House of MurrPurr

My friend Nora wrote this.   

Buy a copy of Tallahassee when you’re in a relationship that’s not bad but not going to work out. Both of you know it— you’re still a little bit too broken, from both the depression and your last relationship, and he’s still as pristine and idealistic as the heroine of a Japanese video game. You’re high school sweethearts, for Christ’s sake, and everyone knows that never really works out, and you both are uncomfortable with the knowledge that you want different futures. He wants the white picket fence. He has planned out his retirement even though he doesn’t know what his career is going to be. You’re aimless, planless, and comfortable with that. Listen to it all the time. Sing along sometimes.

Decide No Children is your favorite song. Play it for your significant other because maybe he will appreciate what a great song it is. Unfortunately, he is the type of person who reads a lot into your song choices. He thinks that “Those To Come” by the Shins is your theme song because of your propensity to make tea in your underwear. He once froze when you told him to play “Grounds For Divorce” by Wolf Parade on your iPod, even though you immediately backtracked and said it was not because it was a secret reason. You just like the song. The idea of thinking of bus brakes as whale song appeals to an artistic sensibility in you that you think he would understand.

Tallahassee is, by now, one of your favorite all-time albums. He hates it. It’s a beacon of bad things to come to him. He says it is the soundtrack to a breakup, and maybe it is. You never intended it to be, but that album is the beginning of your downfall, of the self-awareness in both of you that it isn’t going to work out. There’s a grittiness to you, a darkness, that he just doesn’t have. The only song by The Mountain Goats that he can stand at this point is The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out Of Denton. He thinks it’s funny, and it is, in a way, but you’re in love with Tallahassee, with the idea of the fictional Alpha Couple, with their marriage falling apart. He moves to Louisiana and you disagree more on the phone and you feel codependant and wrong and “Southwood Plantation Road” suddenly rings with a fearful sort of trueness. “This house we call Louisiana graveyard, where nothing stays buried.” Nothing does, and the one fight, the one major disagreement you’ve ever had, stays just below the surface, like New Orleans’ water table. You’re getting closer to people who live near you, and it feels good— a new kind of relationship. Not an adult kind, but not an adolescent type either.

Break up with him over several days, with the kind of conversations where you’re crying on the phone and you feel gross because the phone is all wet and sticky with tears. Buy a copy of Heretic Pride a little later, and spend weeks listening to it. Walk around with Lovecraft in Brooklyn in your head, the drumbeat guiding your steps. You’ve always been the type that prefers the kind of songs where the protagonist is just barely making it through, and you feel like shit but John Darnielle’s voice in your head at least shows you that you’re not alone, even if you aren’t gonna be okay.

http://metatalk.metafilter.com/20506/Mountain-Goats-drinking-from-the-Pepsi-Blue-River#873659