FOR THE LIFE OF ME
Out of the ether. It just enters and worms its way around. This is the start of an idea or maybe prompts me. It's not complicated. A picture or caption seen in a split second while scrolling. Three seconds of a song. It's all it takes. The joy is in following it down. To see what it presses up.
For the life of me
I cannot remember
What made us think that we were wise and we'd never compromise
For the life of me I cannot believe we'd ever die for these sins
We were merely freshmen
The Verve Pipe 1996
Most times the memories that wash up from my brain are almost time stamped. A year. A summer. A fall. I'm cocksure in the timing. Every so often a memory comes back as a combination of many. A conglomerate feeling. That's where this song took me.
An eighteen hour drive north. To Canada. Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, fucking Ohio, finally Michigan and a short stretch to a bridge, an unknown Ambassador. A beep at the 1:01 mark of the Frank Black song, I Heard Ramona Sing, caused by a finger on a guitar string that sounded exactly like a radar detector going off, even though I didn't have a radar detector. It was for sure the summer of 1993. I have pictures for proof. Time stamped literally.
For the life of me, I cannot remember.
Maybe it's because this band was from Michigan and I associate it with that trip because I was going to Michigan. It's a time space impossibility that it was on the radio that year, and yet it keeps coming back to it.
//
I know what the song's about, and that's not what it conjures in me. The line that keeps coming back is not the obvious "What made us think that we were wise and we'd never compromise." It's instead "we were merely freshmen".
Innocence and maybe a healthy dose of naïveté. That's what it pushes up. Longing...for simpler times. The 90's for fuck's sake. Longing.
But for all of the current canned nostalgia for the 90's, I'm constantly reminded of the back half of it. 95-00. Where things got dark and started to slide away. It was like the first five years cracked open an awareness, a sense of carefree or careless, and people, as are always apt to do, took it way too far.
This has to be the same feeling those who lived through the 60's feel as a whole decade is canned and repurposed as a positive, hippie, free love party, where the worst that could happen is smoking a little too much pot. The 60's. Like the 90's and almost every decade were dark and violent.
For the life of me. I cannot believe we'd ever die for these sins. We were merely freshmen.
Maybe there's a convenience to this mornings nostalgia. Bookended by my son’s approaching his freshman year, my daughter just a year beyond. Maybe this conjures the memories from 1989-90. Starting anew at the beginning of a decade, the 1980's, while not as violent, were more ominous. Glasnost! Openness! Me, passing daily, the spot where a dorm of eight identical halls housed some 600 freshmen. I was merely one of them.
I grew 1-2 inches my freshman year. In height. Graduating when I was 17, I got the tail end of a growth spurt I guess. Still the spaces where I spent that first of 33 years in this city seem impossibly small. The campus, while too vast for me to justify walking to class as it was too far, shrinking slowly with the dreams of a 17 year old. I still cling to a lot of them. Still think they are possible.
I brush away the parts of the 90's I want to forget and allow the rush of nostalgia. With friends. With my kids. But with caution. I force myself to remember the things that weren't positive. I try and look objectively back. I sometimes question if things went wrong. Or did they just go, as they are apt to do. Pushed forward. I look at things we accepted as rote that are now archaic at best and I'm cautious to remind myself that "kinder gentler times" were usually bathed in ignorance at best and willful disregard for anything or anyone that got in the way of what anyone wanted to do.
What made us think that we were wise and we'd never compromise.
For the life of me.
I cannot remember.
#hugsandhifives
