Like a Song That’s Been Playing for All Our Lives

we know it’s right, we heard it on the radio

When I woke up this morning, I thought the whole “imaginary conversations with an aging rock star” (no offense, I’m old too, that’s kind of part of it) was starting to seem a little stalkerish and deranged ever since I accidentally wound up standing in front of the real-life man and babbling about traffic jams.

Then I opened up the New York Times, and was brutally reminded that we are gearing up for another election cycle of “spray-tanned octogenarian reality TV star” vs. “slightly pathetic octogenarian who seems to be slowly going senile based on his recent inability to complete a sentence even with a teleprompter right in front of him” and now to make things REALLY interesting the orange guy is under investigation for treason and also a million sex crimes and maybe tampering with an election? I’m losing track. And some wackadoodle anti-vaxxer has thrown his hat into the ring on the strength of his family name alone but unfortunately that name is Kennedy and Americans only read the headlines so good lord we’re fucked no matter what.

Yesterday in therapy my shrink told me to quit reading the newspaper because no good can come of it and it’s damaging my mental health.

This morning my mother-in-law was watching the news in her room and she came out and said “CBS is about to do a thing on Matchbox 20, isn’t that the band you saw the other night” and my husband reached for the remote and I said “I really don’t want to watch that and if you turn it on I will leave the room” and then things got weird again.

Because I definitely lost what little was left of my mind on that stage last week.

And I’ve been walking around ever since feeling like nothing is real and I’m completely Through the Looking Glass.

My life is just SO FUCKING WEIRD.

Always. Every day. It’s like at the end of IT crowd when Roy says “Does it ever seem to you that the things that happen to us are sort of…strange?” and that pretty much sums up my entire life.

I still don’t know why I was on that stage that night.

I know why you were there. I know why the band and the techs and the handful of people who paid thousands of dollars for the privilege of being there were there.

I don’t know why I was there.

I was told it was because some anti-maskers were being, well, themselves. But that’s a reason for their absence. It doesn’t explain my presence.

And I keep winding up in these extraordinary places with no explanation and in many ways it’s because of your words and the whole thing is fucking with my brain.

I know the exact moment I fell down the rabbit hole. Because of course I do.

It was when you stood ten feet in front of me on a stage in Washington and sang “I wonder what I’d do if y’all all did just what I said” and I thought “aw he said y’all” and then I thought:

I did. Now what?

Because it’s true. I did just what you said. Exactly, every word, for thirty years, and what happened was an extraordinary confluence of events that placed both of us on that stage at the same time and I simply don’t know what to make of it all.

For the past few months I’ve had the words “she said ‘oh my god, I feel like hell’”1 floating around in the back of my mind. They just pop up every now and then as I go about my day, and I couldn’t track down the source. It started around the time I began listening to Fallout Boy, and it felt like song lyrics, so I thought it must be something I heard there, but then I could never find it again.

Because it wasn’t Fallout Boy.

It was Radio. Talk about a song that fucks with my head.

When I was eight years old the shit hit the fan and my family left the city and moved into an abandoned house in bumfuck Arkansas and I started asking a few too many questions and child protective services started poking around and it became quite clear that the reading was becoming a problem so in the summer of 1992 my keepers scraped together some cash and bought me a little white stereo with an am/fm radio and a cassette player and pink and blue buttons and a rainbow strap so you could carry it around.

It was hands down the best thing I had ever owned. I’m a little sad I didn’t bring it with me when I ran.

The radio was meant to distract me, to push me in a different direction than the road of books and questions I was barreling down. There were all sorts of rules about what I was allowed to listen to. But also they didn’t like to be reminded of my existence and what they always wanted the most from me was silence and by 1996 I had long since figured out that as long at the headphones didn’t come unplugged I could listen to whatever I wanted.

And one day there you were. Saying the words that were spinning around in my head out loud. On the radio.

Then I found a cassette of Yourself or Someone Like You at a yard sale and in my memory it’s actually a CD but that’s literally impossible because I had no way to play a CD in 1996 and it just makes me feel so old.

Then things somehow got even worse and we had to move to Kansas and we were living in that house with two other families and twelve people in three bedrooms with one bathroom is a lot and the only space I had to myself was the one between my ears and the whole time you were in there with me singing Girl Like That and I was and I am and I always will be.

