The Prodigy - Climbatize
Let me tell you a little bit about 1999.
Of all the fair years I’ve lived in memory, it was truly the best of times. Like the sweetness of early morning night, dimmed by the sun inching over the skyline, it was at once the height and the end of all things right and true in what I knew in the world. The end of a short-lasting reality we all agreed to get drunk on. The sun rises, the world is yours, welcome to garish adulthood.
But that year? It was so perfect, so incredibly surely perfect that ten years after the first Gulf War, our media had to create enemies - the long-arm of conspiracy-based programming: X-Files, Nowhere Man, Seven Days, Millennium; television proving that America never quite was at ease with the idiom of Peace. But seeing what was on television and then being able to open your blinds and be unafraid was important. That we had to construct our horrors from the daylight-burned idiot box to appreciate our creature comforts of suburbia. We had to believe things could get worse to appreciate that they hadn’t.
To think: the end of the century and the millennium and to be eighteen! That summer with the last of the parties you had to sneak beer at, with the friends that meant everything right now and won’t last much longer. Laughing until it hurt and night skies pimpled with stars and girls in sundresses that pulled and puckered the flanks of her breasts into little lines. Of the immediacy of speed: needing to drive fast all the time - thinking it was because you were stupid and young but actually because you couldn’t deal with the oncoming freight-train future and wanted to get as far away from it as possible. To find final comfort in being where you are, at that age, forever. The hope and dream and sleep of that last summer love of a girl who only lived streets away instead of minutes or in another town, another state. That particularly sad magic in that short-stretch of a summer, where eighteen year old girls finally parted their legs for you in the final gasp of adulthood you yearned to experience - all nerves and shaking limbs and words and knowing there was no going back after this.
(Consummation of sex is always the first or last car in the train ride toward adulthood. It is either the first thing towards it if you’re unlucky and too young or the last one if you’re socially inept and alone.)
And this magic? It fades. Most people don’t see it after that year. It fades from your sight like the green-purple dots after a flashbulb. The retina burned to its maximum capacity for a brief moment, the dots linger, slinks into a corner out of sight and fade away.
Like some others I’ve been lucky enough to hold onto some of it. I can make like Richard Collier and in the right moment, I’m there again. The air moves a certain way at a certain temperature and the gasp of rolling clouds and the sky… and it is all I can do to squeeze my hand so hard, to hold onto that VHS quality memory, all faded with time, dulled from playback. Faces but not names, names but not faces - events burned into brain from a hundred re-tellings but pronouns replacing people. But I’m there, and sometimes, so are you and sometimes its just the sensation - like a smell you can’t place or a few moments of a song. You may not know where what its from… but you do know from where.
I’ve lived with this yearning for fifteen years. Bid time return to a land of taller trees that weren’t torn down to make ways for better parking or ugly stucco housing and the greasy opening of familiar outdoor grills and someone’s pet dog barking from a block away. That familiarity, that base, that tremendous unspoken religion around a magic that sums up the old adage of “You had to be there to experience it”.
I’m here to tell you that isn’t always so. I’m here to tell you something nicknamed Karma, alias Supernatural is real and powerful and intelligent and put something in my lap this year.
Its been fifteen years since I’ve been out of high school. Fifteen years since I’ve experienced the things I’ve just detailed to you, so you can guess my age more or less if you don’t know me.
Her name isn’t important for this story, because she was one of those rare types who was less person, less flesh and more about that weird glow. The glow you find once in a while. Like when the sun comes up and the grass is cool and the world isn’t aware its morning and you’re by yourself. Like coffee and cool weather. Like closing your hand tight because the past revisits you briefly with an errant moment of feeling and you want to grip it so tight so it never leaves.
Except she is real. And she is everything - everything - that 1999 was to me.
