beautiful, funny, sad & true

I’d like to take a minute to tell you a story in the long string of heart-warming online tales that illustrates the power of the internet to connect people who have been estranged for decades.  It also illustrates the power of music, and the power of a certain kind of mental pathology, too.  You’ll see what I mean.

One of my cohorts from Iron Horse received an out-of-the-blue message on Facebook yesterday, at 1:30 in the morning, from someone he didn’t know, that said, “Are you [misspelled his last name] from [our high school]?  I remember you; we wrote a song in detention.’  He named the song, and correctly wrote out the chorus.  No, I’m not going to quote it here, because then it would be searchable, but he totally nailed it.

His profile was private, there was no picture, and he had a very unusual first name, but my friend didn’t recognize him in any way.  He had eleven online friends, all of whom shared his surname.  My friend responded, “Yeah, that was me.  I kinda remember writing that in detention. . .I changed the lyrics around, and my old band used to play that song.  Do you have a picture or something to jump-start my memory?  What years were you at [our high school]?”

The guy wrote back that he moved away from Yakima in 1987, and that he’s living in California now.  He’s of a certain nationality, and “try to get sum pic’s.”  (I took the liberty of cleaning up his grammar and punctuation before, but it was all typed lower-case, with slightly awkward punctuation.)  My friend accepted his friend request, and we’ll see where the story goes from here.  The two of us can’t help but wonder what the guy’s life is like, since he’s writing to someone he met only one time, in high school detention, twenty two years ago (!), and seems to be hoping to rekindle a friendship where it left off.   I mean, sure,  my friend is a great guy, and we were a pretty good band, but this guy doesn’t even know about the band, because he left town before my friend and I even started it.  Oh, AND.  I should mention that my friend was neither a miscreant nor a ne’er-do-well (I love those two terms, and I love it when I get the opportunity to use them), he was only in detention that one day, and never saw this guy ever again.  He’s not anyone I knew, either then or now, but I haven’t been able to find my yearbooks to investigate him.

Incidentally, speaking of the band, the community access TV station still plays our videos to this day, which completely mystifies my friend and me.  These are not new videos I’m referring to, either.  They were filmed and originally aired during that same time period, from 1987 to ’89, which is when the band was in existence.   We were just a bunch of high school kids, playing some songs that we wrote ourselves, and I can’t imagine why anyone watching now would even enjoy the songs these days, let alone find a bunch of kids from twenty years ago compelling.

Be all that as at may, I admit that it’s gratifying (in a weird way) that they do still play that stuff.  We had a good time making the videos, and like I said, we were a pretty decent band, but we had no delusions about our abilities or chances for stardom, either.  We were just a bunch of kids who had a band, like a million other kids in a million other bands.

Just for fun, here’s a picture from our very first show.  In fact, it could well be of the song in question, too, because I just now remembered that I actually sang the whole second verse of it (and I didn’t sing lead very often), so it seems very likely that this picture was taken during that song.

I just love the oversize mirrored sunglasses, and you can see that I was working hard on Mullet Number One as well.  Gee, I wonder if this was the 80’s?

Meanwhile, back to the topic at hand.

In the interest of full disclosure, and the interest of fairness to this guy, I’ve spent the better part of this month reconnecting with friends from years ago, one of whom had also been twenty years ago (she reads this blog, too, by the way), and it’s been really great for everyone involved.  You probably already knew that if you’re reading this, though, since I’ve written a bit about it lately.  More than once but fewer than three times, in fact, just in case you were counting.   So I have no business knocking the guy for trying.  As human beings, we all are basically social animals (some of us more than others) who are looking for connections wherever we can find them.  But the people I’m talking with are people with whom I had actual relationships and friendships.  They’re based on more than just a one-time meeting, in detention, more than half a lifetime ago.

The title of this entry, incidentally, comes from a book that our high school’s choir director had on the bookshelf in his office, and it seemed apropos to use it here.  Iron Horse shortened it to ‘Mental Game’ and we used it as the title of our album.  I mean cassette.  Oh, how dearly I wish I had a copy of that.  I have a lot of old videos, and tapes, and pictures, and notebooks, but I’m not sure I have that cassette cover floating around anywhere.  I’ll have to do some digging.

I can’t wait to see how this story unfolds.

From the illustrious XKCD. . .

[Scene 1:  TODD, walking home from the store, with a bag of groceries, containing a chicken Caesar salad, chips, and a small tub of salsa.  TODD passes VERY STONED YOUNG HOMELESS GUY and his equally stoned-looking GIRLFRIEND.]

VSYHG:  Can you spare some change?

Todd:  Sorry, man, I can’t this time.

VSYHG:  Can I have a cigarette?

Todd:  I don’t smoke.  [walks on]  Good luck to you, man.

VSYHG:  [follows Todd]  Oh, dude, I’m soooo hungry.  Can you just, like, break me off a piece of that chicken?

