OOH, babeez, what a week: hot in the hundreds, a coupla shots in the way of Covid booster/flu, and a touch of dental surgery. It’s of the latter I’d like to focus on. In the process of doing some work on my chompers, I was given a bit of twilight sedation. Demerol to be exact. Dripped into my vein so that I was not totally knocked out for the three-hour procedure but nor was I conscious. This in-between state got me to thinking—not during the procedure, mind you; not even directly afterward since I was loopy as Feck—of how weird it is to be tangentially aware of what is happening around you but not be able to form any actionable opinions or movements around it.

In this case, while Mr.GoodDentist was hammering and scraping, building a better foundation in my mouth while I loop-de-looped in my head, I appreciated he was getting the job done without me screaming and thrashing in pain. Being detached enough to not cause a fuss is clearly the best choice for all involved. But the parallel track this brought to mind was how often during my music journalism career I chose emotional twilight sedation over alertness. At the beginning of this weird week, I’d spoken to a writer working on a book about Sinead O’Connor who wanted to talk about the state of the music business when I worked at SPIN and, more specifically, about a piece I wrote for Jane Magazine in 1997 called “It Happened to Me” about the sexual harassment suit brought against owner Bob Guccione, Jr., and the magazine that same year. Her questions were straightforward around the article: how it came to be, how it felt to write it. It was her last question that poked like a sharp stick. The memory of how the editor I’d worked with on the piece made me go back three times to dig deeper and bring more of my emotions to the article and how I resisted, not for any other reason than I thought I was bringing it all. In the end, I chipped away at the hard ground cover of my thoughts and feelings as deeply as I could. Today, reading it, I know there was so much more but at the time, that mental topsoil was just not giving way to all the stuff underneath. A lot of it explained away in my noggin/soul as This was the business, what did I expect?

So much of my music journalism career was spent with thoughts like that. I existed in a place detached from the core of my emotional temperature gauge. Some might say I disassociated from the events. They’re not wrong when read in the context of feeling outside of yourself and observing actions as if from a distance. But the thing is, there were plenty of times when I clocked feelings of pride or exhilaration at certain bad-behavior events. One time in particular comes to mind. I was at a random venue sitting with the singer of a band that had grown from playing local clubs to stadium-size shows. I’d known this guy for a couple of years, back when the group was just starting, playing small places in the midwest, then crashing onto a small indie label and growing large on a huge record label from there. At the time, their type of surge-n-slow bombastic rock songs straddled both the so-called grunge and the anthemic, attracting folx who loved Nirvana and Rush. There we were, a group of us in some-such club having drinks, etc., he on my left. Suddenly he leaned over and bit into my pleather pants at the knee, managing to rip a hole clean through, then looked at me with a shit-eating grin, grabbed his drink and went back to whatever conversation was happening as if he’d just grabbed a handful of nuts. Maybe there was already a little tear that he took advantage of like some kind of puppy-needs-chew-toy moment, but the act was aggressive and startling. My reaction: I laughed as my ego swelled. Out of all the people in the place whose pants he could have chomped into, he chose mine. I think I may have hoped someone had seen it happen and then thought, Damn, I wish B—- C—– would rip out the knee of my trousers with his teeth. I do remember being caught up short seeing the concerned expression on the face of my friend sitting to my right and suspecting that I should be equally as rattled. Yet when she asked, Are you alright? I laughed. Sure. Naturally. This is par for the rock’n’roll course. C’mon, you’d be daft to not expect a rock star to bite through your pants. Isn’t that what we’re here for?

Well, no, not really. My overriding sense of detachment at the time kept me flying over these emotional flashpoints at a distance where the air felt very thin and it was hard to think straight. That was my excuse for not immediately connecting with the annoyance that some rock dude had just ruined a pair of my favorite pants, which I couldn’t afford to replace, nor had he offered to. And what about that weird pride at being chosen for this kind of aggressive act? I decided it was flattering for no other reason than he was a known quantity, something I didn’t think I was. Boy did I need out of that game, which I did, not leaving behind aggro sexism for good but at least putting some distance between myself and a business that uses that behavior as a badge of honor, point of pride.

I still to this day have so much love for the ladies who played the game back then, banded together, and made their point in both music and interviews. I’m also happy that a portion of the male musicians I worked with considered themselves feminists and for the most part acted like that, at least in my presence. The twilight sedation around those years has faded and the loopy aftereffects diminished too. Eventually, everything ends up merging back together: body, mind, soul, emotions, and whatever else I left out there. The healing process takes paying attention: understanding the swelling is a protective thing to give stuff space to heal, and the tender-to-the- touch bruise a reminder to pay attention and be okay with the discomfort. Won’t last forever. Oh, and my mouth’s getting better as well.