Listening Diary #1: I Was a Teenage Masshole

Let me start with this: if you haven’t been on vacation since the pandemic started, and you were able to get vaccinated, I highly recommend it. In fact, stop reading this, go to your transit dealer of choice, buy your train or plane or bus tickets to wherever the hell you want to go, and go. Make time for yourself. You probably deserve it.

Unless you’ve moved recently, chances are you’re still spending too much time in the same place you lived when you were told to hunker down for however long it would take. You’re still in the same place where you watched the world you used to know disintegrate on your screen before your very eyes: galled by injustice, gutted by open-faced corruption, chagrined by the kind of insipid human behavior you once easily blocked out because you didn’t spend all of your social energy sharing a virtual room with the rest of humanity.

You could have looked back at the last sixteen months and acknowledged how surprisingly easy it may have been for you and still realize that you have baggage. You might be sleeping in the same bed where you spent so many nights wide awake wondering about your family living across the country, wondering whether or not your parents might pass by some unsuspecting person in the grocery store and wake up a week later struggling to breathe, being rushed to the hospital, standing on the precipice of death. You might be laying on the same couch where you noticed a tingle in your throat or a series of coughs or a random wave of nausea, sending you into a panicked spiral not just about your health but about the way people might perceive you, that your ability to catch something so many people dared to expose themselves to willingly would draw the judgmental ire of an assumptive populace.

For nearly a year and a half you tried your best, trapped in whatever space you managed to carve out for yourself, and until you take some time to remind yourself that you once had a life outside of that space you’re never going to heal properly.

I didn’t realize this until I got back from Massachusetts earlier this week. I had the trip in my mind every time Mom or Dad talked to me on the phone, when they each tried to convince me to fly out for Thanksgiving and fly out for Christmas and fly out because in all truth they each needed some kind of human barrier between what had built up between them after thirty-two years of marriage. Eventually the excuses ran out and I opted to book a trip in early August, and it was a good thing anyway because I wanted my boyfriend John to meet them. I’ve met a lot of parents to gay people, and you could do far worse than mine.

I’ve lived in Massachusetts for the majority of my life; first out east, then near the Berkshires for a handful of years in college. If you haven’t been to Massachusetts yet (specifically eastern Mass, the hundred-or-so miles circumscribing Boston) let me try to describe it to you semi-briefly:

-It’s humid. I’m not a meteorologist, but I’ve always assumed it’s because the Atlantic holds in the wet air. This makes everything feel ten degrees hotter. Your legs feels heavier and your shirt sticks to you as if the laws of gravity were stricter. If you have your arms crossed while you’re waiting in line, like at Six Flags perhaps, or the fried clam truck on the corner, you’ll find them considerably harder to pull apart.

-Because of that humidity, it’s surprisingly fragrant. This is what got me the whole week. Smell is the sense most tied to memory, and I had to stop for brief moments and catch myself being thrust back into the past. Tiny wild strawberries peeking out of the grass; hot asphalt and brick walls; fir-like bushes and tall trees destined to blaze in reds and yellows by October; wafts of chlorine and salt air on clear days peppered with voluminous cumulonimbus clouds, as if the color blue had a scent.

-There are a LOT of white people. Like, waaaaay more than I remember, which makes sense because where you grow up you don’t have a point of comparison. Politically, New England (with the arguable exception of Maine) is the most dependably blue area of the country to the point where most Republican candidates running for federal government won’t even bother campaigning there, but that means something different in 2021. It’s now simply dependably liberal, and even that is weighted down by its own history, so inflexible that it slides into its own flavor of conservative. I was actually thrown off by how many “thin blue line” flags were flying on my parents’ street alone until I realized how the general demographic would allow few opportunities to challenge that which what was largely agreed upon.

