Happy Thanksgiving, People!
I’m going to keep this relatively short and sweet.
This is the week, the beginning of the family holidays. I don’t know about you but every year a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving I start feeling irritable and snappy. I start snapping at my friends and strangers. I feel ungrounded and fucked up in the head. I never know what it is at first. Then a few days before I have to go to my mother’s for Thanksgiving it hits me--the realization that my inner self is preparing or resisting going back to the source. Not just the biological source but the emotional, psychological, metaphysical, philosophical source of who I am and it is not comfortable.
There are good sides to all that you get without asking for from your parents but there are also the bad parts. Their flaws made us react and that reaction is part of the basic construction of how we react and interact with everything and everybody and some of us spend a lifetime trying to temper, manage and fix those reactions and interactions so as not to become the worst part of our parents. That is just a reality. So, when we have to go to the source, all that tempering and retraining and inner work that we have done is threatened. We innately know that the only person or people that can crumble the structure, albeit temporarily, are the ones we built it to protect ourselves against. In other words, our family. They will easily break us.
Here’s what I know. It is temporary and you just have to fortify. Try to find the good side of the unavoidable. We’re older. They can't hurt us like they used to. They're older. It might be good to start appreciating they won’t be around forever. Hell, we might not. There usually are some good sides to them. We have those, too, and we might have gotten that from them also. Focus on those. Try to find the love you had for them that was once pure and tap that a little bit if it’s not too scary and it won’t leave you too vulnerable. And, for your own and everyone else’s benefit, have a fucking sense of humor about it all. They cant really hurt us anymore. Hahahahaha.
Right?
And above all else, remember we are all fragile and as we get older even more so, in many ways. Respect that.
Today, Monday, I talk to Ira Kaplan whose band Yo La Tengo was one of the defining bands of modern indie rock. Also, Bob Odenkirk stops by the garage and we get Dave Cross on the phone to talk about their new show, w/ Bob and David. On Thursday I share a live episode recorded at LA Podfest featuring radio veterans and legends Jim Ladd and Frazer Smith. The real deals.
Happy Thanksgiving (you can do it)!
Love,
Maron
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