Getting Over It, Part II

Some people never got over Vietnam, or the night their band opened for Nirvana. I'm still not over my first marriage(or ripping off Nick Hornby). In this series, I'll detail my attempts to get over a part of my life that lasted less than three years, but seemingly encompassed all of my soon to be over twenties. For some reason, moving to New York was one of these attempts. Whenever I declare myself officially "over it", maybe I'll have a huge party in Vegas - but I'll probably just have brunch.

Getting Over It, Part II: Watching America's Next Top Model

Let me get this out of the way: I know it sounds like bragging¹ when I say my ex-wife used to be a model(the runway type, not plastic-car-kit or Sears swimsuit type). Wow, you used to date an ex-model, whoop-dee shit dude. However, that doesn't change the fallout from the divorce. Especially since she made it abundantly clear that she didn't feel I was good looking enough to be with her. So any confidence I was supposed to gain from fucking a mainstream, magazine approved version of female beauty was destroyed, defiled and turned into an irrational hatred² of Tyra Banks.

Recently, though, I've turned away from the dark side to...well, another dark side: watching America's Next Top Model and The Tyra Banks Show. Anything even remotely related to modeling used to be avoided like the plague. However, the crazy ego trips of Tyra are such a spectacle, I can't turn away. It's like watching a six-year old girl get her own talk show.

I remember one episode where the topic was girls who are unsafe daters. Now, Tyra made some good points with her little stake-outs of women who gave away too much info to strangers at bars, followed men alone to their cars, and did other generally unsafe things that twenty-somethings do because they assume they are immortal(I still assume this, at least for another year).

However, Tyra left the realm of reality when, after ambushing a poor girl who had followed her fake-date down to his fake-SUV, she lit into the girl and showed her what was stored in the fake-trunk: a fake baseball bat, and fake bundle of rope. She would have been fake-beaten to death and fake-tied up. Once the charade had been revealed, what was the point of showing the girl these things? They didn't shock her, they made her laugh - staring in wonderment at crazy-eyed Tyra, marveling at the talk-show host's need to have every inch of reality defined by herself. She had constructed a perfect date-rape diorama, and goddammit, you were going to see it all.

But anyway, yeah, modeling. ANTM. Avoiding this just seemed like common sense. For one thing, there was at least one contestant every year who reminded me in some way of my ex-wife(most recently some combination of Lisa and Ebony from cycle 9). For another...it's America's Next Top Model. Why would any man watch it, if he wasn't being forced to by a girlfriend?

Oh yeah. My girlfriend watches ANTM(of course), and I've watched it with her. Well, not at first. I made it clear I didn't care for the show, though I never said why(it probably didn't need to be said).

Eventually, though, time dulled my sensitivity to all things modeling and Tyra(living in New York probably helps, with those ridiculous money-shot photos of Tyra that were everywhere a few months ago, promoting her talk show's move to the city. The ones that were titled things like "Gabologist" and "Conversationista". On my walk to work, I noticed someone had finally doctored one with the ink-drawn cock it sorely needed).

Watching now, all I think of are the ridiculous challenges, photo-shoots, and Tyra's bat-shit crazy antics(like the intro to the current season, or how when Ebony quit during last season - I'm sorry, cycle nine - the background music was as mournful as a dirge, since to Tyra, Ebony had died).

Even though this only involves television, I still feel like it's progress: disassociating things from an ex, and enjoying - or enduring - them again.

¹Though, since I've moved to New York, I assume every New York man has dated at least one "model", so it can't be counted as bragging anymore. It's par for the course.

²Yes, Tyra is the target because my ex-wife being a)black and b)model makes c)Tyra her idol. Or at least, her old idol.

Getting Over It, Part One

Some people never got over Vietnam, or the night their band opened for Nirvana. I'm still not over my first marriage(or ripping off Nick Hornby). In this series, I'll detail my attempts to get over a part of my life that lasted less than three years, but seemingly encompassed all of my soon to be over twenties. For some reason, moving to New York was one of these attempts.

