I'm Not Sick But I'm Not Well

I just spent seventy minutes writing feverishly about the rise of secularist subject matter in Germanic art, and what do I feel like doing? Writing more. Cause, you know, the fun. Actually, I consider it of anthropological interest to document my state of non-mind immediately post my final final.

Warning, this post is going to be scattered with lyrics, both with or without context. Specimen one, from the immortal and underrated Harvey Danger: "A shooting star is a little piece of cosmic debris desperately wanting to fall to earth. It doesn't get too far, it's not a real star, it's hardly even worth footnotes in your memoir . . . it's just a surrogate connection, leaving you all alone." I'm just saying, that's fairly impressive wordology for guys whose big hit was "Flagpole Sitta." But they were in Seattle in the 90s, and therefore they are gods. Right? Right.

My work installed a new Big-Brother soul-crushing fun-sucking anal-retentive internet filter. The end result, other than my general misery: no Pandora for Mary. It's pretty horrific. To compensate for the lack of bass beat to accompany my always rhythmic mad 10-key skillz, I've had to dig up my massive stack of mixed cds that are cryptically worded with phrases like "Sweet n Low" and "Why Not?" It's quite the adventure, sticking in a cd with less than the slightest hint of an idea as to its theme or content.

There have been some delightful side effects to this state of affairs. For instance, I have rediscovered a) I know all the words to Savage Garden's "I Want You," and therefore b) I am just the awesomest. That was sooo worth the better half of a semester three years ago when Alyssa and I methodically mastered each verse with brief bursts of enthusiasm every time we got to say "chic-a-cherry-cola."

Also, I would be remiss if I didn't tip my hat to Mary nine-point-seven (there are many, many versions of Mary, I'm thinking I"ll need to break it into Eon, Era, and Epoch soon) for glorying in the poetic grandness of the Josie and the Pussycats soundtrack. Rock these lyrics:
"It took 6 whole hours
And 5 long days
4 all your lies to come undone.
And those 3 small words
Were way 2 late
Cause you can't see that I'm the 1."
Did you see what they did there, with the numbers and the word play? Bloody Shakespeare, that's what that is.

The crazy aspect that keeps me up at night concerning how much I loved/shamefully still love things like Josie and the Pussycat is not my possibly terrible taste, but rather how it pulls into relief how trapped everybody is their immediate reality. I look back at Mary 9.7 and immediately become guilty of historian no-no numero uno: I apply my contemporary philosophies, morals, and expectations to my past self. Which means even though it was me doing all those stupid things, I still can't really tell you why it was that I was/am/will be such a mess. I'm in the best position to recall enough to sketch out a detailed outlined of my past actions, but I feel like I have no more of an upperhand in actually dissecting and predicting my own motivations than any stranger would.

It's like all the circular conversations in my International Organizations class. We discuss again and again the options for peacekeeping, sanctions, regional organizations, but when it comes right down to it we fail to come up with anything innovative or at least mildly better than this mess of an anarchic globe because we cannot fundamentally comprehend what it would be like to live in a world that was structured differently than what we got.

The occasional writer might get all Utopian on me, but I normally find that irritating. A current global political structure without the United States as unipolar power is too essential to our understanding of the underpinnings of our life for us to really "get" multilateralism or a balance of power set-up. Our parents couldn't conceive a world without the Soviets breathing down our necks, and now that we got it we don't know where the hell we're going to go next. It's like we keep on tripping into a new scenario where we pause, straighten, orient ourselves, and then promptly forget everything that had come before. This is the fragmentory, fleeting world we live in, and it's the state of my personal psyche as well.

But back to the important meaty issues. I'm pretty sure that the reason Poison is one of my top-all-charts best-studying/living/breathing/showering/make out-music ever is because it taps into my Inner Mullet. Everybody's got one of them inside--either an Inner Mullet, Inner Trailer Trash, Inner Hillbilly, they all correlate with a seriously mediocre genre of music that creates a bliss factor far beyond their own chord-progression power (I won't disclose what matches up with trailer trash and hillbilly, I don't wanna get in trouble).

But regardless of the causation, Poison is my happy place. And luckily, love-ily, it is now also irreconcilably linked in my brain with the road trip I took with my sister and her mess o' kids for the previously blogged and lauded Denver Trip Of King Tut Mind Melting Goodness. I think I'm just going to have to make Poison my life long culture-journey theme music. Which will totally discombobulate the minds of my future art history students when we go on summer trips to Europe. Ohh, I like this idea even more now. Almost as much as I like G. Love and Special Sauce. Man I should have been in my twenties in the nineties. The music was so much better, and the technology wasn't sophisticated enough to make me as paranoid as I now am. Stupid bunch of Android Cylons.

Oi!! Quick rant. I love me some Hieronymous Bosch. I really do, and it's not his fault that he's a product of his people's preconceptions and indoctrinations, but in "Garden of Earthly Delights" the Garden of Eden panel depicts the creation of Eve as being instantaneous--and in fact synonymous--with the creation of evil. Those kind of historic visual gems genuinely make me want to hurl my cookies across the room every time. It's been noted by wise people that the only type of content in films that I genuinely cannot sit through is the debasement, marginalization, and subjugation of women by men, especially when those men are supposed to be their partners, lovers, and sympathizers. I get so tense it takes me days to wind down just thinking about it.

But when I do need to wind down, this is what I listen to:

I don't wanna be a rusty suit of armor
Or a tumbledown forgotten castle in your mind
I just wanna be a twisted willow
So I can leave your shallow thinking far behind

I can feel the darkness in your shadows
And the melting of ice behind your troubled eyes
And the discoloration of all the words you're saying
As you're hunted without mercy by your lies

I've flown so high I'll never return
And I've been to the bottom of the dregs of your troubled soul
And I've basked in the sun of your revelations
But I guess you and I, we have different goals

So go and slay your dragons in blind amusement
And topple imagination with a song
At the moon, it plays little mind games
So you'll wonder where all the stars have gone

You have spoken to me about nothing
And you've shown me fantasies in a crystal ball
And you've promised me the world for my asking
Don't you know that to me it means nothing at all?

Because I know you'll leave me a burned out matchbox of forgotten roses
Inside a get-well card I had to address by myself
But that's not what I need from another stranger
So I guess I better do things without your help

Ultimate Spinach, y'all. So glad something went right in Boston in the 60s.

I know, posting lyrics is lame, emo, and lazy. So sue. I just freaking schooled finals.

I just re-read this and it's possible a little bit of my essay/paper-writing vocab snuck in there. Profuse apologies.

Twelve hours later I re-read it again, and man there are some pretty interesting spots of grammar going on there. I'll preserve them as an homage to taking school seriously (it's a first!).