Meandering Connections To Guster's Goldfly

It's 2009, man. I'm still listening to Goldfly.

Why am I still listening to Goldfly? That album is a good 12 years old. I'm pretty sure I picked it up used at the old Plan 9 at Albermarle Square when I was in the 11th grade. I was in the 11th grade for about three months total. I was given the boot from Culpeper within the first week and turned down at both Madison and Liberty. At Liberty, they turned me down because I carried a Marvel Super Heroes lunchbox as a purse. When I went into the principal's office, my mom told me to take it back out to the car because it embarassed her but I refused. This principal reasoned that if I wouldn't listen to my mom, I probably wouldn't listen to anyone else. I knew this woman for all of five minutes but I didn't like her. She came across as an angry lesbian if I remember correctly.

I ended up at this other kind of school. I called it a hippie school but really, I did the research; it was a Waldorf school. I spent a good amount of time looking into the history of Rudolph Steiner's version of learning but of course after years of public education, it was inevitable that I would fail at that also.

The same thing that happened at Culpeper happened out in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, as well. I was going about this business of learning usless but interesting things; basic Spanish (which I already knew), ultimate frisbee, pretending to be making something out of clay, and being taught Chinese history by a 21 year old girl that went to film school in New York. I never understood the difference between loving someone and wanting to be someone so there was this amazing cute girl learning usless but interesting things by teaching them to a small group of teenagers and I was obsessed with her.

Goldfly came about after my favorable introduction to Parachute. I had this friend named Rachel and we would listen to Demons and Medicine over and over again and marvel at how great they were. I always felt like Demons was my song; I took the lyrics to heart back then. That was perhaps the very first song I heard that I really identified with. I thought so much of the words that they were used as my senior quote in the yearbook when I eventually did return to Culpeper.

I find a need to be the demon; a demon cannot be hurt.

I hear that song and I think, "Wow. Seriously...why did no one ask me about this? How come no one ever questioned this? As many people that dealt with me from family to teachers to administrators to psycologists to doctors.....why did no one ever think to ask about me in terms of music or writing? Why did no one think to ask what this meant to me?"

So I listened to Demons and never articulated my feelings for Laura..........or Ducky or Meghan or Maura or, you know, Scully from the X-Files. We all just danced around what I thought for sure must be lesbianism or at the least, bisexualism. Those that knew or figured just called it obsession. And I guess it was but no wonder! I kept it inside and in journals so how else would this thing find manifestation? No mental health worker ever brought it up. Not even in the hospitals. Those were all about cutting, Papa Roach, Linkin Park, and that terrible Butterfly song. Is that what teenagers were identifying with? If that "cut my life into pieces" song had been my Demons, would someone have paid attention? Man, mental health facilities were designed in really generic terms. I certainly hope it's not like that today.

I still sometimes think about Laura when I hear that album. I wonder what happened to her. She'd be about 30 or so now; the same age as Jorge Pezzimenti. I remember her pink scarf, her scale-y braclet, and her cute ears. I am fairly sure she was an indie girl before the term indie was widely used or had the same meaning as it does today. I remember being jealous of her usless but totally cool film school education. I also remember feeling offended that she was my teacher when she had absolutely no credentials whatsoever. I always thought that I could do what she does. To this day, I still have that perception about 75% of them time. Laura was proof that all you needed was an undergraduate degree in whatever and you could have a job with a title. Looking back, they probably paid her shit.

I was always hurt at the thought that she was probably not a virgin.

I don't remember the official reason why I left that hippie school. Hell; I don't remember the official reasons why I left Culpeper the two times I did. I just remember that I couldn't deal with seeing the girl I loved with some guy, I couldn't deal with this cute girl I was crushing on in a position of power over me, and I couldn't deal with not being able to convey my feelings to a woman via written words. Demons, indeed. Those were the roots of my actions and yet, they were never discussed. I was always too scared and too embarassed to define whatever I was going though. I hid behind what they called acts of "open defiance" so I wouldn't be hurt.

But I was always hurting. Never the way anyone else perceived, though. My senior yearbook also boasted another red flag quote that a young 6th grade version of myself adapted as her personal motto:

Trust no one but yourself.

Where was everyone? Why did I dwell on this for so long?

Did anything change...?

Eventually I forgot who I was and became an adult. I could tell a million old stories but few of them feel like me. Everything before 18 was something else. Well, almost everything. My musical past is still me. It always will be. Those are the things that always feel like me; from Salsoul Orchestra Christmases to driving with the windows down and listening to Journey to seeing the Pietasters for the very first time. Music is real, man. Demons is real.

Demons is a song about making someone believe lies. When I listen to it now, I am drawn to these words:

Honest is easy; fiction is where genius lies.

It made me think of two current and relevant things. One of those things is writing papers for college. This semester, Matt Bruno taught me how to write a paper for college. It's a lot like lying; I have to give myself another voice and talk about the things They told me I was supposed to learn. College papers are essentually fiction to me because even if I'm writing a first person reflective analysis, it's not completely me. This is the sort of fiction where genius lies because I'm pretty sure that this is how the Real World works. Matt asked me nicely to put my Marvel Super Heroes lunchbox in the car and since I'm now an adult, I listened to him. He was right. I got all A's in my first semester at George Mason University. I give him about 40% of the credit because after all, it was his version of me that wrote all those papers. Plus, it's his fault I'm in the program I'm in.

He would probably be cringing at my honest, meandering writing right now. You know, God bless that man for dealing with me.

The second thing is something I told Ben recently. I said that everyone should write autobiographies but change things to the way they wanted them to be. I feel like if we all did that, we'd have better self-esteem. We'd probably be happy in a smug sort of way and of course, we'd all be living out-right lies but.....wouldn't that be funny? I've long been a fan of doing things simply because "it would make a great story" but really, when will I ever get the chance to go dog sledding in Alaska during an advising meeting? Desperate times call for desperate measures. Just like the dreams I've interspursed with stories of bands, tours, and homelessness, I want my reader to stop and ask, "Wait. Did that really happen?"

And shortly thereafter, "Okay, you're clearly full of shit."