"Big Hands, I know you're the one."
What is it about "Blister in the Sun" that makes it such a great party song? It's exclusively beat/melody driven, I guess, because the lyrics are a train wreck, all about addiction and breakups. (The song was in the movie "Grosse Pointe Blank" (among others), and I MUST GET the soundtrack! I finally watched this movie last night, and it was both charming and a delightful romp down nostalgia lane, since I'm an 80's Child. And John Cusack and Jeremy Piven are two of my favourite actors.)
Addictions and breakups ... one of the most frequent pairings in history. It's like salt and pepper; it just seems inseparable or foregone that where you have one, you'll have the other.
I spend a lot of time thinking about addiction, because it is encoded in my family tree. This tree of mine, it has it all -- addictions to alcohol, drugs, sex, pornography, you name it. What share of those I participate in, I'm not sure. I know I drink too much sometimes, but that's to keep the Peanut Gallery inside my head in line. (Give them a snootfull and they usually pipe down long enough for me to just enjoy the act of breathing.) My brother would call this "self-medicating." There are 1,001 ways to self-medicate. Some are not obvious. And drinking too much is abuse, it's not addiction. Addicts cannot just stop and start and stop and start. At least not easily.
Hoarding is one of the newer addictive behaviours. It's more obsessive-compulsive than it is outright addiction, though. And humans hoard a lot of stuff -- food, trinkets, cars -- and we say we collect, we cabbage, we store. We hoard.
Hoarding is both a psychological condition (http://www.squalorsurvivors.com/squalor/hoarding.shtml) and a behaviour (http://psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-3557.html). I realized recently that I hoard things myself, things that I say are utilitarian (books, music, movies) but are really just a way to make me feel like I belong somewhere. It's part of my need for a nest, but truly it's an anchor, all my bookshelves stuffed with books and pictures, all the CDs and movies, all the magazines and maps. It's a way to make me STAY PUT, to keep me from drifting.
When my grandmother complains that I have moved too far away, why did I have to move so far away, I can't really tell her all the answers, because I don't know them all myself. If I believe in reincarnation, I would say I'm the rebirth of some gypsy woman (not to use that term perjoratively, I am fascinated and respectful of the vagabond ways of ancient gypsy, now Roma, society). It seems a more natural state to be constantly transitioning than to live life in a familiar hole. (Maybe that's why I find simpatico connections such personal catnip? It might be the only true sense of familiarity I ever get in my life.)
While I crave the normality and commonness of the regular routine most people have in their everyday lives, I've never really lived it. So much so that I freelance for work, and I move every couple of years. I never seem to find a place I belong, that nails me to the ground and makes me stay. No matter how much I think I've found it, that place, that life, that ME, it all eventually stops fitting, stops feeling comfortable.
And I bail.
I can't go a day without offering up some Sick Puppies lyrics, so I offer this one today: "You are defined by all that you have hoarded, but you are suprirsed it doesn't fill up the hole."
I'm not surprised.