A few days ago, on recommendation of my father, whose music advice I trust blindly and without fail, I listened to these guys, and I’m playing “Black Tables” over and over again on my computer this morning (morning in terms of proximity to sleep only, I hasten to add–I’m officially on vacation, and it’s actually past noon now).  It occurs to me as I sit here that nearly every artist or band that I have had a lasting and meaningful auditory relationship with  was introduced to me by one or both of my parents.

A huge part of my writing (and, indeed, thought) process involves moments like this: a repetitive soundtrack, a window, a seasonal spark of inspiration.  Music sets my mood; or my mood sets the music.  I can never decide which.  I have an uneasy relationship with music; tender on the one hand, fraught with pitfalls on the other.  Like most things, it’s a relationship which didn’t become complicated until my teenage years.  My memories of music prior to my 14th birthday are simple and, to a certain extent, poignant (in a distinctly generational sense–I doubt anyone who isn’t my age could consider Michael Jackson “poignant”): listening over and over again to the Free Willy soundtrack in the living room of our Laguna Beach mobile home (yes, really, like the TV show, and yes, really, a mobile home) as a 5-year-old.  Bouncing up and down in my seat as we rumbled through the deserts and mountains of Utah in the Volkswagon bus, Mozart (played by the orchestra at St. Martin in the Fields, a poetic name that I liked even then) blaring.  Developing a fierce love for the Counting Crows a few years later, trying to play “Sullivan Street” on my keyboard, writing the lyrics as I heard them (for some months I believed that the song “Rain King” was actually “Rain Gauge,” which didn’t strike me as at all odd).  Playing a Hootie and the Blowfish tape in my dad’s silver toyota 4×4 as we drove in search of planks of wood, toilet seats, faucet fittings, cabinets, bathtubs (my parents were building a house now).  My mom’s “Famous Blue Raincoat” mix tape, which featured at least four versions of said song and which she listened to sometimes on the way to school, lending a morose east-coast sound to our blazing-sunshine west-coast commute.

But in high school it all became something different.  I met people who would judge you based solely on what was in your portable CD player (these were the days literally just before the iPod, when we still carted around heavy nylon cases full of well-loved discs).  I met a boy, who I desperately wanted to impress by my savvy (who once asked me, in dark and derogatory tones, “exactly what CDs do you own?”).  After our adolescent adoration dissipated and we decided, for no good reason at all, that we would never be able to speak civilly with each other again (less than a year later we were comfortably friends), I fell into a strange and uncharacteristic punk phase, dyed my hair maroon, wore Doc Martens with fishnet stockings and a plastic studded belt.  A close friend and I went to Warped Tour, which visited the seaside park in Ventura in summertime, ate french fries and joked nervously that maybe we would get closer to the mosh pit next time.  In our black converse and messy eye makeup we saw Green Day at the Santa Barbara bowl and bounced up and down on each other’s feet, shrieking out the words, convinced that we were cooler by miles than anyone else we knew.  Late one school night her father drove us to town so we could see a band called No Use for a Name play at a now-defunct venue called “The Living Room”; I remember being dissapointed that they didn’t play my favorite song at the time, “Why Doesn’t Anybody Like Me?”, but I bought a sweatshirt that was six sizes too big for me anyway, and duly wore it to school the next day, with my obligatory headphones and walkman.

In the secrecy of my own room, however, I was listening to things that I foolishly felt I could never share with my classmates.  I sought solace in Belle and Sebastian’s album “If You’re Feeling Sinister,” which my mom had purchased on a whim after hearing them on KCRW; on the gravel pathways between classrooms I was humming “Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying,” and before track practice I heard Stuart Murdoch’s dulcet tones reminding me stars of track and field you are beautiful people.  I borrowed all of my parents’ Van Morrison albums, learned through my mom to appreciate Leonard Cohen and through my dad that the pop-punk that I so loved would be nothing without The Clash (I still remember going to the Anti-Mall in Orange County with him, stopping at the music shop to buy “The Best of the Clash” so that he could educate me).

By my third year of high school, I had an iPod (first generation, a birthday gift from my dad, technology still so new at the time that I was literally nervous the first time I brought it out in public at school lest my colleagues deem me hopelessly geeky–ah, the glorious irony) and an infinately more refined taste in artists and songs.  I was still plauged by the people who, now, would judge you based on your playlists, but now I wore a Belle & Sebastian t-shirt every other day and at least my hair (after a brief period of being black) was back to its normal dark brown colour. I would grow increasingly confident about my own ability to make musical choices ever after, apart from a period in college during which a boyfriend continually told me that the artists I liked were invariably “whiny” and during which, therefore, I decided that in addition to my usual litany of favorite artists, I also liked 50 cent, Dispatch, and, confusingly, Ashlee Simpson (that was not a proud moment in my personal history).

I know they say that smell is one of the most evocative senses, but I also have a memory that’s littered with song.  Standing high above a lake in the Sierra Nevada mountains, watching the cold black surface as someone sang Coldplay’s “Spies” in eerie tones; a summer spent playing the same Death Cab for Cutie album over and over again as I wrote hundreds of pages of incomprehensible notes about a monthlong tour of four Greek isles; playing Rilo Kiley’s “The Execution of All Things” as I drove away from a hotel on my first morning as a high school graduate.  If I play Paolo Nutini’s “New Shoes” I can still see the Man’s bookshop, now shut and empty, where I spent hours circling him, listening to the books and smelling coffee and stealing kisses in between customers.

(I like to close my eyes sometimes and feel bits of my own life come to the surface in response to a few notes.)

