jamming to this song yesterday
Green Day - Time Of Your Life
Torn | MySpace Video
It's like when I close my eyes and try to remember when it was in my life that this song blasted from cheap car stereos or from porch parties with boom boxes silver -I always think of her.
We were at a pivotal part of our life-really on the cusp of believing we were grown up.
Funny.
I think I was hanging out with some bartender who didn't even really like me that flash frozen part of my life in 1997. I was drinking away my tips in an Irish pub best known for brewed beer and 80's dance night -where all the freaks like me could seek shelter from the storm at least two nights a week and fling our arms in the sky.
The bartender was for those fleeting weeks perhaps someone who might save me and turn me into a normal person. He was pleasantly average and attractive. He could make me behave like a girl who made dinner in tiny apartments and didn't go out every single night. A normal girl who loved only one person at a time and had a clear trajectory towards adulthood.
Only he didn't. He just faded away in the outright rude and immature fashion that 23 year old boys do- he just stopped liking me and I faded into the background of a song sung by Dexy's Midnight Runners on a Tuesday night. My shadow flickering across the wood paneled walls never tempted him again and I am sure now that it was because I was intensity wrapped into a parcel that no one could hold for too long.
I was like a firecracker or a hot potato being passed around.
I was dangerous buzzing bee.
Sometimes I wish I could listen to a song from the 90's and just enjoy it.
But I think we are just branded like cattle by the music of our youth.
it's why you see people stare off into space sometimes at cafes
or grannies with wet eyes in the market
or baby boomer's driving convertibles with loud all around
we just can't help it
the music is everywhere
like a tiny melodic line
that leads us straight to the past
to a place we used to know
10 comments:
oh Amy, I love this. Can't wait to read your novel.
I this sentence," I think we are just branded like cattle by the music of our youth."
SO, so true!
Oh Amy, YES. I think what I love about you so much is that you put such beautiful words to things that float around my mind and heart that I feel alone in, that I can't explain.
I feel the pit in my stomach, the strange nostalgia for even the hardest of things in my past whenever I hear songs from then. And I want to just sit and listen to them anyway because it's all who I am, every beautiful or rotten thing. I go back with the music and I spend some time in those moments and try to figure out what I feel and somehow it's good. And sometimes painful.
i have been intensity wrapped in a parcel no- one could hold for too long.... i have songs and mine wasn't a bar tender he was a plumber but.....i am nodding with my heart
Amen! I think that every time I hear a song... You took the words right out of my brain. I can never just "listen", I have to play that "movie" from the past. Sometimes good, sometimes bad- but always I think, "God, could I just listen to this like I used to?".
I always think of you, too, when that song smacks me in the face like all those mornings when I'd wake up from a late late night and panic because I had to retrieve my car before I got one of those ridiculous parking tickets. Miss you, and promise to see you soon.
uggh, yes.
sometimes i wish it was just music.
not a far off place with tons of e-m-o-t-i-o-n-s.
said beautifully. and still DMB songs i cannot listen to thanks to a certain someone....
Beautiful writing. Music is definitely all tangled up with my memories. Can't have one without the other. That green day song will always mean something to me too.
I had written this lovely, sweet, clever comment about how I think you are brave. Then it got deleted.
I wish I wrote like you, dressed like you, was loud like you. I am always so happy reading your words.
Mara
(Ser's little sister, Patti's friend, your intense admirer.)
"But I think we are just branded like cattle by the music of our youth."
I had a moment of realization when I read this.
What is it about music that makes us *feel* so much?
(I love your writing style, your voice, so much.)
-elizabeth
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