Underappreciated Scholar
How I Found Robert Palmer and What I Did to Him After I Dug Him Up
or
Your Guide to Writing A List That Doesn't Gently Tell Readers: 'Aw, This Person's Retarded'
By Luther Arkwright 0. "Gonna have to face it, you're addicted to love," sang the late, great British rocker Robert Palmer.
0.1. Quitting cold turkey is being kicked in the chest. Not being kicked, no, but like a large, flat palm delivered directly to and through your sternum, a Bruce Lee move that cracks your chest, takes your breath away, and leaves your heart raw and bleeding. It beats twice, to the tune of The Doors's "Love Her Madly," before turning to ash upon the floor.
0.2. Cold sweats and Beck's "Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometimes," laying in the dark remembering the times you'd lay next to her and try to match your breathing to rise and fall of her sleeping chest. A warm bed then; cold and clammy now. "I need your lovin/Like the sunshine."
0.3. You can feel old all at once, the one-time Jim Morrison that suddenly looks raw and haggard - your voice is now Van Morrison, anything from Astral Weeks. Try then to put a tough face on it: Bon Scott in AC/DC's only ballad, "Ride On," singing, "But I ain't too young to worry/And I ain't too old to cry/When a woman gets me down."
0.4. This time will come, the time when she calls to tell you she's found someone else, and you will have to deal with it. You will listen to Shellac's "Prayer To God," and your roommates will yell through the door for you to turn it down as you plead, "Her - she can go quietly, by disease or a blow/to the base of her neck, /where her necklaces close/where her garments come together/where I used to lay my face.../That's where you oughta kill her/in that particular place/Him - just fucking kill him, I don't care if it hurts."
0.4.5. Is that how you really feel?
0.4.6. More like sitting at Sarge's Saloon with the regular Saloonatics, grizzled men who wear their loneliness like stigmata or a congenital heart defect; Sarge with his eyepatch and bad knee whistles to everyone (a bare dozen) that it's closing time and puts on a double-shot of the Stones - "And I just can't seem to drink you off my mind," from "Honky-Tonk Woman" followed by "Wild Horses" ("No sweeping exits or offstage lines/
Could make me feel bitter or treat you unkind") - and slowly they start to move, taking a last swill of warm, flat beer before making their way out, pulling up their collars against the cold wind that seems to whisper, with Hegel, ".to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength." because they are strong, these men, and very weak.
0.4.7. "Because the world has turned and left me here/Just where I was before you appeared./ And in your place an empty space/Has filled the void behind my face."
0.4.8. Fill that empty space, your roommates say, Now you can finally take that Tex-Mex cooking class you've talked so much about, but never had the time for!
0.4.9. And you crank up Johnny Thunder. "You can't put your arms around a memory, so don't try." Deleted from the buddy list. Buddies NO MORE!
0.4.9.1. Sometimes it seems a little absurd that we elect people to feel for us, poets and writers and artists, and then we have to steal their words to echo the way we think we feel. As though we are their fictions.
0.5. You'd like to think it's more like "Just What I Needed," but Circuit City really blew that song for everyone, didn't it? I can't remember if I needed love or a plasma screen TV.
0.6. Though probably it was Sleater-Kinney, "Some thing you lose/Some things you give away." Which was it, though, really? Is this a question you really want to get entangled in?
0.7. Probably not, because Frank Zappa says Broken Hearts Are For Assholes, and "That's right/You're an asshole, you're an asshole."
0.8. So you in this Crowded House inside your head and wait for A Life Between Us to pass, and "And we're staring at each other/Like the Banks of a River/And we can't get any closer."
0.9. Maybe you want to think that "we'll all float on anyway," but.
0. "I'm addicted to you / Don't you know that you're toxic." |
