My drug of choice happens to be nicotine. I haven’t had it for a few years, but I continue to safely say that even though cigarettes rarely enter my thoughts nowadays, not smoking them is probably the most important thing I do on a daily basis. No joke.
When I first started to put ‘em down, though, every day was a struggle. There’s this saying among recovering addicts, an apt description of what happens when you first start living without your drug. It doesn’t read very well without inflection, but here goes: “The good news is that you get your emotions back; the bad news is that you get your emotions back.” Such was my roller coaster in the summer of ’99.
Feelings came back with an intensity I’d been without for most of my adult life. With them came various problems–real ones and melodrmatic fakes my mind would invent just to get me to light up again. One problem that seemed at home in both categories was music. I had no idea how to fit songs, those perfect three-minute conduits of emotion, into my life when it seemed like any excess feeling would send me skidding off the road I was gingerly treading. I remember my guitar staring at me from the corner of my apartment for at least two months. When I finally did play it, a song called “Jay” came out, so there was proof that I could handle making a song. But when it came to listening…
I borrowed this Rainer Maria CD from my friend John and I liked it well enough–I liked it a lot, in fact. But the second song on it, “Planetary,” was almost too good–too emotional, actually–for me to handle. (Fitting, since Rainer Maria truck in “emo,” a musical style that was just then receiving its first brutal backlash. But anyway.) When I listened to “Planetary,” its verses repeating very specific visuals (“the skyline is three gazes wide / and I bump my head against the windshield”), its choruses erupting into dewey-eyed, sweaty-palmed platitudes (“MOMENTUM MAKES MYYYYY HEAD PONDEROUS AND HEAVY”), it made me want to drive too fast, drink too much, make out with girls whose last names I didn’t know. More immediately, it almost made me want to smoke.
So for a couple weeks there, I just had to sit that one out; my skip button was employed whenever Look Now Look Again was in the stereo. Eventually, like with everything, I got to enjoy it fully once I learned that emotions can’t kill you–that no song can actually put a gun to your head, or a cigarette in your mouth. And hey: Late 2001, Rainer Maria’s next album, A Better Version of Me, was even more orchestrally emotive than its predecessor. And I listened to it all the way through, over and over and over.
