Almost a PI

The first newsletter I ever ran was wayyyy back in 1999. Wild Wild West the movie was just released and dance groups at school were choreographing moves to Will Smith’s music. Shazam was 3 years from becoming a thing so all we had to identify music in the wild were our out-of-tune hummings and snippets of words.

“You know, the one that goes something-something…one foot outside the door. something-something…heart that’s never really sure.” My secret talent was finding the most obscure songs with the barest of words and some hint of the tone of a singer’s voice. I read in a magazine somewhere that song lyrics pop up in fragments when your subconscious is trying to tell you something. At the age of 15, I was convinced that this was my purpose in the world, to shed light on what lies swimming in the deep so I started a newsletter for 8 friends. They would share the earworms haunting their brains and I’d find the culprit, layout the lyrics and add some information on the singer or context. Then, in real life, we would discuss what the lyrics could mean in the context of our lives.

Fast forward a couple of decades and I’m on the phone with a fellow arts administrator trying to find an obscure writer. We trace the name to a school alumni page and find a class photo. We zoom into the names listed at the bottom to see if we recognise any of the pixellated letters and any degree of separation we could tap onto. We find a name of a writer we know, but it’s just generic enough that it could belong to a random person. We look up their interviews and articles to find any mention of the schools they went to. We search for their birth year to see if the timeline fits. We search their friend lists for the writer we want to reach. We joke that interviews for arts managers should include a PI test.

I sometimes think, if I had another lifetime, that I might try a life as a private investigator. I think of immortals, of highlanders and vampires, of the ability to shed a life and start another, to live all the lifetimes you imagine, to take on jobs that never existed decades before. I think this, but I also think about how I’ve lived my life convinced I wouldn’t live past 35. How much of what I’ve considered “achievements” were driven by a constant urgent hum within to get things done before a final deadline. You know the song that Aaron Burr sings in Hamilton, “he has nothing to prove, he has nothing to lose something-something relentless. he wastes no time…what’s it like in his shoes?” When I first heard the song, I felt simultaneously seen and - appalled - that I related to it. After all, I pride myself on being pretty chill, if sometimes intense. (What is that laughter I hear somewhere in my house?) It’s been years since I first heard it but that song and its phantoms of line and verse have haunted me at points in time.

The year I turned 35, I found out a close friend passed away from a phone call. We had an argument of sorts a couple of months before and were on a time-out healing. I still remember that night and how the only lines on repeat in my head were: “Death doesn't discriminate / between the sinners and the saints / it takes and it takes and it takes / it takes and it takes and it takes / it takes and it takes and it takes.”

It’s been 5 years since and time has felt like a constant loop. I live with survivor’s guilt that I am alive and they are not. I’ve been trying to unpack why I feel this hum, and what to do now that time feels endless and I am obviously still here. Where does a hamster run when taken out of its hamster wheel and back into a wide expense of desert?

Earlier this month, I suddenly remembered the title of that Hamilton song. It reminded me of how context is important, how a line isn’t a whole story, how songs can also lead to prompts and insights. I thought of this as I compiled the list of events below. How they represent different parts of me, the different beliefs I hold / have held / may not continue to hold. I remind myself it’s okay to not have the answers. It’s okay to slow the hum or replace it with a new melody. It’s okay to just wait for it. Whatever the it may be.

For now, I take my time. I find songs in the wild without Shazam and listen to what they have to tell me.

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See you next month! |˶˙ᵕ˙ )ﾉﾞ