I’ve always been firmly of the belief that some of life’s greatest truths are delivered via bubblegum pop lyrics. Essentially, the composers of these songs are faced with a grossly underappreciated task: What can you say in fifty words or so that will resonate with fucking everyone? The end result is often remarkably distilled emotion, a full-wall window onto the human experience. It’s not that they put it in ways you’d never thought to put it before. It’s just that you’d never thought to put it anywhere at all before.
But I’m at that point where everything resonates, where even the drivel coming from that pre-pubescent man-child on the last season of American Idol wells up tears, and that hasn’t happened in awhile, and I’m old enough now to know that it means that something is trying to get out. It’s banging on the door and it’s shouting out instructions and it’s waiting for me.
When I was a kid, I was so adept at dealing with this. It happened all the time, and I knew what to do. The reflex was automatic. I’d grab a pen and I’d get down whatever it had to say. And if other people needed to read it, then I knew that, and if they didn’t, then I knew that too. And it would be out, and done with, and gone until next time, and I could move on with my life. As I aged, something changed. I learned to value it, maybe. I learned to fear it. I don’t know. But it’s here now, in a way that it hasn’t been in a long, long time, and it wants to talk, it has something to say, and I don’t know how to let it. I can’t hear you, dude. I’m so sorry.