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I ought to feel proud of myself today; I worked hard at work, I came home and worked hard at writing.  I’ve been staring at this screen on and off for the past six hours and I’ve accomplished a few fairly big things.  But I feel further away from relaxed than I ever imagined possible under the circumstances.  I’ve had several glasses of smooth, cheap red wine in the hopes that my nerves might settle (how very quaint, says a little voice in my head), but it only seems to have agitated me.  I feel like my fingers could write a novel all by themselves this evening; they’re certainly not going to stay still for the next few hours.  I can’t imagine my usual tactic (bath, a dull book) easing my over-active mind tonight.  It isn’t even anxiety, though that’s always mixed in with the things I feel; it’s energy, of a strange and disturbing kind.  I keep clicking the wrong things on my computer, my toes are tapping.  I’m blinking more rapidly than I think I usually do (or am I imagining that?).  Once I was convinced that a bug was crawling up my back, and then I began to imagine that it wasn’t a bug but a tiny mouse that had crawled over the back of my chair and was now making its way past my lower back, and I actually checked to make sure this wasn’t the case.

Hours slide by unnoticed, tonight.  The darkness fell over the garden right in front of my eyes; yet I couldn’t help myself thinking, just now, how sudden it seems to have become night, how late it is, how fast the time moves.  I can’t decide how I feel: if I’m hungry or not, thirsty or not, tired or over-excited.  I can’t decide if I feel confident or desperate, if I’m inspired or jealous, if I want to solicit praise or wait for it, if I even want praise or if I want a slap from reality.  Then again, it’s an upside-down evening, so maybe it’s only fitting that I’m feeling a bit upside-down myself.

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The city this morning was heartbreakingly beautiful. Puffy clouds and air so fresh you could drink it (I seem to have a thing about this). I detoured, went gliding down Broad Street and curled up St. Giles so that I could buy a sandwich and a pastry from a cheerful woman. Traffic, thick traffic, all the way towards town, but the roads away from town were clear and the city in spite of the traffic still had that air of Easter emptiness. I saw a girl in a striped shirt-dress and boots pedalling towards the Bodleian, her basket laden with bags and books, and thought how lovely it would be to have woken up early just to work in a library, to come out into the sun at intervals like a young stalk needing to photosynthesize, to maybe have tea later at the Vaults & Gardens cafe, outside in the graveyard where the chairs overlook tombs and flowers and the yellow-bodied dome of the Radcliffe Camera.

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I wake at the unfamiliar hour to animal sounds. Noises like foxes fighting; exotic screeches carried down the street by wind or proximity. You are asleep until I stick my head out of the window, peering left and right past the dawn-bathed terraced houses.
“That sound,” I say.
“Cats?” you say. Fall asleep again. I go into the bathroom, where the window overlooks a single street lamp. As I am watching it, through the blinds, observing the sallow glow against the almost-bright morning sky, it goes out. Apart from the emptiness it might be mid-morning.

Back in bed, the fox-sounds have stopped. Now it’s only birds. Doves? In that way that early-morning birds have of making repetitive songs with their hoots and growls, they are like the worst pop song on the radio. Over and over again in my head (I’ll forget the tune by afternoon). You are still asleep, and I ponder getting up, going outside, to see the street before anyone else sees it. Sunday mornings are best for this; no early commuters whistling past on bicycles, smugly more productive. All the drunks have gone to bed. For the first time in a long time I perceive how ugly all the cars are, lined up nose-to-tail, cows going to slaughter, in various shades of modern, various kinds of disrepair. There was one last year with a smashed-in window, that sat on the corner of Leopold Street and Hurst, and for months if you wanted to walk past it you had to pick your way through broken green glass. The houses still look bare–even the ones with gardens out front are still suffering the effects of winter gloom.

The thing about this street is, it wears its shabbiness well. Last night as we rounded the corner I said to you how I fond I was of the place where our street meets Magdalen road–of the pub with her bicycle rack, her evening-yellow windows, the red-and-green facades of the bookshop and the café, the weary half-rendered lettering of Silvesters (“E TERS STORES”), with its pots, its herbs, its kitchenware.

Not a soul about this morning, and as I try to fall asleep my mind is suddenly full of a Boston autumn, the crispness of the Charles River and the smell of rich people’s houses in the Back Bay. Couldn’t be further from where we are now. I close my eyes to picture the promenade in October better, the strange dome of the half-shell in afternoon light, the runners, the girls in skirts and light coats, stretching the days of sensible dressing out as long as possible. I think for certain I won’t fall asleep but I do, with you and the pop-songs of the morning birds and the empty river of street that runs between James and Magdalen.

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Sometimes Simon & Garfunkel is the only suitable soundtrack. Even when the sky isn’t cloudy. Today it’s a wide sheet of azure that the Mediterranean would be jealous of. I like the way the building across the street, made of blackened red brick, slants, moves away from the Cowley Road at a precise angle. The graffiti scrawled in white, below the beetroot window frames: Total Texaco Fuel Oppression in Burma. A poetic structure, as I sit here listening to the hum of ice-cream eaters, smelling burnt toast. Watching balding man in an army-green coat, brown leather brogues, smoking. Joined now by a woman with black hair and black boots. She’s taller than him, but they’re both made in miniature, fragile, transient beside the brick. Three girls, one in pink, one in blue, one in green, passing by. The delivery bicycle with its vast basket, shiny silver bell (I’m reflected in the domed steel). The shadow of this building is slinking up the side of the one across the road. Stealthy springtime: before you know it the sky will darken and the evening will dawn, the drunks will come out to play, the chill will slide back into the air and the dark hairs of you thin arms will stand on end, soldiers at attention, reminding you of a photograph taken at that September party, when you wore the jacket of his uniform over your sleeveless dress and leaned against somebody’s garden wall.

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