Entry number 2. 01/06/2024
Carrying a frozen pizza home on the bus.
I don’t want to write a song about that.
Worrying about making rent and all that poor people stuff.
No, I don’t want to write a song about that.
I spend way too much of my time in the supermarket. I think that for someone my age, someone in their 30’s, that might be kind of normal, usually, if you have a family, if you have people that you care for. You might need to spend a lot of time doing food shoppings and getting things in the supermarket for other people, and that would be totally normal. For me, however, I think it’s kind of a problem. Which sounds like a really weird thing to say, but it feels like a problem. And I only really figured out recently why I do it.
So, I am unemployed and have been for a couple of years, for various reasons, which maybe we’ll get into later, so I have a lot of spare time. And as much as I want to fill that spare time with writing music and songs, seeing people, doing nice things, writing, I instead seem to go out for a walk in the middle of the day to try and keep myself from falling asleep, from the excessive daytime sleepiness that some people with ADHD suffer from. I am one of them. Something maybe we’ll come back to talk about later.
So, yeah, convincing myself that in the middle of the day I need to go out for a little walk is fine, but we live, like, less than 10 minutes away from an Asda, so it’s really easy to go for a little walk down there and wander around, come back with a mountain of snacks that I don’t need, and feel completely unfulfilled. Like, I don’t need anything from the shop, from the supermarket. I just need somewhere to go for an hour or more. And I figured out recently that it’s kind of a, like, a thing left over from lockdown. So, obviously, here in the UK, in Scotland, when lockdown was on the go, and we were only allowed to go outside for one hour a day, in the beginning I went for a run a lot, and then me and my partner would go to the supermarket when we needed to. And then I started just going to the supermarket on my own. And it was the only place that you would ever see other people, unless, of course, you lived with other people, or you had a job that meant you were working with other people during COVID. So, for me, it was the only time I actually saw anyone else in person, apart from my partner who I lived with.
I would only see my parents and my sister on the phone. I worked all the way through. The pandemic, which had its own repercussions, which, yeah, maybe I’ll get into at some other point. But going to the supermarket became, like, this thing. It was like a really… I don’t know, it was the only thing we could do. And I think over time, whenever I feel stressed, or whenever I feel like I just need to get out the house, I need to go do something physical, I need to break up my day, the safest place I can think of to go is the supermarket. It’s quiet, pretty much, all the time. That one, near us, anyway. It’s got toilets. It’s got snacks. I could wander around in there for an hour and a half, even though I’ve been there a billion times. And I think that it’s a comforting thing.
But recently, kind of around the same time as last year, actually, when it was summer and I was very depressed, the years are just repeating themselves, I just didn’t know where else to go or what else to do with my time. So I just did that all the time. And it was fine until I started to be like, oh, I have to go to the supermarket because we need food. But I just went there and I feel like I spent all my time there. And all I do is I get up at like 10 o’clock because I’m so tired and then I do nothing, it feels like, anyway, for a few hours. And then I go to the supermarket and I buy things. And then I come home and I fall asleep. And then I’m awake till like one o’clock in the morning. And then I get up and do it all again. And it became a little cycle. And the supermarket became this place where I was like, how do I always end up in there? If I’m out and I’m going somewhere, I have to go to a supermarket to buy food. I have to go to a supermarket to buy makeup wipes. Like random shit, you’re always in a fucking supermarket.
If you think about it, I hope I’m not ruining anyone’s day right now. But if you think about it, you’re always in a supermarket. And that’s mostly because there are so many little express supermarkets around the place now. Here in Edinburgh, we have so many, I guess, like Sainsbury’s and Tesco’s. And I think it’s really funny that you don’t get like an Asda Express or an Asda Metro. Like an out of context Asda garage. Yeah, I don’t know, Walmart is just not into that for some reason. I don’t know, I think that’d be really funny.
Anyway, you’re always in a supermarket. I’m always in a fucking supermarket.
