Someone Keeps Moving My Chair
And everyone keeps calling me Mr. Horrible.
A Comedy of Catastrophes
Have you ever simultaneously gone through a divorce while driving a car with dangerously awful breaks and amidst the turmoil your apartment (that is really just a renovated barn complete with the barn beneath you) catches on fire so you and your oldest kid have to escape out the window and jump to safety all within the same 4 month period?
Then despite all of this ire around you, the only thing that seems to disproportionately agitate you is that you keep forgetting to cash in your coffee punch card for a free latte?
Really? The coffee card is where you draw a line? Not the other hell you were dealing with?
If that’s not relatable for you, it’s probably because it was my reality and not yours.
Today, I’m talking about the song ‘Someone Keeps Moving My Chair’ by They Might Be Giants. It is the 10th track on the album, ‘Flood’.
The Soundtrack to Surviving
Let’s back up to before my entire life burned to rubble and I rose like the most mid phoenix to ever be bestowed that title. All the way back to a time when I was a newly minted teenager and listening to this song for the very first time. The memory of my first listen is not as vivid as some songs but I do recall listening on my Walkman in my room.
This song kicked off Side B of my cassette so in my mind it sets the stage for the post-intermission of Flood. On its surface, it was (and remains) very funny to me. The subject is surrounded by people that refer to themselves as The Ugliness Men and they call our subject “Mr. Horrible.”
The entire song is full of instances where they mention some extremely irritating things they are doing to him or hope to do but Mr. Horrible doesn’t seem to mind. He’s just bothered that someone keeps moving his chair.
Would you mind if we balance this glass of milk
Where your visiting friend accidentally was killed?
Would it be okay with you if we wrote a reminder Of things we'll forget to do today otherwise,
Using a green Magic Marker, if it's alright On the back of your head?
. . .
But Mr. Horrible says, "I don't mind
The thing that bothers me is Someone keeps moving my chair.”
All of that stuff is fine, but where’s is his CHAIR?
Someone Keeps Moving My Chair is a very fine tune. It’s not in my very subjective upper echelon of no-skips tracks but that doesn’t mean I don’t like it! I’m just not always in the mood for this one.
Finding the Meaning in Madness
Over the last 8 years, this song has taken on a renewed sense of meaning for me. At the beginning of this post, when I shared all the life catastrophes I had all at once, that wasn’t an exaggeration. During that dark period of my life, I was running a comedy open mic in Olympia, WA.
One night - at the peak of the tragedies - my xlr cable went bad and the mic quit on me as I started the show and it was the first time I felt like I’d had enough. I said to the crowd (who were well aware of my situation) that this was the worst thing to happen to me.
It killed.
Embracing this Song
Expecting and embracing the absurdity and chaos of everyday life has been my ethos since a very early age. Often, people in my circle say that I seem to have terrible luck but also just seem to lean into it.
This song has grown to become an anthem for this personal “forced on me” philosophy and I’m realizing in real-time as I write this sentence, that I might like this song a lot more than I initially thought. This might be one of my favorite songs of all time.
So, I’m curious: Have you ever had a minor irritation balloon into a massive problem amidst a string of otherwise pre-existing major life obstacles?