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2001-11-18 - 10:42 p.m.
 

Greenday: sensations associated with time. These are mine:
 

1994. Lucas and I are lovers, our first ones. He is 15, almost two years younger than me. (Hasn't figured out he is gay yet.) In my little red Toyota on the hick highways of suburban Minneapolis, tailgated by pickup trucks, we flick them off while turning up the volume on the radio, rocking out to songs of the Greenday album Dookie, California punk smeared all over the FM stations. The Homecoming dance at his big, ugly public high school: Basketcase comes on, we scream. It's our favorite. A song for screwed-up kids who do not fit in, a song for us.
 

Do you have the time/ to listen to me whine/ about nothing and everything, all I want?/ I am one of those/ melodramatic fools/ neurotic to the bone, no doubt about it!
 

1999. Lucas and Nick and I live in the house on Seabury Avenue. It is before we all start hating each other. Lucas has thrown a party. We take his boom box to the basement so we can blast Greenday and not disturb the neighbors. Lucas and his friends John and Brian and I are drunk. We dance like maniacs in the orange and brown basement, even harder when Basketcase comes on. We slam off the walls and into each other. The song is about adolescent insanity breaking lose, and that's what we are, exuberantly out of control. Normally I get tired after dancing hard to two or three songs, much less throwing my body around like a rock star on extra coke, but this time the berserk energy possesses me like something from the outside, and I am slamming and moshing and writhing along with the others through the whole album. Until this one girl who's a friend of Lucas's comes down the stairs in her big punk boots and suddenly we all get shy and embarassed for a minute, at least I do and so do John and Brian, who are straight and thus as awkward around strange girls as I am for different reasons. Lucas, who doesn't miss a beat, scolds us for our awkwardness, and we get back to dancing.
 

Our generation's nostalgia is Basketcase and the other anthems of the 1980's and 90's. Cobain and Love, the prince and princess of grunge, singing about the rough, raw pain of adolescence, in their rough, raw voices. Radiohead, their maturation into sophisticated art rock years away, making their name with the song Creep, which spoke for every one of us, Thom Yorke crooning in the voice of every outcast who needs love and knows s/he doesn't deserve it.
 

I don't have enough/ I wanna have control/ I want a perfect body/ I want a perfect soul/ I want you to notice/ when I'm not around/ You're so fucking special/ I wish I was special.. (here the guitars screeched in anguish) But I'm a creep/ (as the chords rose into some new, triumphant, exultant key) I'm a weirdo/ What the hell'm I doing here?/ I don't belong here..
 

It was a beautiful song to us the monsters. It was the tragic beauty of the ugly duckling, the real life one, which stays ugly all its life. Fat, smelly, dirty, ugly, bespectacled, and desperate, but God could we love. Because it was all we could do.
 

I discover the radio at age 14 and frequently sit in front of the stereo when nobody else is home, listening to Modern Rock KJ104, the best FM station in the Twin Cities. (Lasted about three years before the powers that were decided they would make more money broadcasting country and western.) R.E.M.'s Out Of Time and U2's Achtung Baby are all over the charts. At home, I sit in a corner and lose my religion. At school, I watch with envy as the shiny happy people hold hands. At school dances I move in mysterious ways, not caring who is or isn't watching. I want to kiss the sky and I am willing to learn how to kneel. But then the beautiful-sad One comes on, and as soon as I hear the opening notes I whip my head around and every single boy is already slow dancing with somebody, every goddamn one of them, and I am standing in the middle of the dance floor by myself. (Did I ask too much? More than a lot?) So I dance, fast even though it is a slow song, by myself. Maybe everyone will think I am a creep and a weirdo but I am riding on top of the grandeur of those chord changes and nothing can touch me.
 

At the end of the dances there are the end-of-dance songs. One of them is pre-Out Of Time: It's the end of our worlds as we know them- we may or may not feel fine. We scream along with Stipe, but we mean something else. "Offer me solutions, offer me alternatives and I Decline!" Yes. Especially when the solutions are: Wear makeup. Wear the right clothes. Act phony. Giggle at the right times. Say the right things. It's your choice. You could be popular. You could slow dance with boys. If you took these alternatives. But I declined, and forfeited my rights to love. What right did I have to complain?
 

After the dance I ride home in my mom's car and chalk up yet another missed opportunity to touch a male body. I curl up in my room and soak in the chilling last track of Achtung Baby. Love is blindness/ I don't want to see/ Won't you wrap the night/ Around me? If I want to feel better about myself in comparison to all the yuppie kids at school who have so many friends, I pop Chris Mars in the tape deck and listen to his words of the revenge of nerds: Popular creeps are riding high until the day they get burned/ Who's going to love them when they're unknown? There's another hit that resonates, Red Hot Chili Peppers' Under the Bridge. At the age of 14, there is no question about feeling like I don't have a partner. Sure, my only friend would be the city, I muse, if I had my driver's license and could actually go there. Loneliness is one thing. On an afterschool afternoon of unbearable frustrated lust, however, one needs Liz Phair's Flower. Every time I see your face/ I get all wet between my legs/ I want to fuck you like a dog/ I'll take you home and make you like it. Bound and gagged at school, I sit on the bed with the boombox at home and let Phair sing my undeliverable love letter to the boy in whose pants I need desperately to get.
 

