Counting Down - The Musical

WARNING. "This section is too detailed. It's best appeciated by those who enjoy trivia and finding hidden gems. Maybe go listen to some music or look elsehwhere."  - Prince Horizon.

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Turning Back Time

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The television show It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia features an amazing episode where Charlie, the lovable everyman of the group, inexplicably writes a musical overnight. His friends are immediately suspicious, pointing out that no one just writes a musical for no reason. Charlie won’t admit he’s done so to musically propose to a comically disinterested waitress he’s chased for years.  

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I have my reasons for writing a musical too...It’s about resolution. The way a code or a pattern or a problem wants to resolve. Longs to be completed. 

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I’ve been waiting for death. 

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The original idea was inspired by an old Commodore 64 video game called “Countdown to Shutdown.” Release 40 years ago, the game featured 8 “androids,” of varying attributes, controlled the player and tasked with entering a nuclear power plant and cooling the core before a meltdown. The game is simple in design, but rich in data and provided an ample canvas for me to create my own narratives. I knew these bots, despite them having no descriptions beyond competency based strengths and weaknesses. The game inspired in me a life long interest in psychological measurement. I probably only played it in earnest between the ages of seven and nine, but since I never defeated it, I was always captivated by these bots and (for me) their doomed mission to the core.  

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As an adult, I’ve enjoyed reading reviews of the game. Rated as middling, repetitious, and boring, even at the time, I admit a sense of bemusement. Everybody is a critic, and opinions are like...I digress – the game holds a place in my heart. It represents a pivotal time in childhood development; maybe a time when a kind of cataclysmic shattering took place. And cores melted down... 

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If we’re getting closer to the truth, Counting Down is about a lot of things. Meaning and identity and time. Because the time between my brother’s motorcycle accident and my father’s aneurysm I played a lot of Countdown to Shutdown. And like those robots I can trace the first alarm to the meltdown in those twin event horizons. I never could stop the meltdown. My robots died. And I died with them. That was the end of childhood. Joy was hard earned after that. As I counted down the decades, years, and months finally until my father would ultimately die, near the very end I wrote Counting Down. I sent the robots in again, back through time to the scene of the original meltdown - to ask could I change the past - should I just meltdown - can I save them - can I save me? And this time they won. And when my father died I was ready to forgive him - for his part in everything that went wrong - for all of us.

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I’ve been waiting since then. 

So in Counting Down, my bots are no human controlled androids. They are rich, complex, emotional beings brimming with unique motivations, neuroses, and idiosyncrasies. Fundamentally, they are friends, lovers, and well rounded, interesting people. And they face an existential threat even greater than a nuclear meltdown. They grapple with what it means to be alive at all as they each strive to grow and change. And when we think of counting down to a meltdown, it’s not just a power plant anymore. It’s an emotional meltdown, or even the breakdown of reality, set against the easy-to-understand conflict that captivated me as a child. 

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The first song I wrote for Counting Down provides its emotional spine. Let Us In is about neurodivergence. What it feels like to be a robot to others while still feeling so deeply. What it feels like to sacrifice your identity to prove to others that you and they matter, and that everything they ever wanted to believe about the possibilities of friendship, those tender things they learned as a child and gave away as the traumas mounted, is still alive and real. It never has to die. There are some of us out there who long to be true, just as these noble robots already are. 

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Autistic sacrifice looms large throughout Counting Down, along with more conventional and common mental illnesses. The consequences of surviving narcissists plays throughout. My bots might have funny robotic voices resulting from my own uneven, reedy tenor and the limits of low-cost technology, but they are in no way robotic. It is their nature, but they are so much more. Many of the songs made me cry as I wrote and sang them. They do as listen to them too. It’s difficult for me to express why. It has something to do with transcending limits, not simply being the grooves left by your traumas, and surprising others with the existence of good, in a human experience that seems hard wired to disabuse romantic and optimistic notions. 

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These aren’t songs and this isn’t music. This is psychological art: 

 

Beauty

Friendship

Longing

Determination

Nobility

Freedom

 

These are the collapsed stars of my heart. Compressed into a singularity to gravitationally warp time. Because that is what I am doing. I’m bending reality. I don’t need to play the game again. I need to finish a story. This is how I stop the meltdown. This is how I save everything the way I couldn’t as a child. 

 

Before the clock counts down…