Songs I’ve Been Obsessed With/Evoke Memories 4
”Star Dust” - Vic Damone.
It is raining; this is a rainy song, thusly.
Christmas is approaching. Last Christmas Eve I was all broke up over a girl OVER A GIRL, CAN YOU BELIEVE IT!? DO PEOPLE REALLY DO THAT ANYMORE? I told my parents, after we had our oyster stew, I was “going on a drive” (being a pretend poster-child of the two-thousands reaching after the fifties, I suppose) and they were, surprisingly, okay with it. So I left, turned on some music, and waited for something to break the internal bending that had been bending for a couple months, so I could cry like some baffled whale.
Vic Damone, you broke me! It was the backing strings, and your baritone, and yeah probably some of the words okay, sure, but a select few. When it hit I had hit Johnny Dodds Boulevard and all the street lights came together under my eyelids and my glasses and there was all this construction obstructing the path…I got on the side road and made these squinched, absurd faces while crying, this melodramatic I’ve hit bottom! I’m so sad! Oh, this hurts so bad! mentality that everybody could get to go through lots of times.
I passed a guy with his thumb sticking out of this pretty nice jacket, wasn’t planning on turning around but figured why not, pulled a three-point turn while wiping my glasses, gained some composure and asked him where he needed to go. He said West Ashley, that he had to come all the way over here to get these depression meds because so many places wer closed. I was a little skeptical, but he was really nice, and the jacket made me feel like he didn’t have a knife hiding in it.
You could say I was simultaneously dealing with two situations that had all these what-ifs attached to them, and he won out in an attempt to distract me from the other one, even though I wanted more to not be distracted from the other so I could get on with it. This type of behavior is normal, I believe. Not doing it, knowing one should.
We had all this small talk, the other situation, she called me, I told her what was going on and could I call her after dropping him off, and she said okay. He and I talked about that; it was good, I don’t remember exact words, there was plenty of ”I can relate” language going on.
I dropped him off, we said Merry Christmas to one another and I drove off. Gained some composure, called the lady. When I got home, Pops chastised me for being gone so long so I said to him Well I said I was going on a drive, didn’t I? And he gave me this watch-the-attitude glance. I went over to the couch to sit next to Meme and whispered the shenanigans I’d been up to into her ear. We pinky-promised not to tell her grumpy son.
