Go A Little Easier on Yourself

Delegation - Oh Honey

I’ve been searching for an angle for entry on this song all morning, and have scrapped several half-hearted sentences because they left me nowhere to actually connect to this wonderful tune. When I switched SERMONS! over from the original Facebook group, I may have been caught up in a manic episode, congratulating myself on the brilliance of coming up with a newsletter devoted my personal music tastes well before any of the thing got off the ground. That happens with a lot of creative ideas, the offer of a rush of reward as the work begins then quickly subsides a while later when it becomes apparent that maybe the idea really isn’t great because its now too complicated to communicate to a broad audience and I’ve lost the plot a bit.

The original format of SERMONS! was simple: A song a day, with a vague caption: maybe a line from the featured song, maybe just a nice sounding non-sequitur. But when looking at the possibilities of a newsletter, I recalled all the ‘zines of the 90s I either read or contributed to and proceeded to confuse everything, myself included.

I don’t have grand illusions about this suddenly finding an audience for my writing (although I’d love if it spoke loud enough to my ear for music) but I do want it to feel worthwhile outside of being a record of a time in my life where I essentially made an open library of stuff available on Youtube, while being lonely and moderately depressed because I wasn’t able to return to the life in Canada I had to leave the prior year because immigrating is really quite complicated and even if you’ve been living in said country for closing in on a decade, there’s no guarantee you will be able to navigate the purposed bureaucracy of allowing people into or keeping them out of a country based on their individual ability to contribute to the economy without exiting the production end of work / taxes too early and sooner collect the rewards of the pension system, and not on whether they’ve spent nearly a decade living in, bonding to and immersing themselves fully into a community in ways that employee value and a merit-based immigration policy could ever substitute for, so I end up spending a year living back in the country I left (by choice) living on my mom’s couch (not by choice) struggling through the already difficult process of being hired as a foreign worker so I can return to my girlfriend who is now living in my old apartment where I still receive mail and is next door to my best friend’s brother’s apartment and I miss him, and them and all of my other friends who had no idea who I was when you first showed up in their country and despite the reputation of the city for it’s cold-heartedness, took me in and gave me some of the most joyous and sad and truthful years of my middle aged life, and my return now made all the harder by a global pandemic that is being handled so absolutely horribly by the reality show failed steak-salesman president I couldn’t believe my fellow countrymen elected in the first place and that I watched, from across the border, upend my former country for three years, causing me to vow to never set foot back in my former country while he sat in office, only to have to return in time for he and the whole, cloven hoofed party he represents to mess things up so badly, I can’t even visit my girlfriend who lives in my last known address.

This song soothes me. It makes me think of my girlfriend, and I can imagine playing this to her and dancing poorly in the living room while trying to be charming. Any fans of the golden era of hip hop will probably catch two samples in the first 20 seconds of this, heard in The UMCs - Blue Cheese and Three Times Dope - Funky Dividends. It’s a fabulous song, and if you close your eyes while listening you might see a couple, despite the weight of the world, dancing clumsily in the living room of their tiny apartment as this plays over the nighttime radio airwaves…