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I knew what was happening when Kurt Cobain died. I’d been prepared just a few months earlier when I saw my mother cry through the death of Harry Nilsson. Nilsson didn’t die from suicide directly, but from a suicidal kind of life that I knew about since I was four and Mom was using “Jump into the Fire” to wear us out dancing before bedtime. I knew I wanted to be a bassist or a drummer from all the times I listened to that song, but I couldn’t decide, so I became a writer instead.

Nilsson should probably be better known for a lot of reasons; one is that he wrote the original breakup pop song (unofficially) called “Fuck You” before that was conceivable, and the others go on forever and ever (for real). What he didn’t write, he sang better than anyone else, and what he couldn’t perform in front of an audience due to crippling anxiety, others would make the centerpieces of the diva routine. I am thinking about him tonight because I watched the recent documentary about him, but it sucks. Save your time and buy Nilsson Schmilsson on vinyl and play it over and over.

I was raised on stories about Toulouse-Lautrec and Tennessee Williams, and when Mickey Rourke started going south, I heard the familiar tune from Maman—these brilliant artists, they can’t take it; life is too intense for them. “What a tragedy,” she’d say, and what I heard was “Genius.” And so I planned my decline.

All my mother’s favorite artists had in common that they were sex perverts of some kind, and that they had a weird relationship with God. I knew pretty early on that I was some kind of sex pervert, and God had weird feelings for me, so I thought I was good. I read as much as I could about how to add drugs and sex into my life, under the guise of researching the evils of such things. Portnoy’s Complaint, Trainspotting, Howl, Lolita—how could I ever become a proper drug-addicted sex pervert without doing the required reading?

I started imagining my future life in high school, writing stories that invariably got published in the school literary journal, despite having no content drawn from any life experience I could have possibly had, as the most faithful member of my Baptist church youth group. (Do you see a contradiction here? I didn’t.) I imagined all kinds of suffering and loss and desire that I couldn’t really have, not only because I was a “good” girl, but because I was seen as a “good” girl and no one would have touched me with a stick, nor offered me drugs on a stick. It was a waste of some of the best-looking years of my life and I lament it. I planned to get a lot more drugs and sex done in college. How was I going to become Harry Nilsson unless I made my life terrible?

In college, I learned the devastating truth that I suck at doing drugs. Some of you are (I’m sorry) empirically familiar with this phenomenon. I’m not much better at drinking. Thank God I’m pretty decent at sex or the whole experiment would be a wash.

The other devastating truth I learned was that life already sucks. You don’t have to do anything to make it suck. I had my first little couple of chaste breakups by misogynist nerds, plunged headlong into a brief and disastrous affair with a bisexual European, and then spent a year trying to avoid getting murdered by a seemingly sweet boy with Dissociative Identity Disorder. It really sucked. And what it made me realize, after the fact, to my great joy, was that my life has always sucked, not because of anything external to me, like substances or circumstances, though I have had those too, but because I suck. I’ve always been crazy and unpleasant and anxious, and I don’t need drugs to make me miserable. I’m high on life!

What I saw as my “privilege”—which, don’t get me wrong, I totally acknowledge; we were never bourgeois, but we weren’t hungry—was blinding me from the fact that I already had what I needed. My real privilege, in my eyes, was that I was an antisocial loner with no desire to reproduce. What couldn’t I do? Harry got married three times. As a woman, I figured, you had to choose.

Last week, I had an interview for a (very nice) job, and my future colleagues and students asked me what I wanted to do with my life when I was in school. It’s pretty obvious I wasn’t raised to be an academic. I can’t and don’t want to imitate those cadences, so I don’t bother trying. I can talk about my work, but when small-talk hits the table I revert to my oldest art, telling horrible stories about my horrible self.

What did you want to do when you were young?

Drugs.

Reader, I got the job.

The Gun Club – Sex Beat

Jorge Ben Jor – Errare Humanun Est

The John Shakespear Orchestra – Number One Theme

Neu! – Isi

Jean Louis – Misaotra Mama

Roy Ayers – The Memory

Roy Ayers – Feel Like Making Love

Patrice Rushen – Forget Me Nots

Spacemen 3 – Big City (Everybody I Know Can Be Found There)

Francis Bebey – Le chant d’lbadan

MP3 / STREAM

Yes, it’s the summer session.

During the summer session, I have three and a half weeks to teach two entire courses on literature and writing. My students range from those who are passionately interested in the material to those who have flunked a course several times and are hoping that, somehow, doing it at 5x speed will finally make it stick. I don’t have time to run real office hours. I am not home often enough to attend to email. During my two-hour commute each way to campus, I’m either grading or prepping. I have no life.

I have no life, and I want your braaaaains.

There’s something wonderful about working this much. During the past year, I was pretty down in the dumps because I didn’t have enough work to do at one of my positions, which was not an instructional job, and my life looked sort of similar. I slept too much, didn’t get anything done, couldn’t be bothered to communicate with people. But this feels different. At least while I’m in the classroom, I have a purpose, and I feel needed. If I give it my all, my all is hardly enough.