Buying Damien Rice's Debut Album O

I've always had a peculiar relationship with Damien Rice. I usually feel a kinship with any Irish artist (I'm Irish-American - this largely involves treating my drinking like some kind of cultural imperative), but I have actively avoided Rice for the past three years. The peculiar thing, though, is that for those same three years I have absolutely adored two of the songs from his album O, despite never owning the record, hearing the songs in their entirety, or even knowing their names. This is because O was the album my ex-wife listened to repeatedly the week before she told me she wanted a divorce.

She loved singer-songwriters, particularly extremely fuckable ones with foreign accents. Nick Drake, Jeff Buckley, Duncan Shiek, David Gray, Van Morrison and John Lennon all found places on her CD rack. My memory wants to place Ryan Adams there, too -- right next to my copy of Kind Of Blue that she stole and never gave back -- to round out the American presence, but I'm pretty sure she didn't have anything by him(though I'm sure she loved the Elizabethtown soundtrack).

Rice was the soundtrack to my last memories of my ex-wife without the "ex" part, though I didn't know it at the time. That week I was just happy for her. She seemed to be coming out of a funk. She had long complained that she used to consume new music; that she sought it, loved it, lived it and that something had stifled that part of her. So this someone new in her life, this Damien Rice singing hauntingly beautiful songs seemed like a good thing. A corner had been turned.

Like most hurts, it's a fresh memory: I see her, hair up(weave thankfully gone), lips painted, eyes big and brown, typing away on my laptop while singing along. Our apartment would have been, finally, respectably furnished at this point. A sectional, a black coffee table, and the computer desk she sits at. The walls are the warm colors she had painted them one night while I was visiting my brother in the hospital. It's only a one bedroom in Foggy Bottom, but it's our home. Her voice, though beautiful, is just a few notes away from being a great singing voice. She sounds happy, but in a sad way. Hell, that's what the song sounds like - mournful, but hopeful.

She sings the chorus, over and over:

"I can't take my eyes off of you
I can't take my eyes off you"

Hopefully, foolishly, I imagine she thinks of me when she sings this. Sadly, I was probably right. Now that -- three years later -- I own the album, I know the song is called "The Blower's Daughter". The lyrics continue:

"I can't take my mind off you
I can't take my mind...
My mind...my mind...
'Til I find somebody new "

Damien whispers that last part. I'll bet she did, too.

I'm not sure why I finally decided to buy O; I guess avoiding Damien(my ex-wife) had become too tiresome. I almost missed out on a wonderful collection of covers from Sounds Eclectic because Rice had covered Radiohead's "Creep". And one day, there was O staring at me from the rack. An eight-dollar "classic" buy at the Virgin Mega-Store. It seemed like a step; a tiny one, but a step nonetheless: confront your demons by buying and endlessly listening to the album and artist that represents the most painful part of your life. OK, somethings don't sound like such a hot idea once you write them down.

O is a good album. At least, the first half is. I can never get past "Old Chests", the fifth track. You see, track three is "Blower's Daughter", and track four is "Cannonball", the other song she sang repeatedly. Past that, the album fails to hold any significance to me. I'm sure there are some good songs there, but none of them connect me to that very personal moment, which was the hole point of buying the album in the first place.

"Cannonball", now that I have the benefit of a close examination, is rich with foreshadowing:

"there’s still a little bit of your taste in my mouth
there’s still a little bit of you laced with my doubt
it’s still a little hard to say what's going on"

and the one part I remember her singing:

"love taught me to lie"

Damien, you don't know the fucking half of it.

So why do I love these songs so much? I only knew small parts of both(for a while I thought they were just different parts of the same song). Yet in memory, they both seemed like perfect, beautiful songs. Songs that I would never listen to again, and for good reason: it hurt too much. Rice, unwittingly, captured the last happy memory I had of her, of us. All in songs that having nothing to do with love as a happy concept. "Can't take my eyes off of you" was all I could remember...it was how we used to feel about each other.

