A Mid-June Journal, Vol. 2
Day One:
It’s June again, and once again I really shouldn’t be writing, and yet it’s all I’d like to do.
I’ve been listening to Fleetwood Mac recently, which means I’m in one of my “sentimental” moods. It’s occurring to me only this time, after all these years, that Fleetwood Mac is the most important band in my life. My parents played “Rumours” on CD all the time, which is why it’s my least favourite of their major albums — the others I had to discover on my own, and it always ended up being at the most emotionally vulnerable moments of my life. Fleetwood Mac to me is sentimentality; it is melancholy and looking ruefully back at the past. The members of Fleetwood Mac strike me as “theatre” people, letting their emotions pour out in a dramatic and striking fashion. They don’t hold themselves back. I suppose I need them to unlock that part of me — left to my own devices, I would probably never properly cry.
A friend of mine posted this video on a forum a few months ago. It was clearly designed to appear on some sort of “feed,” to be scrolled to and scrolled past along various other unrelated videos. However, I came upon it divorced from any context, within a deliberately archaic online format. Perhaps this is what gave it its power — for this video almost made me cry. I felt like I wanted this guy to be my cousin, so I could see him a few times a year. Maybe he would do the dance for us at family gatherings.
I was never the biggest Fallout Boy fan, but I certainly had my time with them in elementary school. “Sugar, We’re Going Down” wasn’t one of the songs I had on my mp3 player; instead, I remember “Grand Theft Autumn” being my favourite. After watching the man dance, I found the music video for “Sugar,” and in the end that too almost made me cry — even though it’s just a stupid little thing about a teenage kid who has deer antlers, and his girlfriend’s dad wants to shoot him. At the end it turns out that the dad has deer feet of his own…
Well, maybe I am that emo kid, after all, and maybe I’m also that dad trying to hide his emo feet… I suppose, at that moment, I was coming to terms with the way I was always constraining myself to get along with construction workers. There was a part of me that was very happy to finally be recognized as a “normal man.” But it meant constant repression, transforming aspects of my personality to make them palatable to others.
Last night I had a dream where I was at a party, and Fallout Boy came on. I jumped to the middle of the room and began performing the kind of moves from the dancing man's video — everyone around was screaming and hollering with excitement. I was letting loose! I haven’t danced that emphatically in probably a decade. I was so exhausted by the end that I had to crawl off the dance floor — and then I woke up.
I’m watching the video again and tearing up! Truly, I am in a strange mood today. I don’t know what to do with myself, or where to direct this energy. I don’t have any concrete thoughts at all but just this vague and expressionless sentimentality, this feeling that I love a whole lot of people but I have no idea where they are. My injury has once again untethered me from this world of causation and forward momentum; I feel that I am not headed toward the future but pointed simultaneously in various backward directions. My past feels vivid but formless — it comes to me as waves of music, as if the associated memories did not take place on any concrete Earth at all, and might not even have involved the person I call myself.