Wilco – Reservations
When Yankee Hotel Foxtrot came out, I stuck up my nose at my friend Austin, who has over-suffered my bad attitude. Truth is, Austin is really the one of the only people on Earth I should ever listen to anyway. But of course, I’m a snob. Austin made it one of his top albums of the year, an email he sends out like a Christmas greeting each year.
It took Austin and several other people to really get me going on Wilco, and even then I wasn’t sure about it. It really took “Jesus, Etc.” and a pretty awful first year after college. How tenuously I dipped my big toe into the water until two weeks ago when I was screaming at the top of my lungs during “Hummingbird” at a sold-out Wilco concert in Chicago. “Reservations” was one of those songs I was hoping to hear, but it really didn’t fit into the theme of the whole show, which was much more rocking out than this.
Built to Spill – The Weather
Built to Spill is hardly some internet secret. I’ve just been playing this song over and over through You Tube since I don’t have this album. In fact, I’m not certain that I’d ever buy a Built to Spill album. But my God! This song is beautiful.
My friend Pea hardly ever did an unscheduled thing. He slept for eight hours a night regardless, he washed his clothes a certain day, he went out to eat at certain times, he bought approximately enough Trident gum at Wal-Mart to last him for two weeks. What kind of person knows the average amount of gum they chew in a week and are able to convert that into a purchase?
The kind of person that listens to the same song on repeat weekly, to the point of near disaster for his living situation. Of course, these really never were songs that anyone was excited to hear, let alone on a loop.
And you know what, I’m tired of being sappy about Pea. I love him still, and I miss him terribly. I wanted him to be at our friend’s wedding so bad and I couldn’t help but think about how that extra seat at our table was his. It was his seat; there were seven at our table instead of eight. I mean, seriously?
So instead of writing again and again and again about sadness and making poetic statements about someone who knew how much gum he’d chew in a pay-period, I’m going to pay my tribute in a happier way.
Everyweek, I’m going to post the song I’m playing over and over and over.
I’m going to start with my very favorite Pea-song-of-the-week, Midnight Train to Georgia. I may have heard this song 4 million times, but everytime I smile, thinking of Pea dancing around in his dorm room.
I am preparing myself to live in the woods. Because that’s the only possible way for me to not be obsessed with Facebook. No, don’t come over here and try to convince me otherwise. It’s the woods, all Walden or bust. It’s the only way.
Sometimes I fantasize about the downfall of social networking. Sometimes I see Facebook and Twitter and MySpace and LinkedIn shrivel up and die like Friendster. I think about how great that would be, if I didn’t care anymore about what everyone was doing that Tuesday evening, if I wasn’t worried about someone tagging an unflattering picture of me and I was too embarrassed to look, but too proud to un-tag it. If I could, for a moment, disable the Facebook App on my Yahoo! homepage because they blocked Facebook at work. I wonder if I would be strong enough to get rid of the mobile updates – not be able to text to nothingness about my whereabouts.
Do you even remember what it was like before we broadcasted minute details to people we don’t even send Christmas cards to? I don’t. Before this, my friends and I all had AIM, which was very similar in the I-guess-I-do-give-a-shit-you-went-to-lunch-at-Panera-with-your-mom way.
So, I have to go live in the woods. Somewhere with no wireless internet access and maybe in a country where Facebook is blocked.
I hit my low point recently, when swiveling my laptop toward him after a month of asking, I said insistently to my sweet, charming Gentleman Caller, “I promise that if you friend me on Facebook, I will never talk about Facebook to you again.”
He acquiesced to my demand – a decade older and perhaps a little disconnected in this area, he does not understand what my major malfunction is. Also, I squeal with excitement, pretending to squeeze his cheeks through the screen when I see a picture of him as a little boy. This does not help my case.
“Seriously,” he’ll say, “I don’t understand what the appeal is of telling all of these people you don’t like exactly what you are doing and where you are at that moment.”
And then I will do a piss-poor job justifying it. “Well, you know, people also say important things. It would be an easier way to keep up with family.”
The conversation ends with some variant of, “Please, that’s what the phone is for” or “Is that your phone? Is someone calling you?”, the latter being related to the constant buzz of my Facebook mobile updates, set to vibrate upon their arrival.
“Oh. No, no one’s calling. That’s just Facebook.”
We’re renovating around here. Like coming out of a cocoon like a butterfly and shit.
