Just finished watching an anime film called “Your Name.” - it’s got a 4.2 on Letterboxd, which means it’s beloved since it didn’t settle in at 3.7 like everything else. It’s a beautiful looking, timey-wimey romance that uses a body swap conceit to bring its leads together with pretty great incidental music and some just awful Japanese emo at either end. (Sample lyrics: “The sorrowful gust of wind that blew right between you and me / Where did it find the loneliness, it carried on the breeze?”)
The songs are not awful, of course. They just sound like what was on the radio in the 00s, and I was born in the 70s, not the 80s. Emo is what was adding punctuation to teenage feelings when I was nearly 30 years old; it’s got nothing to do with me. It’s one letter away from Elmo, who wasn’t on 70s-era Sesame Street, so fuck him too.
When I got sober, I went through another musical teenage-hood. I went through a brief Bright Eyes phase, a band I’d missed, after a kid at rehab played “Lua” during one of our daily meetings. While Bright Eyes is a band that could use a little editing, I played that song multiple times a night during my endless walks to be out of my Sober Living house. Haley Bonar’s “Eat For Free”, Robyn Hitchcock’s “Sayonara Judge”, Aimee Mann’s “Phoenix” (Aimee Mann, the Patron Saint of Al-Anon), some throwback stuff like Low’s “Closer” and, oddly, Ringo Starr’s “It Don’t Come Easy”. Maybe a couple dozen more, but only a couple dozen. Nearly five years sober, I’m still there, playing the entire National-adjacent soundtrack to “Cyrano” on repeat on my neighborhood walks more than’s healthy.
Maria Negroni, from “Berlin Interlude”, translated by Michelle Gil-Montero
This weekend I’m rich with scarcity. (Y’all, this book is real good - I shared Maria Negroni Thursday, too.) I spent three hours this morning at a picnic table at a busy outdoor coffee place where I kept my head up, with a simple goal to stay till I was bored out my mind, since boredom is magic. I finished Berlin Interlude, I doodled, I wrote, I tried not to take it personally that everyone there was beautiful but me.
Late one night in 2003, I played the CD of Low’s “Things We Lost in the Fire” (where “Closer” comes from) on repeat while I drank Stoli blue label, not passing out as quickly as I wanted. (I’d bought blue label because it was 100 proof for the same price as the 80 proof red label.) One of my warmest memories was the way Simon, my Chow Chow-German Shepherd mix would snuggle his 90 pounds of shedding fur next to me when I was pickled. I held that dog like a stuffed toy and cried. That was some teenage intensity right there.
I’ve always craved that, usually looking for tears, not angst. Angsty Ben wanted to blast Sisters of Mercy or My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, but the college athletes on my dorm floor would freely storm into the room to turn off my CD deck and shoot me a look. If you want to cry, no one’s really going to bother you, and more importantly, you’re not going to bother anybody else.
Anyway, if I’d been born in the 80s, I’d probably be loading up with meaning from, like, Cursive, Bowling for Soup and My Chemical Romance. (Those are emo bands, right?) But I’m 50, so I walked home and listened to this on repeat. Through headphones, of course. I’d hate to annoy.
Where the title of this post comes from