Every Love Story is A Ghost Story
Today is my best friend’s birthday.
My best friend passed away on April 3rd, 2012.
It’s something that I have mentioned, vaguely at times, in previous, more personal pieces on here.
Full disclosure—my best friend was a rabbit named Dennis
Hopper The Rabbit.
We adopted Dennis on November 14th, 2010. The
week before that, we met him at an Adoption Event sponsored by the Minnesota
Companion Rabbit Society. He was off by himself, and when he as picked up and
placed in my wife’s arms, he had what rabbit people call “poopy butt” and he
smeared poop on her shirt.
Early in 2011, we noticed that Dennis was having some health
problems. They were misdiagnosed at first, and it was eventually discovered
that he had a bladder stone, and needed an operation to have it removed.
It was during the time when he was very ill that I started
to let myself go—slipping into a relatively serious depression. I stopped
eating. I lost weight. All of my clothes suddenly became too big for me. The
job I had at the time, selling advertising space for a monthly free magazine in
our community, was not going well—my boss didn’t like me, and I was afraid of
him; an excellent workplace dynamic.
All I did was worry about Dennis—even after the surgery, and
even after he was showing signs of improvement.
I spent a lot of my evenings hanging out with Dennis. Just
sitting with him and patting him, listening to records, feeling really
fortunate that I had such a good bunny friend. After all he went through with
his health, he knew how much my wife and I loved him. He used to give us kisses
on our noses—the most flattering thing a rabbit can do to a person. We would
put our faces forwards towards his, and he would lick us.
When I would wave at him, he would come running over to me.
He was always happy to see me. He never judged me. He was
there for me when I had a bad day.
The more comfortable he grew in the house, the more he got
out and about. He knew his way to the refrigerator, and he knew what the sound
of the fridge door opening sounded like.
Whenever I’d go to get a glass of water, I’d turn around, and he’d be
right there behind me, standing on the rug, waiting for me to give him a piece
of cilantro as a treat.
He figured out how to open the door to our bedroom—the knob
doesn’t actually latch anything into place, and he would either dig at the door
until it opened, or use his head to bop it open, and then he’d come bounding
in.
Dennis passed away during a surgery to remove an abscess
tooth. His vet didn’t notice it until it
was pretty much too late, and by the time we got in to see a specialist, his
jaw had become so deteriorated, it was just too much for him. I remember
sitting in the waiting room with my wife during the procedure, not sure what
was happening, and I went to go to the bathroom. When I came back, the doctor
was in there with her, and she told me that I need to sit down.
I don’t think I’ll ever really recover from his passing. I
hate saying the word “death.” Or that he “died.” It sounds harsh. When I have
to talk about him with people, something I try to avoid doing as much as I can,
I say that he “passed away.” In the wake of his passing, I lost more weight and
I began the slow, steady descent into an even deeper and more debilitating depression.
I wrote an incredibly long piece that I eventually scrapped
completely over the summer, intended for this blog, which kind of elaborated on
a lot of these things. But this was long before the idea of making this mixtape
for Dennis’s birthday.
There’s a reason that the name of this blog is Anhedonic
Headphones. There’s a reason I quit the radio show I used to do every day.
There’s a reason I have lyrics to a How to Dress Well song tattooed on my
forearm.
This is why.
For about the last five years, I’ve used a rather lengthy
quote from David Foster Wallace as the signature in my personal emails. Pulled
from his seminal Infinite Jest, it’s
the first time I ever saw the word “anhedonia,” which is a condition wherein
you are unable to feel joy from what is perceived to be any otherwise joyful
experience.
There’s really no easier explanation than that. I don’t look
forward to much anymore. It’s not like a “zero fucks given” kind of feeling.
When you have anhedonia, you want to try—you really do. In most cases, it just
isn’t in the cards.
I used to do a daily radio show from March of 2010 to
December of 2012. Unless I was preempted by baseball, or some kind of live
remote from a used car lot (it happens) I was on from 3:00 to 4:00 every
weekday afternoon. In the beginning—the first year, or so anyway, it was a lot
of fun. I mean if someone gave you an hour of radio to pretty much play
whatever music you wanted, wouldn’t you want to do that forever? How is it that
the excitement of that could ever wear off?
When Dennis’s health was in question in the spring of 2011,
and my employment situation was less than desirable, the show started to take a
bit of a turn, and it became an outlet for my feelings—my sad feelings. A lot
of Elliott Smith started showing up in my hour. By the time I started a new
job, less and less “sad bastard music” was finding its way on the air. The
change was noticeable to people who knew me and knew that things were looking
up slightly.
The first time I had ever caught a glimpse of my job at the radio
station as not being fun was in December of 2011—I was doing a “best of 2011”
countdown with another person who works at the station. We had compiled a list
of our favorite songs of the year, and were going through them over the course
of a three-hour shift.
I used to be pretty good friends with this person, but
during this broadcast, I felt like things weren’t going so well. She was
talking over the top of me, not letting me finish my thoughts. It got
incredibly frustrating, and when the microphones were turned off, her overall
negative demeanor about being there in general wasn’t helping maintain a “fun”
vibe for on the air.
About a month, maybe, before Dennis passed away, this person
and I had a falling out, strangely enough, over the expression “totes
amazeballs.” She used to be my Facebook friend, and she had tagged me in a post
regarding that expression, saying it sounded like something I would say. I
jokingly responded that I’d never say something like “totes amazebals,” and
that she didn’t even know me.
