DWAR: My Chemical Romance - Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge; Drug Church - PRUDE

DOG WALK ALBUM REVIEWS: where I walk the dog and listen to an entire album. my mind is free to wander, and I like reviewing shit. don’t expect these to be “good,” or even to totally make sense. sometimes I take notes while I walk, sometimes I don’t.

album: My Chemical Romance – Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge (2004); Drug Church – PRUDE (2024)

Pete Holmes has a weird joke about how jacking off is actually the gayest thing any straight guy can do. his reasoning is that you’re both giving a handjob to a man and working really hard to make sure he enjoys himself to the utmost while simultaneously receiving a handjob from a man until you (hopefully) climax from it gloriously. super gay!

I don’t really buy it, but it’s a useful frame for the negative self-talk I woke up with today.

after a night of brutal stress dreams, which means I woke up tired and discombobulated, with my defenses down, my brain just lit into myself. negative self-talk is truly diabolical because I get the privilege of not only saying the absolute meanest things anyone could say to another person – which anytime I’ve gone over the line with someone, I’m instantly filled with regret that I get to live with forever – AND I get to hear the worst insults about the things about which I’m most sensitive and fragile. it’s a neat reminder of my (apparent) capacity for cruelty and a great way of knocking down my self esteem by approximately negative one million points.

so after dropping my kids off at school, I just sat in my office and cried for awhile. having been down this road before, I at least recognized that I had to get out and do something. so I put on the headphones and walked the poor, lazy Bernese Mountain Dog until her ass basically fell off.

My Chem was useful to start with because it was like exorcising a demon. tears continued to streak my cheeks from underneath my sunglasses as I avoided the gaze of strangers entirely because I had no capacity for small talk and didn’t want to interact with anyone. as the cacophonous music cleared space in my head like the handful of sickos who clear a space on the floor of some dirty punk rock club where they’ll create an ad hoc pit. it was time to get out of this spiral of psychosis and by the time “To The End” was over, I was cried out.

I pictured myself trying to explain the nature of my self-talk to another human and horrifying them with what came out of my mouth to the point that it permanently altered their perception of me for the worse, not because I was correct about any of what I said but because of how fucking ruthless I truly am.

“I’m Not Okay (I Promise)” lol.

I cracked myself up with My Chem’s fortuitous and unintentional droll commentary about what was happening in my head. the first chink in the armor, thank god.

the most irritating part about dealing with this shit is that when my internal voice breaks bad like that, I know I still have to work with that asshole. and when this is happening, when I’m both the arsonist setting fires inside my own mind and the victim trying furiously to toss buckets of water on the growing flames, that’s pretty much a death knell for my creativity.

I get paid for my creativity and if my brain is ping-ponging between deciding who it wants to be: the lunatic prick holding a match and an aerosol can or the exhausted firefighter trying desperately to remember where he hid the fucking fire extinguisher, not a lot else gets done. the shittiness of this self-talk also has an annoying administrative burden too, it would seem.

by the time I got to “Thank You for the Venom,” which is definitely a top 3 My Chem song for me, I had managed to fight myself to a draw. the dog was nice enough to shit in the park, which is the turnaround point for many of our walks, so I didn’t have to carry that dignity-degrading bag with me for but 30 yards before dropping it in a public trash can. bonus!

I spent some time ruminating on the nature of contemporary American politics, which is sort of like the weather under which all of our mental health seems to be beholden to. I wrote a bunch of this down yesterday, and it’s too ugly to reprint here. let’s just say I have some extremely nasty thoughts about those currently holding power and equal disdain for the cowardice, dereliction, and cravenness from those that continue to allow it. also, the second term of this president is a fucking heist, and that’s all it’s ever been designed to be. tie yourself into knots justifying any of his actions all you want, it’s simply a fucking heist.

when I truly came out of my funk, I was on to Drug Church who I recently saw at the Summit Music Hall. melodic hardcore and some of the tastiest fucking riffs I’ve ever heard. their 2024 album PRUDE whizzes by in a in a tidy 28 minutes over 10 tracks. that’s deeply my shit!

I felt my mood shift for good at this album’s literal halfway point. the song “Business Ethics” (I choose business… ethics) is a story about the narrator’s cousin contriving different phony ransom schemes to con people in his life to give him money to buy drugs. huge riff, singer’s voice sounds like 80s goth pop rock, incredible vibe. and then the song concludes with the following lines:

My cousin is full of ideas He needs money for drugs He found a scheme to rely on Now he works in finance

smash cut to “Slide 2 Me” one of the poppier cuts on the album and I literally burst out laughing so hard the dog turned and looked at me. thank you, Drug Church! fuck you, shitty voice in my head! hahahaha! I’m gonna be okay! get the fuck out of here with your trickery, gaslighting, and evil. I’m moving on!

I listened to the rest of the album and somehow timed the walk perfectly so that the last track “Peer Review” ended right as I walked up my driveway. mmmm, satisfying.

I interviewed my pal Shahara once on the old show – and once on this show now that I think about it! – and she said depression is walking down the same street and falling into the same goddamn hole over and over again. eventually you start to recognize the street and you know the hole is coming.

recovery is recognizing the street and learning to take a different street, dumbass. or in this case, since I got hijacked in my sleep and dropped off on this same shitty street that I now recognize and have grown to loathe, remembering where you stashed the ladder to get out of the hole quicker.

and while it wasn’t quite as clean as I’m making it out to be, these two albums were my ladder. I climbed out of that fucking hole, and did it much quicker than I used to.

now if you’ll excuse me, I gotta go start my work in finance.

combined rating for the two albums: eight and a half stars.