Music – 2

The music in this one strikes me as particularly low effort, but it has a lullaby quality that I enjoy. I would also consider this to be one of the ‘dreamy’ songs that he has.

Poetry – 2

Lyrically, this is a pretty boring song. Most of what he’s saying is pretty straightforward and literal, but I found his description of their dynamic to be realistic, and relatable. I also found this line to be pretty striking:

“But will you always stay / someone else’s dream of who you are”

Change – 1

This song is the perfect example of a song that’s scoring a ‘one’ in change, as it is identical throughout the whole song. The first five seconds sound like any other moment in the song. I personally am not a fan of songs that don’t have some form of range within them.

Insight – 2

I give this a two because it’s not a common relationship to write a song about, but that might be because it’s not an interesting relationship to write a song about. So, yes it’s unique, but just because it’s unique doesn’t mean it needs to be rewarded.

Good – 3

I gave this song a three because I do actually like it. When I write these reviews I have to listen to the song well over ten times, and I never once got tired of this one. It also happened to be pretty catchy, as I was still singing it even after turning it off. I’d include this song in a deep cut Billy Joel playlist.

The lowest score a song can get is a five, and the highest is a twenty. This scored a ten which technically makes it a little less than mid-tier. This song is a good example of why I have the scoring system I have. If you want to know more about it, head over to the scoring explanation page, linked in the navigation bar.

“Is this news to you?” I ask.

“You’ve never said it before. We talk a lot.” John replies. 

We’re sitting in John’s office on the eighty-first floor of a highrise in the financial district. 

The elevator ride to get up here takes several minutes. Usually I’m alone, but today I happened to ride the elevator with ten identical-looking men, all wearing pristine, identical suits. I was wearing my usual paint-stained, ill-fitting, and cat-hair-covered clothes. They put an uncomfortably large distance between us. I think they didn’t want any cat hairs on their clothing, or maybe they suspected that I could rob them just through sheer proximity. When I got off the elevator, just as the doors were closing, I could hear a collective sigh of relief. 

I walked the long marble hallway to John’s office at the end.

John has the same haircut year round, which makes me suspect he regularly goes to see a barber. He wears running shoes that he uses to actually run. He drinks calorie-free flavored seltzer water, and, seemingly, judging from the trash can, goes through a case a day. He’s happily married. He has two happy children. He has hobbies, a house, a dog, a green lawn, a clean car, a white fence, a weekly barbecue with his neighbors, letters of recommendation from the HOA, the university, and the mayor. He’s clean shaven, fit, funny, smart. 

I slump down on to the couch across from him. I wonder if we share even a single adjective. I guess I also wear running shoes. I look down at them. I’ve owned them for a year and a half and the sole is so worn down it gives me pain in my feet. I’ve never once run in them. They used to be blue, but now they’re a color I’d describe as being closer to asphalt. John’s shoes look like they just came out of the box, and the laces are tied into picturesque bows. 

“How are you?” he asks. 

How am I? Let’s see. I’m rotten. I’m a rotten little crippled freak. My earliest memory is running away from the circus. My father Cronus kept trying to eat me. Speaking of eating, last week I ate my last can of beans. It was the last in that I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to get more. This caused me great Anxiety. To make it all of this worse, John is very sympathetic to my Suffering. I believe his earnestness, even if at times I suspect his inner monologue to be sheer frustration with me. 

“I’m okay. Nothing has really happened.”

He’s sitting on the chair across from me, and is across from me in every way. I think about what to talk about today. 

“I doubt that’s true. What about yesterday?” 

Yesterday I was walking through a Marshalls. I had mistakenly gone there in search of Christmas decorations. This was a mistake as apparently they don’t really do that, which was surprising to me. The day before I had been laid off from my job of a year and a half. So I was facing surprises from all sides, really. I must have looked quite dumbfounded. 

I pushed the cart through aisle after aisle of a completely empty Marshalls. It was empty because it was currently 8 AM on a Wednesday, a time when no one comes to Marshalls, especially not people in search of Christmas decorations (as everyone knows, they don’t do that sort of thing).

In alternating moments I was completely serene, focused on the store, the endless items surrounding me, and the Christmas music playing on the speakers (which maybe they shouldn’t get to play as they have no Christmas items). And in the next moment I’d suddenly be unable to catch my breath, and I would become overwhelmingly nauseous. I had already thrown up shortly before walking into the store, on the street outside. And then again in the store into one of the trash cans that they were selling in aisle fifty-six (they had no Christmas themed trash cans). And I was about to throw up into a large ceramic jar shaped like Hello Kitty. 

The night before, I had called John and explained to him that I had been nauseous for several days now. 

This was because of the Stress.  

“What is making you so worried?” 

John always had questions for me. Some were new questions that I hadn’t yet interrogated myself with, and others were frequent questions. Questions that people would ask me upon meeting me. Questions boyfriends would ask in confidence. Questions best friends would wait until we were drunk to ask. Questions I liked. Questions I hated. 

“I don’t know.”

This wasn’t quite true. It’s not that I didn’t know, it’s that I didn’t know how to say it. I worried that if I said something that I was feeling, but didn’t think it through before I said it, it could be used against me. 

“But you said…” and so on. This I hated more than anything. This fear made some of the questions impossible. 

I walk around the Marshalls and ask the question John had asked me last night:

“Why are you so worried?”