What followed next was an email shortly after that, where
she instructed me that I needed to finish my shift at 3:58, so that she could
start right at 4:00p, and that there was no overlap time between the shows. The
fact of the matter is that she was rarely ever on time, so me leaving at two
minutes before the hour meant our paths would hardly ever cross.
So I played along. Going on after the 3:00p newscast,
leaving at two minutes before 4:00p, playing as much music as I could cram in between
talking bits and the commercials I had to play.
But this bothered me—that I was being bullied by a colleague
and former friend—the unfriending on Facebook happened instantly after the
“amazeballs” incident in question. And I guess this was just the first nudge in
the direction of unhappiness that I was headed in.
I remember sitting in the car with Dennis, my wife holding
onto his carrier in the backseat, calling the specialist to make an appointment
after we had received the original diagnoses from our old vet. The first
available appointment was, like, weeks away, and it was in the afternoon—at
3:30 or something, and I took it. Obviously the health of my rabbit is more
important than anything else.
“What about your radio show?” my wife asked, after I was
done on the phone.
“Oh who gives a shit about my stupid radio show,” I
responded quickly.
Who gives a shit indeed?
After Dennis passed away, the show literally became a cry
for help. The longer I had to do it, the worse it got—just the saddest fucking
songs I could think of, day after day. Eventually it reached a point where I
could barely bring myself to even turn on the microphone and speak.
After I told my wife that I wanted to stop doing the show,
she begged me to reconsider. She wanted me to wait until I felt better. So the
months passed, and I waited for that day when I would wake up and feel
different—I would feel good about the show, and I’d want to go and do it.
That day never arrived. And even after I took a few weeks
away leading up to the 2012 Election—the station sold 10+ minutes of
commercials, so it was tough to even plan a show around that. I came back on
the Wednesday after the elections were over, thinking that I would be
refreshed, and that deep down I “missed” doing the show.
I never missed doing the show. And occasionally, someone
will stop me and ask me I miss doing it now—like, a year after quitting.
The answer is always going to be no.
This is what being a depressed person is like. This is what
anhedonia does to you. It takes something that you should be looking forward
to, and it turns it into an unbearable burden.
The last song I played on my final shift was “Ocean Floor
For Everything” by How to Dress Well—a song that means more to me than anyone
can ever know. It was fitting for a lot of reasons that it was the last thing I
played—it was my favorite song of 2012 (well, one of three songs by How to Dress Well that I labeled my “favorite.”)
I had also just gone to see How to Dress Well perform in
Minneapolis the night before, and met Tom Krell after the show. At the urging
of my friends, I went up to him and introduced myself, and I showed him the
tattoo I have on my forearm of the lyrics from that song.
A bulk of the How to Dress Well record Total Loss is about the death of Krell’s best friend—“Ocean Floor
For Everything,” specifically, the song that effected me the most, given my own
situation with Dennis’s passing. The tattoo now gets me into any How to Dress
Well show ever, in any city, for free.
But that’s certainly not why I got it.
People ask me about my tattoos—about the portraits of my
rabbits, or about the Stanley Donwood Radiohead artwork on my inner arms. And those are kind
of easy to explain. The words “There’s an ocean floor for everything: For me,
the sun, and he—gone,” are not. Because where do you start?
I was at a Halloween party recently and a woman asked me
about it, and I told her that it was pretty personal, and that I wouldn’t
discuss it. But aside from being so personal, it’s cumbersome. First it’s
explaining who Tom Krell is. Then it’s explaining the song. By then you've lost
them. And there’s no point going into that it’s a tribute to my best friend.
And maybe it’d be easier if I just had a tattoo of a naked
woman riding a flaming boner or something.
That’s easy to explain.
Ain’t no shame in
holding onto grief… as long as you make room for other things too.
Every love story is a ghost story. Everyone is haunted by
something. Not like “spooky” haunted like shit is just moving around in your
house without you doing anything to it.
What I mean is that everyone is carrying some kind of weight
around with them. Sometimes I feel like I still see Dennis out of the corner of
my eye. A quick flash of gray running by in the hallway. Sometimes I think
about the bad times—when he was sick, or that last day, when we gave him away
to the vet tech, not knowing he wouldn’t be coming back.
I know you’re supposed to think about the good times.
Happier memories.
This mixtape comes from a lot of places. I wanted to do
something special to remember Dennis on what would be the third anniversary of
his adoption into our family. A lot of these songs were there for me shortly
after he passed away. Some of these songs came along later on.
If you’ve ever lost someone—a companion animal, a person,
whomever—then you probably understand why I’ve held onto my grief for so long
now.
If you’ve ever lost someone, you’ll know what this music means.
3. Suicide Dream 1 (Orchestral Version) by How to Dress Well
4. I Wish (To All The Homies That We Lost Remix) by R. Kelly
5. I Miss My Homies by Master P
6. It Comes in Waves by Anonymous
7. Waking Up to Life Sometimes Seems Worse by How to Dress Well
8. Up in The Treehouse by Cody Chesnutt
9. Wrapped in My Memory by Shawn Smith
1. I Wish by R. Kelly
2. Between The Bars by Elliott Smith
3. Coldest Winter by Kanye West
4. Set it Right by How to Dress Well
5. Talking to You by How to Dress Well
6. Elizabeth, You Were Born to Play That Part by Ryan Adams
7. Will You Be There? by Michael Jackson
8. Ocean Floor For Everything by How to Dress Well
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