Today’s Repressed Memory, Brought to You in Part by This Morning’s Spin Class:
An hour ago when I was frantically pedaling along to “Everything Zen” by Bush, breathlessly mouthing the choruses along with a pre-Gwen Gavin Rossdale, I remembered being in the eighth grade and thinking that it was the greatest song ever, mainly because it involved the repeated phrase there’s no sex in your violence and the word asshole.
That year, there was a guy in my class who we’ll call Blaine and I more than hoped that maybe he’d be interested in dating a scrawny girl with a spiral perm and an impressive collection of Bubba Gump t-shirts. So I cornered him after Earth Science one day and gave him the only signs of affection that would fit into the pockets of my Duckhead shorts: a pair of cassette tapes I’d painstakingly made the night before, carefully rewriting the track listings until they came out smear-free.
These weren’t mix tapes—he wasn’t quite worthy of a hand-selected assortment of only the finest Phil Collins songs—but copies of other tapes from my collection.
One of them was Bush’s Sixteen Stone.
The other was Yes I Am by Melissa Etheridge.
I think I sent a mixed message that day.
