Slow, Sloppy and Brilliant

megachiropteran:

500-1500:

No Children - The Mountain Goats

I hope that our few remaining friends give up on trying to save us
I hope we come up with a fail-safe plot to piss off the dumb few that forgave us
I hope the fences we mended fall down beneath their own weight
I hope we hang on past the last exit.
I hope it’s already too late

Fun fact: I dated someone once who loved this song because the ex-couple is still a unified “we” throughout all of the animosity. I think she liked to imagine that each person’s commitment to (entanglement with) the other transcended their individual well-being.

The interesting thing is that the “we”—the Alpha Couple—have been described over and over as an alcohol-fueled abusive clusterfuck of a relationship who stay together because of the sheer fact that they are such horrible people and they actually hate each other but forget it the moment they ingest alcohol (which is like, all the time) by John Darnielle. So I guess it’s true that the Alpha Couple’s commitment to each other transcends their individual well-being, but only because both of them are completely unwilling to address the fact that they are Terrible People. Instead, they enable each other to be self-destructive and insist on staying the way they are. I feel like “Old College Try” really hits home with this and while the lyrics seem romantic (I will walk down to the end with you/if you will come all the way down with me) the song is actually about the Alpha Couple contemplating divorce. How they know their relationship is terrible, but they are still going to stick it out forever. John Darnielle writes songs like this a lot: where on the surface the lyrics seem happy or romantic, but there are tidbits and clues that contain a sort of sinister darkness that’s going on—sometimes the characters aren’t even aware it is there.

One of my other favorite moments in the Alpha couple saga is how it ends, with the woman finally bolting in the night and the narrator waking up to an empty house. It’s all in the perfectly titled Alpha Omega. The narrator finds her note and sits there, feeling numb, trying to focus all of his attention on his breakfast of boiled peanuts. He describes them with such detail, the feel of it on his hands, whatever he can think about to avoid thinking about the end of this horrifically mutually destructive relationship. At the end, the narrator is only left with this overwhelming sense of dread: “It was warm on my skin, but I felt the cold blast looming on in.” The fear of reality, of having to find a new way of living, for better or worse, overwhelms him. Slowly.