-Speaking of people, those who haven’t lived in the Northeast but have a passing familiarity with the area assume it’s socially acceptable to be abrasive. This is true to a point. After living on the West Coast for over six years, I can safely say the veneer of pleasantness so evident here isn’t as widespread on the other side of the US, even though there’s a bit of a cultural equilibrium forming across the major cities. People certainly have less patience, either because they’re working on their Ph.D or raising their third kid, and in a sense it’s freeing to know you don’t have to put much energy into being accommodating. This is still, however, the West, where the expectation of unlimited opportunities runs unbound (despite how saturated every market seems to be) and first impressions are that much more vital.

-Did I mention the humidity yet?

Overall the state’s a cool place, and if you’re deducing a list of trips to take, you could do worse than to walk the Boston Commons with the giant Washington statue, or to gaze down at the part of Plymouth Rock that hasn’t been eroded away by time. Maybe you’d grab some expensive battered haddock at some sticky spot next to the Atlantic and find a rare spot free of seagull shit to wolf it down. Maybe you’d stare up at the Mayflower, freshly painted in quizzical shades of matte primaries and beige like it were repurposed to be climbed upon by kids in a bougie play place, and wonder how many years you spent being indoctrinated by the old colonial myths as they all seem to wash away now (in fairness, they apparently renamed the “settler LARP” attraction of Plymouth Plantation to Patuxet, taken from the old Wampanoag sect, which I’m personally impressed with even as it rubs against my memories like sandpaper).

Anyway, this is a music site and I have yet to mention music at all, so here’s some of the stuff I caught myself listening to when I was there:

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The first thing I did when I got back home, besides hug my folks and sleep for four hours in broad daylight, was watch Chernobyl. I dunno how it happened; I think I caught Dad watching TV before dinner and he flipped to it because he thought I’d enjoy it. After twenty minutes I committed to binging the whole series before the night was over.

Binging Chernobyl is not a good idea. Actually, if you want to enjoy the rest of your week to the fullest, watching Chernobyl at all is not recommended. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s fucking horrifying. I’m a bit of an emetophobe and a sucker for horror films despite what they do to my psyche, and watching all those men suffer radiation poisoning combined with the frustration of watching institutional rot in action was gutting to watch. But I was also attracted to the mini-series because John had been raving forever about Hildur Guðnadóttir being the first female winner of the Original Score Oscar (for Joker); he’s always been super passionate about fighting the patriarchy surrounding modern composer culture, and I was excited to see what all the fuss was about.

She did indeed contribute an enormous deal to the show’s creeping dread. The cello is an incredibly versatile instrument, and right from the get-go she uses its thick strings to replicate the fight-or-flight response, laying damp percussion underneath like the stutter of a stressed heart and sliding up the frets to summon fresh waves of nausea. It’s so oppressive that’s I find it hard to listen to on its own, but I can acknowledge how effective it worked in the context of the show. I just wish I didn’t have to work on scrubbing the image of melting flesh out of my mind just to get to that point.

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I won’t get too much into it, but John and I watch Game Grumps together sometimes. It’s comforting. And there’s this one bit where Dan mentions this refrain that goes, “I’ve got a brand new pair of roller skates,” which – if you’re not listening to the link above, go click on it – you’ll notice starts at the top of the voice and steadily, as if in freefall, coasts lower until it hits an actual structured melody. That bit involved him imagining being a pro-wrestler and using that song as his entry theme, and the juxtaposition between the scenes always made me laugh (“It’s Dan with the steel chair!”) You had to be there.

For years I was convinced that this song wasn’t real. I thought it was just some improv-ed approximation of those cute novelty songs that happened to hit the charts in the sixties and seventies. And yet sure enough we were floating in the in-ground pool I was lucky to have grown up with while a cheap boom-box radio played Mom’s favorite station, Easy 99.1, and there she was, good ol’ Melanie (just Melanie) and her guitar: pining for some unspecified person while maintaining her own individuality, determined to save on carbon emissions as she biked and skated across the world. We freaked out, and then we listened closer and realized it was actually a pretty good song. Novelty for sure, but warm and folksy and nostalgic in a fashion that wasn’t just a product of its age, that could have just been built into the song.

