She Was a Level-headed Dancer on the Road to Alcohol

There are better things to do than blow up your TV

A few years ago a tweet about the Presidents of the United States of America song “Peaches” went viral.

Several members of my social media circle (which is made up at least half of aging music nerds) shared this and I did laugh at it, but I also muttered under my breath every time I saw it “No there isn’t.”

Because, Jon Drake, though you are funny and seem smart and have a lot of followers, you actually got this one wrong. Because in 1971 the incomparable John Prine wrote a song called “Spanish Pipe Dream”. The chorus of the song, written by Prine 24 years before the Presidents of the United States of America had their weird hit with “Peaches”, is as follows:

Blow up your TV, throw away your paper
Go to the country, build you a home
Plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches
Try and find Jesus on your own

I’m not aiming to be smug about this at all. There is enough room in the world for as many songs about moving to a rural area and feasting on stone fruit as people want. This is all just to say that Prine’s song in particular has been on my mind, uh, in light of recent events.

It’s an easy urge to cave to right now, feeling weirdly helpless and distressed by the events of the world. Why wouldn’t you want to blow up your TV, throw away your paper and move to the country? I will admit that peaches gives me hives and religion gives me emotional hives so neither of those things appeal, but freedom of the endless onslaught of bad news does seem pretty great, even though if Prine wrote the song today (and wow, do I ever wish he was still alive and writing songs) he’d probably be less concerned with TVs and newspapers and more interest in blowing up a smart phone and throwing away the passwords to his social media accounts.

But of course I know that leaving the news behind, whatever its form, doesn’t make the bad things go away. I am not an infant, I have object permanence. If you put a blanket over my head, I know you’re still there. I didn’t look at social media during election day, but the election still happened and now I have to decide what to do next.

The USA and its non-musical presidents are not even completely my concern, since I’m Canadian and intend to stay that way. But we also have an election coming up very soon and will have to really fight against the encroaching rightwing. It was only a few years ago that a convoy of vaccine protesters parked their noisy trucks in a mob on the streets of the city where I live. They stayed for days. I had to ask my mother in law to stop yelling at them because I was worried they were going to respond to her raging-granny style taunts with violence. All those guys in their trucks protesting vaccine mandates and pooping in public parks are going to vote in the upcoming election. All the people who protest gender-affirming care and education outside out schools are going to vote too. And so are the people who decided it was a good idea to sweep unhoused people out of our city’s touristy market area so that people didn’t have to encounter them while they shopped for souvenirs. So will the people who think it’s wrong to protest genocide.

(from @breadandpuppetpress on Instagram)

No amount of moving to the country and ignoring the news is going to make any of this change, so it’s everyone’s responsibility to work towards the world we want. And I think it’s also our responsibility to take care of each other. And the good news, as many more eloquent activists before me have said, is that every action is a link in a chain that makes things better. Vote, help with community mutual aid asks, become penpals with a lonely senior citizen or an incarcerated person, go to a protest, sign petitions, run for office, sit on the board of your local library, chain yourself to a factory, speak to council about the city budget, give money to people who ask for it on the street, raise kids who understand what is happening in the world and how they are a part of it, boycott corporations who invest in war, or do ALL OF IT. I’m a comfortably employed middle aged white lady sitting in a nice coffee shop in my safe neighbourhood. I have so much privilege and, as a result, so much responsibility to work to make things better. And action is better than worry.

I know maybe you started this thinking you’d get a cute essay about a nineties hit and a seventies folk songwriter, and now we’re here. Sorry, but really not sorry at all.

November 2024 - How to Help

(Oh hi! Thanks for staying with me this far. This will be a new section of the newsletter, usually much shorter than this one today, that outlines an opportunity for social justice action.)

If you are looking for some ways to get started, here are two things that I personally do that are not overwhelming. First, I write letters to incarcerated people through an organization called Penn2Paper whose goal is to “help foster connection, community care, collective growth, and solidarity through letter writing.” You commit to writing at least one letter a month and the volunteers match you with a federal prisoner who has similar interests. They also give you a really helpful orientation to go over the whole process (prisoners send letters to the organization’s PO box and then the volunteers scan them and send them to you by email) I’ve had three different pen pals over the past three years and my current one writes poetry and is a part of a program that allows some prisoners to adopt and care for cats, so we mostly write about our pets and what we’ve been reading.

The other thing I’ve been doing ever since I read this article in the NY Times is giving monthly donations to Sister Song, an American birth justice organization whose mandate is to “build an effective network of individuals and organizations to improve institutional policies and systems that impact the reproductive lives of marginalized communities.”

One thing that I’m hoping to do when the opportunity comes up is to start serving on the board of the Ottawa Public Library. This is partly to give back to the library system that has enriched my life on a regular basis for the last 25 years, but also to have a strong say when it comes to possible future attempts to ban books or restrict access to certain books for the people who need them the most. Libraries are the fucking best, and I really want to keep them that way.

November 2024 - Feelings

If you feel like the world is ending, maybe you’re the sort of person who would like to read some fiction about the world ACTUALLY ending. Or maybe you are thinking “dear god, no”. Either way, I want to encourage you to pick up Suzy Krause’s incredible novel I Think We’ve Been Here Before, which somehow sits at the crossroads between Cormac McCarthy and Stuart McLean. I know, we didn’t even think those roads intersected but they do. This book is tender and funny and made me cry multiple times but it is also, shockingly, hopeful and beautiful. Krause is such a skilled and creative novelist that her story about the end of the world leaves readers thinking about why the world is so magical as it is. I can not recommend this one enough.

However, if you are saying to yourself “maybe I’ll read about the end of the world some other time, Jennifer, right now I just want to read about Christmas during my precious downtime” I hear that too. I just finished Julia McKay’s Holiday Honeymoon Switch (McKay is the romance pseudonym of author Marissa Stapley) and, though I am picky about holiday romances, I devoured this and was delighted by it the whole way through. It is funny and charming and an ode to female friendship. This one also comes highly recommended.

November 2024 - Songs

I’m not going to link to the Presidents of the United States of America song because frankly I do not enjoy it, but here is Prine’s “Spanish Pipe Dream” as covered by the wonderful Maggie Antone.

The always fantastic William Prince released a Christmas EP and so if you’re getting into the mood for Christmas music here is his version of Silver Bells, which is one of my favourite Chrismas songs because it captures the bustle of the season in the city, which I usually enjoy a lot.

I’ve been listening to a lot of country music lately because [redacted] and I really enjoy this cheeky song by Dawn Landes called “Why They Name Whiskey After Men”.

Thanks for reading! See you next month.

J.W.

Instagram : @JenniferWhitefordWrites

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