'this mix tape is another piece of useless junk junk. . . left behind. a category that i guess tonight includes me.'
ignore the cutesy cover, and you really uncover something great. it took me too long to read this, but it was suggested by a friend dear to my heart, and i'm glad that i made the time for it.
---
let the music have its way with me. it's a date. just me and renee and some tunes she picked out.
her voice was full of the frazzle and crackle of music.
we had nothing in common except we both loved music. it was the first connection we had, and we depended on it to keep us together. we did a lot of work to meet in the middle. music brought us together. so now music was stuck with us.
she was in the middle of everything, living her big, messy, epic life, and none of us who loved her will ever catch up with her.
renee loved to do things. that was mysterious to me, since i was more comfortable talking about things and never doing them.
tonight, i feel like my whole body is made out of memories. i'm a mix tape, a cassette that's been rewound so many times you can hear the fingerprints smudged on the tape. . .i want to hear her fingerprints. . .nothing connects to the moment like music. i count on the music to bring me back - or, more precisely, to bring her forward.
i have some unfinished business with these tunes. i'm going to be up for a while.
there are all kinds of mix tapes. there is always a reason to make one.
you like music, i like music, i can tell we're going to be friends - you just met somebody. you're talking about the songs you like. oh, yeah, that band! ever hear this band? you would love this song. i'll make you a tape! frequently confused with the 'i want you' tape by the giving or receiving party, resulting in hijinks and hilarity all around.
there are millions of songs in the world and millions of ways to connect them into mixes. making the connections is part of the fun of being a fan.
you go through an artist's entire career, zero in on that one moment that makes you want to jump and dance and smoke bats and bite the heads off drugs. and then you play that one moment over and over.
when you stick a song on a tape, you set it free.
i have built my entire life around loving music, and i surround myself with it. i'm always racing to catch up on my next favorite song. b ut i never stop playing my mixes. every fan makes them. the times you lived through, the people you shared those times with - nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. it does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. every mix tape tells a story. put them together, and they add up to the story of a life.
'the self is a cloister of remembered sounds.' my first response was, yess! how did he know that? it's like he's reading my mind. but my second response was, i need some new sounds to remember. i've been stuck in my little isolation chamber for so long i'm spinning through the same seconds i've been hearing in my head all my life.
sometimes you lie in a strange room, in a strange person's home, and you feel yourself bending out of shape. melting, touching something hot, something that warps you in drastic and probably irreversible ways you won't get to take stock of until it's too late.
is there anything scarier than the world 'irreversible'? it's a hiss of a word, full of side effects and mutilations.
it was another temporary technological mutation designed to do the same thing music always ddoes, which is allow emotionally warped people to communicate by bombarding each other pitiful cultural artifacts that in a saner world would be forgotten before they even happened.
nothing wrong with a lonely place as long as it's private.
if i had my way, the story would end here. renee was always braver. she always wanted to know what happens next.
while she worked she would lose all her nervous energy and glow like a conquering goddess.
it became our drink of choice for a long, lazy, rambling fever dream of a summer, when kurt was dead but the promise of rock was raging on.
*i'm not going to include the quote, but a note for myself, a memory. page 122*
kurt and biggie were the rock stars of my age who worried about the things i worried about, both of them in fucked-up marriages and yet writing songs about them that felt real. they gave me the sort of tiny wisdoms i got from surrogate older brothers like al green and john doe and lou reed.
the reality of boy-girl life gets harsh, but in my fantasy, the music keeps them together.
she knows pop dreams are a hustle, a deception, a 'glamour' in the witchcraft sense of the word.
on the way we talked about the road sign ' bridge ices before road.' i always wondered, if that's a problem, why don't they just build the bridge out of the same stuff they used to build the road? drema explained that the bridge isn't made out of a different material than the road, but that the bridge ices quicker because it's alone, hanging there without the land under it to keep it warm. i knew i would have to relearn how to listen to music, and that some of the music we'd loved together i'd never be able to hear again. every time i started to cry, i remember how renee used to say real life was a bad country song, except bad country songs are believable and real life isn't.
