Pop Goes the World

--We’ve returned.
My four year old analyzing Pop Goes the World, the ultimate 80’s song.
His most recent addiction.
This is my doing. You can’t make somebody love something, but you can put those elements in the same vicinity.

These arranged marriages that turn out to be true love.

--When he was two, he’d insist on Video Killed the Radio Star, over and over, until I’d learned to hate it.
But not Pop Goes the World.
That is one of those few songs that absolutely transports me, not just in memory, but in emotional state, that kind of timetripping.

So I’m sixteen and standing in the predawn cold, winter time, it’s center, the rez, my outofthebath hair frozen in spikes; it’s so cold out it can’t even snow, and I’m waiting for the bus which will arrive some long time before the sun, the bus to take me to some wrestling tournament in the middle of the state, Montana really a place of prairie; but then there is somebody in a car, a place for me to wait, the warmth and the radio, and that song absolutely capturing me…

If I can’t afford the album, and I can’t, if I can’t ask my parents for money, and I won’t, I’ll steal it.

The Broncos are losing the Superbowl and I’m driving through a blizzard away from that paindful game on the tv, listening to Men Without Hats, that song…

And that song, it’s Montana winter, it’s soft snow, a lot of it, it’s wind and it’s always dark, but not that deep and ugly black, not that kind of blind; it is winter and I have friends the kind of which I’ll never believe in again, and youth, a certain innocence, and I can get swept away in a song so that it feels it ought to be part of me.

--I always get pangs coming from the airport.
Some of that is false.
Usually I make this trip alone.

And there was the girl, that second wife, it seemed I was always picking her up, taking her there, her long journeys and all that early hope when we first started.

What’s left, that last wife, it’s not real pain, just the memory of pain.

Which like the memory of warmth, that feeling the memory itself is not the feeling of the time itself, but an exaggeration of that period, we call that nostalgia; it’s opposite, the memory of pain, whatever you want to call the exaggeration of it, that is something I mostly keep away from now.

Not not thinking of it, but avoiding it, able to.

That’s me in the snow, the only time it snowed in Atlanta last year, standing in the middle of the road at dusk, my truck crumpled, the snow coming down, the bookstore where she used to study behind me, how it caught my eye and held it too long: was her car there?

And then the wreck.

Like all the shocking wrecks. Of car and relationship.

Me standing in the road feeling the way people feel in movies, when we see them from the outside, like this is too much to really be real, the snow coming down, soft, every flake a quick burn on the skin, head light enough to float.

Like this is scripted.

So calm you could die and really not sweat it.
So distance your only mildly curious.
But like a good audience member, you do feel a little something.

Not quite empathy, but at least sympathy.
With yourself, if that’s really you. Standing in the snow.

--And a year later, you can sort of remember, but with the veil of a greater blackness between you and the actuality, as if it a grave from which you’ve risen and not some life that you actually lead.

--Home again, late at night, me and the little one driving through the rain, singing: “Johnny played guitar, Jenny played bass,Name of the band is The Human Race.Everybody tell me have you heard? Pop Goes The World….

And every time I wonder if the world is right,End up in some disco dancing' all night & day.”


And, as Larry would tell you, there are worse things for him to listen to.
He could be quoting Leonard Cohen:
"I greet you from the other side Of sorrow and despair With a love so vast and shattered It will reach you everywhere..."

--Do you ever think about how that knowledge you’ve gotten of the world, you wouldn’t trade it away, find it necessary and valuable so would refuse if offered to cut it out…
but you’d NOT wish it on your child?

That’s the story of Genesis, of course, and the story of what follows, only told that Biblical way, the father is so angered at the inevitable and at his own inability to keep the child from the world that not even a rainbow can really mend the rift.

And your left with the absurdity of the crucifixion.
As if those red moments really sweep it white.
As if the momentary forsakenness could purify even a single life.

As if God could really be forgiven or justly held responsible for the nature of the world.

--“And Every time I wonder where the world went wrong,End up lying on my face going ringy dingy ding dong”