My Life in Music

My life has a soundtrack.  This became abundantly clear to me the other day when I was thinking about the fact that although my musical taste has grown - evolved - since I was a kid (like a real kid, 10 or so, since  I'm quite old now), I still like much of what I did then, and that music has always had an incredibly evocative power.  It works both ways - I hear a song, and it immediately recalls an event, and an event immediately recalls the music I was listening to when the event eventuated.  Everything in my life, major or minor, has a song attached to it.

Because of its evocative power, music also has the ability to change my mood, and so, in a sense, has scripted my life.  The right song at any moment can literally flip my mood switch from insanely-up-and-happy to suicidally-depressed.  It's eerie.  And now that I've grown to appreciate greater diversity in my music (like, yes, I have to admit that I like Hollywood Undead.  Even though so much of me feels like I shouldn't, I do, and even though I know I should be fundamentally offended, I just can't be, and have to laugh at lines like "when I start drinking, my dick does all my thinking"), I have an even wider range of music to flip the mood switch.  And my moods dictate my actions and behavior, so . . . domino effect.

There isn't any music which is exempt from that soundtrack, either.  I grew up on the piano, and played the flute in junior high and high school (yes, for a while I was a band geek, but unfortunately don't have any cool band camp stories), so even "My Sharona" will make me think of my hideously-uncomfortable band uniform and the time I got in trouble at Magic Mountain, whence we had gone for a music competition, and a friend and I broke off from the rest of the group and almost missed the bus home because we were busy flirting with older boys we had met (we were 13 at the time, so had raging hormones).  Then there's all the classical music I learned at the berating hands of my piano teachers, or those show tunes that I'll still sing in the shower (I am totally a shower-singer, because I never sound as good anywhere else, so be thankful you don't live with me), or all the folk songs that my mom and dad used to sing to me when I was little, and which I can still break out for a four-hour car ride to pacify my nephew (and my sister).  I walked down the aisle to Pachelbel's "Canon in 'D'" because my parents did, and have tender memories of my dad sitting on my bed and belting out hilariously-off-key renditions of "Summertime", "Old Man River", and "House of the Rising Sun", with my mom finishing off with her beautiful "Loch Lomond" or "Today".

I can listen to music from my youth, like U2 or INXS or Spandau Ballet or Missing Persons - stuff I started listening to when I was about 10 or 11, because my dad listened to it when we would go off on climbing trips in Joshua Tree - and I can vividly recall what I was doing.  Like, the summer of my twelfth year.  That was a big year for me.  I got my first U2 CD (War) - officially mine, so that I would stop stealing my dad's - a new climbing harness, and a 15-year-old boyfriend who was friends with the guy who lived down the street.  He was an idiot, but he was 15, and cute, and that was exciting.  I remember that almost every night I would play U2 or INXS or Missing Persons quietly on the stereo in my room to muffle any noise that I might make as I slipped out the door, down the hall to the laundry room, through the door into the backyard, and then through the gate into the front yard to meet him.  Then we'd go off and behave like perfect delinquents, breaking into the yard of an empty house down the street to go night swimming, or steal cars, or make out.  The music was important, because my sister's bedroom was just down the hall from me, and she had ears like a bat, and a squeaky-clean conscience, and wouldn't hesitate to report my absences to my parents.

Or the summer between my freshman and sophomore years, when I had my first real boyfriend - Danny - who had an awesome CJ-7 Jeep, who taught me all about the proper way to off-road, make sandwiches, and kiss.  That was the summer that Live released their first album - Throwing Copper - and even now "Lightning Crashes" makes me think of those wild nights at Deep Creek, where we'd go night-swimming, and try not to drown under the hot summer sky.  Or "I Alone", and how we'd look into each others' eyes, grab each other by the arms, and then jump off the cliffs and scream all the way down into the cold, dark water.  Or the first time that we made love, listening to the entire album, song after song, lying there, holding each other, not wanting to get up and break the spell the music cast over us.

I remember the night that Danny broke up with me.  My dad and I were in Durango, on a climbing/rafting road trip for my fifteenth birthday.  We had just pulled into the hotel, and the strains of "Marvin, I Love You", from the Doctor Demento show that we had caught driving through the mountains, were running through my head when I called him.  I remember the rain pouring over my head and the words "Danny, I love you" drumming their way through my soul.

High school was awful, and I cannot listen to No Doubt's "I'm Just A Girl", Nine Inch Nail's "Perfect Drug", Metallica's "Unforgiven II", PJ Harvey's "Down by the Water" - my dad and I would make up new lyrics to it - or Joan Osborne's "Spider Web" without cringing in recollection of all the horrible things that happened between my freshman and senior-ish years.  These songs evoke so clearly the humiliation, rejection, anger, and frustration of those years, the lucidity of which not even time mercifully dims.  To hear them again is to relive the flustered misery of hanging on to the edges of all the "groups", desperately wanting to be myself, but also craving the security of inclusion.

