Better Memories, Sweaters, back to basics, #25
For most of the memories of my life, if I am forced to think of them, I have a hard time figuring out what qualifies as a truly great day. I have many cherished days in my life, but it’s hard to tell if the moment was great because of the people who you were with at the time made it seem all the more wonderful, or if there was one hour so great that it made the day seem all the more rosy in retrospect.
But I can tie many things to certain moments, from an album (and I usually can remember what store I bought from), to a movie, to a girl, or to an event. I don’t claim to know how the human memory system works, and I am hardly the right person to do so, I have a better long term memory than anyone I have ever met. Not for information like a human sponge kinds of way impressive like a Ken Jennings, and my short term memory is terrible, but in matters about life no one I know is close, and I am not boasting, because this gift can wreck havoc on decisions most days. I can remember the first time I met most of the people in my life, from the place, what they are wearing, what I said, and what I was feeling. If you’re inclined, ask me, I’ll give you the story.
I look back at one of my favorite pieces of clothing. It’s a simple grey sweater from Abercrombie and Fitch. It’s a V neck cut, it’s made of wool of the semi rough variety, and while I have since bought a more in fashion grey sweater that is more comfortable, I still cherish it, even if it’s nearing 10 years old.
I’ll note first that for close to two years, the sweater smelled like smoke, not from cigs, but from a fire.
When I was 17 or so, me and my friends had a sleepover at my friend Will’s cabin. It was at best a shack, it was an early 20th century pump house Will facetiously said used to house slaves (both the dates and the state put this in the false category, but high school girls believed it). It had a front room about 12’ by 10’ and a back room that was 10’ by 6’. We partied there close to 100 times in college, and that night it slept 20 people, give or take.
This was during the winter months of Indiana, which, while not near the seasons in Canada or Wisconsin or Minnesota, they still get bellow freezing. Yet they come in deceptive ways, it’s not cold enough to freeze up a car, it’s cold enough for hypothermia. We had two space heaters for the little house, and both were monopolized by Will and four people in the back room. Leaving the remaining 16 or so of us to be heated by a fireplace.
There were a few highlights of this night.
We stole a fire hydrant a few months before. Watching the pee turn to icicles is a pure teenage joy.
My friend Josh and his girl (now wife) were opening fooling around in the dark. During the song breaks of an album I heard: “No it’s cool, take my pants off.” *fumbling of belt buckle* “It’s cool.” It was miserable then, but hysterical now.
I put on Disintegration by The Cure for all of us to fall asleep to. A few moments later Brad comes out and changes the CD. I ask him what he put on. He’s silent for about three seconds and then answers with “YEAAAAAAAAHHHHHH.” License to Ill by the Beastie Boys came on, full volume.
After the Beastie Boys moment, a few people stayed up. Since we were between 14 and 17, we were talking about sex. We started to come up with professions for our penises. Patrick Taurel trumped us all by saying, “Mine’s a fireman. He doesn’t come out to play. HE COMES OUT TO WORK!”
In the morning, most of the girls and couples had gone home. The core group of guys I hung out with were sitting there in the morning, nursing a hangover and shooting the shit. Everyone that night signed a brick in the fireplace. We looked over the signatures, and upon coming upon a girl that Brad failed miserably with, he suggested adding “No tits” in between her first and last name.
I do have to note, that I, and everyone in that cabin, owe my life to Josh’s wife, Erica, who got up in the middle of the night to go the bathroom. In doing so, she noticed that the smoke was a tad heavy, and she cracked the door open to let air flow in. We would have likely suffocated. I could have been a teenage tragedy, but all I got out of it was a cedar smoked sweater.
