Secret Pop

Jun 28, 2005

Nonsense.

This song always sets me off. Sets me back. And it totally shouldn't. It isn't our song or anything. If anything, it would make you think of someone completely else. Not me at all. It wouldn't be the song we would both hear while doing Christmas shopping and be simultaneously overwhelmed with a sense of the bittersweet as we stand in two totally different stores in the same shopping mall unbeknownst to us. Like some predictable little scene in a Nora Ephron movie. I don't even know why it means anything to me. It shouldn't. I didn't share it with anyone. It doesn't need to be evocative. It may be as simple as the place I was in my life when I saw the movie it came from. Or what I felt and what I knew at the time. It isn't even that great a song. Or that well-performed. Why. Why. Why. This is non-scientific.

But when I hear this song -- and, depending on how my day is going -- I think things I'm happy to think. Or things I'd like to burn out of my brain with a hot thing. But without exception, I think of you. And it makes me want to have a conversation about it or write something down. It impels me.

Music inspires action in me more than nearly anything else. Unplanned puppetry. The sharing feeling. How can anyone in the world hear something lovely or good and think, "Oh, this is lovely," or, "Oh, this is good," and not want to share it with someone else immediately? How can anyone keep such things to themselves? I sometimes fear I will have to clap my hands over my mouth to keep from telling everyone everything I think. Instead, I write it down. And sometimes I make something of it. And sometimes I don't. But when I let it get away -- when I fail to say it or write it or remember it in some way -- I get the blues about it. If you think I save a lot of tangible things, wait till you get a peek at my intellectual property.

I can write it all down for writing's sake. And by the time I've gotten it out, the song has changed, and I'm no longer forced to think anything at all.

Fucking nonsense.

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