Get To Feel Old
There are new things standing and waiting out there, each of them a mark on the days ahead, as if they are lighthouses steering me and my most tired bones away from the rocks that might shatter us once and for all.
My back hurts in all the most annoying places I cannot accurately describe. Somewhere down there, on the left and down a ways, off to the side of the middle of nowhere at all. There is no map that shows a satisfactory route to the source, it just hurts most of the time, and I have learned to make peace with the simple truth of not knowing. This unknowable pain is the end result of many things, not the least of which is the decades I spent working demanding physical labour, and the impact of time on the body. I am 43, and somedays I feel like 43 is code for past due. As if my age, any age, is when it all starts to crumble, and maybe when the number changes again I will be made by dust by the first cutting of cake.
I don’t hurt all days though. Some days I feel better than I have ever felt, made joyous by the lack of pain and the freedom of movement. And on those days I am grateful to be alive, especially after all this time, and grateful to be so old, to have seen so much, and to know there is still so much more to see.
If you want to feel old, you can cling to the edge of knowing that the single “1979” by the Smashing Pumpkins dropped in January 1996, 30 years ago. The last song written for the sprawling double album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (which released in 1995), “1979” is both obsessive about the past and cautiously looking ahead. By title alone, “1979” is a nostalgic ode to the remains of days lost to time, half-recalled memories that become gorgeous embellishments of the past when shared around tables by an artful storyteller, one more concerned with the arc of things than they are the truth. It is also the end of an era of sorts for the Pumpkins, as they moved away from the riffs and grunge of it all and began to imagine a world built by samples, loops, and synths.
The video, where destructively lackadaisical teenagers cruise around an Illinois suburb filmed somewhere in California, trash a mini-mart, drink skunk beer out of solo cups and run from the cops, expertly reaps nostalgia from seeds of memory. The sepia soaked chaos of all our younger years, all the days that felt endless, and the fearless freedom of youth. Remember how it felt to be so young, when your back didn’t hurt the way it does right now, and when everything was new and eager to be destroyed. Not always out of anger, but destroyed out of desire to see how it works, to see what it might be. To see what we are capable of. In 1996, 1979 was recent history, close enough to get a working 70s era Dodge Charger that could spin through scenes on though to the end.
I bought Mellon Collie on CD the day it came out, same as anyone whose life was changed forever by Siamese Dream would, and bought the 5-CD singles boxset the Aeroplane Flies High the following year, in 1996. That boxset sits on top of a shelf in my office to this day, with a note inside scrawled by my sister that reads “a big ugly dork” underneath a label stating This box belongs to. The note from my sister has also been hastily crossed out, and replaced with a second, kinder note reads “a really nice guy” written by a former girlfriend who died in 2005. Neither epigraph is particularly true anymore, but they are both matters of history, and as relics of the past they are irreplaceable.
There is life after 1979, specifically the song “Perfect” from Adore (1998). The notes and tone of it reminiscent of the past, recalling the structure of “1979” in all but name. The video also features most of the actors from the video for “1979”, the lone missing member absent because he had been incarcerated in the intervening years. In the video for “Perfect”, the youth of their younger years has been stripped away, replaced by young parenthood and aimless service work. Just like in their youth, one of the core cast members has to elude the cops, only now there is something more tragic waiting at the end of the line. Their lives have changed, not for the better and not for the worse, they just have. Change that can’t be fought back or destroyed, that will come for us all and cast new shadows from our frames.
These changes all happened before the millennium crawled to an end, and before I was 20 years old. How quickly everything moved and changed, and how much closer to the end it seemed to get. When I was 18, I thought more actively about dying in all the ways that would never disappear, like a pain in my back I can’t point to. I didn’t know what intrusive thoughts were, one day they just appeared and never left, and I have learned to live with them all this time. I just always assumed they would be the reason I was not around long enough to feel so old.
I have seen the Smashing Pumpkins become numerous versions of themselves over the years. They have been a grunge band, a pop-grunge band, a synth rock goth group, a cult-ish feeling side project, and a band that felt like they were trying to get back to themselves. Members have come and gone, and the public perception of Billy Corgan has shifted innumerable times since kids in my school shaved their heads bald to emulate his iconic post-hair styling. I have not kept up because time and all things has moved on. I’m sure the new records are good. People will tell me “you should really check it out” and I’ll say I will, which is a really fine little lie to tell. I’m just glad to know he is still figuring it out, even after all this time.
It’s not that I don’t care, it’s that there is still always something new. There are new bands, and old records I have never heard, there are artists and books and things to take in. There is a new coffee shop somewhere in the south of the city. There’s a dog park coming soon. There are new things standing and waiting out there, each of them a mark on the days ahead, as if they are lighthouses steering me and my most tired bones away from the rocks that might shatter us once and for all. I can feel old in memory of the past, but it doesn’t serve me, and it only helps to remind me that I have been alive for so long that the music of my youth has become a collector's item in the intervening years, if not for the marks of history upon them. I can choose to feel old, but then that is all I am, and all I’ll ever be, and the best stories to share around a table will be of the past, with old cars and older friends and names of people who have been lost in the river of days. My body hurts from the years, and I am glad for the pain because who could have ever imagined I could be here, having missed the jagged rocks at the shore, to float and look for the light of days still to come.
Speaking of the past, there is a beautiful new compilation album out today that is the distillation of all my most favourite things. 90s pop-punk, and trans women who are willing to take a joke as far as they’re able. Some Girls Try Too Hard is a track-by-track cover of Blink-182’s 1999 opus Enema of the State, reworked entirely by trans women. There are tributes, and there are reimaginings, as if the only way to revisit the past is to remake it. Each song is broken down to the bones of it and given a new frame and function. I feel so blessed to not know every artist on this comp because it allows me to find someone new, which was often the greatest part of skate punk compilations when I was young. We are so blessed and fortunate to have so many trans women making something so joyous in the face of so much craven evil, and I firmly believe your life will be made better by purchasing this. Proceeds benefit Trans Lifeline.
Bandcamp New & Notable Jul 28, 2016
While we’re in the past, I have certainly mentioned By Divine Right, the band my partner Alysha plays bass in. BDR has been a mainstay of the Canadian arts scene for decades now, and in the years on the body they have built a colossus of immaculate structure. Each record building on those that came before them, each going somewhere new, somewhere that learns from the past, that desires the future. Today, they’ve remastered and re-released their first-ever cassette, Some, which released the same year as the Smashing Pumpkins "1979". It is incredible to me that José Contreras, BDR front guy and beautiful genius, was capable of so much at such a young age, that only grew as he did. It is the proof of what is possible as we add years to our calendars. That instead of feeling old, we feel like grown and changed and all the better for it.
Bandcamp New & Notable Mar 3, 2022
The latest edition of my column at Paste Magazine, Alt-Rock Department is online now. It’s about early crushes, and the Goo Goo Dolls. Take a read online.