now, we had a whole different language to learn, a new grammar of loss to conjugate: i lose, you lose, we lose; i have lost, you have lost, we have lost. words i said out loud, every day, many times a day, for years and years - suddenly they were dust in my mouth.
you lose a certain kind of innocence when you experience this kind of kindness. you lose your right to be a jaded cynic. you can no longer go back through the looking glass and pretend not to know what you know about kindness. it's a defeat, in a way.
i had no idea how to live up to that kindness.
it was nothing personal. that's the way of the world.
how do you pretend you don't know about it, after you see it?
september had come and nothing had changed.
when my friends and family would ask how i was doing, i stalled or stuttered or lied.
love dies in many different ways, and it's natural for the grass to seem greener on the other side. but it's not a competition; there's plenty of pain to go around..
it's not human to let go of love, even when it's dead.
i grieve that grief can teach me nothing. i was hoping that was a lie. but it wasn't.
she was so kind, i wanted to cry with humiliation that i was taking up her time when all i would do was let her down, the way i let down every other person trying to be kind to me.
i realized i was starved for some color and noise, and i knew that's what i would get.
individually, all the songs on this tape make me smile, but lined up in this order, they make me shudder. listening to this tape is like going back somewhere i never belonged in the first place, and it's spooky to tiptoe back in.
it was too hard to keep living surrounded by so much of the past. i needed to go.
it was bittersweet getting to know these songs i never got to share.
i realize that i will never fully understand the millions of bizarre was that music brings people together.
some of them even had something to say about the real world, which is way more than anybody has a right to expect from musicians.
if i didn't want ot have these experiences, didn't want to run into living things that reminded me of the past, i would have to hide under a rock- except that would remind me of the past, too, so i try not to hide. what shocks me is that the present is alive.
that's the part i love about them. but the rhythm of the mix tape is the rhythm of romance, the analog hum of a physical connection b etween two sloppy, human bodies.
no matter how hard you listen, you can't get down to the pure sound, not as it gets heard by impure flesh-and-blood ears. so instead of listening to the pure sound, you listen to a mix. . .you listen, and you mutate along with the sound.
you hear something you like, and you press rewind to go back to it. but you can't rewind the tape to the exact same place again. so you start fresh.
ignore the cutesy cover, and you really uncover something great. it took me too long to read this, but it was suggested by a friend dear to my heart, and i'm glad that i made the time for it.
let the music have its way with me. it's a date. just me and renee and some tunes she picked out.
her voice was full of the frazzle and crackle of music.
we had nothing in common except we both loved music. it was the first connection we had, and we depended on it to keep us together. we did a lot of work to meet in the middle. music brought us together. so now music was stuck with us.
she was in the middle of everything, living her big, messy, epic life, and none of us who loved her will ever catch up with her.
renee loved to do things. that was mysterious to me, since i was more comfortable talking about things and never doing them.
tonight, i feel like my whole body is made out of memories. i'm a mix tape, a cassette that's been rewound so many times you can hear the fingerprints smudged on the tape. . .i want to hear her fingerprints. . .nothing connects to the moment like music. i count on the music to bring me back - or, more precisely, to bring her forward.
i have some unfinished business with these tunes. i'm going to be up for a while.
there are all kinds of mix tapes. there is always a reason to make one.
you like music, i like music, i can tell we're going to be friends - you just met somebody. you're talking about the songs you like. oh, yeah, that band! ever hear this band? you would love this song. i'll make you a tape! frequently confused with the 'i want you' tape by the giving or receiving party, resulting in hijinks and hilarity all around.
there are millions of songs in the world and millions of ways to connect them into mixes. making the connections is part of the fun of being a fan.
you go through an artist's entire career, zero in on that one moment that makes you want to jump and dance and smoke bats and bite the heads off drugs. and then you play that one moment over and over.
when you stick a song on a tape, you set it free.
i have built my entire life around loving music, and i surround myself with it. i'm always racing to catch up on my next favorite song. b ut i never stop playing my mixes. every fan makes them. the times you lived through, the people you shared those times with - nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. it does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. every mix tape tells a story. put them together, and they add up to the story of a life.