The next two days the track swirled around John’s brain (the way songs always do) from dawn to dusk, pushing itself off his tongue at random intervals and threatening to annoy the crap out of me if I weren’t also singing it with him. Normally I tend to do a great deal of research into the music I listened to – it’s kind of my thing, you know? – but this time I was content to imagine who the hell Melanie was. How was she discovered? Did she always just have a first name? What made her come up with the idea of turning a song about roller skate maintenance into a little ditty about codependence? Whatever happened to the person who ghosted her? Is she still out there, crossing the dangerous expanse of the Australian outback and singing along with the hordes of giant spiders? And how did she even get to Australia? Must have been well-maintained skates.

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I grew up in a town just outside of Plymouth, so I’d spent a good deal of days being dragged out to the square on field trips or on shopping days where I had to cavort with the age-advanced, constantly being reminded not to touch anything while Mom did business with whatever eccentric shop owner wanted her to frame a portrait or sell her a new piece of jewelry. I thought it back then and I still believe it now: Plymouth is where you go to raise a family, one you’ve somehow acquired elsewhere because I can’t honestly conceive what a dating scene would look like out there. Then you spend the rest of your days examining antiques and sitting by the water, the smell of kitschy gift shops permeating almost every corner. The only time I’ll consider living down there is if I get to be sixty-five, and even then we’re all aware it’ll look far different.

The harbor may have been crammed with more boats than I remember, but for the most part it remained exactly as it was when I left it. This was the day before were set to leave, and the heat that once dominated the week had been replaced by a cool, post-rain temperateness that blessedly reduced the crowds of walking families. I walked the streets and showed my boyfriend all the places I used to take for granted years ago. There was the small path winding through Brewster Gardens, which radiated green from July’s uncommonly-long rain storms and ran parallel to a rapid river that never failed to excite me as a kid. There was the grist mill positioned at its entrance, with its waterfall and giant rotating wooden wheel that once helped feed the town but now reminded me of when I used to imagine riding it into a dangerous hidden cavern like a scene from the Goonies.

We stopped by the ancient John Carver Inn, which once employed my mother and bestowed her the opportunity to meet the cute delivery driver that would eventually give her the children she desired for so long; the warm, dark restaurant appended to its side had been replaced by a sports bar, its ugly white walls punctuated with lines of blue. Behind the inn rose a hill that overlooked much of the town center, a hill that housed the long-decomposed corpses of hundreds of people who had spent their lives surviving in an unfamiliar land without modern medicine or living conditions. Back then I always requested we stop by here, because I was fascinated by the spookiness of the graves and the eerie stillness of the elevation, which somehow blocked all the street sounds the way fresh snow does. I’d race across the winding paths and read the headstones and didn’t think too hard about what it all really meant, like I do now.

Besides the cookie-cutter fleets of white tourists and all those gift shops, Plymouth is dominated by the Atlantic Ocean, which stretches out impossibly wide and is demarcated only by the thin stretch of sandy land across the harbor that makes up the Long Beach. Oceans aren’t ever supposed to change, which is why they appeal to so many of us. When you sit and stare out at it, watching uncountable creases of saltwater collide with each other, you’re reminded of how long it’s been there. If you’re close enough to an edge you can hear it inhale and exhale like its alive, and the stench of low tide or the sharp twinge of salt feel like shared breaths. It’s also eternally accommodating, readily reflecting whatever color the skies happen to be wearing that moment. It’s there whenever you need it to and it asks nothing of us except to be left, reasonably, alone.

There’s a jetty by the harbor, a line of rocks that extends in a J-shape out into the water where you can bring fishing poles to try and catch stripers or, if you’re young and bold, cans of spray paint to leave a message on the stones. I took John out to walk the length of the jetty, spending about fifteen minutes of time watching our footing and catching glimpses of whatever had been left written over the years: pairs of initials enclosed in a heart, general political stances like tiny time capsules, cartoons uttering inside jokes in hastily-drawn speech bubbles, an epitaph or two. I thought about how darkly funny it was that, in a town famous for introducing the American colonizers to their new home, a tradition had surfaced that allowed their ancestors, hundreds of years later, to participate in a claiming of ownership in kind.

