That one time I had a song written about me.

Spring Quarter 2010 Sophomore Year of College

He was kind of tall. Almost gangly, but you wouldn't know it for the way he stooped and hid behind the shyness of his voice. We'd had a class together the previous quarter, Parasites, but nobody knew he was there. He was a guest with a host, a ghost.

Maybe three of us in the entire class noticed him in the back corner. Even for the online assignments on a social networking site called plurk, he was scarce. His posts, few and far between as they were, were regularly and systematically erased because the most successful parasite (or houseguest) leaves its host with no traces that it was there.

I was drawn to him. I could feel the red thread of fate unraveling the slack necessary to pull us together. 

So I crossed the gap. I read and commented on his posts. I made eye contact as direct eye contact as I could when he walked past. I invited him to share a meal with me.

"So I ate beside [Teddy] today. He's a quiet, awkward soul and underestimates the power he has within himself. I'm so drawn to that. He offered to teach me guitar, but then immediately said he wasn't very good. I asked, and he's played for 10 years."  - Excerpt from personal journal, March 10, 2010

I suppose it helped that at the time he was hopelessly infatuated with one of the two other people in class who'd taken the time and energy to notice him, my friend Kai. We went together to watch her perform at the Naked Truth on Stereotypes.

We got to know each other. We became friends.

When he graduated after winter quarter, I stopped seeing him as much. He was still in town but lived far beyond even my walking prowess. Still, we kept in touch; exchanging emails and continuing an impossibly long conversation thread on plurk.

Late in March, he sent me an mp3 file via email. There was no caption, no commentary. The only way it related to the conversation we'd been having was that at the time I had just started an Independent Study Project (blogged about and mostly contained here) on a postmodern examination of music and society. Just 912 kilobytes, the song was a cover of "Holland, 1945" by Neutral Milk Hotel.

The quality was crap, recorded with a webcam on a shitty computer. But despite that, it was beautiful and powerful. It bit more low key and folksy single-man-with-guitar than the original.

"You have a completely different kind of energy when you're singing than you do talking in person. The closest I can think of to describe it is to compare it to the feeling I get when I'm dancing. Everything else drops away. There's just me and the music and - and it's like making love, by which I mean creating love. I dunno, it's not really something you can put into words. If you have any other music recorded and feel so willing, I would love to hear it." -Excerpt from personal correspondence March 22, 2010

 This was soon followed by two songs he'd written for past loves, a cover of Daniel Johnston and a song he wrote for/about me.



Three minutes fourteen seconds about me dancing.

Danny you dance all through the room.
Danny you dance like nobody's looking at you
And it's beautiful. And it's beautiful.
And it's beautiful.
Danny your hands move where you want them to
Danny you know this what all of us want to do
Because it's beautiful. Because it's beautiful.
Because it's beautiful.
Though it's beautiful.
Though it's beautiful.
It's beautiful.

The lyrics are so simple and drawn out so much in the song. I listen to this, and I want to live up to it. I want to be that beautiful by forgetting about the world for just a few minutes and dancing.

In a later email he told me how I was one of the only friends he'd made in college, which I found sad and beautiful at the same time.

***

We still talk occasionally. Exchanging emails and catching up. About two months ago, I joined him in partaking of conveyor sushi with his girlfriend. We don't talk as often as we should and if he got that job in Portland is now quite a bit less easier for me to find than when he was in Bellingham. 

At the idea of him writing a song about me I'm touched and a mite flabbergasted. It seems... strange somehow to realize yourself as a muse, as inspiration, the uncanny feeling of a writer being written about.

You can listen to the song on my tumblr: http://acelessthan3.tumblr.com/post/27448822390

In Which Danny Goes on a Date

I feel like I rarely post about my personal life in too much detail here, probably because the majority of people reading this are friends who receive regular updates in person and thus it seems redundant and detractive to the semi-academic, semi-social justice, poetic vibe/theme that has permeated this blog.

That said, I went on a date this past weekend. I can't remember the last time I've been on a “date” that had the intention of being a date and wasn't some kind of confusing blend of potential interest and existing friendship. I went on a date with someone I barely know, with the intention of getting to know him better to see if we have any kind of chemistry or if maybe we should abort mission and head for the safety of newly minted friendship. For now, I'll call the gentleman in question Glitter.

I brought him flowers.

“Would you tell me, please,” said Alice, a little timidly, “why are you painting those roses?” -Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland 

 I've never gotten someone flowers like this. Well, unless you count the time over the summer where I got a calla lilies at the Pike Place Market and then forgot them when I stayed the night at my friend Joe's and didn't remember them until I was an hour away on public transportation and told him to give them to his mom.

They were white roses. Or rather they were white roses when I purchased them. I took them home and painted the roses red. I never asked if he understood the literary nod to Lewis Carroll, but the playing card (Ace of Hearts, naturally) with the quote probably made it painfully obvious. Assuming there are future dates and my budget allows for it, I'm toying with the idea of continuing to give Glitter literary flowers.

Perhaps as a friend of Dorothy, I can acquire some poppies. And morbid though it may be, perhaps I can rustle up a small bouquet of the petals Ophelia names in her madness before drowning. A daffodil and a mirror might be too strong a message of Narcissus.

On second thought, maybe more flowers are a bad idea if they're all harbingers of doom and death in literature.

Even as I was painting these roses, I felt really insecure. I'm not sure how many people I texted for reassurance that this was a good idea, but I really needed people to say to me “Danny, you're being ridiculous. Stop thinking and just go with it.”

The afternoon was entirely too long.

Part of our date was going to the Vagina Memoirs, a monologue performance process on campus that gives women opportunity to speak truth to power and break silence. I should have seen it coming when Glitter sat down next to me in line and asked if the flowers were for the cast member and mutual friend who sort of introduced us.

Now, the obvious answer would have been to immediately say no, these are actually for you. But I froze. I was a little embarrassed to not have anticipated that any and every other bouquet of flowers in the concert hall that night was going to a Vagina Memoirs cast member.

So I waited a painful 15 minutes in line letting him believe the flowers were for someone else before I half-whispered (lines are loud) in his ear and told him that if he wanted to give flowers to our friend, he now had some since the roses were for him.

He held on to them for the entire first act before putting them under his seat during intermission. Part of me wanted to trade the flowers for my hand every time I caught sight of this out of the corner of my eye.

The Date