That girl in last year's picture is now haunting her own hallways
[or: "how do you measure, measure a year?"]
Sure, you could get therapy - or you could, once a year, stand shoulder-to-armpit with 500 of your closest strangers and bellow: “they’re never going to love you in that one specific way that you want them all to love you”.
Because that’s what it comes down to in the end, right? And you want them all to love you.
Jonathan Larson suggested we measure a year in daylights, sunsets, midnights, cups of coffee… I could measure one in kisses, in nephews, in single-use coffee cups and Sephora skincare masks that don’t count if my sister buys them for me. In mascaras trialled and ultimately abandoned; in times I’ve built an emergency playlist-of-playlists called “TODAY [candy-coloured heart emoji]” because there are eleventy billion songs but none I actually want to listen to1. In annual leave days remaining and Budgets and the number of times I’ve gone “fuck it” and got myself a roll and sausage from Cafe Metro on Bothwell St instead of eating my yoghurt. In weekends. In Weekenders.
Somehow, somewhen, the annual mile’s walk between the Euston Travelodge and the Electric Ballroom has become our personal Camino de Santiago. Along the way, we count losses: a parent, a weight-bearing knee. This year has been less desperate, and I count the gains: a family member, a handful of new vices, better muscle definition. But to tell you the truth, Phoebe, my resentment is only getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger… perhaps you’ll understand when you too are halfway done.
And that’s already assuming you’ll get more time than he did.
You don’t get to control the things people remember you for. “Ross said I should talk to you about Taylor Swift and Celtic, but I don’t know much about either of those things,” said my new friend at work, who didn’t realise her dad playing in a Bruce Springsteen tribute band was a far more salient detail. I am all of those things, but more than that I am middle-aged men singing about drugs and failure and redemption, like the Easter mass isn’t the worst one of the year.
I don’t know if my dad every heard a note of The Hold Steady, but when I promoted keyboardist Franz Nicolay’s first Glasgow show in 2011 his was, as usual, the spare bedroom that got offered. I thought there was a photo of Franz in my dad’s old reclining chair - there was a time they had the same moustache - but I just checked with the one with the actual memory and it must have only ever existed in my mind.
I just finished reading Sloane Crosley’s memoir Grief is for People - when I tell you I have never preordered a book so fast in all my life - in which she quotes, of course, Joan Didion: “It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.” That’s a good day that is etched upon my memory, but you don’t usually stop to bank them as they pass, do you? At least, I don’t. I was reminded of this when we went to see Bucky F*cking Dent at the Glasgow Film Festival (Jehane: “sorry we saw another dead dad thing”). Clearly, we didn’t read the synopsis, so to save you: a Yankee Stadium peanut vendor moves in with his father, a lifelong Boston Red Sox fan played by writer, director, author of the novel that was the source material and First Great Love of my Life David William Duchovny, who is fighting off god damn CANCER long enough in the hopes of seeing the Sox beat the Yankees in the 1978 playoffs.
Ted, the son, is both trying to repair the estrangement in his relationship with Duchovny’s character Marty and give him reasons to keep going, and it got me tearing up on the bus on the way home while thinking about how you never know when the Last Good Day is going to be until it’s already long past. In the film, Ted and Marty’s was particularly memorable - even before its proximity to finality became clear - but whoever’s on the bastard novelisation of my life could do with a copy of Save The Cat!.
I can’t fight it, and I will never regret carrying around a heart that’s too sizes too big for my chest no matter how many times it gets me stared at in public.
Although, when this is the case, the answer is usually Waxahatchee’s “Right Back To It”.
god I love your writing and I love you