"Hey, The Ice of Boston is Muddy" How a Song and a Moment Explain Why I'm Where I Am in Life

              [This is a story, comprised of old themes and tired, over-told bits of my past, that I am preparing for a story slam in Columbia, SC]

        

                “So I guess the party line is I followed you up here, well I don’t know about that, mainly because knowing about that would involve me knowing about some pathetic, ridiculous and absolutely true things about myself… that I’d rather not admit to right now”

I didn’t write those words. Travis Morrison of the Dismemberment plan, a man with a far sharper mind and tongue than I, wrote them back in the mid-90s. Now, the Dismemberment plan broke up in 2003, which was still a few years before I was “with it” enough to have heard of them. If memory serves, I think I started listening to them my freshman or sophomore year in college.  I’ll have more to say about memory later, so hold onto that.

But it was this song— "The Ice of Boston," and that line in particular that really sucked me in and made me a ravenous, devoted fan – It often takes one intensely provocative piece for a new artist to grab you, to be able to appreciate other things that you wouldn’t have had reason to before.  Well, "the Ice of Boston" was absolutely it for me and the Plan.

                 

              It’s about a guy, who’d evidently, and inadvisedly moved to Boston, following some chick. He’s alone, despondent, and snarky, drinking champagne naked in his apartment on New Year’s Eve, trying to avoid thinking about poor life choices, and ranting about Gladys Knight and the Pips. A famous music critic called it one of the “greatest not-getting-laid anthems of all time,” and I’ll let you make your own joke as to why I would gravitate to a song with such an ethos.

            But it is an amazing song, and if you haven’t had the joyful experience of screaming the chorus as loudly as possible, while thinking of someone who doesn’t love you as much as they did, then you’re missing out.

In itself it’s not much of a story. It isn’t worth your trouble, and it’s barely worth mine “Hey, this guy likes this song, by this kind of obscure band." But, "the Ice of Boston" is deeply enmeshed in why I live in Columbia now, and am able to be here to to tell my story. I’ll explain:

                

       As the D plan was becoming me and my best friend’s favorite band, the early 2000s were drifting into what is uncomfortably enough my 4^th decade on the planet. As Jon and I wandered from our native Florida to France together, and then me to Chicago, and him to Seattle—we reinforced in each other an ever renewed passion for that band.

           It became one of our strongest points of connection, which is saying something for a relationship like ours. We’ve been friends since 7, and I’m quite certain that we both harbor resentments towards the other for not being born a woman. Well, perhaps not him, he is seeing someone right now, and she does look better in a two piece.

            

            So, the summer of 2010, I was in Chicago, and I was caught up in the twin joys of a recently broken arm, and a recently broken heart. I tell you, facing one genre of pain to a degree that you’ve never had before is one thing, but I had never before had either emotional or physical pain to that extent in my life. Taking them on at the same time was… well, it was a mindfuck.

            The details of my broken heart are their own rollicking story, which I suppose I can save for another slam. But I will provide you with the skeletal details, if you’re curious.

Her–a writer, exceedingly hip. A razor sharp wit. We connected on music, traveling, and clever conversation. The things  that I am guaranteed to fall for every time. For the sake of balance, though, she was probably more than a little pretentious. I didn’t see it then, maybe I would now. Me – I was along for her ride. We fell in and out of love over the course of 3 or 4 months. I had a whole series of things that I desperately needed to work on in myself.

The standard sort of problems of the "who I was and where I was going in life" variety, and her breaking up with me sure did give me reason to try to be a better person. To give a shit. One fantastic thing I can say about her is that she made me cry for the first time in years, and for that I am genuinely thankful.

The arm break… it didn’t make me cry, but I did almost pass out from the pain. The story itself, well that’s fairly mundane: I was biking to work, and then I wasn’t. I don’t know how it happened, but all of a sudden I was falling off my bike… and, in a genius move, I decided to break my fall with my elbow. My elbow was broken along with my fall. I guess I just have terrible instincts. There’s a Seinfeld episode about that.

So these two events happened within 3 weeks of each other, and I was, pretty obviously, a wreck. Added to that was the irony that I was about to start school, at Depaul in Chicago, that fall, and I had just broken my writing arm. Not just that, I was studying history, while being pretty decently tormented by my own, recently-been-dumped-in history. A lot of forces were at work here. Oh!  and did I mention that she worked at my favorite bar on weekends, lived two blocks away, and had just gotten hired at one of my best friend’s office!?

My lifestyle, I felt, was going to have to be remade from the ground up.

I kept trying to get her back. Every week, a new attempt. It was Christlike 40 days in the desert (I remember it was exactly 40 days after she broke up with me that I last tried to make contact—the mind is a funny thing) I tried to convince her that she was wrong about me, about us. Appeals to reason, to logic, to rationality, none of these are particularly helpful. Hell, I’m sure she thought I was a bit unhinged. Hell,  I’m sure she was right.  In retrospect she seemed genuinely worried about me—worry that I willfully interpreted as reason for hope.

The last sad attempt was in Seattle. Jon had returned to the US, and we spent several days hanging out in Chicago. And by hanging out, I of course mean, Jon would help me and my broken arm cook, clean, and do things like tie my shoes. All while I talked in circles about Kate. The man is a saint. I love him, and love him desperately. He was moving to Seattle to be with his lady, and we were going to take the train together out there.

46 hours. My best friend and I.  Fellow travelers through life, through the South, through France, and now through the West.

The Midwest. The Great Plains. The Rockies. The observation car. We had an overpriced dinner and bottle of wine on the dining car while the train sketched its way through Glacier National Park, with the sunset framing it all.

