"Just out!" I'd grumbled earlier, when my parents asked where I was going. "I don't know!" was my response when pressed about when I'd be back. "I'll be back when I'm back!"
That level of saltiness toward my parents was not only unprecedented, but unwarranted, and I'm surprised one of them (my dad especially) didn't intervene. But they were nothing if not amazing parents, always seeming to know when to rein me in, and when to let out the leash a little. I like to think they must have sensed this was one of those teenage moments that just had to be left alone, allowed to fix itself.
And it surely was. My first love was out with someone else that night, and as I put on my shoes and shouldered into a light jacket, I was, for the first time ever, experiencing the slow, agonizing shred of jealousy.
Sadly, it wasn't even a true relationship. She and I had a strong connection, had made out a few times even, but at the end of the day, it was really just the dreaded "friendship". She knew this, because she was older and smarter, and I guess I knew it too. I just didn't want to accept it.
She lived a ways out of town, so it wasn't at all easy to get together. Behind us lay a year of long but largely unsatisfying phone conversations, during the most recent of which, the words no guy wants to hear had reluctantly but determinedly escaped her lips: I was such an amazing person, she loved and respected me...but as a friend. She had designated (demoted) me to friendship status, then went off to her prom with some douche...
Okay, I don't know if he was a douche. In my mind he was, anyway.
Plopped onto that was an extra greasy dollop of futility surrounding the difference in our ages. This girl was not a freshman like me, she was a senior, and about to graduate high school. Long, unsatisfying phone conversations lay behind, and now a long summer of frustration lay ahead, at the end of which she would go off to college, and I would enter 10th grade. Let me tell you (or maybe I don't have to, actually), it's one sorry state of affairs when you're the sophomore in that equation.
A year later, Summer of '89, I would have my drivers license and my own car, and I would stay out all night for the first time, wind up on a beach on the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore of Lake Superior, watching dawn crack the sky in the east at 3:30 in the morning, and everything would be put into perspective. In other words, so much would be different in barely 12 months' time. But it wasn't even imaginable now. Now, I was feeling sort of helpless. I had no car, no license, a heart overflowing with feelings I didn't know what to do with, and I was about to be left behind to boot.
I had gotten into the habit of coping with unrequited love by doing something creative; over the course of that year, I'd written all sorts of songs about that girl, made funny videos for her (and her family's) amusement, written poetry, started novels ("Jared Glovsky is the author of several unfinished novels..." was for a long time a critical element of any "author bio" I composed). But none of that was working on that night in May 1988. I didn't want to "create"...if anything I wanted to destroy something, destroy everything. I knew I couldn't do that, but I also knew I couldn't sit still...I couldn't stay seated. It was almost like a panic attack. I had to do something. I had to get out.
Six years before the movie came out, it was a real Forrest Gump-type moment in my young life. I didn't have anywhere to go, just felt I needed to go somewhere. I simply could not sit cooped up in my bedroom with the silence of my phone blaring in my ear. Forrest Gump started running. I starting walking.
By some miracle, I'd made it past my parents, and as I stepped outside and started down the block, I felt like I was discovering the night. There really was something magical about being out so late, so close to the midnight hour...even past the midnight hour....and on a lovely spring night smelling of the rain that had passed through earlier, to boot. I avoided downtown, where so many of the kids I knew from school were cruising and hanging out (God forbid I run into her...). I hit the side streets instead, and I liked feeling incognito...
...even kind of nebulous.
That first late-night walk was a monumental step in my life. I was in turmoil, but for the first time ever, I found myself coping with that turmoil within the framework of something larger than myself. And what I really discovered was an undeniable comfort in knowing that I was part of a larger state of affairs. It made my turmoil seem less Earth-shattering, somehow. Not any less painful, necessarily, but less important...if that makes any sense. Perspective.
