My Most Awkward Years: Musically Distilled

This is a mash-up of a bunch of songs from the 90s brought to my attention by a fellow wild child of those halcyon days—days that are just as bleak even veiled by nostalgia.


Nineties FTW (Wick-it's 90's Rock Nostalgia Overdose Mashup) by Wick-it the Instigator

If somebody with ProTools was able to similarly condense my existence spanning the years this music was made, the resulting song would entail a machine-gun staccato of crying, masturbating and taking Accutane for my acne. It would sound akin to a Joanna Newsom live album.

This summer went by quickly. I know that sentence makes me sound like a schoolteacher lamenting the return to the classroom, but I am not a schoolteacher because: a) what if anyone found this treasure trove of closet skeletons? and b) I do not like children. All of a sudden it's fall in New York and the sun is setting earlier and I am getting crankier but also reorienting myself with some direction. The blurry summer passed, a shot of methadone focus is definitely in order. Primarily, I am resolving to eliminate negativity (and sources of negativity) and only fight for and with that which fulfills me. My first thought after writing that sentence is to sell all my belongings, quit working and eat cheeseburgers and fried pickles every day until my heart explodes with joy and hypertension. Although that's one path to a greasy form of enlightenment, and Buddha is always depicted as a chubby fellah, it isn't really what I meant. I aim to seek out good people who appreciate my talents, encouraging and inspiring me, and not waste any time with or for those who do not.

Two quotes from one story by the incomparable Southern writer Barry Hannah struck a chord today:

Wretched hesitation ... is what embalms our lives, and that was what age demanded of you more and more, to get less and less life.

I've seen peers accept "less and less life" for the past ten years and it's a been a terrible thing to witness. People who used to seem so full of life are both aging toward boredom and personifying it. Their unnatural progression makes me want to quit Facebook. Ten years ago we flung ourselves toward excitement both haphazardly and erroneously without care or regard for the consequences, only a yearning for escape from suburban drudgery. I only assumed that my partners in crime would just grow older and choose wiser ways to get our fun, our "adult" kicks; instead of sneaking past our parents with a flask of whiskey we'd be vaulting past the rubes trading years of fluorescent office imprisonment for a chance at eventual freedom—retirement at 65, provided they live that long—with a freewheeling jaunt toward success without boundaries. And it hasn't happened. And as much as I'd like to think that they're the only ones who've given up, I must admit to my own struggles with "wretched hesitation."

Another:

I was desperate and would have been throbbing in shame but I was still drunk enough to ignore it and was majoring on the theme Whim of Fortune, and I believe trying to attach myself to a woman of such low estate that the two of us would destroy ourselves in spontaneous combustion at an impossible diving speed.

Now this quote is not quite as introspective as its predecessor, but knowing Hannah's life I think it's more than semi-autobiographical. He's at the pulse of a feeling I've had once or twice or ten times in the past, and evoked with the dexterity of a F-15 fighter pilot, fingers flying Mach-1 over the keyboard. As a young writer, Hunter S. Thompson typed the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald to get the flow of his hero's writing. To get his rhythm. I only hope that typing Hannah's words can move me in similar ways.

So was that mash-up above the soundtrack to my most awkward years, or have the songs to that time in my life even been written yet? I don't know. But after surviving my first earthquake (yes, in Brooklyn) and a hurricane that shut down all public transportation in the city and called for evacuations in the same week, I biked down to Greenwood Cemetery for a few hours of wandering mental clarity.

And then I grilled cheeseburgers. Everyone deals with mortality differently.