The Torment Room
I was getting for a temporary crown on my tooth and I was looking around when a sign on the wall caught my eye.
Wait, what? The torment room? I was here to get a crown, not reenact the horror scene from Marathon Man.
But then I looked harder and realized the word was “treatment”, not “torment” and realized that my overeager eyeballs had gone negative once again.
I can’t say I’ve ever looked forward to visiting the dentist—and I really dread when the bills come due—but my doctor and his assistant are great people, and I wound up doing a fair bit of socializing amid the drilling and spitting.
In addition to the good company, my dentist—it’s a father and son team—has a good office sound system and I often hear some nice old tunes over the racket.
One song--“Couldn't Get It Right” by the Climax Blues Band—had been on my mind just a day earlier and then there it was playing in my dentist’s office.
The tune from the 1976 album Gold Plated came about after the band’s label told them the record lacked a standout single and asked them to “try and write a hit”.
The song was writing “from absolutely nowhere,” according to bassist Derek Holt and it hit #10 on the UK Singles Chart.
The song, he said, was about being in on the road in America and it was just “just a lucky moment in time.”
The chorus about “kept on looking for a sign in the middle of the night” referred to searches for Holiday Inn signs.
“Couldn't Get It Right” came out in the year of the U.S. Bicentennial when I was 19 years old and I remember how it seemed to be on the radio all the time.
My dentist took a break and heard the start of another old song. I recognized the opening and I struggled to pull the name out of my memory bank. And then Dave Loggins started signing “Please Come to Boston”.
Oh, yeah, this was a song released in 1974, when I was 17, and it’s the story of a guy who keeps asking a woman to join him in Boston, Denver, and Los Angeles.
And each time she says “no, boy, would you come home to me” and declares she’s the “number one fan of the man from Tennessee.”
Born and raised in Tennessee, Loggins was inspired to write “Please Come to Boston” by a 1972 tour with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band that included stops, in, yep, Bean Town, the Mile High City and La-La Land.
Somebody I Can Sing To
Loggins said in an interview that the story is almost true, “except there wasn't anyone waiting {here} so I made her up.”
“It was a recap to my first trip to each of those cities and out of innocence” he said. “That was how I saw each one. The fact of having no one to come home to made the chorus easy to write. Some 40 years later, I still vividly remember that night, and it was as if someone else was writing the song.”
There was no torment that day at all, even though my mouth felt a few sizes larger.
No, I saved that for a trip to the annual Japan Summer Festival at Industry City on Saturday.
The day featured traditional dancers and musicians and a soba noodle eating challenge.
Industry City has a grass-covered play area for kids in one of the sections and it’s always fun to watch children running around like lunatics.
I sat watch a young father sitting the grass with his little girl in his lap and his young son nearby and I started doing a number on myself.
What was I doing at his age? Probably working at some crap job I hated in some small town, just dreaming of the big time, but not putting in the effort and never even thinking about staring a family.
Yeah, I kept on looking for a sign in the middle of the night and I couldn’t see—morre like "refused"—to see the light. And I couldn’t get it right.
I had a lot on my mind that day. I was planning—and stressing about—a vacation, and some other things that I elected to make worse.
I felt myself sliding into some unhealthy territory and I finally got up and started walking, acknowledging that I was very depressed.
Confronting what’s troubling you and saying it aloud, if possible, can help slow down the inner assassin.
And I realized that the torment room isn’t a physical place, but that portion of my mind that opens like a trap and pulls me into the darkness.
I’m disturbed that I slipped so easily into this funk, that there is still a part of me that looks to destroy the happiest moments.
But that’s how it is and it’s going to take a lot of work to board up the torment room.
I ran across an Instagram meme that addressed the Japanese concept of Oubaitori, which translates to the “art of not comparing.”
The word literally means "cherry, plum, peach, and apricot.” It symbolizes the idea that everyone blooms and grows at their own pace, encouraging self-acceptance and avoiding comparison with others.
I’ve heard about the dangers of comparing myself to others for years and done very little change my ways. Maybe giving a new label to the problem might help.
I’m due back at the dentist this week and I’m looking for some good conversation and some really nice songs.
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