GRIEF IS SO GODDAMN PAINFUL BECAUSE IT’S MADE OUT OF LOVE AND LOVE IS SO GODDAMN POWERFUL.
GRIEF IS SO GODDAMN PAINFUL BECAUSE IT’S MADE OUT OF LOVE AND LOVE IS SO GODDAMN POWERFUL.
GRIEF IS SO GODDAMN PAINFUL BECAUSE IT’S MADE OUT OF LOVE AND LOVE IS SO GODDAMN POWERFUL.
Shannon Shaw of Shannon & the Clams on the podcast and ooh it’s a good one
Look, all we have in this world is each other. Maybe some snacks, perhaps a tape deck, but mostly each other. And other people are what makes the whole fucking thing so bearable. And when they leave, sometimes unexpectedly, we are forced to move forward anyway and man that hurts.
You’re looking at a picture of Shannon Shaw and Joe Haener, two people very much in love. So much in love, in fact, that they were due to be married. But that never happened because Joe was involved in a fatal auto accident just outside his family farm in Oregon a few months before the wedding.
Shannon is my guest on the Depresh Mode podcast this week.
Shannon, who is the lead singer of the band Shannon & the Clams, did her best to deal with the shock and the grief and the unbearable pain. One of the ways she dealt with it was to do what she does all the time: write songs. The rest of the band, who were all close with Joe as well, did the same and the result is their new album The Moon Is In The Wrong Place, which just came out.
As I say in the intro to this episode, “Look, I’m not going to sugar coat it. This week’s episode is hard. It can be a tough listen. It talks about death, sudden, unexpected, horrible death. It talks about the searing pain of grief. And you can hear the pain and the grief of the person I talk with. So yeah, not going to sugar coat that.
“But I’m also not going to... I don’t know what the opposite of sugar coat is. I guess salt coat? I’m not going to salt coat it either. This week’s episode is beautiful and inspirational. It talks about the love being felt by the person I talk to and the love of a lot of people around her. And about the art and insight and preservation of love that can emerge, even from unimaginable tragedy.”
This is one of my favorite episodes of our show.
A commission?! NOW things will really start happening!
Okay, I’m being a little sarcastic and perhaps a bit dubious about the effectiveness of our national government. But it’s better to have something happening than continue on with an insufficient status quo. And so, a commission then.
U.S. Senators John Fetterman and Tina Smith have introduced a bill that would establish a U.S. senate commission on mental health to help those struggling to deal with these issues.
Called the United States Senate Commission on Mental Health Act of 2024, the goal would be to provide congress and the president independent policy recommendations by experts to improve access and affordability of mental health care services, according to a news release from Fetterman's office.
Some of the topics the commission would study include:
Coverage of mental health care services, including mental health parity requirements under federal health plans.
Reimbursement rates for mental health care services with regard to mental health care providers.
Workforce challenges, including barriers to entering this field and challenges faced by mental health care providers. This includes factors that contribute to burnout.
Think about the past… carefully… for better mental health
Psychology Today reports on new research from Deakin University indicating that it’s good and healthy to reflect back on events of the past if you can do so in a properly constructive way.
The trick to this adaptive type of reminiscence is to be able to interpret your past events in ways that strengthen your view of yourself as someone who can get things done, or what’s called “self-efficacy.” Ideally, you can also feel that you have personal worth, are valued by others, and feel that your life has purpose and meaning. Although not every memory will come with a set of sunny interpretations, adaptive reminiscence allows you to integrate disappointment and loss into coherent “narratives about one’s life and self”
In what is called “cognitive reminiscence therapy” (CRT), individuals are helped to rewrite past events with a more positive spin, but not just by trying to sugarcoat their outcomes. Like cognitive therapy more generally, CRT is based on the concept of reframing.
Has the painting location of the Mona Lisa been determined?
It was at this one lake in Italy, says Ann Pizzorusso, an art historian, geologist, and winner of the annual Most Italian Surname contest*.
Ann Pizzorusso has combined her two fields of expertise to suggest that Leonardo painted several recognisable features of Lecco, on the shores of Lake Como in the Lombardy region of northern Italy.
Pizzorusso has matched Leonardo’s bridge, the mountain range and the lake in the Mona Lisa to Lecco’s 14th-century Azzone Visconti bridge, the south-western Alps overlooking the area and Lake Garlate, which Leonardo is known to have visited 500 years ago.
Pizzorusso says that art historians never took geology into account when trying to figure it out and geologists never factored in art history.
HOORAY FOR LIBERAL ARTS.
* not really
Bill Corbett on Sleeping with Celebrities
Bill Corbett of MST3K and Rifftrax fame has a lot to say about the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. Enough that you’ll fall asleep.
New York’s Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge is 13,700 feet long. Comedian, Rifftrax star, and MST3K alum Bill Corbett is at most six feet long, maybe even a little less. Still, Bill has a lot more to say about the bridge than the bridge can say about him because bridges can’t talk. Bill’s funnier too, by a lot, whereas the bridge has its own strengths like 13 lanes of traffic to Bill’s none. Bill, a native New Yorker, fills us in at great length about New York’s second most famous bridge, the Andrew Ridgely of bridges, really, the Andrew Bridgely so to speak in a long and sleepiness-inducing conversation that also veers into discussion of the Texas rock boogie band ZZ Top, who may have crossed over the bridge at some point, we just can’t really tell. Bill and the bridge both debuted in the 1960s, a fact that doesn’t come up.