Second:
The first time I ever went out on a real date in high school (meaning it didn’t suck, and I cared about the girl) the night began with me going to Puccini’s in Indy on a triple date (bad already) only to have my (older, but younger than me) sister and her friends show up at the exact same restaurant. Being that me and my sisters were never really close, that the divorce of our parents cause a rift (I sided with dad, she sided with my mom more so, and my younger sister was too young to pick sides and ran in the other direction). We never trusted each other at home, and did so with a tad more venom than normal sibling rivalry. Having the family dynamic present itself (even if in my mind alone) during the first social moments of a physical relationship put me in multiball mode, trying to get everything done in a short moment of panic instead of trying to focus on one task at time.
At the end of the night, we walked out of the theater to find her mother on the hood of her car, and then running to grab her and shout to me: “I am sure you may be a good guy, but my daughter hasn’t learned how to be responsible enough to date yet.”
The weird thing is that I walked away from that night feeling a sense of relief. While I am a hopeless romantic at heart, most of my mind & the fight or flight systems seems hard wired for the one night stand.
When I got home that night, I was privy to an empty house. I got a call from my dad, and shortly thereafter one from my mother asking if I was alive or in trouble. This all stems back to the girl at the time, who misread the movie times, and while our movie started @ 8 or so, she misread the next showing at 9:30. It’s a simple mistake for a girl to make when telling her parents, and since I knew nothing nefarious was planned for that night, it was a mistake of naiveté and not of stupidity or rebellion (she went to Cornell or Princeton, and was smart enough to get away with fooling her parents). This gaffe however sent her first generation immigrant parents into panic mode, thinking their little girl was doomed for the worst on her first date. They had called both of my parents, multiple times, and did so thinking the worst case was the only likelihood.
So I got home, deleted the numerous messages, including one from my sister to my mother telling the family I was on my first date (see this wasn’t entirely in my mind, and if growing up with women has taught me anything, you only need two women in your life, a wife, and a mother, and the wife’s primary duty, even more important than being there for you, is weaning his mother away from their life until the first baby is born. Then they become a baby sitter.) and doing the message in the sing-song, I care, but I am going to taunt later message diction. And then my mind went into panic mode, wondering what Sunday with the fam would be like and worse, what Monday at school would be like.
And while it didn’t in the end, perhaps love conquered all in the moments after my dinner with friends ended, and the girl and I took coffee and then a movie.
Like I said, my body is wired to get the most of a situation if a deadline seems imminent. I went for broke because I knew that the end of the night would be soured, but that I still had three or more hours left with this girl, and goddamnit, I was wild about the girl – I botched a test in biology because my mind was solely on her – and went from fumbling teenager to the dating gambler, one step below Casanova in moves, but just as likely to fail as Ted the Farmer.
After coffee, I walked her to my car to make the short drive from the restaurant to the movie theater. Instead of opening her door, I halfway trapped her against it, leaned in, and kissed her. It was a risk, because she could have wanted to wait, but I didn’t care, and it paid off. We walked into the movie theater as lovestruck teenagers in the worst way. I can’t swear that we had our hands in the other’s back pocket of their jeans, but I’m positive we looked that adorable and annoying.
It was one of the few moments of my dating life I was not trying to impress the girl, not even trying to be me, but just there in a moment with her. I know the movie we went to see: It was Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. I had read the book over the previous summer. I’ll be damned if I remember anything about the movie. We were in full on make-out mode. If the school of thought that sex changes everything is to be accredited, I may never get a more pure kiss than those of that night. I still had no conception of what sex would even be at that moment, I was happy just with that moment there. And I remember her slowly caressing my arm with her free hand, we were shoulder to shoulder, and with the hugging embrace impossible, she made sure I knew she was there.
I could go on about the tenderness of the first time, and how it’s never the same after you turn post-virgin, or whatever, especially since I could argue that due to the importance of the moment, I didn’t lose my v-card until I slept with a girl who I loved, but you can only get a handful of those moments. I remember that sweater, because of the way it felt blissful as she graced the fabric of it, and slid it up and down with the movements of her tenderness. My favorite fringe benefits of being in a relationship are back scratches in bed (I like to sleep on my stomach) and when she rubs the semi-ticklish sensitive region of my arm on the opposite side of the elbow.
