I Feel Stupid

Change is in the air. You can hear it.

Of course I mean that literally. I always mean everything literally. I’m working on that.

I’ve been listening to Mad Season again.

Timing is everything in life, and for me, Mad Season is the soundtrack of big, life-altering decisions.

This album forces me to look inside my own head and figure out who I am and what I want and break it down in pieces make it simple and decide on a path and put myself back together in just the right order to travel down it successfully.

Timing is everything, and Mad Season came out in the spring of 2000. This isn’t me trusting my spotty, memory, I googled it to be certain. Which is how I found out that Google categorizes Mad Season as “children’s music.” Which made me laugh loud enough to turn heads in the bookstore/coffeeshop I in which I am currently eating/writing because the other day I was listening to Mad Season in the car and had a “wtf is wrong with you, Thing2 can hear this” moment and switched to Katy Perry. My boys LOVE Katy Perry. They know every single word of Roar and will happily belt it out on command. But I digress.

2000 was a very interesting year for me. First of all, the world did NOT end and the planes did not fall from the sky and we all woke up on January 1, 2000 and it was all NBD. This was pretty cool for me because bm and her husband were deep into that extremist christian end of the world shit and being a 16-year-old girl in 1999 in one of those households was…unpleasant. They thought the rapture was coming and that I was too evil to be redeemed. It sort of fucked with my head a bit.

But then the world didn’t end and it was senior year in high school and they gave us all those standardized tests and even though I kept falling asleep in the science bits (they keep it so WARM in those testing centers!) I scored pretty well, overall. Mostly because I made all the language sections my bitch. Every. Single. Test.

So then all of a sudden the mailbox is being flooded with all these letters from all of these schools all over the country saying “come here, we will teach you, and if you promise to work hard we will even give you a discount.” And I was young and naïve and had no one to explain the whole “but you’ll be paying for the balance for the rest of your life” thing to me.

And I’m walking around the woods of rural Kansas with Mad Season playing tinnily in my ears through those cheap wire and foam headphones that had to be plugged directly into my fucking walkman cassette player and the next thing you know I’ve been spending time with “the wrong crowd” and I’ve chosen New Orleans over Illinois or Virginia or California or Pennsylvania and my life will never be the same again.

We’re going to digress again, because I’m very upset about the cassette tapes. You see, in my memory, I only ever owned any Matchbox 20 albums on CD. A month ago I would have looked you in the eye and earnestly stated that Matchbox 20 was not old enough to have ever released an album on cassette. In my head, cassettes are 80s things. Blame the Beastie Boys.

Anyway the other day I realized that I didn’t have a cd player until I got some guy to give me one after moving to New Orleans. Before that, I had a little white am/fm cassette player with pink and blue buttons. If you put enough batteries in you could carry it around, but I never had money for batteries so I had to plug it into the wall with the detachable cord. In high school somebody gave me an off-brand walkman, and that would have been what I listened to walking around in the woods.

That treasured copy of Yourself or Someone Like You that I found at a garage sale for $1.50 would have been on cassette. In my head it is a CD, but I would have had no way of playing a CD in 1997. I didn’t steal a cd of Mad Season from the Walmart in Pittsburg, KS, because that would have been of no use to me. It must have been a cassette tape. Jesus I feel old.

In 2006 I had a cd player. And by then I had legally purchased a legitimately licensed copy of Mad Season. And I listened to it on a skippy discman, still with cheap headphones that had to be plugged into the damn thing, as I paced up and down in the dead of night along the banks of the Mississippi River where it runs through uptown New Orleans trying to decide which bass player I was going to keep and then one night he really did say “we should just get married” and before I could think I laughed and the decision was made and I went back to school and the world shifted on its axis but kept turning.

As 2009 died away and 2010 dawned bright and fresh and full of promise, I listened to Mad Season on the very nice (to me anyway) earbuds that still had to be plugged in to the big ass expensive iPod my boyfriend bought me “to help me study.” And I did listen to loads of lectures on it. But I also listened to Black and White People over and over again while pacing that semi-circle around the LSU Law Center. New and old buildings. Start at Dalrymple and Highland, follow the sidewalk that hugs the semi-circle that is West Campus Drive with its coveted right in front of the library spots, up Veteran’s Drive to Highland Road, make a right, return to Dalrymple and start again. Over and over and over. Thinking about “these people” and “those people” and which one am I and how can lawyers in training be such black and white thinkers when the law is nothing but shades of grey?

