I have a new essay at March Xness about how the 36-year-old They Might Be Giants Song “Road Movie to Berlin” is perfect for the sadness of now. Please stop by and give it a read. 

March Xness is an annual, shared writing project about music, culture, and memory. It is also a tournament, the least sportsy type. This year it features the saddest songs of the 90s. A few years ago I contributed to March Vladness, the tournament of goth. It was my valentine to Xmal Deutschland’s “Mondlicht” and all the aging Trad Goths out there.

An early draft of this TMBG essay detailed more of what the Cold War meant to me as a kid in the 1980s, and how deeply scared I was of nuclear war. Growing up, I had a constant, low-grade existential fever knowing that I lived in the town next door to Cheyenne Mountain, where NORAD was located behind a pair of giant, 25-ton blast doors. Thanks to unfettered access to network television and HBO, as well as my own wild imagination, I was able to conjure up all sorts of post-apocalyptic scenarios on top of that. So the fall of the Berlin Wall wasn’t just something that mattered out there in the world; it felt like something that actually mattered to me.

That’s not really what the piece is about, of course, but the writing of it reminded me of how thinly protected from catastrophe I felt most of the time.

One of the biggest influences on my earliest political sensibility was the comic strip Bloom County by Berkeley Breathed. I read every daily strip, and then re-read them time and again in collected editions. One strip from the day after the 1983 broadcast of The Day After has never really left me: the anxious kid Binkley, bleary and aghast at 6:14 in the morning, still parked in front of the television after watching it. Then he's outside, in nature, where the sun is coming up and the creatures are either sleeping or just waking, all of it utterly indifferent to what was on ABC the night before. He lets out a thought bubble: Whew!

I realize now that I have been re-creating this moment, in some way that’s both deliberate and unconscious, every day for the past eight years. I wake up early, scroll the news to absorb the magnitude of the headlines, and then I head outside with my dog. Whenever the weather allows (and even some days when it doesn’t) we go to the park, and as she runs around off-leash at the top of the hill, I breathe in as much of the outside as I can and I always, always, always think Whew.