Someone Saved My Life Tonight

I can't breathe, I'm waiting for the exhale
Toss my pain with my wishes in a wishing well
Still no luck, but oh, well
I still try even though I know I'm gon' fail
It's stress on my shoulders like a anvil

Sometimes I don't know how to feel
Let's be for real
If it wasn't for the pills, I wouldn't be here
But if I keep taking these pills, I won't be here, yeah

Wishing Well – Juice WRLD  

When Kurt Cobain died, other than the obvious shock and tragedy of a 27-year-old artistic genius dying too soon, I never really felt it. I loved Nirvana, but there was no emotional ownership. I didn’t cry or wish I could place flowers on the memorial or even see the death as a metaphor for where the path my own teenage angst might have led. It was a massive death, but an impersonal external loss.

Even though, he told us he was dying, or trying really hard to tell us in almost every song he wrote, when I heard about Juice WRLD’s passing, I felt it in my bones.

What possibly could a middle-aged mostly drug-fearing white dad have in common with a 21-year-old African American rapper with a heavy propensity for Lean and Percocet? I mean other than the fact as a Chicago-born kid raised in Homewood Flossmoor, Juice probably knew about the old brick oven-cooked pizzas at the original Aurelio’s and loved them like I do.

Cobain’s easy to explain away. The tunes were great, but you don’t get too emotionally invested in mosquitos and libidos or albinos. You could kind of intuit Kurt’s pain from the way he carried himself and how he sang, but Juice wasn’t metaphorical or implied.

He was clear about his existential angst. He wore it wearily on every single lyric. He may have been a million-seller, but he lived emotionally like a workaday. His pain offered those of us struggling a real kinship, told us it was ok to be tender and open about it. Unfortunately, the way it worked for Juice, even when the crowds roared back, he got very little in true emotional return.

While all young death is tragic, Cobain felt like a full-grown adult, a dad already. In fact he was a dad to Frances Bean. Juice was a legal adult, but as science tells us, the brain, or more specifically the pre-frontal cortex responsible for executive functioning isn’t fully mature until 25.

I don’t want to infantilize a guy who was mature enough to communicate so effectively through his art, but it was likely Juice’s terrified-not-fully-developed child-like mind that rationalized that popping a boatload of Oxycodone to hide them from the police about to search his recently landed plane at Midway airport that killed him.

I’m not a child. I’m a dad. As a dad I grieve for Juice’s lost adulthood and his difficult childhood. I also got dad responsibilities, dad worries, and dad fears. As much as I’d love to be as pop culturally literate as I once was, ain’t nobody got time for those things. Or as James Murphy sings, I am losing my edge. I only know about Juice because my son told me.

This matters, because while parents are evolutionarily engineered to love their children immediately, kids have to learn to love their parents. Even when the parents abandon their kids like Juice’s father did, it’s not because that love wasn’t there. It’s because imagined fear masked the reality of that love.

As much as we demand or believe our children should automatically return our fervor, a child’s love is always earned. Sometimes it never is. For many of us, if we’re lucky we’ll get the empathy and respect of an adult child going through their own parenting or adult struggles. If we’re really lucky, we’ll find a lot of those moments we’d find with a new friend or a lover, whereby we connect through shared amity for the external. Juice was one of those things connecting me and my son.

This is, as I keep lying to myself and you over and over, a food newsletter, so why am I talking about Juice?  Well, it’s because Juice’s song Wishing Well was playing over the house sound system while I dug into my food at Roy Choi’s Best Friend restaurant in Las Vegas this week.

As a reminder (so you don’t have to scroll up to re-read the original quote) Juice sings:

“If it wasn't for the pills, I wouldn't be here
But if I keep taking these pills, I won't be here, yeah”

If you substitute food for pills, we’re talking about me. 

Generally, I have always used the rewards of food to numb the pain. Eat too much food, you get fat. I once got fat. I’m not thin, but also, I’m not too fat now. I’m mad at myself that I felt I had to write this last sentence because it tells you that I need to establish somehow, that I somehow got it together, that I’m ok or that weight even means anything about your worth or your happiness.

In this very moment, thinner or not, I’m still too weak to accept where I’m at or what I am. Some people claim to get there. I don’t know if I ever will. If I’ve lost weight and now have an average societally acceptable dad bod, slight man boobs and all, all it means is like Juice, I realized eating too much food means I won’t be here, and decidedly right now I want to be.