Sometime in the last year, we found this video on YouTube of Choir!Choir!Choir! performing Men At Work’s song “Overkill” accompanied by Colin Hay (the singer from Men at Work).
(There is also a video of Choir!Choir!Choir! performing Never Gonna Give You Up with Rick Astley and if these videos do not make you want to move to Canada to join C!C!C! then, how can we be friends?)
Anyway. Overkill makes me cry. Gene says it’s about nuclear war (the idea of being able to bomb the Earth to kill everything 100x is overkill) but he’s wrong. The refrain of “Ghosts appear, then fade away” absolutely kills me every time (maybe it Overkills me, I don’t know).
We all have ghosts, right? Maybe not in the haunted house sense, but in the sense of the ghost is something you wanted, someone you miss. It’s dreaming of seeing that person and waking up to the pleasant sensation of remembering seeing them, even though it was a dream.
I’d love to be the bigger person and say that the person for me is The Boy (who is now The Man, 26 years old) but I don’t need to be dreaming to see him as a ghost. He’s the ghost of my waking dreams, the fork in the road, the turning point where I can point and say “If we’d only done this and that differently, where would I be?”
So, sorry. The ghost is the (lack of) a (human) child. For years after Plan B was scuttled, I still dreamed a few times a year about being pregnant. Even after we moved to TX (so a full decade later). And the dream was always lovely and I woke up so happy. And then remembered, oh right, that didn’t happen.
(And it won’t. I’m 43 years old and my eggs were dicey at 33 and downright ruinous now).