicked in.  I mean, death is supposed to be a release from pain, and getting shot is painful, so that’s pretty much all I thought about. 

The medication.  The first go-round didn’t work.  The doctor upped the dosage. The higher dosage made the room spin around for about an hour, starting ten minutes or so after I swallow the pill.  I stopped taking that. The insomnia got worse... something I had dealt with before, but it was back and worse than ever before.  When I did manage to sleep, I would wake up drenched, having sweated profusely through horrific nightmares... body wet, hair wet, clothes wet, sheets wet, pillow wet.  Ick.

Then I started having trouble concentrating.  Those that know me probably know I have perfectionist tendencies… I hate being wrong.  I’d rather say nothing than say something that is wrong. One of my personal points of pride in the past has been being efficient and effective at work, showing attention to detail, and getting things right.  Well, I started making mistakes… silly ones, when I should know better. Often, nobody would notice. Sometimes, someone would notice. I noticed them all, and each one ate at me… I would get more frustrated with myself.  Some days, I just couldn’t function. I would just lay in bed all day. I wouldn’t eat. (By the way, not eating for a few days is a very effective weight loss strategy, though most nutritionists would probably not recommend this.)  I got more irritable. Sometimes I would cry for no reason. More often, I just felt numb… everything was “meh”... no good, no bad, no up, no down, just IS. I’m sure I was a pain for my wife to deal with. I couldn’t remember things that I had read or seen… and again, those that know me probably know that I tend to remember just about everything I read, especially if I read it more than once.  Since all of this was beginning to impact my ability to do my job, I figured I should be more thorough about getting professional help. 

When I did this, my wife told me that she knew I was depressed even back when we were dating, many years ago.  That was an interesting revelation. Maybe I don’t even know what “normal” or “well-adjusted” is supposed to be.   

The therapy.  I went to therapy.  I didn’t like that. I should probably try it again, but sitting in a room talking about my feelings is not my idea of a good time.  I have been told to try it again, by multiple people. Sure, I’ll try it again as soon as I am done procrastinating. 

New doctor.  New medication.  It gave me diarrhea.  I didn’t feel better. I kept taking the medication.  I kept checking in with the doctor. I kept having panic attacks, albeit less frequently.  More medication. Higher dosage. The diarrhea stops. I didn’t feel better, but the doctor says he sees improvement in my ability to focus and have a conversation.  This makes me realize that I was affected in ways that I surely didn’t even notice. I go on a work trip to North Carolina, where one day I go to the lobby of my hotel around 4 in the morning convinced I am dying again.  New hospital. Still no heart issue. Yet another panic attack, a particularly bad one… and particularly expensive, due to the ambulance ride and hospital visit and the United States. More medication. Check in with the doctor. Higher dosage.  The feelings of worthlessness.  This is my new normal. Medication daily, try to fight off the very dark thoughts, try to stay busy, try to get work done.

I’m broken.  This is something I have come to accept. More often than I care to admit, I just don't have "ganas"... somehow this feeling makes much more sense in Spanish than in English... see, "ganas" means "want to" or "feel like" when it is a noun.... yeah, "se fue las ganas" is something you could quote me as saying regularly, except for I don't often actually say it out loud.  Some might reason that having faith should make everything better, but faith doesn’t work like that. Alexa, insert that meme that says “that’s not how any of this works”.  For instance, imagine that a person has lupus.  This person may have all the faith in the world, but that isn’t going to make the lupus go away, or even treat it.  This person needs professional attention… and while faith might help them to endure the condition, it is not a cure.  I have come to understand that anxiety/depression works in a similar manner. It’s something that I need to manage with professional attention, and while having faith might help me to endure, it is not treatment, and it will not make the issue go away. 

You know what helps me feel a little better sometimes?  Music.  Now, I do not mean that music is a panacea, nor is it treatment.  Indeed, there have been multiple occasions where I have had tickets to a show already paid for, and couldn't bring myself to leave home, so I skipped the show and was just out the money.  (The musicians got paid though, so there is your silver lining.)  However, quite often, when I am sitting at the piano or playing the bass, I can feel some of the stress peel away.  Writing songs is especially cathartic. I am not exactly a gifted musician by any means, but I like to play, and I like to continue learning about theory and how/why music works.  Indeed, music is a great confluence of my inner drive to read and learn and absorb, mashed into an art form that I find to be pleasing. In addition to making sure that there isn’t any weaponry readily available in our home, being project-oriented around music helps to keep the suicidal ideation at bay.  First, making suicide plans just seems to be too much effort… and second, I have a bunch of songs I want to record, and being dead would make it much more difficult to get that done.  It would be inaccurate to say that music makes me “happy”, but sometimes it makes me feel just slightly less broken.