I’m addicted to stress, that’s the way that I get things done
When I’m not under pressure then I sleep too long and I hang around like a bum
I think I’m going nowhere and that makes me nervous
A confession, then, to kickstart this edition of “Songs in the Key of Life”: I am stressed.
I hear the familiar chorus rising once again. “Join the club,” you all say, unimpressed. “Welcome to modern life. We’re all stressed out. Deal with it and move on like a normal person.”
And that’s a fair assessment. I have no children that depend on me to provide for them. I don’t have an expensive mortgage to keep up on; my wife and I rent a shack in a New Jersey field. I bought my car for $800 on Craigslist. I have a wife, a dog, and a cat – a comparatively small amount of living beings that I provide for. Hell, I don’t really have anything to complain about – my current regiment of two jobs withers in comparison to my wife’s workload, which encompasses school, being the face and sole employee of a self-made small business, and two part-time on-call jobs that could require her attention at any given moment. All in addition to a husband who has no real concept of time management, and simply works until he runs out of steam and faceplants on the couch, leaving her to make sure the house doesn’t collapse.
So why does a satirical funk-pop number about a caffeine-addled workaholic command my attention so?
Perhaps it’s because I feel like I’m not doing enough. “I think I’m going nowhere and that makes me nervous,” Jim Infantino of Jim’s Big Ego spits in the chorus, and you can practically feel the barely-contained pressure rise. For one, I’m rarely writing, and that makes me nervous – when I picked up a second job, the time spent writing for the website I’d lived and breathed for two years dwindled to nil. My pipe dreams of buttering my bread from writing took a backseat to my need to make money here and now. Or maybe I’m literally going nowhere – after years of vowing, like Bruce Springsteen, to escape the New Jersey “town [that] rips the bones from your back”, I’ve made no real moves to escape it. I haven’t moved beyond my window – I’ve simply gazed out of it and vowed to blow this popsicle stand of a state for almost a decade.
Perhaps it’s because of that other line in the chorus: “when I’m not under pressure then I sleep too long, and I hang around like a bum.” I’m writing this on a rare day off – well, half-day, as I’ll be working again in a few short hours – in my underwear (which, by the way, is not the pretty sight it was in my early twenties). I just drank black coffee because running down to the store for half-and-half and sugar would require clothes. The other option was not drinking coffee, which is just lunacy, because how else am I expected to handle that pesky migraine monster that rears its ugly head when I don’t rock it to sleep with heavy doses of caffeine?
Speaking of caffeine, that most notorious of modern drugs, Jim’s Big Ego has a verse about that, too. “Trying to cut down on my caffeine consumption,” begins Jim in the first verse, which leads to our jittery protagonist outlining the absurd amount of caffeinated beverages he swills during a normal workday. Perhaps this is what hits home for me, then – the notion of working so often that a drug is required to deal with it. Brew a pot of coffee in the morning, stash a few energy drinks in the fridge at work before brewing another pot, more caffeine en route to job number two and cap it off with a cup of coffee on the way home because, hey, how else am I supposed to not fall asleep at the wheel?
But hey. Lest I come across weepy and self-aggrandizing, it’s important to note that, if I’ve been taught anything by Elvis Costello, it’s that anguish should always be catchy; so today, I raise my cannon-sized coffee in a toast to Jim’s Big Ego, who crafted “Stress”, an insidiously earworm-y gem of a song that has the good sense to set the tribulations of the working man to funky guitars and horns.
3 comments
Kevin says:
Oct 28, 2013
Love the “Songs in the Key of Life” column! And can relate to this one, fo’ sure! Thanks Drew!
MJ says:
Oct 28, 2013
I certainly relate to this. After all, my day job is essentially two jobs (I report to two different bosses and work for two different departments.) Running this site is a full time job (which I don’t get paid for,) and then add in side pursuits ranging from DJing to officiating weddings, and…yeah, I’m a busy person even before you throw the rest of stuff life hands to you in the mix. It’s dangerous as much as it’s rewarding-I’ve literally been working to keep a roof over my head for 20 years now-and I’m wondering when the grind either stops, the coast begins, or it all falls apart. And waiting for one of the three to happen is even more stressful. So, yeah…I get it.
In reference to your specific situation, there’s nothing I can say a) that should be said in a public forum and b) that I haven’t said 87,000 times to you over the past decade. But if I was in your situation, I feel like I’d be kicking and screaming to look for ways to get out of it.
Greg says:
Oct 28, 2013
I can at least half relate. I’ve been fluctuating between underemployment and unemployment since leaving college. My hometown isn’t exactly a textbook “suicide rap,” but it’s lost a lot of businesses these past few years and opportunities have become scarce. Much of this area is a pisspot in the making, and I’ve been trying to get the fuck out for the past few years to no avail. Some days I’m content to blame everything on external forces. After all, it’s a wonderful time to be ashamed of this country and its faltering economic superstructure. It’s hard to imagine any kind of a payout in the long run. A lot of the benefits that Boomers took for granted will be either compromised or liquidated by the time Gen Xers and Millennials hit retirement age. Still, I can never shake the feeling that I haven’t done enough. Even though sending out resumes is an increasingly doomed enterprise, I still feel guilty when I get out of the habit. My own writing has been sporadic and inconsistent, and there’s really no excuse for it. It’s not like I have anything to occupy my time outside of work. It is what it is, I guess. Good luck getting out of your rut. Thanks for writing.