That night in the cabin was a better night on the whole. Maybe because it had a coda moment in the morning to allow all of us to recap and better remember the full of the night. Drunken memories only solidify if they are refreshed within 24-48 hours usually. This sucks, because they always tend to be the ones worth telling the next weekend.
It’s a funny thing, because I remember the cabin night more often and usually in happier circumstances. The movie experience is almost a lost moment since I didn’t wind up with the girl and the night was mostly sour. This is why I am glad I kept the sweater… I don’t think of her often, if at all, anymore, but occasionally, when I wear it, I think of the moments in the movie theater and the first kiss outside of my car. Memories hold a long list of tangential feelings not related directly to that moment, yet it’s those feelings that didn’t matter then that embed the memory a little bit more securely. I’d gladly relive the movie theater again, but I’d take the chance to be 17 and with my friends in Indiana again.
Like I said, memories are a curse. If the impetus of this post was thinking about the 2004 Red Sox, sometimes a curse can be a blessing. Sometimes the great moments feel great because they erase the pain of the bad, those 8 straight wins, that moment in the movie theater wouldn’t be special if not for the pain of numerous other factors, with the Sox, if not for 2003, if not of the 0-3 deficit, it wouldn’t be the best sports moment of the last 25 years, and if I hadn’t been through those pains, I wouldn’t have the joy; if my moment in the movie theater wasn’t abruptly ended by her parents, and if I went on to marry her, it would have been a funny story about our first date, but I would have never seen it as the special moment that it was, just the moment when it started (which would likely be devalued by the socially bigger moments).
And so, why the hell not, I’ll give you all a video.
Bitter Sweet Symphony – The Verve
The song as a lyric sheet is as melancholy as it gets. I’ll leave it at that.
This lyric sheet is also composed upon a riff written and discarded by Mick and Keith, a fact that caused the Verve to have their biggest and only American hit to be rendered as a fluke and to only receive $1000 in royalties due to copyright infringement.
In the American history of hit singles that came from nowhere, ruled the charts, and then the artist never cracked the list again, this seems more part of a symptom trend than a song that got through on its own merits. It just sounded unique, which puts it in the bunch of Gnarls Barkley “Crazy” and Gorillaz “Feel good inc.” of the one hit crossover hits. Which means not that the Verve were a fluke, but that most Americans will view them at that. When it comes to being an American on music (and foreign policy of the Bush administration for that matter) I think I feel like what a self-hating Jew must feel like, I love and am proud to be what I am, but I hate my fellow constituents in this group most of the time, and mostly for superficial reasons.
Being an American music fan when most of the great music produced (that I like) isn’t American. Worse, even the stuff that is American that I like, few people have heard of in this country. This is why I spent 2 hours talking to a below average British chick last Friday night
I say all this, because in all likelihood, the odds of someone reading this blog that still owns Urban Hymns is low. Even those I know who read this blog who know of the band would likely state Ashcroft’s Lonely Soul as his best work… but whatever. I know British people like this album in the same way we like Nevermind or Ten, scaled down about 75%. This was an album that is solid, and one of the better of the Britpop scene of the 90’s. It’s not Morning Glory but it’s still better than most. The song wasn’t a fluke 6 minutes of brilliance, just the best 6 minutes the band ever wrote, which means people only compare the best to the rest, which isn’t fair for a lead single.
So it’s a gimmick, one-trick video. But it works. Single Shot style, and the only variation in theme comes at the end when Ashcroft is joined by the rest of the band to walk in unity.
Life is a miserable struggle, but it’s an easier and more enjoyable path when you have people that care about you and you to them likewise around you.
That’s the simple message of the video.
And it nails it.
The video is done in time to the single edit, it’s down to under 5 minutes.
And it’s one of the few videos I have ever seen that immediately after seeing it, I went out to buy the album.
