Protected: cuz tha boyz in tha hood are always hard…
Little Boots – Rich Boys (The Virgins Cover)
The Black Keys – Lies
The Cave Singers – Dancing On Our Graves
Chiddy Bang – Kids (MGMT Remix/Sample!)
White Lies – Death
You should also download these gems, which aren’t available on YouTube yet….
Sonos – White Winter Hymnal (Fleet Foxes Cover)
S/Alexander
I need it to rain.
Every site online says that it won’t rain today. Every site tells me I have to endure another day of sun, but I honestly don’t know if I can. I haven’t had a thought in days. I haven’t been able to think. To process. The sun and the heat and the humidity have drained me of any ambition. Any energy. I still function and I still sit and talk and laugh. But I need a moment to myself. I need a moment where I can feel whatever it is that the sun has kept me from feeling. It’s random and it doesn’t make sense, but I know that rain would make everything better. I know that there is something that I need to deal with – some problem I’ve kept tucked away and hidden – that will show itself in the shadows thats clouds create.
I would clean my room, and watch through my windows and people leap over puddles and muddle through the rain water – running, having forgotten their umbrellas. I would walk down Thayer Street and feel the water pound my skull and hear the cars honk, their lights on in the middle of the day. The water would run down the street, picking up bits of trash and dirt and liter before depositing it down drains – clearing the way, I suppose. I would sit on my bed with my window cracked and smell Spring. I would listen to the water hit pavement and nap for a few hours. I would wake up and feel my bones ache and know, for a moment, that I exist.
But best of all, I’d have a moment to myself. It is too hard to be alone when the weather is as nice as it has been. It is too easy to get trapped in the feelings of jubilation that the sun brings forth, and rain would take care of that for me. I would finally have the time and energy to understand what I am doing.
So it’s been a while since I suggested any music, and this isn’t exactly new. But Ida Maria’s “Oh My God” was so amazing (and became my theme for first semester) that I have become an instant fan. ”Queen of the World,” is the perfect song for senior year. The power of the drink and dancing. The need to keep the moment forever. It’s amazing, and I highly recommend that you take 4 minutes and give it a listen.
S/Alexander
“So it doesn’t count if neither one of us came, right?”
He slipped out of my room and I sank onto my bed, too emotionally drained to reach for the phone and call for help. For a moment I was too shocked to take it all in, and the only thing that kept passing through my mind was how bright the lamp was and how dirty the room was and how I needed to get to my phone. He was gone but I could still smell his cock on my sheets, in the air. I could still taste him on my tongue. I could feel him in my mouth. Disgusted and defeated I gripped the bed post until my knuckles turned white and I found the energy to pull myself up, stumbling to the bathroom where I kept my toothbrush. I brushed until the only thing I felt was shame and the only thing I tasted was blood and the last thing I wanted to do was walk outside and pretend as if everything was somehow the same when it wasn’t. So instead I slide down the wall, landing with a thud on the wet tile.
I had almost made it. Two more months and he would have been more like a bad dream than an actual moment. Even now, stories from fall semester feel more like the tales of a friend that I used to know. I hear about a boy who shut himself in his room for days and didn’t come out. I remember people talking about someone too shattered to make it to meetings or the dining hall. I remember whispers through the wall mentioning some boy, some boy who stayed awake at night staring at the ceiling and barely breathing. I had almost gotten to the point where these things weren’t even about me anymore. Who was this boy, so pathetic and sad? Could he have been me? I was supposed to be made out of steel – hardened after years of sexual dalliances and southern confinement. I was the friend you wanted with you when anything happened, because I was supposed to be able to handle everything. I could almost handle anything.
Sitting on the wet floor I couldn’t help but pity myself; so pathetic as to sabotage to return to the scene of an emotional carnage. Love, and I use that word without irony, destroys my public persona. My judgment gets clouded and my heart thunders and rather than risk putting myself out there I recoil into transitory phases of music or men or money. With the good men, the men that see past my façade and attempt – with great difficulty – to love me as I am, I believe them to be weak. Their easy acceptance comes off as simplemindedness. They try to reach me. They want to move me out of my moods of tepid blues and violent reds, attempting to broker an uneasy truce with the demons I bring with me wherever I go. But I refuse to waive – how could someone as good as him love someone as damaged as I am? I imagine that I am doing them a favor as I slowly start to miss dates or not return phone calls. I am freeing them for people that understand them; that will appreciate their simple nature. And then I mourn their loss in the closest bar or bedroom.
Instead, I shower my love and attention on the ones that, like me, imagine themselves too damaged to ever be actually loved. The narcissist or the manic depressive or the closet case, each one a challenge that I accepted believing that – should they ever lower their defenses – their appreciating for my fixing them would eventually turn to reciprocity. To love. I imagine myself finding a soul mate and healing them of their demons, all the while exercising my own. However, I often find myself caught in a constant battle of ego that I never win because I never play as dirty as they do – because I am not as bad of a person as I imagine myself to be. So when the dust settles and the jeans are zipped and the only thing left is a taste or a smell or a feeling, they are gone and I am still broken – slumped against a dingy wall, bleeding from the mouth, and still haunted.
