Inspiration: Give Me Zen
Give me groceries and booze
Give me FaceTime with my friends
Give me intravenous news, little drips of CNN
Give me meditation apps, text me pictures of your dog
Give me life, give me peace, give me noise
Someone gimme fucking zen
Someone gimme fucking zen
Gimme space, at least six feet
Dig my grave just as deep
I got sex on my mind all the time, fuck
Scrollin' through the internet time suck
I've been feelin' flat like a pancake
I could use a hug or a handshake
I could use some drugs or a Band-Aid
Cooped up in a hole I wanna lose all my control
I wanna just go on a rampage
Gimme wisdom, gimme teeth
Gimme vision, let me see
Gimme courage to confess
Every night I text my ex
Gimme girls, gimme boys
Gimme life, gimme peace, gimme noise
Someone gimme fucking zen
Someone gimme fucking zen
Gimme fucking zen
I need something to avoid all of my fears and paranoia
Gimme, gimme
Someone gimme fucking zen
Yeah, gimme an appetite
Gimme hope for the afterlife
Or a reason to look past tonight
Gimme happiness when I found the fame
Gimme music that doesn't all sound the same
Gimme something that I can look forward to
Gimme humans that I can get closer to
You look down at me but the next thing you know it's you
With the rent overdue
Gimme a little bit of piece of your peace of mind
Gimme a piece of yours, you'll get a piece of mine
Gimme something to do when there nothing to do
But when I get it, shit, I'll probably just fuck it up too
Gimme two steps to the left (Ayy)
Gimme one step to the right (Ayy)
Gimme one dance with the volume at ten
And someone, anyone, gimme fucking zen
Someone gimme fucking zen
Gimme fucking zen
I need something to avoid all of my fears and paranoia
Gimme, gimme
Someone gimme f-
Give me hope for something better
Give me justice for my cries
Tell me we're all in this together
And if we're not then tell me lies
Gimme love, give me Wi-Fi
Gimme drugs, get me sky high
Gimme headspace, set my head straight
Cut the dead weight, burn the red tape
Gimme the good old days from seven days ago
Let me go outside again
Gimme life, gimme peace, gimme noise
Someone gimme fucking zen
Someone gimme fucking zen
Gimme fucking zen
I need something to avoid all of my fears and paranoia
Gimme, gimme
Someone gimme fucking z-
Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: Kristine Flaherty / Adam Levin / Samuel Harris / Jordan Benjamin / Casey Harris
Zen lyrics © Dressing On The Side Songs, Valleyheart Publishing Global, Kc Harris Publishing Llc, My Dear Uncle Jack Publishing Llc
When I read these lyrics now, I feel the ghost of a very specific season press against my ribs. Not nostalgia. Not even memory. More like muscle recall. The body remembering what it was like to live inside a paused world. Covid did not feel like danger at first. It felt like suspension. Like someone took the ordinary machinery of life and turned the volume down while leaving the mind fully awake.
“Give me groceries and booze.” That line already smells like March. The first weeks when survival shrank into transactions. Bread. Wine. Screens. Connection delivered through bags and bandwidth. We were suddenly domestic astronauts, orbiting our own kitchens. FaceTime became a substitute for touch. CNN became intravenous, drip-fed panic and counting. We did not seek information, we mainlined it, hoping certainty would arrive disguised as statistics.
“Give me meditation apps, text me pictures of your dog.” I remember how comfort turned digital. Calm in rectangles. Love in pixels. We traded bodies for bandwidth. Everyone wanted peace, but no one knew how to sit inside it. So we scrolled. We binged. We performed wellness while quietly unraveling. Zen became something to acquire, not something to inhabit.
Someone gimme fucking zen.
That line is funny and desperate at the same time. It is a prayer screamed into a shopping cart. We did not want enlightenment. We wanted anesthesia. We wanted something to dull the fact that the future suddenly looked like a blank hallway with no doors. Fear and paranoia did not feel dramatic. They felt administrative. Six feet. Masks. Death counts. Curfews for the nervous system.
“I’ve been feelin’ flat like a pancake.” That is depression without poetry. Just gravity. I remember that flattening. Days losing edges. Time turning into soup. Sex on the mind but no bodies. Desire circling with nowhere to land. Internet time suck became our new climate. Hours evaporated inside blue light while the soul sat in the corner like a patient animal waiting for release.
“I could use a hug or a handshake.” That line still aches. Touch became contraband. Love turned suspicious. We learned how quickly the body starves without contact. We joked about it, but underneath was something feral. Cooped up. Losing control. Wanting rampage. Not violence, but motion. We wanted friction again. We wanted resistance. We wanted the world to push back so we could feel ourselves pushing too.
“Gimme courage to confess, every night I text my ex.” Isolation made everyone porous. Old loves resurfaced like wreckage floating back to shore. When the present is suspended, the past gets loud. We reached backward because forward felt canceled. Loneliness rewrote our standards. We wanted proof we still mattered to someone somewhere.
The song keeps saying give me. And that is the psychology of Covid. We became receivers instead of participants. Give me hope. Give me music. Give me humans I can get closer to. We were waiting for life to be delivered instead of lived. Even peace became a product. Even zen became something to order online.
“Gimme a piece of your peace of mind.” That line holds the real ache. We did not want solutions. We wanted to borrow each other’s sanity. Just a little. Just enough to make it through another strange, silent day.
“Gimme the good old days from seven days ago.” That is devastating and accurate. Time collapsed. Nostalgia shrank to a week. We missed versions of ourselves that were barely gone. The pandemic taught us how fragile normal actually is. How quickly ordinary becomes myth.
When I revisit this now, I do not hear chaos. I hear grief in sneakers. Humor trying to outrun terror. People bargaining with the universe through playlists and apps and grocery lists. We wanted life, peace, noise, all at once, because silence had grown too honest.
Covid isolation was not just about being alone. It was about being hyper-aware of being alive while the world felt temporarily uninhabitable. This song captured the jittery psychology of that era. The craving. The profanity. The longing for transcendence mixed with Wi‑Fi and booze and hope for the afterlife.
Someone gimme fucking zen was really saying:
Someone remind me I still belong to the living world.
Looking back, I do not judge that hunger. I recognize it. We were trying to stay human in a season that turned humans into data points and living rooms into bunkers. We were learning, clumsily, how to breathe inside uncertainty.
Revisiting it now feels like touching a scar that once was a wound. The body remembers the panic. The soul remembers the strange intimacy of that time. We were isolated, but oddly synchronized. Everyone asking for the same impossible thing.
Give me life.
Give me peace.
Give me noise.
And somehow, slowly, imperfectly, we walked back into it.