I'm at the point now where O, "The Blower's Daughter", and "Cannonball" still hold special meaning, but I can enjoy them without automatically thinking about "happier" times in a small apartment in DC. So I guess that's some sort of progress, right?

In a bizarre twist, for the past three years I have also refused to watch the movie Closer, because we watched that movie the Saturday before she told me she was leaving. Since then, I've hated that movie. It's a bunch of people cheating and leaving each other. I didn't know -- or blocked out the fact -- that the Closer soundtrack contains both "The Blower's Daughter" and "Cannonball". Both of these pieces of media I have avoided, one because it reminded me of being happy, and the other because it reminded me of being hurt. Why? Why not hate both; why does Damien get a free pass, while the movie that uses his songs to soundtrack infidelity, broken hearts, and the general fucked-up nature of love end up reviled?

For that matter, why do I not hate her favorite band, The Strokes? She adored them, hung out with Julian Casablancas when she lived in New York during her modeling days. Why then, when I see him in a video or listen to Room On Fire do I still think "hey, cool dude" instead of "hey, fuck you poser who probably banged my ex-wife"?

Yet MySpace, who made her the "feature" profile that week, I can't stand. I almost bought the infamous "MySpace Ruined My Life" t-shirt. Seriously, the sudden surge in popularity seemed to play a major part in her decision to pack her bags. At least to me it did, and I haven't been on the site since then.

Obviously, I have issues. This series should have many parts.

You Forgot It In People (The Meadowlands)

Ian Mathers, an excellent writer and podcaster for Stylus, pondered how he had never seen the video for Broken Social Scene's "Anthem For A Seventeen-Year-Old Girl". And I thank him for pondering, because I don't know how I hadn't seen it before either:



I bought You Forgot It In People during the death throes of bad relationship(though it would recover, only to die again...but that's a story for another time). Up late one night, eyes red from tears and the piercing glow of my computer monitor, I searched Amazon for something that would sound different, profound, and beautiful. This obscure band from Canada was in everyones "must have indie rock" list, so I read a little about BSS and ...In People. It seemed a likely pot of musical gold, so a click and UPS trip later, I had the CD in my hands.

Others have celebrated the album far better than I could, so instead of telling you how great the music is, I'll just give it a more personal praise: it got me through tough times. I listened to it constantly, in the morning, at work, but most importantly, at night. I can't sleep when my relationship has gone to shit. I tossed and turned, I took deep breaths, and I counted backwards from a hundred. Nothing worked, until I popped in the beautiful, soothing sounds of ...In People.

The intro was mysterious, the way it rose from a flat line to a split-second of cacophony before instantly melting into the second track, the rollicking "KC Accidental". "Almost Crimes", track four, was a shot of pure joy and optimistic energy(exactly what you need at four in the morning after spending the entire night dreading the rest of your life). "Anthem", at track seven, is the perfect song to fall asleep too. The video above is the perfect companion for it: ethereal, intangible, and beautiful.

After that, I bought The Wrens' The Meadowlands, and I had a soundtrack for the breakup. I sang along with "Happy", screaming "Are you happy?/You got what you want/I'm over it now". I nodded along to the opener, "The House That Guilt Built" : "and I’m nowhere near/what I dreamed I’d be/i can’t believe/what life has done to me". The album was therapy; the only closure I could get.

My nightly ritual for weeks was Meadowlands followed by ...In People; they became my tried and true "bad love" albums. One for cathartic mourning, the other for remembering there's still a big, beautiful world outside your door.

Fooled Again

I've hesitated to write about this; it didn't seem right to throw dirty laundry onto the lawn for the neighbors to see, especially when the bedsheets were shared. I wasn't going to write this.

