the tools you need
APRIL REGROUP
My online diary and I needed some time apart. I have plenty of unnecessary typings but for a while there I just didn’t feel like sharing. I wouldn’t say that this entry is “worthy” of sharing, we don’t operate on judgment and meritocracies like that around here. It’s more akin to how yoga teachers say that chin mudra can be palms up for receptivity or palms down for grounding. I have had my internet-sharing hands placed palms-down for a few months now.
Speaking of shaky psychic ground, I shan’t give spoilers but if you have SuccessionSluts(™) in your life, please check on them. We are not okay, and I am speaking as someone who knew that the thing that happened was going to happen. We need hot drinks, gentle pats, maybe one of those space blankets from after the marathon.
CHILDHOOD MUSICAL BAD MEMORY
I heard a lot of popular music as a small child, either at home or on the car radio. I had forgotten about one song that scared me until I heard it again recently and looked it up (with some difficulty, for the following reasons).
The song is apparently called “Lido Shuffle” and what worried me about it as a kid was that I could not understand one word of it. I don’t mean like “what is this song about.” I mean that it literally sounded like gibberish. I think after repeated hearings I could identify “one more for the ro-oo-oo-ooad” but the rest of it was just a baritone yawping of random syllables over a driving beat, with a synth interlude that did nothing to tone down the strangeness. I was very small and it made me feel weird that adults would enjoy a song that was just stuttering “bloo bloo blawp woah ohh ohh.” Then it gets worse, because the song was on the radio when I was driving somewhere with my dad and I asked “who sings this” and he said “Boz Scaggs” and I was like BOZ?!!?! SCAGGS???!!? My dad is speaking gibberish too, I will never understand the world!
I have been keeping a dream-notebook lately and, maybe because this stupid Boz Scaggs memory was on my mind, I dreamed that Boz Scaggs was murdered. I did not witness the crime or anything like that, just someone came to me and said “oh, Boz Scaggs was murdered.” I looked up Mr Scaggs the next day and he was not and has never been murdered, although he did lose everything in one of the California wildfires. Sorry to hear it sir, and I bear no ill will even though you screwed up my preschool sense of reality with your guttural sputtering.
ENEMIES
On a walk last week I cut through the college campus near my house and there was a lone goose hanging out near the sidewalk. I gave the goose the finger because that is my standard protocol with geese. I didn’t realize the youth walking behind me had noticed this until I heard “Damn that’s cold. What did he do?” I did not engage the youths but come on: you know what geese do! So many bad things! I hate them (the geese; not the youths) much less than pandas but they are still on the shitlist.
LT has occasionally remarked that this campus, as well as the one of the much larger and much farther away university attended by Aaron, seem “deserted.” This word, in my opinion, is incorrect in the case of Aaron’s university, although it is true that you are more likely to see students in groups going to or coming from somewhere, rather than just rolling around on grassy quads doing a whole lot of nothing, as was the standard at our (extremely) small liberal arts college in the 1990s.
I think (puts on Cultural Critic hat) (which is sometimes just an Old, Out-Of-Touch person’s hat) there could be a few reasons for the difference. First, I think that today’s college students, especially at a large flagship university, are legit busier than we were. Yes, college me had work to do, but as a literature/language dork it tended to be in big evenly spaced clumps like papers and research projects and stuff. I was definitely able to go to my classes, complete the few bits of simpler homework I had (Greek translations, poetry workshop peer critiques) and still have plenty of time for public lounging. Then of course final-exam time or the paper deadline actually approaches and everyone switches to living on icky black gas station coffee and having extended panic attacks in the library every evening. Good times!
Another reason is that today’s lucky golden college children have texting! And social media! They do not need to drape their attractive bodies over available public spaces because they can pose their attractive bodies for a photo and post it online. They can text the person they would like to know better and propose going to hang out somewhere specific, rather than posting up at the coffee shop with a pack of cigarettes and a carefully chosen book and hoping that person stops by. Heck, they can keep the entire flirtation contained to text if they want.
I do not mean to make any digs whatsoever about the downsides of social media; the world does that effectively and repetitively enough. My point is that the behavior is exactly the same! Assuming I am speaking to a fellow Old here: you did things for “likes” too! You brought the “right” book or stack of comics to be seen reading at lunch. You wore sunglasses when you didn’t need to, fished the band t-shirt out of the laundry, and went specifically to the graveyard with your sketchbook to smoke cigarettes. You told your funniest jokes very loudly at the party and did your best, most dramatic basketball moves when your crush was in the stands. You just couldn’t tell as easily who had noticed, and instead of DMs you had to hear from a friend that your interested party had asked their friend to ask a friend of yours if you were going to the thing on Friday. Technology! For all its ills, the hookups have been quantumly facilitated!
—mimi smartypants has an intermediate position in the narrative.