Menthol-Guy

It’s one of those nights where it’s too late for yesterday and too early for tomorrow.

Well, I was lying in my bed in this Norman Mailer way–I mean, the way Norman Mailer’s character in The American Dream might have done it, smoking a cigarette stick and just blowing it away to the ceiling. It’s a classic way of smoking, methinks, with Cherry or Donna sleeping besides you, the way they must have looked like in the 60s or 70s, or the way those hipster polaroids depict it. I have just finished watching Insomnia from the laptop, directed by Christopher Nolan (I’m finding my way around directors lately; I think that I should know the directors too, out of respect), and by the time I was smoking my last cigarette through the Norman Mailer way (I should reread again that book if I would ever grow up, since I couldn’t exactly grasp the entire plot, sorry) my iTunes started playing blink-182.

When I was in my High School (here we go again) I used to listen to them. Not really non-stop and all that exaggerated fanboy lines, no. This Dell of a laptop first broke down in its first year, in 2007, and all my music files were wiped out from the system–my blogging archives and my music, including my entire blink-182 discography. I soon got tired of redeeming my entire library back (which is full of Saosin and Senses Fail, heh) so I didn’t give a shit about my library until recently, when I tried logging in to my Last.fm account.

I downloaded some of their albums I liked last Friday and it hit me.

One of my personally memorable posts in Utakgago.com is entitled “Songs as Memory Cards”, and though it did fail (unanimously!) in its attempt to narrate or pose this capability of songs to save memories, well, I still liked the thought. I don’t even think the readers understood what I’ve said in that post; they thought it’s esoteric, or that it is just some fucked up delusion I made

What hit me is that whenever I listen to blink-182 songs, I don’t remember High School. At all. BUT it gives me shivers, for in the summer of 2007 at Fort Lee, New Jersey, when I was at the backseat of the Subaru my sister used to own, I was listening to blink-182’s Down. (I do have an unquestionably sharp memory.)

At my sixth puff I was listening to Stay Together For The Kids, and it was eerie to listen to, in a night like that. November. The biting cold.

As I type this I’m listening to All The Small Things and all I remember was their awesome video–they were nude, all right, and they looked like Backstreet Boys and shit and it was beyond hilarious.

I know some of you guys don’t like blink-182 since they’re punk, or that you hate tattoos who happened to look like men (or rockstars, or Pharrell). But to put it generally, there are certain kinds of songs where we develop this special, personal (even biased) intimacy. Our spines shiver, our faces smile, our eyes well with tears out of the nostalgia we stoically deny. May it be blink-182 or that braided Britney Spears singing in the late 90s–or even Sammy Davis Jr. for all I care–the point of those special songs we have on our playlists, on our iPods or what-have-yous, is to refresh memories in our minds. It could torture us to the point that we would want to delete the song or crack the CD (don’t do it; I’m also on the verge of deleting my blink-182 songs because of the same reason) but that’s life: it’s a royal pain in the ass no matter where you go. At least you’re listening to a song. I’d be damned if it’s blink-182, too.

That way, they’re memory cards. I don’t really care if you guys understand it, but this is better than the former write-up (which is so last 2007; bordering on palm-in-the-face sentences and awkwardly written emotions).