Was it the band’s highpoint? History may be up there, as may be Lucky Man. But yeah, this was lighting in a bottle. They just had a few other bottles a little less bright.
Dave’s top 25 Videos: #25.
But I can tie many things to certain moments, from an album (and I usually can remember what store I bought from), to a movie, to a girl, or to an event. I don’t claim to know how the human memory system works, and I am hardly the right person to do so, I have a better long term memory than anyone I have ever met. Not for information like a human sponge kinds of way impressive like a Ken Jennings, and my short term memory is terrible, but in matters about life no one I know is close, and I am not boasting, because this gift can wreck havoc on decisions most days. I can remember the first time I met most of the people in my life, from the place, what they are wearing, what I said, and what I was feeling. If you’re inclined, ask me, I’ll give you the story.
I look back at one of my favorite pieces of clothing. It’s a simple grey sweater from Abercrombie and Fitch. It’s a V neck cut, it’s made of wool of the semi rough variety, and while I have since bought a more in fashion grey sweater that is more comfortable, I still cherish it, even if it’s nearing 10 years old.
I’ll note first that for close to two years, the sweater smelled like smoke, not from cigs, but from a fire.
When I was 17 or so, me and my friends had a sleepover at my friend Will’s cabin. It was at best a shack, it was an early 20th century pump house Will facetiously said used to house slaves (both the dates and the state put this in the false category, but high school girls believed it). It had a front room about 12’ by 10’ and a back room that was 10’ by 6’. We partied there close to 100 times in college, and that night it slept 20 people, give or take.
This was during the winter months of Indiana, which, while not near the seasons in Canada or Wisconsin or Minnesota, they still get bellow freezing. Yet they come in deceptive ways, it’s not cold enough to freeze up a car, it’s cold enough for hypothermia. We had two space heaters for the little house, and both were monopolized by Will and four people in the back room. Leaving the remaining 16 or so of us to be heated by a fireplace.
There were a few highlights of this night.
We stole a fire hydrant a few months before. Watching the pee turn to icicles is a pure teenage joy.
My friend Josh and his girl (now wife) were opening fooling around in the dark. During the song breaks of an album I heard: “No it’s cool, take my pants off.” *fumbling of belt buckle* “It’s cool.” It was miserable then, but hysterical now.
I put on Disintegration by The Cure for all of us to fall asleep to. A few moments later Brad comes out and changes the CD. I ask him what he put on. He’s silent for about three seconds and then answers with “YEAAAAAAAAHHHHHH.” License to Ill by the Beastie Boys came on, full volume.
After the Beastie Boys moment, a few people stayed up. Since we were between 14 and 17, we were talking about sex. We started to come up with professions for our penises. Patrick Taurel trumped us all by saying, “Mine’s a fireman. He doesn’t come out to play. HE COMES OUT TO WORK!”
In the morning, most of the girls and couples had gone home. The core group of guys I hung out with were sitting there in the morning, nursing a hangover and shooting the shit. Everyone that night signed a brick in the fireplace. We looked over the signatures, and upon coming upon a girl that Brad failed miserably with, he suggested adding “No tits” in between her first and last name.
I do have to note, that I, and everyone in that cabin, owe my life to Josh’s wife, Erica, who got up in the middle of the night to go the bathroom. In doing so, she noticed that the smoke was a tad heavy, and she cracked the door open to let air flow in. We would have likely suffocated. I could have been a teenage tragedy, but all I got out of it was a cedar smoked sweater.
Second:
The first time I ever went out on a real date in high school (meaning it didn’t suck, and I cared about the girl) the night began with me going to Puccini’s in Indy on a triple date (bad already) only to have my (older, but younger than me) sister and her friends show up at the exact same restaurant. Being that me and my sisters were never really close, that the divorce of our parents cause a rift (I sided with dad, she sided with my mom more so, and my younger sister was too young to pick sides and ran in the other direction). We never trusted each other at home, and did so with a tad more venom than normal sibling rivalry. Having the family dynamic present itself (even if in my mind alone) during the first social moments of a physical relationship put me in multiball mode, trying to get everything done in a short moment of panic instead of trying to focus on one task at time.