And so when I realised this a few months ago, I started trying to write a song about it. And there’s this thing that happens to me, which I’m sure happens to a lot of songwriters, in that I have like a line or a phrase or a sentence or just something that I would know really needs to go in a song and I write it down. And I just can’t get anything else to come alongside it. I cannot think of what else should be there. And then a little bit of time goes by, and then I’ll be like, oh, wait, no. This is what it should be. This is what the line should be. And it doesn’t fit with the other one. So I ended up with like four different beginnings of songs that were about wishing I was doing something productive, but instead I’m in a supermarket.
But I could never figure out how to finish the song. I spend too much time at the supermarket. I wish I was at home, writing songs, making art, doing something to further my career. But I’m in the supermarket and it feels like a choice. But it also feels like a mental health coping mechanism. So it’s not really a choice. I don’t know what to do with this information. So it goes from being like a silly little song to being, oh, this is actually quite dark, but like it’s quite a difficult thing to write about because then it makes me think about COVID and the pandemic and all the things that happened and how bad I felt and how I had to leave my job, how I’ve been unemployed now for like two years. And I feel like that’s like so many different songs. That’s not just one song. That’s like loads of songs. And I’m not totally ready to write all of those songs.
So I think that’s why, like literally right now, I’m just figuring that out. I think that is why I have not been able to write one solid song about how difficult it is being pulled, being drawn to the supermarket like every day. Yeah, it’s a weird one, but I gave it a shot. And this is the reason I wanted to do this podcast is because I wanted to push myself to finish things. And technically I’m giving you something that is not actually finished because there’s no music, but I just knew that if I waited any longer, I would never put this out. I even considered like literally when I came here to record this part of the podcast, I was like, I’m just going to find another song that I’ve already done that I can just talk about because I hate this. I hate it. I don’t want anyone to hear it. It’s trash. And this is exactly why I’m going to let you hear it anyway.
So what I did is I went and looked at the notes I had written down about my feelings on this topic. So I had a couple of things in my notes app and I had a bunch of stuff in my notebook and all of it was very, all of it was just like phrases, words, lines, ideas, kind of thing. So I put them into a Word document and I don’t usually write songs in Word. Actually, I never write songs in Word documents because it’s just weird to me. I don’t want to have to look at a computer to write words and I need to be with my little specific notebook with all my ideas and all my things in it. So maybe that’s another reason I struggled with it actually. But like, yeah, I took everything I had and I put it into a Word document and I took out the things I really liked and things that I thought worked and I found what I figured would be like the beginning of the song and maybe what would be the chorus and what would make like a pretty decent verse and all that. And I started trying to piece it together and I really didn’t like it at all.
I found it so, so difficult. Every time I try to write this song, it goes one way or the other. So I’ve had times where I’ve tried to write this song and it becomes really directly about food. Like I start naming things or being like, oh, I’m in the free from aisle and I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna say that. Like I don’t wanna talk about being in the free from aisle and regretting being vegan because it’s so expensive. That’s not what the song’s about. So it kept flying off in all these fucking directions that just weren’t what I was trying to write about. I really love this little phrase here which I didn’t use but I think I have to use it somewhere else. So words I had were,
‘I want to write beautiful songs but I spend all of my time in the supermarket.
Restock and refuel on low quality food. I will never be free of the store.’
I love that. I think that’s brilliant but it didn’t work rhythmically with the other stuff. So when I write lyrics, I write them rhythmically and I think, I think some people write them melodically and it’s basically, it’s the same thing but it’s rhythm for me which is why a lot of my work ends up having like spoken word in it because I don’t know, I just write rhythmically, right? I write, I write words the way that I would speak them in a spoken word piece and then I have to try and fit them to music and I don’t know, that is just what I do and it’s really difficult, it makes things really hard but I don’t know, it’s just how I do it. So yeah, I’ve got all these words and they just didn’t really fit together properly at all.