Then, a vivid memory came to me: another blog, written over a year ago, where the author proclaimed to anyone with interest or a MySpace account she had left her husband and was looking forward to a new future without him. Below were one line comments of affirmation from people who knew only what they could learn from a lone paragraph on the internet. It confronted me in the cold glow of a monitor in a half-filled apartment that had been full the day before.

So fuck it.

For now, I'll focus on the most recent business. Maybe, someday, you will be regaled by my divorce scabs and scars(but those are my responsibility). No, what is most pressing is something still the responsibility of two people: money, of course.

My ex-wife and I were a couple just starting out, young and poor. Our first - and only - major purchase was a stylish couch. We shared a nice one-bedroom apartment in a good area of town, blocks from her job. Neither of us had much.

When she left, there was a huge tax bill, credit debt, and six months left on our lease. A lease signed with the assumption there would always be two incomes paying the rent.

The day after she left, I was fired. That was not a good week, unless you count the record number of 151 shots I did that Friday, which I don't.

Despite my one week alcoholism, I found a better job, a better girlfriend, and I paid everything off. It wasn't easy after two months of unemployment, and it took nearly a year, but it could have been much, much worse.

The divorce was finalized a day before what would have been our third anniversary; one of those meaningless coincidences that reminds you the universe is an uncaring mean place. My ex-wife, albeit late, took care of the papers(papers that came to me on Valentine's Day, another coincidence - or the job of a well paid mailman, I suppose) and she even promised to start paying me back her half of all the debt I had paid off for us. She would start in September, she told me in an e-mail that also gave me updates on family members I would never see again.

It's mid-October. Nothing, not a word.

I'm not surprised...no, I'm lying, I am surprised. The money means nothing at this point, it's a past hardship I'd like to forget. The gesture, though, the sign on her part that the marriage at least meant something, even if it was just a debt to be repaid; that meant something. To me, it meant a tiny bit of satisfaction you get from a little respect. I still craved respect from this woman, or I at least liked receiving it.

What can I say, I'm a sucker - I don't learn. And in a year plus since I last saw her, my ex-wife can still remind me of that.

Moving Back

Well, I'm back in DC. A year ago(give or take a couple of months) I moved out to the wasteland that is the suburbs. Wasteland is a little misleading...perhaps to avoid offending surbanites I should say the alternate universe that is the suburbs, seperated from city life by a ring of gas stations and strip malls, and ten asphalt lanes of something called the "beltway" that I never seriously believed existed before I moved into the suburbs.

I used to live in Foggy Bottom, which is very conviently located near the George Washington Universtiy campus. And it would have been very convient for me if I was a) a GW student or b) a doctor at the GW hospital or c) worked in Georgetown. Unfortunately, none of those statements were ever true. It was a nice neighborhod. I was surrounded by GW frat guys driving Escalades and Hummers(how these were ever parked I consider a miracle of physics, either that or you can major in magic at GW now. Or these frat guys were capable of Octopuss-like squeezing in-between stacked luxury SUVs, slipping in through the cracks of the doors and then expanding back to their original size like other invertebrate life).

I moved out of Foggy Bottom due to....unpleasantness. Not because of frat boys or SUVs, or even the constant presence of a Seven Eleven that literally was only open from seven to eleven, but due to a break-up. Well, a divorce.

But that's over now, and here I am, back in the city. Ready to get back to the city life I've missed. I've had doses off and on. Working in the city, it's hard not to. Visiting my girlfriend in New York has also helped; there is no place like Manhattan.

What to do, what to do. So many possibilities, I don't know where to start. All of my stuff has been moved. I'm ready.

Hmmm. I think my first act will be to invest in some curtains. Like so many city dwellers, I have the luxury of a peeping tom. While disgusting, I can't help but feel sorry for him. I replaced a rather attractive girl here in this room, and now he gets to watch my white irish ass make it's way from my bed to the shower. And when I say white, I mean white. If the light catches it just right this bastard might go blind, and then he won't be able to peep on anyone.

Anyway, now that I've shared that, I think it's bed time.