Before we left we stopped by Norman Beach, just to the north of the harbor proper and normally impossible to park by. But we got lucky, and soon we sat in small beach chairs that Mom had thoughtfully packed and watched the water move while a nest of ospreys chirped blithely.

This is where I thought about this Weather Station song, which I didn’t get a chance to listen to until the train ride back toward the airport (if you’re wondering, Ignorance is still one of my favorites this year). As bark-sharp towers of green raced by the windows I listened to Tamara Lindemann lament the beauty of the landscape in front of her, caught in a sudden moment of weakness where her eyes and ears were left unattended, contemplating the ending of things. It’s hard for me to imagine that something as culturally entrenched as Plymouth will functionally disappear soon, that the ocean, so normally accommodating, won’t have a choice but to reclaim what had been already stolen, but I guess that’s why we don’t think about it.

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You know how they talk about love languages? Dad’s, one hundred percent, is money. It’s why he spent most of my waking adult life chasing it, working far past overtime as an hourly UPS driver. It’s also why, despite his incredible heart and sense of generosity, he made for kind of a poor father figure. You can ask my therapist for a second opinion, but I honestly don’t blame him for that because no parent is ever perfect and he really did do his best.

One evening he opted to take me, my brother and my boyfriend out to this local ice cream place (I forgot to mention that Mass has a beguiling number of ice cream shops and creameries that endeavor to outdo each other with how many flavors and pictures of dogs they can stuff onto their menus) and pay for some soft-serve. When I was a teen I’d visit this shack called the Dairy Twist in Pembroke, which specialized in this combination of coffee and black raspberry swirled together. This place had it too. No, I have no idea who landed on that concept, but it’s fucking delicious. People take their coffee ice cream products seriously out there.

We sat with our stacked cones and, in true New England fashion, wrestled ideas: us three quasi-hip millennials against an old exhausted feeder driver from New Bedford. Dad’s had this idea he’s come back to almost every time we get into world politics, which is that any time I bring up the simmering existential dread that’s become a mainstay for my generation he mentions the fact that the world is overpopulated and that too many people across the world are trying to live a “first-world” lifestyle. It’s a point of view that’s both vaguely racist and irritatingly grounded in reason, and I have yet to convince him otherwise because I’m a terrible debater, but I hate the notion that he’d likely be supportive of some removed, overseas attempt at genocide. But then who’s there to challenge it? Six full days of the week he spend legitimately half of that time sitting by himself in a truck.

The conversation eventually turned to music, which is where I was surprised that he was aware of The Modern Lovers. I was working at a coffee shop in south Seattle the first time I was exposed to the band’s debut, which remains to this day some of the best enduring proto-punk out there. I legitimately thought “Picasso” could have been part of any given revival from the last decade, or from the early 2000s garage one at least. But then I also remember discovering “Roadrunner” and thinking about how much it reminded me of my Dad. I’d stand washing dishes, my head craned underneath an overhang, and think about if they ever played this song on Sirius XM and imagine him in his enormous gray truck crossing Sagamore in the dead of night feeling like his existence was validated for just a moment, that there was somebody who technically would have been his senior writing music extolling the sheer thrill of driving, siphoning significance out of the locale.

And sure enough, we were back in the truck heading home with bellies full of sugar and cream and he had his phone out on top of the cup holders and marked to a YouTube video – not even plugged into the stereo, because who could be bothered – to play us that song. This shop was near Exit 20 (Exit 10 in my youth) and we had to drive south up the road toward the center of town, past the ever-rotating grocery store and the driving school where I used to panic about right-of-way while a taciturn man in his fifties smoked cigarettes endlessly, his right foot perched on the emergency brake like a cocked flyswatter. We hit the Stop and Shop right as Jonathon Richman said it and suddenly we were there, wrapped in the same sense of hometown pride and buoyed by his effortless, raspy delivery. The glee that radiated off of Dad was just as I imagined. I hope I never forget that moment.