Every Placebo Song, Twice

The mood swings have been going on for months. One moment I love the whole stupid world—genuinely, embarrassingly love it, want to hand out good feeling to strangers on the street—and then twenty minutes later I’m convinced everyone around me is lying, the whole thing is a performance, and the only sensible response is to pack a bag and move to Canada and never speak to anyone again. No transition, no slope. Just: warmth, then nothing, then something that feels uncomfortably like contempt.

When it gets bad I go to iTunes and run through every Placebo record in order. I skip every Muse song that comes up, deliberately, as a rule. I don’t entirely understand why this ritual, but Brian Molko’s voice fits the specific shape of that particular darkness better than anything else I own—not comforting, exactly, more like confirmation. Yes. This is real. Yes, it’s as bad as you think. Okay.

Productive work becomes impossible. When things are good privately everything else is manageable; when they’re not I can’t hold a straight line through anything. Right now I feel weightless in the worst sense—like every gust of wind deposits me somewhere new with no say in the destination. No fixed point, no ground.

Two theories for what’s wrong: either I watched too much Will & Grace at an impressionable age, or I just need a girlfriend. I know there’s supposed to be some creative benefit to this kind of private wreckage—the wound as source material, the low as artistic fuel—but that consolation is only available from a comfortable distance. When you’re inside it, you’re just inside it, and the philosophy can wait.