This girl was almost customized, order-by-mail, we-do-it-for-you perfect. Her facets and weaknesses and vocabulary and her huge almond eyes and the sway back and the hair (adorable!) and the hunger in the center of her being for validation. I could detail you all these things about her personality and physicality and sexuality and verbiage and never get to the whole of her - or to the simple fact of her. The kind who when she curled into you like a paper doll and put her head on your shoulder - your guts would shake involuntarily. Not like it was cold but the warm vulnerability after a long hour of hot sex.
She was, without a doubt, a harbinger of that summer I had fifteen years prior. Wrapped up in pretty flesh and a bright voice and a real person, surely - but supernatural in scope. Like a Ray Bradbury morality: “This is the culmination of all of what you have sought in life, and it will damn you forever if you follow it.”
Let me tell you a little bit about 1999.
Of all the fair years I’ve lived in memory, it was truly the best of times. Like the sweetness of early morning night, dimmed by the sun inching over the skyline, it was at once the height and the end of all things right and true in what I knew in the world. The end of a short-lasting reality we all agreed to get drunk on. The sun rises, the world is yours, welcome to garish adulthood.
But that year? It was so perfect, so incredibly surely perfect that ten years after the first Gulf War, our media had to create enemies - the long-arm of conspiracy-based programming: X-Files, Nowhere Man, Seven Days, Millennium; television proving that America never quite was at ease with the idiom of Peace. But seeing what was on television and then being able to open your blinds and be unafraid was important. That we had to construct our horrors from the daylight-burned idiot box to appreciate our creature comforts of suburbia. We had to believe things could get worse to appreciate that they hadn’t.
To think: the end of the century and the millennium and to be eighteen! That summer with the last of the parties you had to sneak beer at, with the friends that meant everything right now and won’t last much longer. Laughing until it hurt and night skies pimpled with stars and girls in sundresses that pulled and puckered the flanks of her breasts into little lines. Of the immediacy of speed: needing to drive fast all the time - thinking it was because you were stupid and young but actually because you couldn’t deal with the oncoming freight-train future and wanted to get as far away from it as possible. To find final comfort in being where you are, at that age, forever. The hope and dream and sleep of that last summer love of a girl who only lived streets away instead of minutes or in another town, another state. That particularly sad magic in that short-stretch of a summer, where eighteen year old girls finally parted their legs for you in the final gasp of adulthood you yearned to experience - all nerves and shaking limbs and words and knowing there was no going back after this.
(Consummation of sex is always the first or last car in the train ride toward adulthood. It is either the first thing towards it if you’re unlucky and too young or the last one if you’re socially inept and alone.)
And this magic? It fades. Most people don’t see it after that year. It fades from your sight like the green-purple dots after a flashbulb. The retina burned to its maximum capacity for a brief moment, the dots linger, slinks into a corner out of sight and fade away.
Like some others I’ve been lucky enough to hold onto some of it. I can make like Richard Collier and in the right moment, I’m there again. The air moves a certain way at a certain temperature and the gasp of rolling clouds and the sky… and it is all I can do to squeeze my hand so hard, to hold onto that VHS quality memory, all faded with time, dulled from playback. Faces but not names, names but not faces - events burned into brain from a hundred re-tellings but pronouns replacing people. But I’m there, and sometimes, so are you and sometimes its just the sensation - like a smell you can’t place or a few moments of a song. You may not know where what its from… but you do know from where.
I’ve lived with this yearning for fifteen years. Bid time return to a land of taller trees that weren’t torn down to make ways for better parking or ugly stucco housing and the greasy opening of familiar outdoor grills and someone’s pet dog barking from a block away. That familiarity, that base, that tremendous unspoken religion around a magic that sums up the old adage of “You had to be there to experience it”.
I’m here to tell you that isn’t always so. I’m here to tell you something nicknamed Karma, alias Supernatural is real and powerful and intelligent and put something in my lap this year.
Its been fifteen years since I’ve been out of high school. Fifteen years since I’ve experienced the things I’ve just detailed to you, so you can guess my age more or less if you don’t know me.
