I was driving yesterday to go visit my 3-year-old son for the first time since the dust from all of this has begun to settle, listing to a mix CD of random songs that I like, when this acoustic version of “Creep” came on. Track 17. I let it loop, over and over, 4:15 at a time and I began to see it and feel it, not just hear it. I started to take in the lines that Thom Yorke wrote about a man afraid to talk to a woman because of his own insecurities, so he follows her, lost in the background. The beauty of interpretation and interpolation is that it is infinitely subjective.
“…When you were here before, couldn’t look you in the eye. You’re just like an angel, your skin makes me cry…”
Pulling in the driveway, returning to the scene of the crime. One innocuous argument finally becomes the straw that broke the camel’s back. Years of defensiveness, discontent, and emotional starvation, played out on a grand stage for an entire family to see. In a time of mourning, no less. Both of us tried to grasp tightly to keep a relationship together that had long since turned caustic and had begun to spoil. Built upon a foundation of sand, we had started out as two depressions drawn together to create a perfect storm. She didn’t look the same as I remembered. A tad older, more human. I felt nothing, nothing but excitement to see my son. It’s her late mother’s house. Our pictures together still adorn the hallway wall. Copies of the same picture at my home that after that night my teenage daughters turned down in their frames. I’m still not sure if that was done for me or for them. I feel nothing.
“…I wish I was special, you’re so fucking special. But I’m a creep. I’m a weirdo. What the hell am I doing here? I don’t belong here…”
Playing on the floor in his room. Old Star Wars action figures she found while cleaning out the garage. He laughs with his eyes and his entire body when I do voices for each character. She’s in the room, making small talk about this and that. I feel nothing. Time for a brief smoke break, precluded by a stop at the restroom. My neurosis oftentimes led me to dark and shameful places. The old me, once in the bathroom with the door closed would make observations and summations like the following; 3 toothbrushes in the holder. Hers, my son’s, and…an unknown third. Any pill bottles stashed in the usual places? Condom wrappers in the trash can? Men’s deodorant in the cabinet? None of this happened this time. I stood and stared back at my reflection in the mirror, I felt nothing.
“…I don’t care if it hurts. I want to have control. I want a perfect body. I want a perfect soul. I want you to notice, when I’m not around…”
I’m realizing on a daily basis that I am not in love with her, and haven’t been for a while. I was in love with the idea of her. I love her, but I’m not in love with her. For years I have cried out in vain at the fact that I felt no genuine love from her towards me. It felt forced, contrived, and hollow. I was perpetually sharing a couch and a bed with someone who was inches from me physically, but emotionally in another universe. Resentments begin to build and barriers are erected, battlements for an impending war of attrition. I was so caught up in my own hurt and feelings of neglect; I never noticed that it was actually how I felt all along as well. I had subconsciously tried to fool myself into never acknowledging in but rather focus on the pain, the only thing that’s real. I became contaminated by my bitterness, no longer able to see the forest for the trees. It hurts to be alone and to have failed at happiness again, especially with the collateral damage that it caused in all of the lives that I effect. I needed to regain control. She thanks me for stopping by to see them, and for the conversation that I don’t even remember being in. My son doesn’t want me to go, which tears at the fiber of my being, but I must. She looks at me and I smile and say goodbye. I feel nothing.
“…Whatever makes you happy. Whatever you want. You’re so fucking special, I wish I were special. But I’m a creep. I’m a weirdo. What the hell am I doing here? I don’t belong here…I don’t belong here…”
All we ever wanted was to be happy, and to make each other happy. We found a way to do that, but it is not defined as winning, just degrees of losing. The only thing we have in common is our son and our music. Let’s no longer make each other miserable trying to anneal each other in fires of discontent. I do feel something. I feel sadness. Remorse. Failing another person and children who depend on you for their serenity leaves a little dirt on your soul that is hard to wash clean sometimes. I’ve carried bitterness around my neck like an albatross for a long time about things I have said and done that I can’t change. I am sensitive, and I don’t do superficial emotional attachment well. Never have. Never been the one night stand kind of a guy, and when I have found myself in those situations I become neurotically troubled by it. I can’t be the guy who never calls and moves on, to provide a smile and a head nod the next time we come into contact. At the same time, at what level does contact after the fact seems desperate, suffocating, and over bearing? Have this juxtaposition of thoughts fire off in your synopses several times a second, and you will see. It is my default mechanism, my modis operandi. Now I am just rambling….
I’m sorry that it went down the way that it did, but we just became people that we didn’t like, and we took that dissatisfaction out on the other until it poisoned the well. I will close with the coda from track 18, same mix tape.
“…for a minute there, I lost myself, I lost myself…”
I want to end by thanking my friend Eric Hampton. Eric is an amazing musician who at a critical point in my then young life taught me how to appreciate music and to experience it with all of my senses, to think musically. Eric showed me the bass line to Radiohead’s “Creep” on a right handed throw down bass that, being left handed, I had to play upside down. Nothing complicated, not counting opens, 2 strings, 3 changes with a scale at the end, then repeat, close your eyes, and just feel it..Thanks Hamp
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