I used to run cross country in high school, and I used to train doing something like 5 mile circuits while holding a portable CD player. (Idiot!) I invariably listened to Pinkerton, Weezer's delicious dark album every time I ran, and during real races where CD players weren't allowed it was the song "The Good Life" that got me through that final mile. "Shakin' booty, makin' sweet love all the night/it's time I got back to the good life." Nothing could propel me to the finish line faster, except for maybe imagining that the tallest mofo on the team could poss be cheering me on. (He wasn't. So thanks for everything, Rivers Cuomo.)Lately I've been running again, albeit a little bit slower and on harder pavement courses in my beloved Brooklyn. See now there's this guy who really is cheering me on to run and has helped me to get back into the good, good habit of 30-40 minutes at least 3 times a week. And today I got super nostalgic for my collection of 3-minute gems called Pinkerton Trystan got me for my 17th birthday.
Onto the iPod Pinkerton sprang, and I felt like running extra today. Thank GOD I hadn't listened to this album last summer when I was a mess. Rivers is all heart break and longing, and I just melt at his sorta creepy, ultimately so shy and sweet musings. And where Album by Girls stepped in during my desperate love craze this winter, Pinkerton could have picked up some slack, what with its multicultural, interracial, May-December self-loathing psychodrama. Rivers loves that half-Japanese girl, the one who's so much younger and makes him call himself an "old man," the one who plays the cello and leaves it in the basement (on purpose, you just KNOW it) so he can "whack it" to the thought of her hands going up and down, up and down its neck.
Oh, love. Oh, torture.
Naked in desperation, "Across the Sea" has always been my favorite Weezer tune, as I've always had a melodramatic bent. He opens the song singing the words written to him from an 18 yr old girl in Japan whose letter opened a deep chasm in his chest, as wide as the Pacific fucking Ocean that separates the two. He "thinks it would be wrong" to touch her so he gives her this song instead. Why? She's 18. She's legal. He's a rock star and he has money. The thought of making love to a girl from another country makes him nervous? That doesn't stop him from sniffing and licking her stationary and thinking of her touching herself in her teenage bedroom (and then telling us all about it, the crazy). And when he exclaims, "Words and dreams and a million screams, oh, how I need a hand in mine to feel!" I just about lose it because I totally get it. Sometimes the fantasy really is good enough, no, even better than the real thing because it never, ever goes bad. But there are rare instances where you're absolutely certain, would sign your name on any dotted line for it, that if you don't get what you want, if you don't get to stick it to her (or get stuck) you really will fucking perish.
And then this Japanese girl shows up again in "El Scorcho," where she's cursed in the first lyric because "you do it to me every time." And her cello shredding makes him jello. He's just going crazy-- the distortion tells you so-- thinking of all the ways they belong together and could help each other. There's a cute cultural impasse in the form of Green Day. And once again he says he can't talk about "it:" his physical craving for this totally different girl. He can only make a "record" about it. He can't even talk about it. And I've been there too; where all the oppositions mentally pile up and you feel like the only thing you can do is sit in the bedroom with a bottle of Kentucky Bourbs and make cliche art but feel like it's so, so good because it has this... shine... which is the essense of that face. God, that flat, black-eyed face.
Before Rivers closes the album with the happy dagger that is "Butterfly" he gives us one more chance with "Falling for You." Maybe to give us a little bit of hope? He admits his "irrational fear" about being an "old goat" hanging out with such a young chick, and "Holy sweet, goddamn, you left your cello in the basement." If he has a fetish for the letter, the pages, the envelope, then just what is he going to do with that instrument? He's a musician, for God's sake, and this girl is playing him better than he can go Guitar Hero on stage. No wonder he says he'd do anything to get the hell out alive... or maybe settle down with the crazy girl. And isn't that always the challenge?
Before I started running again I told myself I had a timeline. I had a date in June that I had to face and if at that point nothing had materialized with the cello-player whose cello had been in my mind's basement for months then it was time to physically, mentally, and literally, even, wrench myself out of that sitch and get the hell out alive!! But through it all, I always clutched at the thin shred of hope that I might just get to "settle down." Somehow the old goat and young chick combo made so much sense, so much like "I'm a lot like you, so please. Hello. I'm here. I'm waiting. I think I'd be good for you and you'd be good for me."
And you know Rivers ended up marrying a Japanese woman, and I hear they're pretty happy.
