Take your hands out of your pockets and hold me
Has it really been a year? A year since I last got swallowed whole by this or that emotionally damaged young man? A year since I played the "I bet I can fix it!" game? Yeah.
In a way, I have the least reason ever in my life to resonate with this song. I am seeing the most normal guy I've ever dated.
He's not:
Prone to drinking to the point of blackout
Obsessed with violent dark death metal
Given to disappearing from all contact for weeks at a time with no notice
Into reading aloud journal entries about his ex-fiance
Mentally and physically crippled by chronic pain and resulting masculinity loss
Perpetually melancholy
Or any other of the laundry list of pathetic bullshit attributes from that bunch of yahoos who make up my past. I can smell a nutcase from a mile away after all that - and this is just the tip of the iceberg. (Yes, I've dated a couple of good ones, too, who don't qualify as yahoos)
But it's hard - no, impossible - not to listen to this Everybodyfields song, Worth Keeping, and get a little nostalgia for the emotional crack that is dating damaged goods.
After you listen to that one, skip ahead to A Gun, catch that opening line, and, more importantly, the way it's sung:
Take me down /
Shine me up /
I'm your favorite coffee cup /
I want to pack up and hit the highway to Tennessee tomorrow and go save Sam from himself. Maybe this time it will work.
You can watch the video from Paste here, and really, you need to hear it.
(Sidenote: the "I bet I can fix it!" game is quite similar to "he may be an asshole, but he's MY asshole!" syndrome, seen most recently in discussion around why the hell a modern feminist woman might dig Mad Men's Don Draper. More on this soon, I hope.)