À La Recherche du Brooding Perdu

Eiffel Tower
Photo © AJ Wood

While listening to the song for the first time in years, I also (because I can!) Google up the lyrics, just to make sure I remember them all, and that simply changed everything: seeing the lyrics printed out with punctuation, having gained ten years, being in Portland, Oregon instead of Mayenne, France: it was a different—if not pedestrian—song.

It’s the question marks! What I took to be little snippets into many people’s lives were actually just speculations into one woman’s life and now having had a car for eight years, it all fell into place: “I take a look to my left [while stalled in traffic],” “[the woman in the car to my left] paints her lip greasy and thick, and she’s going where . . . ? Another office affair? To kill an unborn scare? To talk dirty to a priest? It makes you human at least.”

In those intervening years, I had sat in traffic many a day and stared out at other people and never thought more than “Jeezly crow, why are you on the road when I want to be!?” or maybe, “People can see in through those windows, nose-picker!” I had never singled anyone out for inspection, never played “who are you?” with them. This song now became a hardcore, rediscovered, total bore: I know exactly what he’s talking about and who he’s talking about and there’s no mystery, no je ne sais quoi, no existentialist dread; its just quotidian. So much so nothing-to-it, I don’t even do it. Oh, fine: this woman may have a dead body in the trunk, she may be an unemployed nurse, she may be on her way out of her current life and into a new life entirely. Who cares? Bo- to the -ring. This song is sophomoric junk and I was pretty sophomoric to even think it any more than that.

A few more years pass: a little older, a little wiser, and very bored while waiting to pass through the bottleneck of a tunnel into the city from my suburbs job. I look around and there’s a woman a few years older than I am in a more-green-than-aqua station wagon replete with bumper stickers about suggesting votes for Obama in 2008, Ending THIS War, some slogan I don’t understand which—I think—is related to a workers’ union, and the far simpler advice to just “coexist,” and I can’t help but wonder: what’s your story? You weren’t always a seeming soccer mom, were you? Do you even have children or a spouse? Maybe the wagon is for the dogs? Or are you just on the way to the grocery for a rotisserie chicken and a pint of ice cream?

Montmartre
Photo © AJ Wood

I think of my own mother and how when she was my age, she already had four children and a divorce and the largest worry I’ve had today is my expanding waistline because someone brought donuts to the office. Who are you and why are you in that lane as I’m in this lane, as we are separated by some metal and glass and the fact that my lane is going a little faster?

So then I realize, it wasn’t that I was young and thus foolish or naive to think of this song as some sort of Noble Truth, it was just baseless. Without freshly seeing that it was indeed true, that it can indeed leave you with a hollow feeling of isolation, I was writing the whole song off along with my brooding, awkward years.

It sort of sends the mind reeling though, that if this song can really have that much meaning now, what about all the other things which I went through when I was younger? What about Camus’ The Stranger or Mart Crowley’s play The Boys in the Band or REM’s album Automatic for the People?

What about what I’m writing right now? Will all this, when I’m 45, ring dull and baseless and not really all that meaningful, like hearing “melon-farmer” on French radio? Je ne sais pas, but at least now I know I don’t know anything for sure.

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