On the other hand: 46 hours.  We were too poor to afford a sleeper car. Jon is not good at sleeping under the best of circumstances, and I had a recently broken arm in a soft cast. I was on some sort of powerful pain killer that made my arm feel a bit better, but made me disturbingly emotionally detached. Emotional detachment is fine in moderation, but two much of a good thing, you know….

Ergo, by the time we arrived in Seattle we both were zombies, having maybe 4 hours of sleep between us, for the whole two day trip. And I was, if possible, more despondent than before. There was something in physically distancing myself from Chicago, from Kate—moving away by train—that  must have motivated, compelled, driven me to make one, quixotic, last effort.

We’re in South Carolina, so, I could rather make the easy analogy to Pickett’s charge. But, I discussed it with Jon, and with my cousin who I was staying with in Seattle, and I decided to make one last bold effort to have her give me another chance.

Lovelorn people fall back on clichés. That itself is practically a cliché. I am certainly no different. Or maybe I’m just different by virtue of being worse. But the tenor of that last phone call had all of the expected rhetorical flourishes. I apologized for not being the man she needed. I tried to own up to the stupid things that I thought she didn’t like in me. I tried to convince her I could change – a veritable greatest hits collection …. But somewhere inside, I think, I knew, that she would shoot me down hard and fast. I wouldn’t have made that last attempt if I wasn’t prepared for that. So even though that call was for her, as I’m sure you know, that call was for me.

So, for me, for my pride, and for Jon and our immature humor – so that I could embed in that conversation something that she was oblivious to, something that I could always remember happily no matter how things with Kate and I ended- in trying to win back this woman that I loved, and unbeknownst to her, since she wasn’t a Dismemberment Plan fan (which should have told me all I needed to know) my resolving salvo was an homage to the quote that I started my story with: “I was sorry,” I said, “because when we were together I didn’t want to admit that I needed to make changes in my life ‘mainly because knowing about that would involve me knowing about some pathetic, ridiculous and absolutely true things about myself, that I’d rather [have] not admit[ted] to [back then.]’”

She did shoot me down. I knew it was coming, and didn’t fight it. After I hung up the phone, I called Jon and glibly told him what I had done. How we would be talking about that D Plan line in a new light, with a different subtext from now on. Sometimes maturity is realizing that it’s ok to be a seven year old now and again.

So how did I get from there to here? I lived in Chicago another 9 months, and even though both my heart and my arm did get a lot better, there were a lot of stops and starts along the way. Still, that period really demanded of me to take charge of myself. Be a bit more responsible, less of just a bystander in my own life – and all of those other coming of age clichés. It was also when I was seriously attacking my professional life in a meaningful way for the first time in at least 5 years, if not ever; it Started me on a road that would eventually lead me to the USC history department, to Columbia, and to Drip.

So using that song, in that conversation, was me wanting to have some “good” come from a dialog destined to go the way that it did. It was a juvenile inside-joke between my best friend and I, and, it just felt good to say it – but it was something else, as well.

I was purposefully making a memory. Jon and I talk about that song, that moment, a lot, and he’s even told people about it, who’ve never met me. I sometimes fantasize about emailing Kate, to tell her about it, but then I think about it for 5 seconds, which is long enough to remember all of the reasons why that’s a terrible idea. But, it means something to me, and weirdly enough, it means something to Jon, too.

The Dismemberment Plan played a reunion tour this past winter, and had a show in Chicago. Jon flew in from Seattle, and we lived an evening we assumed we’d never get to have, a D Plan show. And The Ice of Boston, as per tradition, was their closing song.

                                                                                                       .

So what does any of that mean? I hope I’m not just some dude, who gets to talk about some song I dig, some girl who dumped me, and some joke I made. But rather, I hope that there is something more important at work here, and I think I’ve got an idea or two what that is.

I think that with memory, like with relationships, the points of connection that you have matter infinitely more than those that you don’t—whether those that you don’t are connections that have faded, or maybe just the ones you think you want, or think you need.  And even if those connections are magnificently random.

If you’ve watched anyone you care about radically lose their memory, then you know that whatever fragmented filaments of a shared memory that you have become pure gold. And those bits of gold can be made of the most disconnected, inconsequential stuff.

But honestly, how much of our own memories are of the same sort? What the mind holds onto and what it discards may have some deeper logic to it, but what that logic is far surpasses my understanding. And, while there is a certain randomness, it’s those bits of unconnected memories that you have yourself, and that you share with others – that lyric –  the way that Kate and I first caught each other’s eye … and the last—my reflection in the window on the train –Jon and I trying, and failing, to sleep--  the fast-approaching pavement when I broke my arm — they're the atoms of stories, and they hold a reservoir of power. And they’re all there, the remnants of some irretrievable past.

 I think that if memories have any power at all, it’s only when we weave the disconnected fragments to try to tell a story;  when we try to get at what they mean for the us in the present, and try to get them to point us in the direction we should be headed towards.  And we use these memories to diverse ends; the same ones are reassembled to tell different stories at different times, and that's the never ending project of interpreting and reinterpreting the past. I’d be naïve to think that that process is always constructive. People don’t always look for the good. Or maybe we just don't know what "the good" even is.

But, at our best, we use our stories to build relationships, and try to do things better. They inform how we understand the present, and suggest better ways to live our lives. That’s asking a lot from a story. Stories have power, sure, but to do all of that?

Our stories are often woefully inadequate, I’ll be the first to admit, but sometimes woeful inadequacy is better than nothing. Sometimes it feels good just to say the right words, at the right time, in the right place, even if it doesn’t change anyone’s heart or mind.

And as much as anything, and more than most things, that is why I’m here.