At the end of the night, we walked out of the theater to find her mother on the hood of her car, and then running to grab her and shout to me: “I am sure you may be a good guy, but my daughter hasn’t learned how to be responsible enough to date yet.”
The weird thing is that I walked away from that night feeling a sense of relief. While I am a hopeless romantic at heart, most of my mind & the fight or flight systems seems hard wired for the one night stand.
When I got home that night, I was privy to an empty house. I got a call from my dad, and shortly thereafter one from my mother asking if I was alive or in trouble. This all stems back to the girl at the time, who misread the movie times, and while our movie started @ 8 or so, she misread the next showing at 9:30. It’s a simple mistake for a girl to make when telling her parents, and since I knew nothing nefarious was planned for that night, it was a mistake of naiveté and not of stupidity or rebellion (she went to Cornell or Princeton, and was smart enough to get away with fooling her parents). This gaffe however sent her first generation immigrant parents into panic mode, thinking their little girl was doomed for the worst on her first date. They had called both of my parents, multiple times, and did so thinking the worst case was the only likelihood.
So I got home, deleted the numerous messages, including one from my sister to my mother telling the family I was on my first date (see this wasn’t entirely in my mind, and if growing up with women has taught me anything, you only need two women in your life, a wife, and a mother, and the wife’s primary duty, even more important than being there for you, is weaning his mother away from their life until the first baby is born. Then they become a baby sitter.) and doing the message in the sing-song, I care, but I am going to taunt later message diction. And then my mind went into panic mode, wondering what Sunday with the fam would be like and worse, what Monday at school would be like.
And while it didn’t in the end, perhaps love conquered all in the moments after my dinner with friends ended, and the girl and I took coffee and then a movie.
Like I said, my body is wired to get the most of a situation if a deadline seems imminent. I went for broke because I knew that the end of the night would be soured, but that I still had three or more hours left with this girl, and goddamnit, I was wild about the girl – I botched a test in biology because my mind was solely on her – and went from fumbling teenager to the dating gambler, one step below Casanova in moves, but just as likely to fail as Ted the Farmer.
After coffee, I walked her to my car to make the short drive from the restaurant to the movie theater. Instead of opening her door, I halfway trapped her against it, leaned in, and kissed her. It was a risk, because she could have wanted to wait, but I didn’t care, and it paid off. We walked into the movie theater as lovestruck teenagers in the worst way. I can’t swear that we had our hands in the other’s back pocket of their jeans, but I’m positive we looked that adorable and annoying.
It was one of the few moments of my dating life I was not trying to impress the girl, not even trying to be me, but just there in a moment with her. I know the movie we went to see: It was Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. I had read the book over the previous summer. I’ll be damned if I remember anything about the movie. We were in full on make-out mode. If the school of thought that sex changes everything is to be accredited, I may never get a more pure kiss than those of that night. I still had no conception of what sex would even be at that moment, I was happy just with that moment there. And I remember her slowly caressing my arm with her free hand, we were shoulder to shoulder, and with the hugging embrace impossible, she made sure I knew she was there.
I could go on about the tenderness of the first time, and how it’s never the same after you turn post-virgin, or whatever, especially since I could argue that due to the importance of the moment, I didn’t lose my v-card until I slept with a girl who I loved, but you can only get a handful of those moments. I remember that sweater, because of the way it felt blissful as she graced the fabric of it, and slid it up and down with the movements of her tenderness. My favorite fringe benefits of being in a relationship are back scratches in bed (I like to sleep on my stomach) and when she rubs the semi-ticklish sensitive region of my arm on the opposite side of the elbow.