She gets sad when there’s nothing going on / she says it makes her feel damn worthless

Then we got that little house and yeah two bedrooms is tight for a family of five and yeah the foundation was so fucked up that the whole house swayed when you walked across the living room floor but the toilet flushed and there was a working shower and it was hands down the nicest place I had ever lived and things got a little better but there was still that year where I didn’t speak at all except in the classroom.

Then Columbine happened and they said I was dangerous and they told me to watch my words and I didn’t feel dangerous I was just so angry and then Mad Season came out and I stole a cassette tape from the Walmart in Pittsburg, Kansas and no I didn’t report it on the character and fitness application for the bar exam because I didn’t get caught and the statute of limitations had long since run.2

I also didn’t disclose the time I was placed on suicide watch at the age of 19 for being “a danger to myself.” Louisiana and Kansas can have my law licenses back if they’re mad about it. I’m pretty sure I’m done with them now. I certainly never expected to have them in the first place.

A few weeks after my 18th birthday I ran away to New Orleans.

Drinking culture is BIG in Louisiana. The whole state, not just the city of sin. Drinking culture is also big among lawyers, where the year is still 1952 and the “highly successful” ones still keep bottles of booze in their desk drawers and have liquid lunches and sure they let women in the courtroom now but only on the understanding that they aren’t “real” lawyers.

I know A LOT of functioning alcoholics, is my point.

But I don’t drink much and that’s because when I was thirteen years old a man on the radio sang about giving in to the alcohol in a way that made me think that sounds like a bad idea, I’m not going to do that. And then I didn’t.

It seems like everyone I know has some story that is both funny and horribly tragic that starts with “I was drinking.”

I don’t.

Well, not the tragic part. There’s definitely some funny shit. And there was that one night when the six-foot-tall Irish guy taught me the delights of frozen Irish coffees and then things progressed from there and it ended with me projective vomiting all over the bathroom of the Three Legged Dog and my husband thinks that was a terrible night because it’s the one time ever he had to come and get my drunk ass from the Quarter but from where I was sitting it was just fucking awesome.

Because I always drank responsibly. Because you told me to. And that’s crazy.

Crazy, not stupid.

Never stupid.

And now I’m pushing 40 and I’m having the traditional nervous breakdown/mid-life crisis right on schedule but instead of telling me to grow up and be responsible everyone around me keeps saying “this is good, you’ve had a hard time, you deserve a break.”

It helps, of course, that my “throw caution to the wind and do whatever the fuck you want” plan is to go back to school and get an associates degree and a masters degree because then I’ll have one of each since a law degree is technically a doctorate.

My therapist laughed when I told him my plan. I think it was the bit where I defended my law degree as “technically a doctorate” that got him going that time. He laughs at me a lot. It’s not just him. I’m weird in an absurdly adorable way. I know this. I’m not sure how I feel about it.

I’ve used the word “weird” too much in this piece. I’m going to switch to “peculiar” now.

My life is so fucking peculiar. If there really was a Home for Peculiar Children, I would have wound up there. That’s probably why I like Harry Potter so much.3

But magic is only sort of real and there are no special schools for peculiar kids so I just bungled along doing my best but now I feel like I’ve hit a road block and I’m not sure where to go next.

And in the middle of all of that I wound up on that stage and it just feels like it means something and if I could just figure out why I was there the world will make sense again.

Then I remember that the world never made sense in the first place.

By the way, we know now what you would do if we did what you said. You thanked me for coming. And after listening to Maggie talk about you for hours—the black-haired security lady is apparently named Maggie which I learned when someone from the fucking venue saw my last post about it on tumblr and commented on it because statistical anomalies are just a normal part of every day life for me—I think you actually meant it.

Maybe you ought to think about that a bit.

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1 And as I’m writing this I’m playing the song and I think it might actually be “he said” and I can’t really contemplate what that means right now.

2 Fun fact: in Louisiana it’s called a prescriptive period, not a statute of limitations.

3 JK Rowling is a cunt, just so we’re clear. I like the character she made up, NOT HER. And also in my head Daniel Radcliffe is Harry Potter, not her, so that makes it even harder to abandon the franchise because he’s the fucking shit.