The Indie Rock Fag: Lost On My Merry Way
I hate July. The languid asshole of summertime, it’s a month when sand gets in the gears of normal life and causes all the attendant machinery to stop. I usually kill time in July by thinking of what Fall will be like, and by thinking of ways to add some change to my person. I don’t have the money for tattoos right now and DC doesn’t have any good thrifting. So I turn to music.
I’ve been listening to Grandaddy. A band that often gets characterized as a poor man’s Radiohead for their sonic textures and obsession with technology, but I find them infinitely preferable to Thom Yorke and co’s experimental ramblings and smug fanclub. Grandaddy’s penultimate album, Sumday, is almost entirely concerned with the perks and perils of escaping the modern grind for a glittering somewhere else. The process is not always an easy one.
The disc starts off on a fairly optimistic note with a song called “Now It’s On,” but the standout tracks just get bleak from there. “I’m On Standbye” is sung from the vantage of an outdated robot whose boxed for not having a great enough understanding of humanity. “The Go in the Go-For-It” voices the fantasy of leaving your mundane life for parts unknown, but could easily read as the world’s most melodic suicide note. The Group Who Couldn’t Say” shows a group of office drones losing their minds when confronted with a simple afternoon in the countryside. “Lost on Yer Merry Way” and “Ok With My Decay” are self-explanatory, an addmittance and acceptance of a desultory and degenerative life, puncuated only with the drunk dejected sleep that occurs in “The Saddest Vacant Lot in All The World.”
So yeah, I listened to too much Grandaddy and decided I needed to get out of town. A weekend trip to Pittsburgh fell apart last minute, so I found myself tagging along for the night on a good friend’s birthday trip to Baltimore.
***
An initial sense of excitement, at finally cementing my plans, at clearing the rest of my evening, at my boyfriend’s permission to flirt, at an impending sense of possibility, is quickly tempered when I rush into Union Station and found out that my train did not leave at 8:20, as I had assumed, but at 8:45. Time doesn’t work right sometimes and I could swear that I spent a lifetime in there reading Nylon Magazine’s “Guys” issue and eating spaghetti at the Sbarro’s that hygiene forgot.
When I can finally get on my train I spend the whole time on my headphones trying not to stare at a really cute guy across the aisle from me whose girlfriend is in a wheelchair. I didn’t want them to misinterpret the target of my gaze.
Unleashed into Baltimore, the first person I encounter is a hotel employee who informs us that the titties are “that way, and then to the left.” I tell him I’m not looking for titties tonight and he seems baffled. On the way to the bars my friend and I remark on how old the churches there look. It is ominous it is that none of them are lit, and it is also appealing. We pass three men in Polos and cargo shorts that are clearly visiting from DC.
At bar number one, I make small talk with a guy from Minneapolis with a newsy cap and appealing tattoos on his arms. We dance and exchange numbers before he heads off the Baltimore Eagle. I ask if he has any more tattoos and he shows me the silhouttes of several WWI fighters on his ribcage. I run my finger over them and he tells me to “be good.”
Shots are taken. I roll a joint in a bathroom stall. A waitress named Cairo at a nearby diner lends me her lighter and we take it to an alley. When I return it, I ask when she gets off work to be nice. She tells me that she has a boyfriend. I don’t really feel like correcting her assumption, but I do anyway to make our parting a sweet one.
At bar number two I drink more beer and talk to any guy in a plaid shirt that will listen to me. I get in a brief and anticlimactic fight about penis size with a relative stranger. I find my friend on the dance floor, dancing alone, and I join him for a while but the music is too familiar for me and we instead do a lap around the bar. At one point I make eye contact with a dark-haired boy and we kiss briefly. And then we disengage. And then my friend and I head to an afterparty. I might as well be at home
My night’s final destination takes place, for no discernable reason, at an oxygen bar. We sit on the floor and stare at the neon tubes of fresh air and wonder if they’d wither when they hit our tongues. And I wonder if I’ll ever find the kind of party I’m looking for, or if it’s precisely that wondering that acts as my obstacle.
On the way back home my friend insists that we walk through what was, 8 hours earlier, a bustling outdoor art fair. The remnants of color and experimentation hang in tatters in row after row of identical canvas stalls. I am told that this one had paintings and this one had sculpture. This one had a live band. This one had a woman screaming about pickles. And this one had a rave.
The tin foil still hung from its walls where, earlier, tiny crowds had danced. We walked through the back of it and emerged again into a footstep-less thoroughfare. We navigate the lanes of plastic bags and old napkins that have come to admire the art. If a less-slight breeze had come through there the place would have turned into a whirling dervish of refuse, but it didn’t.
We went to get pizza and my friend confesses that he’s not over his ex. I do my best to console him. He tells me “you’re speaking to me in platitudes” and he’s right. TNG
First time here? See what we're all about... Get involved... Send us a tip!...
Leave your response!