Age of 16. Somehow, I get my preppie, popular high school friend Shannon obsessed with They Might Be Giants, the band every pubescent nerd cuts their teeth on. We walk down the hall at school singing Birdhouse In Your Soul at the top of our lungs. She in turn gets me into Fugazi and Simon and Garfunkel. We careen around in her Jeep Wagoneer with The Boxer blasting out of the stereo. We go wild like blisters in the sun. We have a game we play where we pick a car and follow it until its driver gets very paranoid. The target car puts on its right turn signal and turns left and Shannon follows suit screaming "Shit! Shit!" and I am laughing like a hyena and Neil Diamond is calmly singing that Ramblin Rose is a store-bought woman. Shannon comes from a wealthy family, and The Ballad of Richard Cory strikes very close to home. I sit on her canopy bed in her bedroom, complete with TV, VCR, and full bath, while Shannon plays it over and over and over. "Richard Cory went home last night.. And put a bullet through his head." Not all rich kids are happy kids, and Shannon has the razor marks on her arms to prove it.
 

If Shannon and I have one thing in common, it is a fondness for boys wearing makeup. She has a futile crush on Boy George; I am madly in love with Todd, the head thespian at our school. We shout our favorite line of James' Laid together: "Dress me up in women's clothes/ Mess around with gender roles/ Dye my eyes and call me prettyyy-yyyyyyyyyyyyy!" Our untrained voices rising to ugly dissonance with the sustained high note.
 

My friendship with Shannon is one sustained by gender roles: her the dominant girl, me the submissive boy, blushing at her teasing like the boys she flirts with and dates. After I find Lucas, our friendship distenegrates, as these things will. Suddenly my complete and utter lack of sexual experience can no longer be a running joke, much less the basis of her superiority. She turns into a skinny pseudo-Goth smoker, and Lucas and I turn Japanese. Gender roles are indeed messed around with. We are a creep and a weirdo finally finding love that is requited. In Annie's Parlor in Dinkytown we put quarters in the juke box to play People Are Strange, but the faces in the rain are on the outside now, and we are inside where it is warm and dry. Until his true sexual orientation emerges, and Lucas, tragically obsessed with a member of his high school's wrestling team, lies in his bed each night with the Pansy Division cover of Liz Phair's Flower on repeat until dawn comes.
 

Deeper into the past. Songs from my mom's impressive collection of vinyl, records dating from back when Alternative was New Wave. My prepubescent mind formed its templates of adult romance using material of When Doves Cry and Tainted Love. To this day Tunnel of Love by Dire Straits, if I concentrate right, evokes for a fleeting moment the smells and feels and mental states of being approximately 9. It's in our little cabin of a house with the wood floor and built in kitchen table, which I am sitting at, watching the black stereo (it was new then) like a TV while the guitars get soft and he sings "Girl it looks so pretty to me.." I'm thinking of the boy in school that I want to kiss. The next line sounds like: "Life's been kind of shitty to me," and the line "When we were kids" projects me into a distant, imaginary future of adulthood, in which I will be looking back on this very moment.
 

Also in the cabin-house, from the stereo in the kitchen: the Wallets and their funny, exuberant songs. Mother And Daughter, the sardonic dialogue between the two in the background mirroring the real-life argument with my mother about dinner, which does not completely drown out the music; today's a good day. Totally Nude, the lyrics essentially the title, punctuated by moans and grunts from the singer, a sexy tenor, filling my developing mind with the image of him wearing no clothes. My favorite by the Wallets, though, is about two ghosts that, haunting the same house, begin a post-mortem love affair. "They were dying/ to be loved./ Well, they died/ and now they're in love." A very optimistic theme to a young nerd: at least there is hope in the afterlife.
 

As far back as memory will go, or maybe further: I am 3. My favorite song is Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Mom puts it on the phonograph and I dance and dance with my hands in the air to catch the diamonds, the beauty of the world still strange enough that no psychedelic drugs are necessary. While I was an interuterine organization of cells, another Beatles song was inspiring my parents with what would be my name.
 

I'm 24. I rent my own apartment. I have a group of college friends, just like the ones my mom had when I was listening to Lucy, when they were distant adults, whose relationships to my mom were unfathomable. I'm trying to pick out three songs for a soundtrack of our lives. All the adolescent songs come flooding back, and I have to scribble lists on backs of envelopes, crossing out and adding, doing the calculations, putting in order and narrowing down, losing the envelope and cursing, starting over. It must be perfect. The songs must capture the overarching messages of my life, of wanting to be mesmerizing, of the powerful desire to tell it (my story) like it is. The opening credits of the story go back to another first love in the pop music world, Suzanne Vega. (Ten years old, middle of the night, wracked by anxiety no child's mind knows how to handle, Song of Calypso and Gypsy in a tape deck slowly calming my heart rate, showing me there is peace in the world, somewhere. Helping me finally sleep.) The story of David is one of a small being confronted with a vastly powerful opponent. Perhaps a domineering family member, perhaps the Popular Creeps at school, or society as a whole, or yet more abstractly, the obstacles that lay in the path to having love and having your identity recognized and being understood. The small one has no chance, and yet, as Suzanne Vega sings,
 

I might be out like a light, extinguished in the throw/ But I'll make my mark/ And you'll know/ 'Cause I'm really well acquainted/ with the span of your brow/ If you didn't know me then/ You'll know me now/ You'll know me now...