Look What We Have Built Together

Hello!

So I’ve been caught again in the whole not updating thing.  I’m sorry!! I am in Europe now (bye bye Hoyt) and starting my study abroad program in Salamanca tomorrow! I won’t have internet in my homestay (eep!) and I didn’t have access to the internet for much of the past few weeks, so I can’t promise I’ll be able to update much in the coming months.

Here’s to a wonderful and hopefully life-changing semester!

Down by Okkervil River, slow silent thick and black, I stared into the water, and the water it stared back. The night it fell from tangles of the branches on the shore as it had on Okkervil River before. Down by Okkervil River’s cigarettes and rusty tires, we made ourselves an altar, we lit our nightly fires. And the smoke lay thick and smothered all the skunk cabbage and vines where Gods were born and Gods lay down to die. With your hand inside my pocket, you whispered in my ear, “We have come from ugliness to find some refuge here.” With this bracken for a blanket, where these limbs stick out like bones, we have found a place where we can be alone. And I tried to tell you, as I kissed your hard dry lips, all the things I dreamed about. I touched your bone white hips. Far away our parents slept in while we watched our fire burn. They dreamed of nothing and got nothing in return. And the water slipped on slowly past our bodies in the weeds, pulling plastic wrap and razors on its current through the reeds. Then I woke up one cold morning, felt an absence at my back, and I searched and stared but only the river stared back.

- “Okkervil River Song,” Will Sheff

As a continuation of my adventures of digging through the endless abyss that is my iPod (thanks again Freddy for the 1000-song donation last summer!), this week I listened to Steel Train’s Trampoline straight through.  I’d listened to certain songs from the album before that I liked and thought were interesting, for example “I Feel Weird.”  I’d noticed a strange chaotic kind of jumbled quality to the music, like sometimes it was overwhelmed by itself and fell into an unexpected tangent.

“I Feel Weird” is very influenced by the events of 9/11, and much of the rest of Trampoline seems to suffer from a sort of PTSD.

“Dakota” talks about “awful things washing away in the rain.”  Its first verse discusses a cross-dressing man who becomes attached to an older man who gets him into drugs.  The second verse talks about a boy being terrorized and left to die alone in the rain.  The song meanders with a sort of psychological distance from these horrible events.  The singer “knows” the cross-dressing man, but doesn’t explain the depth of the relationship.  It could have been his best friend, or he could have just read about it in the paper and gone on with his day.
“Dakota” is easily the saddest song on the album, but “Killing Monsters in the Rain,” which I heard for the first time on the bus to work this week, is in some ways more powerful to me.  The chorus doesn’t stray too much from the verse, but in the bridge, the singer gets overwhelmed -

I can almost imagine him spitting on the ground as he sputters the lines in quick succession:”I was cold/ In line/ Picked Out/Backed down/Fucked up/Out of love/ Out of time/ I fell/ I’m never going back again.”

These lyrics are sung with a ragged desperation, but before hearing the rest of the song, I might still see these lines as hopeful.  He had hit rock bottom, yes, but didn’t that mean the only place to go was up? In my interpretation of the lyrics, not so. Not at all. Because when he reaches the bridge again, he adds:

Then you heard/ Then you smiled/ And I fell/ Open eyes/ I can see that ghost/ That soul was buried alive/ And I swore I’d never see that place again.

I can’t know exactly what he’s talking about, but to me this suggested that the singer was initially picked up, backed down, fucked up, as a result of heartbreak.  He “swore” he’d never see that place again, but when the “you” smiled, he fell again, as foolishly as he had before.

“We can kill monsters in the rain,” is the main refrain of the song, which he placidly repeats over and over, reminiscent of David Bowie’s, “We can be heroes, just for one day.” The singer still believes that when he finds love it will be larger than life, and it will save him - even though all it’s done, over and over, is destroy him.

“I Feel Weird,” “Dakota,” and “Kill Monsters in the Rain” by Steel Train

I’ve been drinking black tea for ages now, my favorite being the illusive Berry Black Raspberry Darjeeling tea:

Lately, tea has just not been doing the trick.  Today, I had my first cup of Peet’s coffee…. and I experienced the INCREDIBLE AMAZING EFFECTS OF UBER CAFFEINE!!! 