The Specials, English Beat, Reel Big Fish - those bands are inextricably linked with the dancing, wicked blue-green eyes of Joe, the handsome, clever surfer boy from Anaheim, who was poor but ambitious, and made me love him in scandalous fashion.

Then there were the days in transition, when I met Brandon, who introduced me to Dave Matthews, the Playboy Mansion, and the Marine Corps.  The songs "Jump Right In" by The Urge and "Circles" by Soul Coughing elicit memories of the long drives from Lake Arrowhead to Camp Pendleton, the traffic in Orange County, the long ocean vistas off the 5, the MPs on base with their propensity for ticketing wildly, and the silhouettes of all the helicopters in the flight wing as the sun sank behind the hills, softening and blurring the dilapidation of the aging base.

Then came my husband, and with him an explosion of musical knowledge and experimentation.  Three-quarters of the music I now call my favorite is because of his delight in exploring new and old bands, and passing along his discoveries.  Not a memory of my time with him is without its musical equivalent.   Rob Zombie's Hellbilly Deluxe will always be perfectly matched with those early, heady days in San Clemente - the beach, rogue cigarettes with the smoke curling in the salty air, never-ending skies, 7-11 nachos, Snickers and Butterfingers, and running half-naked, laughing hysterically, from beach police.   Korn - that's the long, terrifying drive from California to Ohio, and never again will I be able to listen to "Falling Away from Me" or "Make Me Bad" without remembering Cal, the friendly Texan Penske rescue man who so desperately wanted us to abandon our 25-foot moving truck and come stay with him while we waited for his son, who was apparently the only person within a 50-mile radius who knew how to fix "them computer-chip trucks".

Ohio State days are laced with  Rammstein, Slipknot, Mudvayne, Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park, Fear Factory, and  Nothingface.  Going to classes under the gray, gray skies, watching the bodies grow from tiny, blind balls of fluff to sleek, gorgeous, fascinating cat-beasts, playing "Icewind Dale II" and "Neverwinter Nights II" and "Fallout II" and "Civilization III" with freezing fingers, a new obsession with cross-stitching, college-football-Saturdays, and reading piles and piles of books - each moment is trapped within the crystalline structure of musical memory.

It was when we moved back to California that my husband started constructing his "HfN" series - "HfN" meaning "Hard for Nard" (Nard was my nickname then, and "hard" because, up until that point, I'd only liked music which dwelt on the edges of truly "hard").  He's up to HfN 33 now, and each album has become symbolic of where we were - where I was - when he created it.  HfN 5, that's a tough one to listen to now, because that one brings up those early days at Cal State, when I first learned of the band Deadsy, and fell in love with "Asura" and giggled at my husband's assertion that "She Likes Big Words" was really and truly my song, and hated every second of my job and masochistic boss, and wondered if we had made a terrible, terrible mistake moving back to California, and if we would ever be happy together.

When we first separated, that's when he sent me HfN 28, starting with Rise Against's "Savior".  It was like a fast-forward to the future, and even now can make me sob: "It kills me not to know this, but I've all but just forgotten, what the color of her eyes were, or her scars and how she got them. . . .  Seldom do these words ring true when I'm constantly failing you. . . .  So tell me now, if this ain't love, then how do we get out?  'Cause I don't know.  That's when she said, 'I don't hate you, boy, I just want to save you while there's still something left to save.'  That's when I told her, 'I love you, girl, but I'm not the answer to the questions that you still have.'"

When I left for Virginia, I left to the strains of Five Finger Death Punch's "Far From Home", from HfN 30 - "I can't seem to find my way home.  And it's almost like your heaven's trying everything, your heaven's trying everything to keep me out.  All the places I've been and things I've seen, a million stories that made up a million shattered dreams, the faces of people I'll never see again, and I can't seem to find my way home" - and Linkin Park's "Waiting for the End" from HfN 31 - "Waiting for the end to come, wishing I had strength to stand.  This is not what I had planned.  It's out of my control. . . .  It's hard to let you go.  I know what it takes to move on.  I know how it feels to lie.  All I wanna do is trade this life for something new, holding on to what I haven't got."  They were both songs from his soul, but they resonate within my soul, and I wonder at times if we're not still linked somewhere, in some broken version of our heaven, and if we'll eventually find a way to be happy there together.

