The Anthropocene Reviewed(62)

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2018: “Discontinuity of tense and perspective hallmark of your time.” I have no idea what those words mean, but there they are, typed by me in March of 2018 with no further context.



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2017: “Driving alone at night is heartbreak without the agony.” I had this thought while driving alone at night, and then I pulled over to write it down, which ruined the feeling.



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2016: “No bright line between imagination and memory.” According to my Google calendar, when I wrote this I was at the home of my best friends, Chris and Marina Waters. I suspect Sarah probably said a version of that line in conversation, and then I stole it. At any rate, it ended up in my book Turtles All the Way Down, which is about a kid who is constantly remembering what she imagined and imagining what she remembers.



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2015: “This bar has lights everywhere but you can’t see anybody’s face.” I sometimes feel like I can’t properly participate in conversation, because everything I say and hear has to drip through the sieve of my anxiety, and so by the time I understand what someone has just said to me and how I ought to respond, my laughter or whatever seems weirdly delayed. Knowing this will happen makes my anxiety worse, which in turn makes the problem worse. I sometimes deal with it by imagining myself not as part of great conversations but instead as a chronicler of them, so I pull out my phone and take some notes. “This bar has lights everywhere but you can’t see anybody’s face” is something a movie star’s publicist said to my colleague Elyse Marshall when we were all at a hotel bar in Cleveland, Ohio. I liked the line a lot and I’ll probably try to use it in a novel someday.



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2014: “Strawberry Hill is not the luxury alcohol experience I remember it being.” I wrote this after I’d had a bottle of Strawberry Hill, a four-dollar, bright pink, wine-like beverage made by Boone’s Farm. I often drank Strawberry Hill in high school, and loved it then, but in the intervening years, either it has changed or I have.*



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2013: “Fire fights fire.” This phrase must have mattered to me, because I wrote it three separate times in the Notes app in 2013, but I have absolutely no idea what it meant. It’s a small reminder now that memory is not so much a camera as a filter. The particulates it holds on to are nothing compared to what leaks through.



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2012: “Only line meant literally.” One day I was at church, and the gospel reading included Matthew 19:24, which goes, “Again, I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.” The minister said that people take every line of the Bible literally except for that one, when it is the only line that is meant literally.



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2011: “It was kind of a beautiful day—only saveable sentence.” This one I remember quite vividly. I’d spent almost a year working on a novel about six high school students who end up stranded on a desert island. I was stuck with the story so I decided to take a couple weeks away from it and then reread it. When I returned to it with clear eyes, I found absolutely nothing—no heart, no wit, no joy. It had to be scrapped, except for that one sentence, “It was kind of a beautiful day.” I still like that sentence, though. It ended up in The Fault in Our Stars.



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2010: “Her eyes on His eyes on.” According to my phone, this was the first note I made in the app. I assume it was written when I first noticed the pun inside a lyric from my favorite band, the Mountain Goats. Their song “Jenny” is about a girl who has just acquired a yellow-and-black Kawasaki motorcycle, and the narrator who loves her. One of the song’s couplets goes, “And you pointed your headlamp toward the horizon / We were the one thing in the galaxy God didn’t have His eyes on.” That line always reminds me of being in eleventh grade, lying in the middle of an open field with three friends I loved ferociously, drinking warm malt liquor, and staring up at the night sky.

Being the one thing in the galaxy God didn’t have His eyes on gets a solid five stars from me, but as for the Notes app: I give it three and a half stars.





THE MOUNTAIN GOATS



I DON’T KNOW HOW TO TELL YOU about my love for the band the Mountain Goats except to say that it is genuinely unconditional. I do not have a favorite Mountain Goats song or album; they are all my favorites. Their songs have been my main musical companion since my friend Lindsay Robertson played me the song “The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton” half my life ago. Lindsay, who has the best taste of any person I’ve ever met, recommended I start my Mountain Goats journey by listening to their at-the-time new album, Tallahassee. (Like me, Lindsay grew up in Florida.) Within a few weeks, I’d memorized every song on Tallahassee. John Darnielle, the band’s front man, is, as music critic Sasha Frere-Jones put it, “America’s best non-hip-hop lyricist.” On Tallahassee, he presents love as I was then experiencing it: “Our love is like the border between Greece and Albania,” he sings in “International Small Arms Traffic Blues.” In another song, he sings of a relationship “like a Louisiana graveyard / Where nothing stays buried.”