My Anxiety Files - The Songs of Doom
Also on the radio in 1980. Why couldn't this be in my head!?!?
I don’t really have stories of my own life. I have a few anecdotes, and most of them are a bummer to share with anyone. This one is sort of a bummer, but it’s also an interesting look at how the brain works and what it does to protect us. From itself.
1980. A shitty time in my eight-year-old life. We moved from Syracuse to Orlando and we almost immediately moved back because of cancer. My mom’s mom and my dad’s dad were both diagnosed. It wasn’t good for anyone. We moved back without a permanent place to stay and my younger brother and I ended up sharing the room of my then high school-age uncle. That’s the when and the where. What you also need to know is that I probably had anxiety my entire life, before I knew what it was. One of the side effects is lack of sleep and I also was a light sleeper. Still am.
For the four to six months of living at my grandmother’s house and sleeping on an extra mattress in my uncle’s room, at age eight, in third grade, I barely slept at all. Sometimes two hours a night. There were times I never fell asleep. The reason was that my uncle played music to go to sleep. His stereo would be on all night long, and he used that like some people use a fan or a sound machine for background noise. My brother slept just fine. I couldn’t. I would have small increments of light sleep and I would immediately wake up to Queen, Elton John, or something off the Michael Jackson Off the Wall album. Maybe I got him to shut if off sometimes, I don’t remember. I do remember wandering around a darkened house in the middle of the night, trying not to wake anyone.
So that wasn’t cool.
Now, this is part that makes the anecdote kooky.
This memory isn’t burned into my head like so many other shitty ones. But the songs that were on the radio ARE. Specifically, three songs from that time bring me back into the body of that little boy in his pj’s roaming around trying to figure out a way to fall asleep. However, and this is the weird part, if you asked me in the last thirty years what those songs were, I COULD NOT TELL YOU.
Does that make sense? I could not recall the songs at all, however, when I would hear them in a grocery store PA, an elevator, in a movie’s soundtrack, I immediately knew it was one of the Songs of Doom. My brain blocked them from floating around in my skull. They were banished from memory recall and mostly remain that way. I remember plenty of songs from my youth and the memories that are attached to them, even shitty memories. But those were unique. I knew they existed, but I could never recall them.
One day, about eight years or so (2010!) I heard a commercial with Blondie’s “The Tide is High” in the background. Blam! That was one of them. I also knew it was the most famous of the three. It came to me as I woke up one morning and because I had now been writing for so long, it was time to track this shit down. I wrote down the title and made it my mission to try to find the other two. The internet was built for that type of bullshit, so I looked for ‘Top Radio Singles of 1980’ hoping to get a clue from the song titles. I found both of them. It was the first time I’d ever looked at them as a group or thought about them for more than a fleeting second in 30 years. They are:
The Tide is High - Blondie
Never Knew Love Like This Before – Stephanie Mills
He’s So Shy – The Pointer Sisters
(This is absolutely the honest truth. I just had to look these up on Wikipedia because they slipped away again. I could not remember The Pointer Sisters name or song at all. Thanks again, internet. And brain.)
So, between 1980 and 2018, whenever these songs popped up in my life, I felt like shit. But I could share the story because I could remember the songs. And, now that I have perspective, “He’s So Shy” was the worst. I think I hated it at the time and it was just fucking grating every time it came back to me. The really crappy thing is that 1980 was a killer time to listen to the radio, but none of the tracks I liked, or continue to enjoy were the Songs of Doom. I guess that’s how it works.
So, yeah. The songs, that time we found an unexplainable turd in our house and…that’s about it for me and personal stories. Unless there are a bunch that are all blocked out, too.