So I just made myself a new iTunes playlist of 80s remixes. ’New jeans’, I’m calling it, in honour of the new jeans that I encouraged L- to talk me into buying today and of the songs that remind of how often I woke up in the mid-80s fearing both nuclear annihilation and dying unknown in small town Ontario (arguably, and not to trivialize either, there may be little emotional distinction between the two).
It might just be the ground bison in the shepherd’s pie I had for supper talking, but I think there’s a link here between my new ass cladding and some antique beats, so bear with me as I find it and wrastle it into submission. Okay. On one hand we’ve got the most expensive jeans I’ve ever bought in my life. I blame the jeans on my sister, who in her typical, “Did I really say that? I totally meant to say that” fashion, reminded me yesterday that I am rapidly approaching a birthday, and am running out of room to claim ownership of being 40. It put the fear in me and not withstanding that both maggie and ronnie are variously deceased and demented and the wall is down, I went shopping. Who wants to die in dumpy jeans?
And on the other hand we’ve got 12″ remixes of songs that remind me of an acute state of longing that comes with being a person of the teenage persuasion, living in a small town, but aware of a larger, funner outside world, which may be on the brink of disaster because of the massive egos of two heads of state (weren’t we all disappointed that Lennon died but Reagan didn’t?), but that has better music than where you live. Those songs could split me in two, making me feel both the possibility of more and the hopelessness of ever getting more. More than twenty years later they still make me want to move.
It all leads back somehow to Mr. M-’s history classroom at Ingersoll District Collegiate Institute, and a specifically general memory of an overheated, wet-wool-humid debate about politics among kids who were trying this stuff on for the first time. Mr. M- made the space for us and I expect we’re still figuring out where our longing for more can lead us. I know I am. There’s something about the idea of incipient that never stops intriguing- I’ll consider it’s time to pack it all in when it no longer beckons.
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