mr dave

Soul to Squeeze was recorded during the Blood Sugar Sex Magik sessions, yet for whatever reason was not included on the album. Personally, I think it would have been a much better inclusion than ‘I Could Have Lied’ but whatever. It was included as a B-side to later versions of the ‘Give It Away’ single as well as ‘Under the Bridge’, but the song didn’t become a (unexpected) hit until it was released as a promotional video for The Coneheads movie. I also don’t understand why the Chili Peppers don’t make their official lyrics available to the public but again, whatever.

I've got a bad disease
But from my brain is where I bleed
Insanity it seems
Has got me by my soul to squeeze

That 2nd line seems wrong to me, the other common lyric is ‘Up from my brain is where I bleed’. I’ve always heard it as ‘Out from my brain is where I bleed’. Either way it seems rather obviously written to be about mental illness and/or depression. In a way the song also reminds me of Nirvana’s Lithium which also deals with finding solace within you. One of the toughest realizations I’ve made within myself is that the hand that held the whip to bind me to servitude was my own; the ‘want’ of my ego would trample the ‘need’ of my soul. Yet, without the ‘want’ we become stagnant, the ego is a fundamental aspect of our being and while it shouldn’t be ignored it also shouldn’t become the dominating aspect of our minds.

Drawing a parallel from the ‘want’ of the ego to the superficial and self-centered nature of the modern mainstream entertainment industry seems pretty obvious to me now, couple that with the adulating worship from so many within the listening public and it becomes clear why there seems to be so much crap on the pop charts. It’s as though our society is a reflection of the dominant voice of the collective ego of our species within particular cultures; and at this point the bulk of our culture seems to be about wanting anything without needing to accept the full responsibility or cost, but I digress.

Today love smiled on me
It took away my pain said please
All that you had to free
You gotta let it be oh yeah

I’m sure everyone has heard the old adage about how a person can’t really love another before they can love themselves. For me a big part of that was accepting my imperfections, or harder still, accepting my normalcy and the fact that we all feel hope and fear and love and pain and hurt and happiness in similar ways. The other challenge was the loss of familiarity, when the negativity is such a major element of your mental state it’s kind of terrifying to consider a clean slate, I guess that also explains why so many people end up in vicious cycles and why so many of us choose to abuse ourselves.

I think my subconscious desire to break that cycle I think is one of the main reasons I approached music the way I did during my 20s. In retrospect my drummer and I both saw it as therapy. The raw improvisation allowed us a cathartic release that we didn’t really see other avenues to approach from. While it didn’t always result in the most listenable music for people outside the group, it did provide us with a modicum of solace from our own internal struggles, and ultimately therapy is not for the primary benefit of others.

Oh, so polite indeed
Well I got everything I need.
Oh make my days a breeze
And take away my self destruction

I don’t believe in absolutes, everything is relative to the perspective of the individual considering the situation; right and wrong are simply reflections of the emotional reaction from the moral balance within the individual. It felt like a massive weight releasing from my head once I first grasped that realization a few years ago and marked a significant decline in suicidal thoughts and urges. That’s not to say I don’t still have bad days but it’s no longer a constant. In a sense it was a mental release of the pain I felt physically throughout the majority of my childhood, there’s still some residual frustration that I’m trying to free but I can definitely see light at the end of the tunnel now.

The sobriety I mentioned last time hasn’t really taken hold as much as I had anticipated or hoped. I’m using the excuse of wanting to cap off the work day with a puff after dinner, after a few weeks without I also realize I don’t need ‘that’ much. The new job isn’t stressful per se but at the same time it’s not without ‘room for improvement’, on the other hand the nature of the job also makes it that I’m far less inclined to want to sit in front of my computer so I’ve been picking up my guitar a lot more. This track happens to be one of the few I’ve learned recently, I never was able to find the tab for it back in the day (or really listen to it aside from the radio for that particular Summer).

Where I go I just don't know
I might end up somewhere in Mexico
When I find my peace of mind
I'm gonna keep it for the end of time

For a long time I thought peace of mind and happiness were fallacies by weak people who lied to themselves about the nature of their reality. I’ve also come to realize I used to be a prick. But like anything else saying it is easier than doing it, or in this case not doing it. Peace in my mind requires a balance. When I had substantial revelations about myself it would result in a momentary achievement of that balance, but in time the weight would invariably shift, the focus would be lost and the cycle would repeat. The difference being I’ve started being able to see the cycle, I can’t quite recognize its full shape yet; then again it’s never quite the same thing twice. One thing I am noticing is that the variance is diminishing and some semblance of balance presents itself more often. I guess what it really means is there are still a few issues to be addressed before the last door opens and I get to step out into the light.

Someday.

__________________
i am the universe