Darkest Day

DARKESTDAY

In this song, the teachers have all gone crazy, and that gives the girl a break from their constant oppression. (See below, if you're unfamiliar with this series of songs). You'd think that'd be positive, in the sense that she should be able to get back to normal, now that they're off her back.

But instead, she gets really depressed. She gets so depressed that she feels like this is the darkest day she has ever experienced and can possibly experience, the nadir of her existence. As such, she seizes upon the metaphor of a dark day in American history, the day Walter Cronkite tearfully announces JFK's death. It's like, this is the lowest of the low. The pit of awfulness.

See, here's what I think she's experiencing. When soldiers are out on the battlefield, they endure horrors upon horrors, but they keep their shit together because of necessity. If they fall apart and succumb to PTSD out there, then they're probably dead meat. As such, it's not till they get home and are in the safety of their own homes that they fall apart and get all PTSD-ish. That's basically what happens to the girl in this song. She's in survival mode while the teachers are being all mean and oppressive, and once she gets a break from their oppression, she falls apart and gets real bad depression. Yesiree.

This is last week's song if you play it backwards.
Weird darkest day

The lyrics are:

In the darkest day I see:

Walter Cronkite is crying / and the president’s dying

And I don’t feel like trying / when the planet is frying

In the darkest day I see:

That the angels are with me / but I can’t feel their mercy

And I can’t hear them singing / cuz my ears started ringing

Bastard fuck-land / backwards stuck-sand

Poop-shit raining / stupid staining

In the darkest day I see:

In the song singing nowhere / it’s the long stinging don’t-care

And the days are repeating / makes my brain start receding

In the darkest day I see:

Everything got unraveled / in the time that got traveled

I got split down the middle / as I cry on my fiddle

It has gotten really intense

And the teachers’ minds have got bent

What the fuck is happening here?

They got stuck in minds that aren’t clear

And the girl is never complaining

But the swirl of tears are raining

She got stuck inside her sad

Timeless muck it got real bad

One day, I started writing a song about a fucked up school. Then, a few days later, that lawsuit came out, involving those pervy professors in the Dartmouth Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. I was all, oh, my stars!!! That’s where I got my Ph.D.! Then I finished writing the song about a week later. I thought it was just a song about how the school system fucks up kids, but after I finished writing and recording it, I realized parts of it were about my experiences in that poopy psych department (the unconscious mind works in mysterious ways). In any event, I decided to write an album about a fucked up school in order to process my experiences of having been in that department and how the culture there impacted me. This album ain’t necessarily about Dartmouth, per se. It’s more of a weird, inner exploration where I’m, like, having a fucked up dialogue with my unconscious about my experiences at Dartmouth. Jung used to call that kind of stuff “active imagination.” So far, this album follows the story of a girl, whose guardian angels try to protect her, but often can't find her. The angels at some point decide that they have to protect the girl from those nasty teachers and start to plot against them. But then they realize they don’t want to actually harm the teachers, so they, instead, make the teachers’ brains into nature brains ™, which are basically brains that hear communications coming from nature spirits. The angels do this because they think it’ll give those teachers more empathy, and will, in turn, be nice to the students.  After the teachers receive those nature brains, they go crazy because a mountain starts speaking to them, and the numinosity of that experience is too much for them to handle.