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The other day it occurred to me that I haven’t given an update on my mental health in some time. Earlier this year, my staff picks were focused primarily on my mental state as I used my writing to try and make sense of a very tough time I went through. I was feeling financial stress, grief, and all kinds of other emotions that all seemed to catch up with me at once, leaving me incapacitated for several weeks. I wrote pretty frankly about what I was experiencing, and many people wrote in to express their sympathy, offer help, and just let me know they were thinking of me. I can’t emphasize enough how much I appreciate that. There are still a few emails I haven’t replied to, and I feel terrible about that. I hope no one thinks I’m an asshole when I don’t get back to them… I just get more email than I can reasonably reply to. Often, it’s the emails that are most important that wait the longest for a reply, since I want to find clear headspace to respond thoughtfully, yet I never seem to prioritize actually making time to do that. So, I guess if I didn’t get back to you, you should probably take that as a compliment and not an offense, LOL.
As for how things are going now, I have to say I’m doing pretty well. My biggest stressor was definitely the process of buying our storefront from our landlord, and once we completed that transaction in early July, I felt a giant weight lift from my shoulders. Around that same time, I also started a new medication regimen that has been working well for me. I had struggled for years with side effects from the various meds I was on, and a few months after I stopped taking the main one, Lexapro (which I did, stupidly, with no medical supervision / advice and no tapering-off period), my anxiety and depression completely overwhelmed me. The new meds have me feeling a lot better. The side effects of the Lexapro have lessened and I have more energy. I’ve even gotten into a consistent sleep and work routine, which is something I’ve struggled to establish for most of my adult life. I still have my struggles, but I feel like I’m out of the very dark space I was in earlier this year.
I don’t know how obvious it is to a newsletter reader or a Sorry State shopper, but I’ve been really focused on work since we closed on the storefront in July. That’s partly because the meds have made it easier to focus on work, but mostly it’s because I felt like I had to. So many people asked if our expenses would go down after buying the store, but it’s actually the opposite. Our landlord hadn’t raised our rent in years and we were still paying 2010 prices. The monthly payment on the store’s mortgage is almost double what our monthly rent payment was, and when you add in the far more expensive insurance policy we had to buy, HOA dues for our building, and property tax, the fixed monthly expenses for the shop are nearly triple what they were. Alongside expenses going up, I had also put a lot of bills to the side while we were scrounging money to pay the down payment, and now we have to dig ourselves out of that financial hole. Fortunately, most of the people we owe money to are punks and have been extraordinarily patient. But owing money to people you consider friends is even worse than owing money to a bank, and those debts weigh heavily on me.
Another thing that’s helped me deal with financial stress lately is that, for the first time ever, Sorry State has a bookkeeper who is not me. My therapist had been recommending that I hire a bookkeeper for some time, but I resisted, partly because I thought it would be too much work to train someone to do it, and partly because I was scared I was doing something wrong and it would be a giant pain in the ass to fix it. However, a couple months ago I learned my friend Stephanie is a bookkeeper and she kindly agreed to help us out. She’s been really amazing. Not only has she taken a lot of really tedious work off my plate, but also having regular meetings where we talk about finances helps relieve much of the stress. In the past, when I’ve been stressed about money, it’s all fallen on my shoulders because I didn’t feel like I had anyone I felt like I could talk to. Stephanie has given us some great ideas about things we could do better, but the biggest impact is from having someone to talk things through with and to tell me my ideas and decisions are not wrong or crazy.
Focusing on work and making some much-needed changes to how we do things at Sorry State has yielded promising results so far, but it’s also a really challenging time in the record world. I don’t know if you’ve noticed our subtle pleas to sell us used records, but collections have not been coming in as frequently lately as they have in the past. It seems like every day new businesses are opening that sell vinyl, existing businesses are expanding into vinyl, and many (most?) record collectors also double as dealers or side hustlers, so there’s just a lot more competition when it comes to sourcing good used stuff. Since we’re getting in less used stuff, the proportion of used versus new stock we sell in the shop has been changing. As I’m sure you’re aware, profit margins are slim on new records, so selling more new records and fewer used records changes the math that makes Sorry State work, making everything just a little bit harder. I think Sorry State will be around for a long time—those of you who read this every week and rely on us to keep you up to date on the punk world will keep us running, and we are extremely lucky and grateful for that—but I have a feeling we’ll see a lot of these newer record shops close in the coming months and years. It’s already starting, but I think there’s a lot more to come.
On that depressing note, let’s get to the record I wanted to write about this week:
D.I.: S/T (aka Team Goon) 12” (Revenge Records, 1983)
People who know me probably assumed I already owned D.I.’s first 12”, and I definitely did at some point. I can’t remember why I sold it, but I have a feeling the thought process went something like this: Horse Bites, Dog Cries is D.I.’s shining moment, and this first 12” EP is basically just a slow wind-up. Nowadays, though, I feel differently. I still hail Horse Bites, Dog Cries as a seminal piece of the Rikk Agnew canon (alongside All By Myself, Only Theatre of Pain, and the first Adolescents album), but nowadays it sounds a little slick and pop-punk-ish to me. It’s like the most ripping pop-punk ever, but it’s still kind of pop-punk.
I think a big part of me turning that corner on D.I. was watching Suburbia in the theater a while back. They did a screening at the Alamo here in town and a big group of punks all went together… it was sick. Of course I’d seen Suburbia before, but this time around D.I.’s appearance in that movie, where they do “Richard Hung Himself,” hit differently. It’s so dark and menacing… it made me appreciate the grittiness of the early material, particularly the death-rock leaning tracks from this EP: “Richard Hung Himself,” “Venus De Milo,” and “Purgatory.” “Guns” (which they re-recorded for Horse Bites) and “Reagan Der Fuhrer” still feel like fetal versions of Horse Bites, but the other three songs are something else entirely. I really wish D.I. had an entire record in that style.
Another reason I might have ditched my previous copy of this record is because I confused the original release with subsequent reissues, which drastically change the track listing. Generally, having more tracks is a good thing, but the later versions of D.I. (which, according to Discogs at least, were retitled Team Goon) totally reimagine the track listing, and not for the better. A cover of Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll Part II?” I’ll go to a baseball game if I want to hear that song. Their cover of Devo’s “Uncontrollable Urge” is alright, but the other two bonus tracks, “Nuclear Funeral” and “The Saint,” are very Horse Bites, Dog Cries-esque, but not as good. It probably would have been fine if they put all the bonus tracks after the EP’s original running order, but they put three of the bonus tracks before the EP (starting the record with the Gary Glitter song… who OK’d that?) and the Devo cover at the end of the record. So weird. I guess I’d rather have heard these songs than not, but I think the way they were added waters down the aspects of this EP I’m feeling most these days.
Thankfully this bad boy is back in my collection, and I’m glad to have a new appreciation for it. I’d be bummed about having to re-buy it (for, I’m sure, way more than I paid the first time), but honestly it was kind of fun. Maybe I should sell all my records and slowly buy them all back again. Or maybe you should sell your records to us and slowly buy them back again, LOL.