Minnesota

Maybe you've realized: I'm a little obsessed with Full Force Galesburg. For that very reason, I swore I would not do another Full Force Galesburg post for a while. But you know what? I was a little obsessed with "Minnesota" even before I knew that The Mountain Goats had things like 'albums.' (I was introduced to The Mountain Goats via a 'Mountain Goats Primer,' AKA a scrupulous mix CD.) So -- at least for now -- fuck 'not always posting about the same album.' It's Minnesota time.

What you need to know: I am a child of the West Coast. Every fall, I pack my polka dot handkerchief and walk across the plains to the East Coast to go to school (we don't have our own out on the frontier, of course). On the East Coast they have buildings that are more than a quarter-century old. I pretend everything is the same but it isn't. For example, there is a total dearth of gold and grizzly bears. The feeling that I have sometimes, when I think of Chinook salmon pulsing up the Sacramento River, or of the whales known to imitate them, equals exactly the sound of A.C.'s voice in this line:

But we are not as far west as you suppose we are

Of course, in the song, we have traveled from the opposite direction. All that that means is that west is a flexible idea.

Original Air-Blue Gown

Sometimes Mountain Goats song titles are like words in a language you don't know. No, that's not right. They're like English words that you don't know yet, so you go to your dictionary, but then there's no entry for "Original Air-Blue" (you're pretty clear on the "gown" part -- or are you?), because your little brother scribbled "BAD" all over that page with ink. This does not seem fair. "Original Air-Blue" cannot possibly mean "BAD."

So you invent your own meaning. This is my meaning:

There's a girl I've had a crush on since I was fifteen. At that time it was a fierce and lonely crush, because she spent a lot of time eating Chinese food and making out with her boyfriend against my locker. It was also a confusing crush, because I didn't really understand why I liked her. Well, OK: I liked her because she was cute and tallish and awkward and lanky and a little nervous. But she was also the kind of girl who, if she had been an indie boy, would have had natural indie rock bedhead (in fact she did have natural indie rock bedhead) and spent hours writing emo-indie lyrics in a Moleskine with ballpoint about Girls. (Indie boys are very capital letters about Girls.) That isn't usually my type. Perhaps for this reason, I've never really been able to explain why I liked her so desperately. Now it's even harder because I haven't seen her in who knows how long, but whenever I think about her, I have a gentle sweet powerful feeling of loving her just as she is, wherever she is and whoever she's with, whatever she's doing. And of wishing her all the happiness possible.

Sometimes I still dream about her. When I wake up in the morning after those dreams and try to capture them in chalk pictures, the color I use for her eyes is "Original Air-Blue."