I'll never forget a moment of my life, captured as each is by the delicate fingers of music, held in embryonic stasis, ready to be born again with fragments of an introduction, or the faint strains of a refrain, or even the echoes of a lyric, trapped and made mundane in some banal discussion of trivial life.  My memory of my existence will always be filtered through the music of that moment, which manages to lend a fragile beauty to even the ugliest remembrance, and, in that way, to redeem it.

I DO judge you when you use poor grammar.

Over the last few weeks, I have spent a fair amount of time engaged in arguments with a friend about language.  Specifically, proper vs. improper usage of punctuation, "adverbjatives" (that's his, not mine), prepositions, and all the other pitfalls and minefields of modern American language.

Now, before I go any further, those of you who are howling in the background, "But you're a PhD student in English!", shut up.  I know that.  I know that my expectations of "proper" language usage are probably much higher than the average American.  However, I also think this gives me the ability to discourse knowledgeably on why "proper" language usage is so important, much like a computer programmer can discourse knowledgeably on the difference between C++ and Python.  The difference between the computer programmer and the hapless student of language is found in the seemingly-esoteric nature of programming: how many people actually know enough about the differences between C++ and Python to even discuss them (C++?  Is that extra "+" an accident?  And Python?  You mean Monty Python?), and then further, to have opinions about them?  Not bloody many.  So when a computer programmer offers his opinion, the layperson accepts it.  Not so with the student of language.  The minute language becomes a subject for discussion, anyone and everyone feels competent to discuss it.  If I hear, "But language is always evolving!" one more time, my brain might literally explode.  However - and this is an important "however" - it is far, far easier to develop a valid opinion of programming languages than language usage.  Yes, dammit, I said valid.

Now, I do not pretend to be a paragon of perfect speech.  Frasier still has a few-up on me.  I break the rules - frequently.  I split infinitives so often that bits and pieces of them litter the floor near my desk.  I happily incorporate words unrecognized by the OED into my speech all the time.  And I swear.  Often.

Yet my spine twitches when someone says "ain't" in an un-ironic fashion.  The ending of sentences with prepositions makes me a little violent.  The flagrant disregard of "ly" on the ends of adverbs leaves me cold.  The colloquial speech patterns of the South make it difficult for me to remember that just because they sound like total, unrequited idiots does not mean that they are.

The thing is, just because you use language doesn't mean you're qualified to speak about it as though it's something you've given a great deal of thought, and something you understand intimately.  I use my microwave every day (that's an embarrassing admission, but there you go), yet I would never presume to speak about what actually happens when I push the buttons, because I really don't know ("You mean it isn't magic?  There aren't little people in there roasting my food over very hot fires?").  And that whole "language-is-evolving" argument has become the reason for each and every bloody-awful lazy spelling mistake, or punctuation abuse, or sloppy grammar usage.  Yes, the language is evolving.  Apparently, what it is now evolving into is a morass of muddy, incomprehensible, and thoroughly-confusing attempts at communication.

I guess people want to return to an age where "as long as you understand me" is good enough, and where the beautiful subtleties of the language, the exquisite confections of construction, the perfect pairing of thought and written expression, are utterly forgotten.  Where it is no longer possible to appreciate the incomparable elegance of Nabokov's Lolita, or the haunting spareness of Graham Greene, or the lush images of Milton.  icanhascheezburger rules the day, apparently, and being able to understand something - even if only at the crudest level - is all that matters.

I refuse to believe that the only purpose of language is communication of immediate and shallow thoughts.  I'm not making the categorical statement that just because something is easily understood means that it's not complex, or worthy of careful thought.  No, I'm categorically siding with Heidegger, and saying that language creates thought, and that it is an expression of yourself in the purest form.  If you do not have elegant and subtle linguistic abilities, then how can you possibly construct elegant and subtle thoughts?  If you do not have the linguistic ability to construct a complicated sentence, then how can you construct a complicated thought?  Philosophy, for example, relies heavily on an understanding - an intimate understanding - of the relationship between thought and language, and that is certainly why so much of it is devoted to the exploration of that relationship.  How we think is inescapably influenced by how we speak.

So I guess, then, my point is that by not understanding how language works, we're shorting ourselves on our ability not just to communicate at a level higher than Koko, but also on our ability to create, to imagine, and to fully realize ourselves as independent, living, thinking human beings.

So there.  I'll judge you when you use poor grammar, because I'll be wondering if you are too lazy, sloppy, or just out-and-out unintelligent to realize that you're expressing yourself in the crudest possible way, without giving any thought to how you sound, and how other people will perceive your expressions.  I'll judge you because I'll wonder if you're incapable of coming up with a clearer, more accurate way of expressing yourself.  And I'll judge you because I won't be able to help but wonder if you really are only capable of communicating on the level of icanhascheezburger.