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November 29 Did i Ever Tell You the Story of the Girl Who Made the Greatest Mix-Tape of All Time?No art. No thinly veiled innuendos presented as humour. No rants on the state of aesthetica. No, ladies and gents, this is simply a story. And i have no idea why i’m blogging it, cuz it’s honestly pretty personal, but it’s also pretty and honest, so i guess it’s a story worth telling.
As the title implies, i probably haven’t told you (whomever you are) about her and her fabulous mix tape, but I know I have mentioned her to most of you. To most of you, she is known as the ‘married girl’, which places her in the hallowed annals of tyler’s messed up history of mates with mates, but alas, none of this devalues the status of her mix tape.
I should probably start at the start, but for this story, the start is at the end, or at least close to it, as the end just happened about 20 minutes ago. Vainly searching my room for a document that would verify the contents of an account validating the money i owe to the government, i dislodged an ancient, brown, accordion file folder containing the various meaningless and meaningful documents i’d accrued over the years. Flipping from compartment to compartment, vaguely noticing the applied ‘theme’ to each, i stumbled upon treasures of the paper variety i had long since discarded. Letters, personal and impersonal, received and unsent, hidden away in the folds between taxation documents and a list of the 100 best books ever written (which i will complete someday…2 down, 98 to go).
As if the papers themselves had hands with will, they essentially sat me down and began to speak to my eyes. I’m not going to pretend that i’d forgotten her letters, because as most of you know, i never forget anything, for better or worse. But the intricacies of these words came as a shock to me. I don’t think i can express to you what type of affect these letters had on me, both on the first read and on the last. I mean, this girl taught me to write and I was being reminded of it. Now, truly, the collecting-of-phonetic-sounds and putting-pen-to-paper writing was established by various teachers throughout my schooling days, and, i should probably single out Mrs. Ross for teaching me to write correctly, but these letters were a lesson on how to write how the brain thinks; how to package the words as art and, most of all, how to art the package that is the words.
The story of the letters is short, 3 acts, with the most pathetic tragedy at the end. We met at a Calgary-to-Regina-trip two day party on day one, talked the entire night as if no one else existed, met again on day two, progressed similarly, she off-hand remarked that she was married (“Really. I never would have thought.”…i wonder why…), we exchanged addresses (she didn’t do the internet, oh lord what a hipster…but more on that later), she gave me the wrong address, not that i wrote her anyway, she wrote me, i wrote her back, she wrote me again, sending a mix-tape in tow, i never wrote back, she wrote again, and again, i never wrote back. That’s how it ends. Through my apathy, the most pathetic of all tragic traits, i never heard from her again. And honestly, it kind of haunts me to this day.
I mean, it wouldn’t be difficult for me to come up with a reason now. Or we could brand it an excuse. Regardless, these letters took intimidating to a new level. The first letter she wrote was a two page ditty, the first whole page encompassing why she was writing me, even though she never wanted to, mainly due to socio-political reasons that i vaguely understood at the time and am shocked at the immature maturity of them now. Immature maturity? Well, that would be the type of insecurities reserved for those with a litany of social interactions that transcend the cry-baby adolescent ones that so many have trouble shaking well into their ‘mature’ years. Beyond that, the second page was peppered with the type of self-aware social commentary, acquired child-like wonder, and hipster-speak that winds a boy up like you wouldn’t believe. And i haven’t even gotten to the mix-tape yet.
This thing was solid gold in plastica form. I had never heard of a single band on it (which made her sooo cool to me…funny how some things never change), but i know so many of them all too well now. Sadly, i lost it through the years, which pains me worse than something like this should, but I still remember a few tracks…Enfilade by At the Drive-In, the best Belle and Sebastian song I have ever heard, a Spoon tune for the ages… and sadly the rest are lost on me. All this, back in 2000. Which believe me, was ahead of it’s time.
Reading her letter now, she self-deprecatingly refers to herself as ‘emo’. This shocked me, reading it now. I mean, not only was she throwing around the term emo a full six years before it became mainstream, but she had already progressed to the stage where it was uncool to be as such. For crying out loud, i didn’t hear an emo tune until three years later (unless you count At the Drive-In/Refused…but i don’t), and didn’t hear the phrase until 6 months after that. Hell, some people still don’t know what it means (you know who you are…and so do i). God knows i had no idea what i was reading in 2000. I probably glazed over the word as if it would come to me sometime…and hey, it only took half a decade.
And that’s it. Lost mix-tape, lost touch, lost my mind. Perhaps this is me carrying the torch, swinging signals in a snow storm for a ship that’s not coming back, but i like to think of it more like making amends. I still have her address…well, an address…I should try writing this apartment and scream back into the void.
And, oh, i couldn’t leave without posting this: if you’re this girl, if by the most random chance you’ve happened across this, you have given me the greatest mix-tape of my life. Thank you.
Jesus Christ, that's a pretty face...the kind you'd find on someone i could save Comments (5)
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