Nope. That’s not a typo. That
title is basically the essence of my dream.
I’m 51. I’m a wife, a mother, and
a student. I have a good job, albeit not a particularly exciting one. I love to
cook, I love tattoos, and I love rock and roll. And I have this crazy idea. I
want to work for the Foo Fighters.
I came up with this idea almost
two years ago, after first discovering the band (yeah, I know they’d been
around for a while, I just hadn’t found them yet), immersing myself in their
music and becoming a die-hard devotee. What can I say? Sometimes you pick the
band, sometimes the band picks you. But we’ll get to that later.
I tried to tell myself that going
to work for a rock band was not something you just did. Seriously, who does this? I have no musical talent. I’ve got
no background in the entertainment industry or concert promotion or any of
that. What could I do for an iconic rock
band? I was just a middle-aged empty nester with a wild idea that I had no clue
how to bring to fruition. What the hell was I thinking?
But still, I couldn’t stop
thinking it. Trust me, I tried.
There’s a scene in the movie
“Babe”, when the narrator first explains the farmer’s notion to use the little
pig, Babe, to herd sheep:
“When the thought first came to him, Farmer Hoggett dismissed it as mere
whimsy. But like most of his hare-brained ideas, it wouldn’t go away.”
Yep, that was me. I, too, had a whimsical
idea that wouldn’t go away. As much as I tried to dismiss it, it would not
allow itself to be set aside.
It, my Foomania, if you will,
began to grow and expand and go off on tangents. It distracted me and needled
me. I dreamed about it. I tried desperately to put my energy into other things,
but it was always there, in the back of my mind, waiting to pounce at any
opportunity. It just wouldn’t let me be.
Dear God, I was becoming Farmer Hoggett!
One day, while questioning my own
sanity for at least the thousandth time, my brain and I had a serious
discussion, the gist of which was this:
Me: “You’re not going to leave
this thing with the Foos alone, are you?”
Brain: “Nope. You’re not crazy. You
need to see it through”
Me: “What if I never make
anything happen with it? What if it’s just a mid-life crisis?”
Brain: “So what? If you don’t
follow the thread, you’re never going to know. And do you really think you
could put so much mental energy into something meaningless?”
I turned that thought over a few
times and looked at it. My brain had a point.
I’m a pragmatist. I’m not mentally
unstable. I’m not given to flights of fancy as a rule. And I’ve certainly never
had a crazy idea plague me for nearly two fucking years! I began to accept that there had to be a
reason I couldn’t let it go. Maybe I needed to learn what Babe’s farmer knew in
his infinite wisdom. Cue the narrator…
“Farmer Hoggett knew that little
ideas that tickled and nagged and refused to go away should never be ignored,
for in them lie the seeds of destiny.”
Maybe I couldn’t let go of my Foo
Fighters dream because it was guiding me to something else, something
important. Something big. I had no idea what it was, but I decided I would not spend
any more time trying to talk myself out of it. If I chose to pursue it, the
worst that would come of it was that NOTHING would come of it. But I knew that
if I let it go, if I chose to ignore it, I would likely spend the rest of my
life wondering ‘what if.’ Not pursuing it, and never knowing where it might
have led, would eventually send me round the bend.
I don’t know exactly how to begin
this journey, except to tell you why I’m taking it. It won’t just be about the
Foo Fighters, although they serve as my muses and I can’t tell the story
without them. It’s really about life, and dreams, and music, and food, and joy,
and disappointment. Mostly, it’s about
believing in possibilities. And yourself.