Working this much and this hard really clarifies the world. I remember from reading Trainspotting in high school that one of Irvine Welsh’s most insistent arguments about heroin addiction is that it renders all other life-decisions pointless. Part of the addiction is physical, a need to get a fix as soon as possible, but the other part, the psychological part, is a desire for simplicity. I cannot worry about my relationships; I need heroin. I cannot wonder about whether I am a good person or if I can fulfill hopes and dreams; I need heroin.

Hard work does the same thing. It makes all your real cares and anxieties go away. You don’t have to keep up with people or panic about consequences; you have work to do. It’s an artificial high that distances you from yourself in a blissful place where you have no will. How can you have a will when you have work to do?

I realize that this temporary existence that I have each June, when I am a teaching zombie, is sort of how everyone else lives their lives all the time. I remember dating a young lawyer once who would get up at 4, race to work, and stay there until 8 or 9 at night, and when I saw him after one of these days, he’d be glowing with pleasure. He’d worked all day, and would work all day the next day. He couldn’t figure out what he wanted from our relationship or where to have dinner or what would happen on the weekend–he was working. He was work.

When one works like this, who can find the time for sadness or longing? Who has time for having a soul? It’s rather marvelous not to have a soul for a while.

There were gasps. I just thought it was because it wasn’t New Kids on the Block or that it had cursing on it or something, but it turns out the problem was much deeper. The problem was that it wasn’t Christian.

Before this time, the idea of people not listening to secular music had not occurred to me. I was a devoted young person who’d read the Bible a few times and took my study seriously, but surely people were lying if they said they didn’t listen to rap music. Not rock? Not pop? Not even old pop music? Not even the Beatles?

“They said they were more important than our Lord Jesus Christ.”

“Especially not the Beatles.”

It was time to have a talk with my folks. Why did we, in our family, listen to whatever we liked, when everyone else’s parents at church strictly prohibited them from listening to non-Christian artists? Not that I wanted it to be different, I added. The thought of subsisting on Michael W. Smith and pre-”Baby Baby” Amy Grant was chilling.

My parents told me about how, when I was little, around four years old, our preacher at a previous church had held a revival series to get members to burn their rock and pop records. People wept and confessed publicly that they danced in their cars to rock music and that it had led them to all kinds of horrible deeds.

Held up as a particular example of evil influence was Huey Lewis’s song “I Want a New Drug.” The preacher read aloud from some cherry-picked lyrics in a Satanic voice. This music was going to murder your children… with drugs!

My parents were not sure about this. They had an extensive record collection, including things far more suspicious drug-wise than a Huey Lewis record. They prayed about it, and got really sad. They seemed tormented by this question, of whether they were murdering their children with drugs through records.

One night we were all driving home from somewhere and, out of habit, Mom turned the radio on. It was “I Want a New Drug.” She snapped it off. My brother and I cried and pleaded for her to turn it back on. We liked singing that song. Mom said the words were evil, that Pastor said so. Somehow, as I recall, we ended up listening to it together in that car, in a parking lot, and decided, as a family, that our pastor was a moron. We didn’t go back to that church.

At home, music and books were never censored. Once that decision had been made about Huey Lewis, the whole idea of saving our precious little brains from bad ideas got chucked. Despite having no privacy in any other respect as a young woman–my personal notes and yearbooks were all read when I was out of the house–I did have complete freedom about what I read and what I listened to. So I listened to Ice-T and read kinda porny/violent books, from elementary school onward. It didn’t really occur to me that other people didn’t.

I was thinking about this after seeing fretting in various places about the effects of music on These Kids Today, especially worrying about girls partying too much and being sexual too early. My initial reaction was that it’s the 2010 version of the same old song. You know the tune; sing it with me: What about the children? I wasn’t a drunk or promiscuous kid. I didn’t get into fights, or get tattoos, or do drugs. I waited for college before I started drinking, and didn’t lose my virginity until junior year.

But then I think about those kids I knew from church who only listened to Christian music, never heard a pop song except at school assemblies. What happened to them? They married their junior-high sweethearts, had kids, stayed in the church, stayed close to home. And I did none of those things. My parents feel like they failed somehow. Where did they go wrong?

Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered in my case. Maybe no matter what I listened to, I’d be what I am now. Or maybe I’d be more like what my parents wanted me to be.

I think about this sometimes when I teach, that a lot of the poems and novels my students read for my class are the sort of things that will change them, make them see the world, at least temporarily, in a way their parents wouldn’t be pleased to see. My students tell me, when I voice this reservation, that it’s just a book. But when my religious students find something they really love that runs deeply counter to everything they’re taught, and they come to my office telling me they’ve read it over and over, I say, you’ve got to know this is dangerous stuff.