So I spent ages going over everything, trying to fit things together, really trying to like get a chorus which is another thing that I just, I find so hard. Like I can write verses for days because they’re rhythmical,and it’s not that I can’t write melodies like I think I’m way better at it now. It’s just like if I don’t start with a melody, I find it so hard to find it like I find it so hard to put two parts of the song together. So yeah, that’s something I need to work on and there were so many times when I was doing this song that again, it started to veer off into being about being poor. It started to veer off into being about food and my terrible eating habits and so many other things and again, now I understand that it’s because really it is about all of those things. It’s about being unemployed, it’s about having dysregulated eating, it’s about being poor, it’s about always having been poor, it’s about how life revolves around supermarkets and consumerism and how difficult that is and how tired of it I am. We all are, but what the fuck else you’re meant to do about it. So it’s kind of about all of those things and I just feel like what I ended up with is a good start and it’ll definitely help me build the song I actually want and maybe this does have to be more than one song. Maybe I have to write like three songs about this, not even just like a couple of draft songs, draft, draft, draft and I’ll find the one good song I want out of this. But actual multiple songs.
I think this actually, it’s about so much more than just how I spend my time. I feel like it’s a whole lot of things that really need to be explored. So even though I’m still really frustrated with how this has turned out, I feel like it was still a really useful process because it’s really helped me to think about why this is so difficult to talk about, to think about, to write about and how I might actually be able to process some of the things I’m still struggling with post lockdown and maybe it’s just by writing three songs about the supermarket and that’s fine. It’s fine.
So what I have for you to listen to today is lyrics with no music and you can hear the rhythm of the words and the melody of the chorus but it’s nothing special at this point but it does show kind of where I’m going, what I’m thinking and how it might come together in the end and I don’t know, I’d really love to know what other people are still dealing with after lockdown. So many people are still living in lockdown in their houses. So many people are still so vulnerable that they need to take that kind of precaution where they still aren’t feeling like safe enough to go outside. It’s still happening and the pandemic isn’t over. It never ended. It’s just that those of us who are less vulnerable are able to go outside but the trauma, the collective trauma and the individual trauma of that time is still with us. It still affects me for sure. I can see it in other people.
I’m still feeling the effects in so many other ways as well in the industries that we work in and the way that we socialise, the way that we take care of ourselves, the way that we make art. It’s all different and the adjustment had to happen so quickly. We’re all still kind of reeling from that change and I feel like there’s so many things that we don’t talk about. We talk about the mental health, we talk about long COVID but yeah, there’s never, there’s really not a lot of chat about how many people still live their life indoors because of COVID. There’s a lot of art that gets made about lockdown, about COVID, about that time but that time is still this time. It’s not over. The world has completely changed and I feel like we’re not really doing that much to recognise that and actually figure out how to help everyone through that.
So not that my dumb little song is going to be able to help anybody with their trauma but maybe at least it’s kind of relatable. I guess it could just be called Supermarket Blues at this point which is so fucking cheesy but whatever. Yeah, okay. So have a listen and if you would like to give me any feedback about it or if you want to share your experience of being drawn to the supermarket or any of your COVID lockdown drama then please feel free to get in touch.
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I’m spending all of my time at the supermarket but I’m wasting away at the waste like I can afford it. Yeah, I’m rich. Five days a week, frozen pizza and microchips.
I’m in the supermarket at midnight again
Another day spent smoothing out my edges, waiting for the phone to ring.
I think I need this.
I think I need this.
Ticking off all of my problems off of the shopping list. They’re all out of hope but I don’t even know if I need it. Yeah, I forgot myself. I better go back for it.
I’m in the supermarket at midnight again.
Another day spent smoothing out my edges, waiting for the phone to ring.
I think I need this. I think I need this.
Touring the aisles, faking my smiles, getting caught in the one-way system.
Buyer’s remorse, shopper’s regret. I’ll get a receipt but I won’t return them.
Touring the aisles, faking my smiles, getting caught at the till with no credit.
Payment declined, payment declined. Should I run now? Would it be worth it?
I’m in the supermarket at midnight again.
Another day spent smoothing out my edges, waiting for the phone to ring.
I think I need this.
I think I need this.
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