Thank you for your response. I know it’s difficult to convey tone, so I hope my wall of text didn’t come off as lecturing, as it was not my intent. As you say, it’s all in the eye (or ear, in this case) of the audience, and any interpretation can be as personally truthful as any other. I’m just offering some different ways the song has spoken to me over the past few years as an alternative.

For what it’s worth, my interpretation is not born out of my lived experience matching the narrator’s, but rather that self-destructive individual. Had a crash out some years ago which resulted in a period of hospitalization, and this song was an expression of what I feared my support system were thinking when I leaned on them.

Ultimately though, if Maynard’s misanthropy (and for all my talk about separating art and artist, I’ll agree that homie DEFINITELY has some misanthropic sentiment) is not something you can get over, I totally get it. As I alluded to earlier, I think Mel Gibson is a great actor and director. I also will never support another project he’s involved in because of who he has revealed himself to be. J.k. Rowling is another that falls in this camp.

For me though, Maynard being a mean lil troll doesn’t raise the same amount of bile in my throat as folks of that ilk. I remind myself that I’ve written lots of things that don’t reflect the totality of my perspective on a given subject, including juvenalia which boils down to “everyone is an asshole except me”. A lot of them are journal entries, some of them are exercises in fiction. In either case, I was trying to exorcise myself of thoughts and feelings I wasn’t happy having rattle around my head, so I got them out onto paper where they could wither in the light.

Again, not saying that this is at all what is happening with Maynard. I’m clearly living in relative ignorance of his intent and the wider context surrounding his lyrics, and I absolutely don’t mean any of this to say “I’m right and you’re wrong”.