That I grew up in a place where I could take a late night walk safely was itself a miracle not lost on me. I had a cousin who was my age, had grown up in New Jersey, in pretty much a concrete jungle surrounded by expressways and neighborhoods he was well-advised to stay out of. He had a single path to and from the Sears store near his house, and not much else. It made me feel better to think that whatever he was doing on that night, whatever teenage malaise he might have been going through at the dawn of adulthood and however he was coping with it, it wasn't by walking around the streets of New Brunswick. He couldn't walk anywhere he pleased. He simply didn't have that option.
I would eventually get a Walkman, and on walks like these (of which there would be countless more in the next two decades) I would bury myself in my music (Smokey Robinson would be discovered as a powerful inoculation that September, right around the time that girl went off to college). But for now, I had just the sounds in my head, and I'm not sure why, but the sound in my head as I made my way up and down the tree-shrouded streets of my hometown, the sound accompanying so much newness, so much revelation in that sweet spring darkness: "Angel" by Aerosmith. It was on the charts at the time (in fact, I think it was the theme of the prom she went to with douche guy...) and positively ringing in my ears as I conquered each new block, visible for just a moment or two passing under the streetlight at the corner.
I came back from that walk feeling better about things, really a new kid, ready to be a new young man...and the song has kept a special place in my heart ever since. It's not a happy song, I don't think, but there's a spaciousness to its sound that was well suited to the new space in my mind back then, and to this day, it makes me think of excitement and anticipation...the hopeful notion that each exit in life is merely an entrance to someplace else.
"I'm in love, and I don't know if I can face the night..."
#228) "Blinded by the Light" by Manfred Mann - Another one of those rare examples of a cover version that outshines the original, although I'm sure many purist Bruce fans would disagree. The driving force of this song is the lyrics; Bruce's early stream-of-consciousness style is pretty obvious here. And if you know that, I guess it's hard to take Manfred Mann's "interpretation" seriously. In a way, Bruce Springsteen is like The Beatles, and Tom Waits...maybe everyone ought to just leave him alone. Don't try to "cover" him.
That being said, this is an instance where I simply came to like the first version of the song I heard. Bruce's version is a deep track, whereas Manfred Mann's has been residing on classic rock radio for three decades now.
I also think Manfred's arrangement does the poetry of the lyrics justice, particularly the bass line and the dreamy middle section, which crescendos to the most important line in the song: "Mama always told me not to look into the eyes of the sun, but Mama, that's where the fun is..."
If nothing else, it's just a fun song, great to sing to. And oh yeah, it's "revved up like a deuce", not "wrapped up like a douche"...
Unless we're talking about my first love's prom date. ;-)
"She got down but she never got tight, she's gonna make it through the night..."
#229) "Tik Tok" by Kesha - Yes, it's true I've complained about Kesha pretty negatively (and loudly) in the past, and I guess I stand by it, for the most part. Her saccharine, image-saturated (and yet completely contrived) persona is probably more emblematic of the times we live in, and the generation that spawned her, than anything. She is the Millennial fantasy girl, absorbing all the self-absorption, willful ignorance and infantile emo leanings of what academic Mark Bauerlein has called "the dumbest generation", and blowing it back into our faces in a kind of musical and aesthetic belch.
That being said, I've mellowed out tremendously about her and her generation. My objection was mostly about the larger thing that created her, but screw it, I don't care anymore. And at this point, for better or worse, Kesha, and all that her glitter and dollar sign posturing implies, has become historical. She is to the Millennial generation what the flannel-wearing goatee "grunge" guy eventually became to Generation X...or the hippie-cum-yuppie to the Baby Boomers...a totem for an age that is passing faster than we (or they) realize.
So therefore, "Tik Tok" is no longer an annoying (rather than impressive) affront to the senses, so much as just an extremely catchy pop song. Maybe that's always what it was. For her part, Kesha, it would seem, has known it all along. I admit, I may have been mistaken: it would seem she's not the persona she presents, and isn't really expecting anyone to take her (or it) too seriously or literally...even if they have.
I think "Tik Tok" is a much better produced song (more complex) than anything she's done since, more listenable, less laughable. Although I still can't watch the video without feeling a little grody.
I laugh a little too, however, and I think I'm supposed to...so, there's that. ;-)
"But we kick them to the curb unless they look like Mick Jagger..."