Todd:  That’s dinner.

VSYHG:  Oh, man, what about just a little piece of that chicken?

Todd:  [exasperated, but still friendly]  I’m unemployed too, dude.  Good luck to you.

VSYHG:   Can I have a cigarette?

Todd:  I still don’t smoke.  [turns and walks away]  Good luck, man.

VSYHG:  [turns and says to Girlfriend]  Let’s go to Safeway.

“Everything is more complicated than you think.  You only see a tenth of what is true.  There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose.  But maybe you won’t know for twenty years, and you’ll never ever trace it to its source, and you only get one chance to play it out.  Just try and figure out your own divorce.

“And they say there is no fate, but there is; it’s what you create.  Even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are here for a fraction of a fraction of a second.  Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born.  But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone (or something) to make it all right, and it never comes.  Or it seems to, but doesn’t, really.

“And so you spend your time in vague regret, or vaguer hope, for something good to come along.  Something to make you feel connected; to make you feel whole, to make you feel loved. And the truth is, I’m so angry.  And the truth is, I’m so fucking sad.  And the truth is, I’ve been so fucking hurt for so fucking long, and for just as long have been pretending I’m OK.  Just to get along; just for – I don’t know why – maybe because no one wants to hear about my misery, because they have their own, and their own is too overwhelming to allow them to listen to, or care about, mine.

“Well, fuck everybody.  Amen.”

Here’s the video of this scene.  It’s from the movie Synecdoche, New York.

When I was about eighteen, I had a girlfriend, B, whose estranged, abusive stepfather was the guy in town who sold worms out of his front yard. He had a very famous and weatherbeaten sign facing Sixteenth Avenue that said in scrawled black letters, ‘BAIT WORMS HELLGAMITS’. I still have no idea what ‘hellgamits’ are, but based on his childlike handwriting and second-grade education, I strongly suspect a misspelling.  Yeah, I know, an internet search would reveal the answer easily enough, but I actually like holding onto that particular little mystery.

As far as I know, he’s still in business.  I haven’t driven that stretch of Sixteenth Avenue during the last couple of times I was in town, but as of a few years ago, he was still at it.  And no, I didn’t stop by to say hello or anything.  In fact, I never met him back in the day, and I didn’t want to, either, all things considered.

And what happened to B?  Well, I was in college at the time, and one of the things college is good for (aside from the whole getting-an-education thing) is meeting significant others.  I think you can imagine where this is going.  After a couple months of dating B, I met K, who would change the course of my life, and I knew that our orbits would synchronize from the first minute we met.  K and I would be together on-again-off-again for the next five years, through both of my mullet haircuts.  B joined the Navy and I’m sure is living a perfectly functional life somewhere.   Last I heard, she got married and had a baby when she was around twenty years old.  My mom really liked B, actually, and they kept a friendship going for about a year or so after that, and wrote long letters back and forth, much to my annoyance, because I felt it sent a terrible message to K, who I count among the great loves of my life.

I still find myself wondering about K occasionally.  She moved to EmeraldCity at the exact same time I moved to Portland, and we went our separate ways and lost contact, somewhat surprisingly, after that.  She’s not on any of the usual social networking sites, and doesn’t seem to have an online presence, despite the fact that she works as an artist for a well-known video game company.

I’m not feeling romantically nostalgic for her, even though it may seem like I am.  I am curious, however, to see how her life has turned out, and every once in a while I’ll see something or someone that reminds me of her, and that will make me start to wonder.  We’ve all known people who really made their way deeply into our hearts, and sometimes the echoes of their voices seem to reverberate back into the world again.

But I’m not a Pollyanna, and I’m not stupid.  There were good reasons for us to split up, despite how much we loved each other, and I’ve never regretted our decision.  Most important of all is the fact that if we had stayed together, I would never have met the myriad of great people I have in my life now (hello, myriad of great people!), or made the changes in myself that needed to be made.  The people I’ve been with since then have affected me even more deeply, thanks in part to the experiences and expectations that I learned from my time with K, but also thanks to all those years of therapy, if we’re being completely honest here.   Doesn’t mean that I can’t wonder about her sometimes, though, and that’s perfectly okay.

There’s a Decemberists song, one of my very favorites, called Red Right Ankle, which has a poignant final verse that sorta sums up this weird, non-nostalgic nostalgia that I’m feeling, and I’m going to use it in an attempt to tie up all of the loose ends of this entry into a neat, tidy little Scooby Doo ending.

This is the story of the boys who loved you, who love you now and loved you then
Some were sweet and some were cold and snuffed you, some just laid around in bed
Some had crumbled you straight to your knees, did it cruel, did it tenderly
Some had crawled their way into your heart, to rend your ventricles apart
This is the story of the boys who loved you
This is the story of your red right ankle.

What a strange feeling this is.   What a strange entry this is.  And not a bit of Scooby Doo in the ending after all.  Sorry about that.