Her name isn’t important for this story, because she was one of those rare types who was less person, less flesh and more about that weird glow. The glow you find once in a while. Like when the sun comes up and the grass is cool and the world isn’t aware its morning and you’re by yourself. Like coffee and cool weather. Like closing your hand tight because the past revisits you briefly with an errant moment of feeling and you want to grip it so tight so it never leaves.
Except she is real. And she is everything - everything - that 1999 was to me.
This girl was almost customized, order-by-mail, we-do-it-for-you perfect. Her facets and weaknesses and vocabulary and her huge almond eyes and the sway back and the hair (adorable!) and the hunger in the center of her being for validation. I could detail you all these things about her personality and physicality and sexuality and verbiage and never get to the whole of her - or to the simple fact of her. The kind who when she curled into you like a paper doll and put her head on your shoulder - your guts would shake involuntarily. Not like it was cold but the warm vulnerability after a long hour of hot sex.
She was, without a doubt, a harbinger of that summer I had fifteen years prior. Wrapped up in pretty flesh and a bright voice and a real person, surely - but supernatural in scope. Like a Ray Bradbury morality: “This is the culmination of all of what you have sought in life, and it will damn you forever if you follow it.”
We became close and at times even intimate. And the exchanges were very warm, very regular, very powerful. She was talented with her words and her assembly of words as much as she was with her kiss. She would open her mouth and I kept hoping to drown in it.
Of course it doesn’t last. Summers never do. And I feel some deep shame in myself for almost bleeding away her youth - like a vampire - simply by bringing her into my circle for a time, even if she wanted it. No, its not a matter of moral, its a matter of - here is this creature like a forest spirit or nymph and she comes to you walking on ballet slippers of your half-remembered dreams and dressed in the silk of the forgotten hopes of youth. But to have her ends in reminding you of the fifteen years of unanswered pain that followed, all over again.
And that is where I am now.
Most people never get to live their dreams twice. They remember those playgrounds and revisit them with a sigh and then pass back into the dirty reality of kitchen fixtures and traffic jams. Others - often men - crowd in bars and trade stories about youth so vague that they’re interchangeable and universal while huddled over empty pints of beer. I, on the other hand, got what I wanted for a time and it is more than a pound of flesh I must sacrifice for that rare honor: the chance to do it all over again. Time travel without ever leaving home.
But like the past, she was not permanent. Her youth seems to have her interests casting a wider net than just me, just men, just one or two things but all of life. The narrowness of age hasn’t thinned her perspective. She is not mine to have, though I want it so badly. Like Amanda, something I can appreciate fully but somehow kept forever at arm's reach. (Perhaps the second time would heal the first?)
I still can’t believe that it happened at all. It frightens me awake that I had the experience that all men have clamored for for as long as cognitive thought has existed. I do not know why I was singled out to receive it and I am not sure what to do with the experience now that I’ve had it. I feel like someone who has learned a whole new language - except that no one else speaks it.
The nights skies are skinned with a brighter dark now. More purple than black and I can see that may be the color of the old magic I’ve been looking for all these years. All those bygone and forgotten days and nights and drunk early mornings where no one is alive or awake unless you’re between the age of seventeen and twenty-five. And that energy, mixed with the feeling of distance, time, memory, reverence - and my own personal tastes - is why I linked to that song above. Wordless meanings memorable only to myself.
And I go out on my front stoop with that song or some other b-side from an era of music that is passe and done and best forgotten and I stare out into the inky black knowing that she was a reply from that Outer Dark. That enough wishes and hopes and prayers and whining into the Abyss eventually answered with this person - who will undoubtedly pass through me and toward her own life and its joys and miseries and I will become as much of a harbinger for a certain time in her life as she is to me.
And now I am left to wonder: who’s hopes was the Night fulfilling? Mine or its own?