'the self is a cloister of remembered sounds.' my first response was, yess! how did he know that? it's like he's reading my mind. but my second response was, i need some new sounds to remember. i've been stuck in my little isolation chamber for so long i'm spinning through the same seconds i've been hearing in my head all my life.
sometimes you lie in a strange room, in a strange person's home, and you feel yourself bending out of shape. melting, touching something hot, something that warps you in drastic and probably irreversible ways you won't get to take stock of until it's too late.
is there anything scarier than the world 'irreversible'? it's a hiss of a word, full of side effects and mutilations.
it was another temporary technological mutation designed to do the same thing music always ddoes, which is allow emotionally warped people to communicate by bombarding each other pitiful cultural artifacts that in a saner world would be forgotten before they even happened.
nothing wrong with a lonely place as long as it's private.
if i had my way, the story would end here. renee was always braver. she always wanted to know what happens next.
while she worked she would lose all her nervous energy and glow like a conquering goddess.
it became our drink of choice for a long, lazy, rambling fever dream of a summer, when kurt was dead but the promise of rock was raging on.
*i'm not going to include the quote, but a note for myself, a memory. page 122*
kurt and biggie were the rock stars of my age who worried about the things i worried about, both of them in fucked-up marriages and yet writing songs about them that felt real. they gave me the sort of tiny wisdoms i got from surrogate older brothers like al green and john doe and lou reed.
the reality of boy-girl life gets harsh, but in my fantasy, the music keeps them together.
she knows pop dreams are a hustle, a deception, a 'glamour' in the witchcraft sense of the word.
on the way we talked about the road sign ' bridge ices before road.' i always wondered, if that's a problem, why don't they just build the bridge out of the same stuff they used to build the road? drema explained that the bridge isn't made out of a different material than the road, but that the bridge ices quicker because it's alone, hanging there without the land under it to keep it warm. i knew i would have to relearn how to listen to music, and that some of the music we'd loved together i'd never be able to hear again. every time i started to cry, i remember how renee used to say real life was a bad country song, except bad country songs are believable and real life isn't.
now, we had a whole different language to learn, a new grammar of loss to conjugate: i lose, you lose, we lose; i have lost, you have lost, we have lost. words i said out loud, every day, many times a day, for years and years - suddenly they were dust in my mouth.
you lose a certain kind of innocence when you experience this kind of kindness. you lose your right to be a jaded cynic. you can no longer go back through the looking glass and pretend not to know what you know about kindness. it's a defeat, in a way.
i had no idea how to live up to that kindness.
it was nothing personal. that's the way of the world.
how do you pretend you don't know about it, after you see it?
september had come and nothing had changed.
when my friends and family would ask how i was doing, i stalled or stuttered or lied.
love dies in many different ways, and it's natural for the grass to seem greener on the other side. but it's not a competition; there's plenty of pain to go around..
it's not human to let go of love, even when it's dead.
i grieve that grief can teach me nothing. i was hoping that was a lie. but it wasn't.
she was so kind, i wanted to cry with humiliation that i was taking up her time when all i would do was let her down, the way i let down every other person trying to be kind to me.
i realized i was starved for some color and noise, and i knew that's what i would get.
individually, all the songs on this tape make me smile, but lined up in this order, they make me shudder. listening to this tape is like going back somewhere i never belonged in the first place, and it's spooky to tiptoe back in.
it was too hard to keep living surrounded by so much of the past. i needed to go.
it was bittersweet getting to know these songs i never got to share.
i realize that i will never fully understand the millions of bizarre was that music brings people together.
some of them even had something to say about the real world, which is way more than anybody has a right to expect from musicians.
if i didn't want ot have these experiences, didn't want to run into living things that reminded me of the past, i would have to hide under a rock- except that would remind me of the past, too, so i try not to hide. what shocks me is that the present is alive.
that's the part i love about them. but the rhythm of the mix tape is the rhythm of romance, the analog hum of a physical connection b etween two sloppy, human bodies.
no matter how hard you listen, you can't get down to the pure sound, not as it gets heard by impure flesh-and-blood ears. so instead of listening to the pure sound, you listen to a mix. . .you listen, and you mutate along with the sound.
you hear something you like, and you press rewind to go back to it. but you can't rewind the tape to the exact same place again. so you start fresh.
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