Daily Jam - Staying Alive

I have started and stopped and started and stopped writing this article about a dozen times now, mind blank and an unending stream of words erased parading in front of my eyeballs. I start from one angle, then abandon it and begin again from another only to abandon it as well. I change my song choice. Start over. Come back at it again. Start over. Change the song again. Start over. Come back to the original song. Blank. Blank. Blank.

I start to write about my kids, get halfway down the page, and realize the whole thing’s a rambling mess of goo.

I start over again.

I debate writing a long list of songs I could have chosen, realize how stupid that sounds and stare blankly at the computer some more.

This is going nowhere.

I guess there’s a reason I’m bringing this column to a close. I’m repeating myself or losing my train of thought, and after 198 entries, I suppose that makes some kind of sense. I’m tired, and that may have been the angle I was coming from when I started writing about my boys. But then erased.

Writing is hard.

And what does this have to do with “Staying Alive,” the closing track on Cursive’s 2003 album The Ugly Organ? Nothing. Nothing at all. I really could have picked anything to play for this penultimate edition of Endless Loop, but the dramatic swell and then sustained pause of the song just felt right, and felt more at home and in place than the songs by Genesis or The Deftones or Spiritualized or The Flaming Lips or so many more that I could have used instead.

So let’s just let this quasi-emo track play us into next week’s finale.

I’ll be better then.

“Doo do doo do doo do doo do, the worst is over…”