Harsh band

"That's harsh" was a phrase that was popular among my siblings a few years back. There was a lot that fell under this one handy word, so we all used it quite a bit. At some point, my siblings informed me of an expansion of this term. I suspect marajuana was involved. They had discovered The Harsh Band. According to them, The Harsh Band plays the theme music for all those truly harsh moments in your life. The Harsh Band composes, arranges, and performs the incidental music to every scene from your life that makes you squirm whenever it comes to mind.

"What scenes?" the more faint or denial riddled of heart might be asking, cursor hovering over the tab closing X. Hey, don't be a wimp. Think of this as theraputic. Identifying the soundtrack to your misery is one way of laughing at it. We all need to be able to do that sometimes at least. None of us has lived so charmed a life that we are free of crushing and possibly public disappointments, humiliations, blunders, mistakes, and the like. We all have those moments. They're in there influencing us whether we consciously think of them or not. Of course when they threaten to become fully manifest in our conscious mind, we want to skip over them. Maybe we hum a compulsive little song whenever the memory threatens. Maybe we speak too loudly and brightly, trying to chase away the mental ick with verbal frippery. If you want to enjoy The Harsh Band, you'll have to think even just for a minute of one of those moments. When you cringe and think "That's harsh..." hang on for just a second before you jump away from the aftermath. There. You can almost hear it, the low discord of The Harsh Band.

What exactly The Harsh Band plays doesn't matter so much. It is unmusical from most traditional perspectives, it would be hard to hum along to, in fact humming along to it would probably make you very upset. It is what all the utility companies and university bursar's offices would play for hold music if only they could jack straight into the band's sound board embedded in the deepest parts of your psyche. What matters (in catalogable terms at least) say my siblings, are the instruments in the band. While the pieces and their combinations in the ensemble are unique to the person, some individual elements may well be universal.
Years ago, my siblings would occasionally announce that a new instrument had been added to one or the other of our bands.
"We've added a block."
"A block?"
"Yeah, you know like in kindergarten when they'd hand out the instruments for music time and there would always be the block?"
"I think it was supposed to have a stick that went with it - "
"Right. But no one ever knew where the stick was. So it was just the block. The block should definitely be in The Harsh Band."

From what I can remember, to date, the instruments in The Harsh Band include: triangle, saw, jug, washboard, two rocks being banged together, our mother repeatedly playing the first few measures of Fur Elise, block (sans stick), various pots and pans, and although she may not have consciously acknowledged the addition, I'm pretty sure that a around 10:30 PM on December 31, 2004, my sister added my former neighbor's ukulele playing 8 year old as a soloist.

So, what's in YOUR Harsh Band?