[Songs My Son Should Know] Neutral Milk Hotel | In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

Three years ago from right now, as Melissa and I were lifting our seat backs to their full and upright positions, each two-or-three bloody marys deep into the flight that would ship us to our rainy wedding weekend in New York as a two-pieced parcel, later to be fit together as one; this song was triggered by the music gods on my earphones as a Call to Post:

It was entirely befitting as a cross-section of what my life had been up to that point as an individual -- but also an example of the antonym of singularity, which, in the case of this story, would be the bond of marriage.

What a beautiful face
I have found in this place
That is circling all around the sun

Here I was sitting in this airlifted carriage beside the woman who had brought me such a very long way in life to this particular moment in the sky; circling all around the sun, trimming the sea, writing pages to a better story.

What a beautiful dream
That could flash on the screen
In a blink of an eye and be gone from me
Soft and sweet
Let me hold it close and keep it here with me

And one day we will die
And our ashes will fly
From the aeroplane over the sea

And our chance meeting years prior caused the realignment of integers so that this life is measured by alternate calculations: a flash on the screen, or a blink of an eye is an eternity or more with this beautiful face I have found in this place.

  

But for now we are young
Let us lay in the sun
And count every beautiful thing we can see
Love to be
In the arms of all I'm keeping here with me

And because of this awareness of the indefinite, we bathe in the beauty of devotion and love without the anxiety of loss; in his arms she will always be.

-----

Later that day, waiting amongst the immeasurable mass of humanity inside of New York's City Hall for our license application, it was very clear that there is no cross section to this life.  The multitude of living organisms that have bisected my life and influenced it in every way possible had led me to exactly there, on that day, with this person.  It was, quite simply, staggering.  There was no single moment, but an explosion of moments.  Every bit of organic machinery working overtime to ensure your fate. I was not enraptured by marriage only three years ago -- just as Enzo was not born only seven months ago, he was created centuries prior, when the gods of music made it so.

[Songs My Son Should Know] Kings of Leon | Arizona

When it comes to the Kings of Leon, there are so many odious demonstrations by the band, that they could teach a volume of lessons before they begin strumming one, single, solitary note. 

1) Don't believe your hype
2) Don't overextend your boundaries
3) Don't insult your admirers
4) Don't become a rocketdouche Sooner fan.

And while The Kings are a case study in buffoonery, they also come with certain caveats, because we, as humans, tend to egregiously apologize for our athletes and artists as reimbursement for making us feel so fucking thrilled all the time.

When this album was released, it was a massively transitional time for your mother and I -- the kind of transition that makes you nearly collapse from dread had the circumstances surrounding it happened any differently.

In the complicated pre-summer of 2007, there was a very slight sliver of opportunity where it was going to be possible for your mother and I to meet, hit it off, and eventually decide that a relationship was worth the tokens for admission.  Any sooner than that small window, and the complications of other circumstances fold the relationship before it even begins -- and any time after those three days, we ride out our final days of the school year having never met, mommy moves on to New York by autumn, and your daddy continues to grind it out, never knowing the fugitive of an alternate universe that is this life.

This song reminds me so much of those three compelling days; probably on an iPod playlist I built to drift along with my in Phoenix -- because that is what people do in Phoenix, they drift.  It probably never extended past its initial song: Arizona.

The laze of the melody speaks intricately about the melancholy of isolated, desert living.  I always called Phoenix The City of Dreamers, because so many people there had other ideas about where they would end up -- in some far-off exotic locale -- and just how they were gonna do it.  Rarely did someone forget to remind you of their ambitions.  Dreamers.  In the face of easy, comfortable living, nobody appeared to be exactly satisfied with their open-ended drift.  Living in Arizona was like renting temporary space in a broken heart.  Don Draper said it better then I can, "Tell them that it didn't work out because it didn't. Tell them the next thing will be better because it always is."

And I don't think he was very inaccurate with that statement, for here we are now.  And this is how we did it.

[Songs My Son Should Know] Aerosmith | Sweet Emotion

Aerosmith actually used to kind-of rule the school before they were making dedicated theme songs for commercially appealing event films and casting Alicia Silverstone in every 1990s version of my wildest dreams.

In perhaps the greatest opening film montage ever conceived, it's Aerosmith's Sweet Emotion that binds the whole two minute mini-episode together like saliva to Zig Zags -- and so much so, that this entire rock opera has become correspondent with the awesomest day of school: The Last One.

That, my friends, was yesterday -- which makes today the awesomest day of the entire year: The First Day of Summer Break.

 

This suggestion doesn't end at the endorsement of Sweet Emotion.  Instead this promotes the entire film and its accompanying score as an essential experience for the Class of 2029.  While the natural elation and triumph of educational finality is celebrated fairly uniformly from ages four to twenty-four, its the peek into historical context that provides for mimicry and personal inventory on how to properly beast the final day of classes -- a beer bust, a vintage Pontiac GTO, staying out til sunrise.  Despite the prospect of these events being displaced 52 years by the time of Enzo's senior summer, it will still be relevant.

Its pretty much the way we've all experienced it -- but then again, we've all hit a layup before and no one is mistaking us for Wilt Chamberlain.  This generation were the engineers of lewd-cool; a rebirth from the 1920s after the four, long decades of composed-cool.  Better still, these were the artists of Austin-cool, which paced the rhythm of ideology for the way this city operates today, even after a millennial turn -- hipsters and the creative class and old hippies and students.  Government plodders, professors, struggling musicians, and dragworms.  Cool kids, scene kids, fit kids, and just too-many kids.

At last, a way to amplify the foundation of post-modern Austin into a solitary tune.  Austin is infinitely the Last Day of School.  To the maxx.



* ... and sure, you will always have record of your Aunt Annie's theatrical debut.  There was just no way to bypass this familial fact. :)