In the Garage, Where I Feel Safe on the Eve of Bloomsday Whilst Channelling Enid Coleslaw

By Rudolfo Carrillo


There's a song by the american pop-punk flavoured rocanrol band named weezer that has lyrics that speak in plaintive tones of the journey of the mystical or mythical, if you will, outcast. The song is cast in a form built from the irony inherent in proclaiming one's triumph over the establishment, over the defining and restraining nature of the universe. You know, what that fellow up above pronounced as the ineluctable modality of the visible.

in case you are wondering, the song lyrics of the Weezer song include the line, "I write these stupid words and I love every one". One refering to the word, I presume, for purposes related to the nature of this post, I reckon. You know, the word and all that, right?

The musical content on In the Garage isn't jazz, but rather, a relatively simple form of rocanrol. rather than relying on musical complexity, the short tune focuses on rhythm, dynamics, and repetition. Melody seems reserved and awkward, a consequential effect.

But besides all that textual and literary hocus-pocus, I am listening to the song I talked about because of how I feel tonight. I can relate to the embedded narrative. In case you haven't heard it, take a listen here:



Now that you are done with that, you may be wondering why I am so inclined toward sentimental ruminations of what was and what was imagined to be, how i survived all that, into the middle of the twenty-first century.

Well, it's been thirty years since i've been in high school at the City of Gold. of course some of the kids, sharing,as they do, that commonality, are planning a thirty year reunion.

in retrospect, the City of Gold was a special place back when I was there. Top flight instructors balanced delicately with advanced students that had sprouted from nuclear scientists, managers of vast defense industries, business people and entrepreneurs with the acumen of laser light and the full funding and intricate interest of the department of defense, and so on and so forth.

Anywho, I went to my twenty year reunion and it sucked. My friends and I felt more like outsiders than ever, even though we were, by that time, teachers and writers and artists and doctors.

Thereafter, through the magic medium we refer reverently to as facebook - which by the way, really is like instant digitized and engergized relational database about anything you want to know, one way or another, even if just a footnoted hyperlink somewhere near the bottom of the pages and it's on all the time. too - i wrote about all that disillusion, to the guy who is organizing the whole thirty year affair.

It was kinda awkward, but as a freak, I had to do it. there was always a sense of marginalization for some of my contemporaries, for my self, while we dwelt at the golden city. And for some of us, high school was a way to get to college, to grad school, to the centers of our shared culture. That contributed to our sense that our tenure at the school was just another vague image, lost across the wide span of years.

Of course I mentioned the twelve-sided die and the dungeon master's guide, because all of that was true. I also implied that an analogy could be drawn between certain characters in Ghost World and my experience in high school.

One of my favorite parts of the filmic version is the Mohammed Rafi tune that Enid listens to at the beginning of the film. Here it is, if you would like to listen to it, before reading on:



I don't know if I will be there, at that gathering which is still a year away and like a distant ship mast from a slow moving boat on the very edge of the horizon. While i think about it, I am going to listen to a couple of the songs we were listening to back in Burque, at the City of Gold in the year commonly refered to as nineteen hundred and eighty-two.

















Be seeing you.