We can't be contained
My mom has recently found a seven inch record by the band Cupid Car Club, in my old room at her house. Its cover features a veritable how-to manual on how to go about killing yourself, with each of the band members separately engaging in their own choice methods of suicide. Accompanying this are songs titled “Grape Juice Plus”, a song about a savory blend of cocktail meeting hasty ends, and a manifesto about “starting at the finish line”. Ian Svenonious, indie-rock provocateur and champion of the man-scream—would be professor of economics if he didn’t get distracted and start a punk rock band instead—is all but lost on my mother, however. Confounded by youth culture in the USA, a place which creates such alienation that the only reasonable thing left to do is jump off a bridge and join the Cupid Car Club in eternity, my mom is all but spazzing out on me. She produces the record, holding it up before me, as I try and explain. It’s weird, but I feel instantaneously transported to the tenth grade again, like she’s just found a humongous stash of weed in my closet and I have to point out that’s it’s actually oregano I’ve been using for my home economics experiments. I stammer, trying something about disaffected youth, but she has no idea what this has to do with starting at the finish line. “I want this out of the house,” she says to me, handing the record to me. Oh, man, I think; what a setback. I’m pretty sure my parents think I’m weird enough, but this is the kind of thing that’s going to send them over the edge. Family get togethers are going to be dotted with conversation about my weird suicidal tendencies, evidenced by my record collection, which will serve as just some small addendum to a lifetime of odd and unusual behaviors. “Oh, and that wasn’t all she found,” some vestigial aunt will stand up and say, “There was one by a group called Death Cab For Cutie.” Sometimes you just can’t win.