Mermaid Avenue in anticlimatic

Up until a few days ago I was using Youtube on my phone (not even the App, the website via Safari) for all of my music and podcast needs. Like a fucking animal. Fortunately, I discovered Spotify- and have been getting used to this quality of life update.

Aside from the ability to use my phone for literally anything else while listening to music (or just close the screen), I found that I can bring up and listen to whole albums. Like the old days. This morning it was raining, and as I wracked my brain for some rainy morning music album, “Mermaid Avenue” rose to the surface, and shazam, just like that, while it seemed like I was on my way to work, I was actually peeling carrots in the back of the café as the sun rose over an early autumn day in 2001.

Sure working in a restaurant or coffee shop pays slave wages and is insanely stressful and will almost certainly drive you to acquire a nicotine habit, but what they don’t tell you is that you get a massive group of friends to party with all the time. If you’re under the age of 25, that is worth the price of admission. It certainly was to me, and my 2 bedroom slumlord special flophouse that I rotated room mates in and out of.

Around my 6th or 7th roomie, by the time I had been reduced to posting room-share ads on Cragislist, I got a guy (named Craig, ironically) to move in. Complete stranger. Few years older than me. He was an odd one. Only lasted a few months. I had a lot of people like that, they always followed the same pattern: initial optimism, loving the new change, clean and cozy style, optimistic- then a slow stagnation and decline. A restlessness setting in. Anxiety. Depression. Splitskee. Repeat.

This album, though (hell, albums in general) is from such a special time and place for me. For everyone, probably. Nineteen years old. A baby adult in a world of adults consisting of generations X through Greatest. Just browsing their songs in the original order, like I did so many times in my car’s CD player when I’d take my lunch breaks on the back country roads to get high.

Fellowship Of The Ring came out that Christmas.
Good luck topping that year.

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Postscript: this song splits my memory open along this very specific landscape of rolling yellow fields with groves of maples in the background- cocked at a slight angle, with a stiff breeze. That smell of the grass. The sight of it blowing on a late pre-9/11 august afternoon. That feeling of being in peak civilization, and the incredible hope and optimism I had for my own future and the future of the world. All the beauty of nature lay complaint before me, and art was winning. A feeling I have called ‘normal’ ever since, and an ever more disappointing comparison the world makes, next to it, by the day.