That night in the cabin was a better night on the whole. Maybe because it had a coda moment in the morning to allow all of us to recap and better remember the full of the night. Drunken memories only solidify if they are refreshed within 24-48 hours usually. This sucks, because they always tend to be the ones worth telling the next weekend.
It’s a funny thing, because I remember the cabin night more often and usually in happier circumstances. The movie experience is almost a lost moment since I didn’t wind up with the girl and the night was mostly sour. This is why I am glad I kept the sweater… I don’t think of her often, if at all, anymore, but occasionally, when I wear it, I think of the moments in the movie theater and the first kiss outside of my car. Memories hold a long list of tangential feelings not related directly to that moment, yet it’s those feelings that didn’t matter then that embed the memory a little bit more securely. I’d gladly relive the movie theater again, but I’d take the chance to be 17 and with my friends in Indiana again.
Like I said, memories are a curse. If the impetus of this post was thinking about the 2004 Red Sox, sometimes a curse can be a blessing. Sometimes the great moments feel great because they erase the pain of the bad, those 8 straight wins, that moment in the movie theater wouldn’t be special if not for the pain of numerous other factors, with the Sox, if not for 2003, if not of the 0-3 deficit, it wouldn’t be the best sports moment of the last 25 years, and if I hadn’t been through those pains, I wouldn’t have the joy; if my moment in the movie theater wasn’t abruptly ended by her parents, and if I went on to marry her, it would have been a funny story about our first date, but I would have never seen it as the special moment that it was, just the moment when it started (which would likely be devalued by the socially bigger moments).
And so, why the hell not, I’ll give you all a video.
Bitter Sweet Symphony – The Verve
The song as a lyric sheet is as melancholy as it gets. I’ll leave it at that.
This lyric sheet is also composed upon a riff written and discarded by Mick and Keith, a fact that caused the Verve to have their biggest and only American hit to be rendered as a fluke and to only receive $1000 in royalties due to copyright infringement.
In the American history of hit singles that came from nowhere, ruled the charts, and then the artist never cracked the list again, this seems more part of a symptom trend than a song that got through on its own merits. It just sounded unique, which puts it in the bunch of Gnarls Barkley “Crazy” and Gorillaz “Feel good inc.” of the one hit crossover hits. Which means not that the Verve were a fluke, but that most Americans will view them at that. When it comes to being an American on music (and foreign policy of the Bush administration for that matter) I think I feel like what a self-hating Jew must feel like, I love and am proud to be what I am, but I hate my fellow constituents in this group most of the time, and mostly for superficial reasons.
Being an American music fan when most of the great music produced (that I like) isn’t American. Worse, even the stuff that is American that I like, few people have heard of in this country. This is why I spent 2 hours talking to a below average British chick last Friday night
I say all this, because in all likelihood, the odds of someone reading this blog that still owns Urban Hymns is low. Even those I know who read this blog who know of the band would likely state Ashcroft’s Lonely Soul as his best work… but whatever. I know British people like this album in the same way we like Nevermind or Ten, scaled down about 75%. This was an album that is solid, and one of the better of the Britpop scene of the 90’s. It’s not Morning Glory but it’s still better than most. The song wasn’t a fluke 6 minutes of brilliance, just the best 6 minutes the band ever wrote, which means people only compare the best to the rest, which isn’t fair for a lead single.
So it’s a gimmick, one-trick video. But it works. Single Shot style, and the only variation in theme comes at the end when Ashcroft is joined by the rest of the band to walk in unity.
Life is a miserable struggle, but it’s an easier and more enjoyable path when you have people that care about you and you to them likewise around you.
That’s the simple message of the video.
And it nails it.
The video is done in time to the single edit, it’s down to under 5 minutes.
And it’s one of the few videos I have ever seen that immediately after seeing it, I went out to buy the album.
Was it the band’s highpoint? History may be up there, as may be Lucky Man. But yeah, this was lighting in a bottle. They just had a few other bottles a little less bright.
Dave’s top 25 Videos: #25.
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