To an outsider, of which there were none in this Marshalls at 8 AM on a Wednesday, it might seem like the reason I’m spontaneously throwing up is because I’m growing increasingly more perturbed by the lack of Christmas items, despite already having gone through over ninety seven aisles. But this is not the reason, even if it is making me feel like I am losing my mind. 

“Why were you so worried?” he asks again. 

I stare out the window of John’s office. I’ve been seeing him for two years, but his window has been under construction that entire time (just his window, which from the ground looks unbelievably strange). Scaffolding on unbearably high stilts runs along the shiny glass wall all the way up to just this spot. A little platform, some tools, some broken pieces of wood, netting. Two years of this and yet somehow they never seem to make any changes or progress. It’s been so long that I’ve started to wonder if maybe it’s actually part of the design of the building, and I’ve been an idiot this whole time thinking it was real construction, when it was actually a high concept sculptural element. I don’t ask John about this, as I don’t want him to think I’m the idiot who doesn’t understand high concept sculptural building elements. Through the mesh netting I can somewhat make out the buildings of the city below. I stare out the window for most of our conversations. John meanwhile stares at me. 

“I was worried I was going to get caught throwing up in Marshalls.” 

“What else has been going on that might make you worried?”

“I guess getting laid off.”

“Sure, that probably has something to do with it.”

John has a sense of humor. This is unusual, as most people like John don’t joke. Ever. They don’t want to accidentally make light of what you’re saying. Meanwhile, I’m hoping we make light of everything I’m saying. I can’t bear the Seriousness. Before John there was Charles. Charles had a lot of the Seriousness. I spoke to Charles five times a week, and he did almost no speaking back. He found that in the panic of a silence I would start nervously speaking faster than I could think about what I was saying. Faced with the Seriousness, and the fast talking, I would cry constantly. Every memory of Heartbreak, Abandonment, Fear, Distress, Drowning, Suffocating, Bleeding, Fainting, Hitting, Falling, they all led to more crying. He had a stack of tissue boxes in the corner, which he’d silently pass to me as I went through them. “And then… And then… And then…” one after another. To hear it from me, no one had ever lived such a miserable and wretched existence. 

Now I have eight new gray hairs on top of my head. They seem to have appeared only where I part my hair. This is unusual because when I was looking at my hair yesterday I had no gray hairs, as far as I could tell, and today I have eight. Eight is both more and less than you might expect. Eight looks like more than eight, but when you count them, it is only eight. However, when you are taking a quick glance, you might not see any at all, but there are a whopping eight of them. I guess I do not wish there were less. 

I remember a time when I had very many, because I had more Stress. 

Then I had less because I had less Stress. 

I later discovered that a lack of Stress, and therefore a lack of gray hairs, wasn’t necessarily a good thing, because sometimes it means you are experiencing what John has called a ‘failure to thrive.’

He’ll say something along the lines of: “I’m really not certain as to why you’re experiencing this failure to thrive.” And what he means by that is, if you look at me, and everything outside of me, and everything inside of me, everything seems A-OK.

However, I am not doing any of the things I should be doing, and I’m not feeling any of the things I should be feeling. 

No, I am not happy, but I’m not sad either. 

I’m not succeeding in anything, but I’m also not failing at anything. 

I’m not isolating, I’m not eating more or less than I should, I’m not more or less fit than I should be. 

I seem to be performing the way that one would expect of a happy, satisfied adult. And yet, I come to John’s office on the eighty-first floor every week to talk to him. I feel I need to talk to him because…

“What do you think is going on?”

I’m laying in my bed, staring out the window. There’s nothing outside my window except for my fire escape, the white brick wall of the building across the yard, and an ever growing set of vines that seems to grow twice in size every day. I keep occasionally going outside to hack at them, but this doesn’t seem to hinder or discourage the plant at all. I wonder if it will always be there. Technically the vines are already a hazard since they have cemented the ladder to my fire escape, and are slowly working on permanently shutting my window too. I close my blinds so I can’t see them. Their persistent creeping unnerves me. But moments later I can’t stand the not knowing. I whip around, pulling the curtain back, but in their privacy the vines have now fully enclosed the glass. I pry the window open using a screwdriver, and with a pair of clothing shears I start snipping at the vines. They fall, untangling, one by one. I climb out onto the fire escape. Left unobserved, they decided to cover everything they could. My building. The yard. The building across the yard. The roofs. Above my head. I stand in the massive vine cocoon, the humidity growing. I can feel the sun in full force on the vines from the other side. They devour the light and grow at rates almost perceivable to me. I can hear their heartbeat, the slow, gentle breathing of the mass. After a moment, I climb back in my window. I shut the blinds, and assume that this has become far too big a problem for me to handle. 

“Do you often feel like that?”

At the end of our conversations we leave the building together, going down in the long elevator ride, walking through the massive, ornate lobby, past the security guards and doormen. When we reach the outside, John says a quick goodbye and jogs off. I think he knows that a) I would never run in order to keep up with him, b) I could make small talk, the kind we had in the long elevator ride down, for hours, so c) if he doesn’t run off, immediately, we will be stuck in a social situation for at least another hour because of our similar commutes. I wave goodbye and walk in the same direction, at a much slower pace. Last week as I was about to board the train, I saw him sitting in the car. I decided to just wait for the next one, so as not to defeat the purpose of his run for him.