I was like, woah, I can’t believe they let me do drugs at work!! I was literally shaking with energy, and went from being half dead to WIRED!! I understand why they talk so quickly on Gilmore Girls now.  I now know why my mother is insane! She just wants more caffeine! 

AND THUS, COFFEE OPENS A WHOLE NEW WORLD FOR LAURA!!!

Two nights ago, I had a nightmare about August 14.  August 14 is the day I have to move out of Hoyt and move on to the next exciting chapter of my life - Europe! Spain! I have every reason to be beyond excited.  I am so blessed to have the opportunities I do.  Our lives are so great! I said this once to my friends at Hoyt, admittedly overzealously, and they have been making fun of me ever since.  But it’s true! “Our lives are so great!” When will we ever be this young and free again?  Never.  That’s what’s scary about it.  The whole song and dance of growing up, getting a job, etc. etc. the things we are all constantly trying NOT to think about… well.  We’re gonna have to.

In the present moment, though, I have three weeks at Hoyt.  Just three more dinner shifts, 10 more days at VolunteerMatch, 3 potential open mics to perform at… I just don’t want to think about it.  Thinking about time, or lack thereof, changes my whole perspective.  I’m suddenly anxious, withdrawn, insecure.  There’s so much pressure to make things happen that I’ve been procrastinating and/or thinking about all summer - as the prospect of failure hurdles closer and closer.  I will do my best to just enjoy the time I have left.  No one wants to sour good times with thinking about the end of them.  But I know what the Modest Mouse song means when it says, “the good times are killing me.”

We talked all night, oh, but what the hell did we say?

Regina Spektor personifies everything I love about song lyrics.  I’ve jumped on the Regina bandwagon far too late - I’m listening to 2004’s Begin to Hope just this summer.  I’m like that a lot of the time.  Because my iTunes has been messed up, I’ve been combing back through the old music on my iPod I never had a chance to listen to instead of ceaselessly adding new things.  I’ve been rediscovering my old favorites - the perfection of Death Cab’s Forbidden Love EP, which they haven’t been able to top since.  The songs bring back old memories, of when I first started listening to the music I listen to now, the summer before high school, holed up in the guest room of my house late at night writing stories I wouldn’t ever show my parents. 

I listened to music then as an escape.  I hid from my family and wrote and listened only when they were asleep.  I hid my writing in envelopes behind my old children’s books.  No one at school knew about these secrets - no one would understand.  In high school, always sequestered by what seemed acceptable, what made me stand out the least.  Being called “weird” would be the worst insult possible.  I worried about being invisible, but I was the one who held myself in that spot.  “College will be better,” everyone told me.  They were right.  I don’t want to go back there, but I love the same songs just as much, if not more, than when they were my only happiness.

Somehow, listening to “Photobooth” now - as an adult with a new perspective, less swayed by the romance and more moved by the realism - still takes me somewhere indescribable.  Different parts of the lyrics stand out now.  Then it was the bristling excitement of “our clothes on a pile on the ottoman,” starved for any kind of adventure, romantic or lustful.  Now it’s “as the summer’s ending, the cold air will rush your hard heart away - you were so condescending as the alcohol drowned the days.”  I understand the outcome now like I desperately lacked the experience then. 

Regina and I didn’t mix in high school.  Her voice was too weird, the lyrics trying too hard to be “quirky” or “different,” but I can’t think of a better time for me to discover her than now.  While it would be easy to fall into a hardened cynicism about all the songs of ill-fated love, all the times I’ve felt brokenhearted, Regina reminds us, even in the most tragic moments, that childhood doesn’t really end.  She effortlessly avoids cliches and other cheesy pitfalls.  If I had listened to Regina Spektor in high school, I think it would have helped me realize that “weird” isn’t the worst insult - far from it.  As a kid you just want to fit in, but when you grow up you learn that you only get anywhere by setting yourself apart.