Morrissey - The More You Ignore me The Closer I Get

I am now a central part of your mind’s landscape, whether you care or do not... I've made up your mind!



Everyone is born with special skills. Some people can turn somersaults or play the trumpet. Some people can speak clearly and make themselves understood and some people can write music. My special skill that God seemed apt to fit me with is that I have an uncanny ability to push people past their point of comfortability, causing them to throw up their hands and walk away from me. I’ve always been good at forcing people to shut me out. If I could, I would put it on my resume. I push someone so hard to get what I want, that when I don’t get it, I self destruct and force the object of my demands into a corner. It is a skill I have perfected so keenly that I don’t even realize I am doing it anymore.

Vauxhall and I came out in 1994. It is literally the soundtrack to my senior year in high school. I am a huge U2 fan, obviously, but its Morrissey tattoos that cover my arms. This man, he understands the darkness, dislocation and despondency in me more than Bono ever could. There is the sadness and surrender inside me that U2 could never touch. Sometimes I need to revel in it; sometimes I need to lie down in the mud pit of my depression and wallow around. Senior year is about the time when I finally started to realize my limitations and see all too clearly my future of loneliness to come. All my friends had boyfriends and I’d never even been on a date or barely been kissed. I didn’t let myself care when I was around other people, but I would come home at night and I would lie in my bed and dream as hard as I could. Any man that comes into my life at this point has a good 20-24 years of expectations and fantasies to contend with. How could anyone live up to it?

What happens: I have an idea of a perfect love in my head, the love doesn’t come to fruition, something in me feels like I’ve suffered enough pain and rejection in my life to get what I deserve. I don’t get it, I get obstinate, I fight back. The person who didn’t want me in the first place eventually shuts me completely out and has to ignore me forever because I can't give up. The rejection, rather than teaching me a lesson strengthens the resolve. If only I had the same tenacity for something that actually made sense or helped anyone.

Beware !
I bear more grudges than lonely high court judges
When you sleep, I will creep into your thoughts like a bad debt that you can't pay
Take the easy way and give in
IT’S WAR


The stupid thing is here, I know I do it. It’s never worked, it will never work. I’ve just been doing it for so long that I don’t know how to do anything else. I’ve expected and felt like I have a god given right to have magic and miracles. I feel like I am owed. My best friend tries over and over to teach and tell me that I can’t expect any sort of reward for kindness. I know better. Whether I allow myself to believe I am expecting it or not, which I usually do not, I can always look back and realize I always have. In two weeks I will be 33 years old. I have never been loved the way I know I deserve. I have been close, but I have always pushed. I am really good at ruining golden opportunities with outlandish expectations.

Today I realize I am more comfortable being ignored and forgotten than being strung along by my own hope. Nothing anyone else can say or do will erase the undertaking of my task and the memories of my pain. Moz understands this, the fight for my reward. One day someone is going to come along and want to deal with this mess. And If they don’t, I’ll always have my Moz. You seriously have to have gone through the amount of pain, rejection and disappointment in your life to the extremity that I have to understand and appreciate Moz. this is why I have no friends that "get" him. I guess that's a good thing; that i don't have any friends that have suffered the way i have and that i have chosen such upbeat groovy people to be my friends.

When I hear this song I am 16, I am setting a resolve in stone. I am angry at the world for not knowing how amazing I am and how much I deserve. Sometimes I think "wow, I must be a really strong person to have been through so much heartbreak and disappointment!" mostly i think, especially when i am down like i am today, "when am i going to finally going to just give up?" ... times like this are when i listen to the most Morrissey.


NOTE: the soundtrack to the past 2 weeks of my life as of this moment can be found here.

Why did you give me so much desire when there is nowhere I can go to offload this desire?
And why did you give me so much love in a loveless world when there's no one I can turn to to unlock all this love?
And why did you stick me in self-deprecating bones and skin? Jesus- do you hate me?
Why did you stick me in self-deprecating bones and skin?
do you hate me?
do you hate me?
do you hate me?
do you hate me?
do you hate me?



This turned into a much more personal and emo livejournal type entry than is less typical for this blog. sorry.

David Bowie - Sound and Vision

I used to babysit a little girl named Michaela. Every Wednesday for a year and half, before I went away to college, Her dad would pick me up and drive me over where I would hang out with the 7 year old for about 30 minutes until she went to bed (which would take hours to finally happen sometimes) and then I would be left all alone in a house with no junk food or cable TV.

The dad was a dentist, the mom a nutritionist and every Wednesday they went to a couple’s counseling/prayer meeting at their catholic church and then would go out on a date. (They were really cute and very good to me.) But their house was boring as hell. This was pre-internet and they had practically no movies. They had a complete works of William Shakespeare and a miniature record collection of about 25 vinyls. I slowly made my way through each album, copying (onto cassette) each album I felt worthy. The only two I really remember were Lou Reed’s Transformer and King Crimson’s Islands.

After I had made my way through the record collection, after a couple weeks I eventually discovered that I could pick up NCSU’s college radio station, WKNC 88.1 from their stereo. This was around 1993, when their signal didn’t reach much further than the beltline, and I ironically only lived about 1/8^th of a mile from the family, but the signal didn’t reach my house at all.

I started recording hours of just random songs… songs by bands that I, as a 15 year old, had only just recently discovered… the sugarcubes, siouxsie, moz… after an hour or two of then, “current” songs, suddenly this one song comes on. I thought it was catchy and cute. I taped it. I was that kid in school who always had headphones on (not much has changed in that respect,) and I listened to the tape with this song on it constantly. But me, being brilliant and forward thinking, decided not to record the bit where they were talking, so I had no idea what the song actually was. I knew, by way of my childhood obsession with the movie Labyrinth, that the singer was David Bowie. I knew he said the world “blue” over and over.

I played the song for friends who I knew had even the smallest inkling of musical aptitude and no one had a clue. Flash forward a few years, tapes become obsolete. This song still followed me. I always kept an ear out. I never heard it again except for on that one tape. (Damn you, Google, for not existing 10 years ago!) I got so excited once, I found a Bowie cd with the song “blue jean” on it, I bought it. It was not the song. It was not a good song, in general. It was not a good album. I was bitter for a while, at that point.

For whatever reason, one day rob and I were at a borders way up in north Raleigh, and he buys Low. At this point, I am around 21 or 22 years old, and had given up on the song. We had recently watched The Man Who Fell to Earth, and he said it was music that was either in the film or meant to be in it. He bought it and put it in, in the car. 4^th song in, and I’ll be damned… there it was. I was so shocked; I think I had to pull off the road.

Since its discovery, I have heard this song no less than 4,877,992 times. It never seems to get old and every time I hear it, I am 14 on Michaela’s parents’ floor, making mix tapes.