My friends eventually came for me, and I told them the only thing I could tell them which was a name. That was all they needed to judge me. “The flesh is weak,” they said as they helped me to my room. I cleared out my room of the people and I started packing. I threw things into my bad without caution or forethought. I didn’t plan for outfits or matching sets or weather. I needed to get away from tonight and Providence and the taste of a boy who had quickly reminded me that my own judgment is never as good as I imagine it to be. I needed to leave because no matter how many windows I opened he would still be on the edge of my bed or in the hallway or in the SafeRide. I let myself fall back into this nightmare again. I called my friend with a car and he came and got me within the hour, stopping for a moment for coffee and breakfast before hitting the highway.
Providence was fading, like a distant memory, and I had begun to feel again. The numbness was gone and I fought the urge to kick myself for my stupidity. Seriously? Seriously? Not again. The car sped up but it was still a while until the airport appeared, so I watched the city disappear in the side mirrors before lighting a cigarette and looking straight ahead. The sun was beginning to peak its head above the horizon, throwing flecks of gold and red through the clouds, bathing my friend and I in a brilliant, almost blinding light. I was almost free, and then I wasn’t. I took a deep drag of my cigarette and held it for as long as possible, until it burned my lungs and my eyes began to tear up. I began counting the yellow lines as they passed under the car, every one another step closer to the plane – and further from the night.
I turned and looked at my friend.
“If I started to cry right now, would you be okay?”
He paused for a minute and looked at me, before turning his attention back to the road.
“After the night you’ve had, I’d probably join you.”
After a moment of silence the airport came into view, and I cried as quietly as I could.
S/Alexander
When I was growing up, Sundays were for cleaning. It was just understood that Saturday mornings were for cartoons and sleeping late and spending time as children, but that Sunday mornings were for cleaning. My sister and I would get out of bed to the smell of scrambled eggs, bacon, grits and tuna, and drop biscuits. We would stumble to the kitchen, take a seat at the bar, and eat this massive breakfast while my mother leaned against the kitchen sink and smoked her morning cigarette and/or drank a cup of black coffee. Sometimes she would take a fork and eat a little bit off of our plates, but usually she just watched us eat and listened in on whatever two children had to chat about that early in the morning. When we were done she would clean our plates and start the dishes, sending my sister and I to clean the rest of the house. We would fold laundry my mother had started hours before we woke up, crawl under furniture to dust, sweep the entire house, vacuum the area rugs, sweep the porch, and anything else that my mother directed us to do.
But before any of that happened, we had to have music. At the time there was this gold and glass monstrosity that held a massive stereo system that my father had brought into the house. Situated in the living room, I can still see my mother bending over it – fidgeting with the buttons and trying to make it work. Eventually she would get it to play one of dozens of mixed tapes that my father had created for her, or a CD that she had bought from someone at work, or maybe the local black radio station – but either way, our house would fill with the sounds of Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross, The Spinners, The Chi-Lites, and a whole host of other MoTown/Soul classics. By the time my sister and I were nine years old we could could sing the entire Diana Ross catalogue – even the 80’s hits.
After my mother’s accident left her disabled, breakfast were scaled down to oatmeal or cereal or whatever my sister and I could manage to fix by ourselves. My mother wasn’t able to stand on her feet long enough to fix us the same breakfasts we had had when we were younger, and for a number of years we weren’t old enough to fix it for ourselves. The stereo was thrown away at some point – when it stopped playing the cassettes my father had made. I think we sold the gold and glass stand at some point to make room for a new living room set. My mother would have her coffee and cigarette in her bedroom, and my sister and I would stare at the front of the house and prepare ourselves the clean, alone. But, of everything that changed, the music remained the same. My sister and I would hook our computers, and eventually our iPods, up to computer speakers and clean to the same Motown we had heard when we were seven, ten, or thirteen years old.
I’m twenty-two now, and, even though I live in a small dorm, Sundays are still made for cleaning. And even though my room is small, and doesn’t require nearly as much energy to clean as my house did, I still take pride in knowing that I have kept this little bit of tradition alive. After I clean, I reward myself with breakfast – and while it will never be as good as my mother’s, or in some case’s my sister’s, it is still comforting nonetheless.
Here is, in my opinion, the best tracks to clean to:
- Yester-Me, Yester-You, Yester-Day – - Stevie Wonder
- I’ll Be Around — The Spinners
- Diana Ross and the Supremes – Stoned Love
- I Wish It Would Rain – The Temptations
- Best of my Love – The Emotions
- Backstabbers – The O’Jays
- Then Came You – Dionne Warwick
- Band of Gold – Freda Payne
- Until You Come Back – Aretha Franklin
- Please, Please, Please – James Brown
- Have You Seen Her – The Chi- Lites
- Got To Be Real – Cheryl Lynn
- Donna Summer – MacArthur Park
- Get Down On It – Kool and the Gang
- You’re The Best Thing That Ever Happened To Me – Gladys Knight
- What’s Love Got To Do With It – Tina Turner
- RESPECT – Aretha Franklin
- Lady You Bring Me Up – The Commodores
Do yourself a favor, download these tracks and clean your room. It will put everything in perspective.
Thanks for driving OAR
S/Alexander
