Whenever I’m out on a Saturday doing any shopping trip and my daughter is in tow, she commandeers my phone and my Spotify account. She’ll start playing songs I don’t want to hear, interspersed with songs I do want to hear, just to create that parental cognitive dissonance all teenagers love. You know, the angst and anxiety that they use to fuel their teenage years much like the screams of children fueled entire cities of monsters in Monsters Inc.
Yes, that’s right. I am drawing an analogy between teenagers and monsters. I am not wrong.
But I digress.
Once the angst is at a fevered pitch and I’m fighting for space between crazed Tesla drivers and oversized Infiniti Q60s commandeered by mocha-sipping suburban moms (you know the ones, I know you do) she starts playing the Home Depot song.
I don’t watch TV. I have little patience for talking heads and bad attempts at comedy. Let’s face it, we’re living through dystopian times and no comedy is good comedy when you don’t know if you’re going to die, have super powers, or starve to death. That’s compounded when the story of your eventual demise or length of your suffering changes every 17 minutes.
So since I do not watch television, I did not know the Home Depot song. And I wish I still didn’t.
But I do, and I am not a fan.
And of course, now she knows. One small gap in the steely armor of parental stoicism is opportunity for a teenager. And that opportunity is taken, boldly and unapologetically, wherever and whenever she can.
Here’s a 10 hour loop of the Home Depot song. If you’re a teenager with a parent, I know what you’ll do with it. That 10 hour loop is the reason why YouTube needs to go back to 10 minute videos. No one needs that much Home Depot in their life.
So, to get to the point of this complaint: now the Home Depot torture song is one of the top songs in my Spotify “On Repeat” playlist that I use for focused work. And of course, being focused, I don’t get distracted by figuring out how to hide that.
Today however, I am awake and aware and it is now hidden.
She’ll find another way to get me, I’m sure. But today, I will live to create without power tools.
