Look, I hate Nickelback as much as the next gal. In fact, I long ago wrote a scathing indictment of their absolutely disgusting misogyny anthem, “Figured You Out,” as well as Death From Above 1979’s equally reprehensible entry in the shaming of “coke sluts” genre, “Dead Womb.” Look them up if you want to barf.

Then I got too worried about offending one guy in Death From Above because we were friends in high school, and then I even started feeling bad for Chad Kroeger, that he didn’t mean to be like that, maybe he was just buying his own hype, how would I feel if some random writer eviscerated me like that, etc, etc, and, well, eventually publishing the thing just didn’t feel worth the anxiety.

Which brings me to my actual topic, which is basically I feel anxiety every time I sit down to write. Not an uncommon thing I think. For me it manifests in various ways – grinding nausea, brain fog, overwhelming lethargy, racing thoughts…I’m scared of sharing my opinion, I’m scared of failing, I’m scared of people not getting what I’m trying to do, I’m so so so scared of people thinking I’m shitty at this.

So  in order to keep going, however slowly, I’ve developed some tricks to get up in anxiety’s face. 

Here’s one of my faves. It’s a track on my ipod that plays “How You Remind Me” and “Someday” at the same time, one in each ear. I’ve got it on right now! 

I guess it was made to demonstrate how completely formulaic and awful their songs are. Like, they’re almost identical. That’s the joke. I have no memory of why it was ever downloaded, but that’s part of its intriguing mystery.

Even more mysterious is why it calms me down so much. I mean, they’re both shitty songs. But I have pretty shitty taste. Formulaic and awful doesn’t usually bother me much. And in this case, I don’t focus on the lyrics. I just focus on the weird feeling of calm those two slightly different but almost the same songs produce in my brain. It’s like two gentle hands wiping and blurring over the jaggedness between the doing and thinking parts. It kind of makes my head feel clean.

I know. What the fuck?

But honestly, it works. I just blast it a few times through my headphones at my writing desk, and it calms my squirmy guts. So the real question, what this post was intended to be about (before it kind of veered off into my inability to address the heinousness of “Figured You Out,” in a timely manner, and which I listened to just now for old time’s sake, and discovered it to be still as shocking as I’d remembered in its blatant disregard for women as anything but attendants to the speaker’s desires, as was “Dead Womb,” the title of which I’d forgotten, a title that unsettled me even more now, some twelve years later, when YouTube found it as a result of my searching, “coke sluts,”) is this:

Is this Nickelback joke maybe my own version of Binaural Beats?? 

Anyway, what are your weirdo writing tricks?