And then it was February and the Saints won the Superbowl and Obama was just picking up steam and it seemed like the whole world was happy and there was his voice in my ear telling me to slide on over, and accept fate and suddenly everything was just so EASY and I wasn’t used to that and it was confusing. So I just went along with it. I found people to teach me how to talk and how to dress and I got my teeth fixed and I learned to smile and I hid my tattoo and that was all it took.

A few months ago, a young criminal defense attorney in Baton Rouge asked me what happened to me. Not with any judgement, just “for people like you and me, there are two dream jobs: tenured law professor and Federal Public Defender. I’ve heard the way people talk about you. All you had to do was put in the time and do the work and it would have been yours, no question. So why quit after only ten years?”

Because I don’t want the top spot. I could have gotten promotions. I could have trained to be a trial attorney and earned more money and gotten more glory and someday, 20 years from now, it might have been my turn to be “the guy.” And none of that appeals to me, at all. I just want to write. I think all I’ve ever wanted to do, ever, always, is write.

I haven’t listened to Mad Season in 13 years. The thing is, I don’t actually like that album. It’s the icky sticky building blocks of who I am, covered in tarnish and ash and puss and gore and bits of rotted flesh and brain matter. That album makes me hate both of us, just a tiny bit.

Nobody wants to see themselves dissected. There’s a reason we were all so revolted when Hannibal Lecter fed that guy his own brain.

I’ve been listening to Mad Season again. Out of $65 dollar wireless noise-cancelling headphones that my husband insists on calling “not bad for some cheap ones” and which are hands-down the nicest thing I’ve ever owned and I took his attitude as permission to buy a second pair, one to wear outside and one to keep safe by my bed. When did I turn into a headphone person?

And the music is coming from this tiny, magic device that is smaller than my hand and I have notoriously small hands, ask any person who has ever given me a manicure. This little square can play every song you ever released and take pictures and tell me where I am if I get lost and summon me a car if I get to tired to make it and connect me with perfect strangers on the other side of the planet in real time and it will even tell me a joke in a pleasant voice if I ask it to.

Yes, I am a tiny bit afraid of an AI revolt, why do you ask?

So I’m listening to Mad Season again, but it’s different this time. Because I can’t see the wires. Because it all seems like magic this time. Because there’s something about this island and these mountains and the knowledge that the ground underneath your feet is solid bedrock and it is Beltane and the streets are thick with fallen cherry blossoms and tourists.

What if this time I clean the pieces off before I put them back together?

I know what lies beneath may not be anything worth showing off. But I have always preferred beaten, tarnished silver to smooth and gleaming gold so does it even really matter?

I listened to Mad Season today, and I listened all the way to the end. That’s new.

I always stopped at Stop before.

In my memory that would be the point where I would hit the “skip back” button twice so the cd reset to the beginning. But it wasn’t a cd at first, was it?

I wonder if I hit stop before I hit rewind, or if I just demanded that the tape change speed and direction in one click. Probably the latter. If people were nice to cassette tapes we wouldn’t have been so eager to invent something easier to care for.

I don’t like it when he gets all piano-ey. I don’t listen to You Won’t Be Mine because the opening bars make the muscles between my shoulder blades tense and tingle like I’m the Final Girl running through the woods and the Killer is five steps behind me and who will get to the shotgun on the wall first?

I listened to it today. By accident, the first time. The album was playing and I was looking at the water and all of a sudden there was a fucking symphony in my head and I was swaying on the dock thinking “what the hell is this and how did I never notice it before?”

I never heard the rain or the violins or the way they fall over the swollen, throbbing ache like a cold and gentle waterfall.

Fuck now I’m thinking about shampoo commercials. Calgon take me away.

It is a very interesting song though. Very interesting.

I wonder what other interesting sounds he has made that I didn’t really pay attention to before?

I think I need to go find another bluff to climb around on.

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