December 18, 2002

THE FRIGHTENING THING about the songs I tend to go for is how much influence they have on my opinions. They're like commercials for my most inexplicable impulses, my strangest moods. They leave behind scenes that are hard to recover from, comments I'll be trying to explain for weeks. Over the past 10 days I've questioned the wisdom of the elders, the wisdom of ever leaving the house again, the worth of saying what's on my mind, the worth of shutting up while I still have a chance, the words the pilot spoke over the intercom as we left Detroit in the middle of a snowstorm, National Public Radio, monogamy, cheating, my job, my near-jingoistic championing of San Francisco, my decision to run away from home, and most of the people I've dated since I was 12. I was listening to Iron and Wine's The Creek Drank the Cradle when I decided I'd never experienced love like this before. My mind drifted toward pregnancy and a house in the country, and I turned the volume down.

I wouldn't mind if it didn't make me feel so suspicious of myself. How can I be counted on for anything, how can I possibly be trusted, when I act like a 14-year-old girl – all hormones and cloudy judgment? Three fixated days pass by, I play the same fucked-up song by Moving Units every time I walk in or out of the room, and I've lost all sense of context by the time the weekend comes. I think I spent too much time as a child investing the branches on the trees with first names and mood changes instead of playing kick-the-can and asking questions about gravity and what makes the wheels on the bus go round and who invented shortwave radio. Nowadays I have no concept of what it takes to make an album and enjoy music most when I can pretend that everything coming through the speakers is really happening somewhere – the basement of a condemned house, a dance floor crowded with sexy automatons, an Appalachian mountaintop where people are about to find old-time religion.

I was first introduced to 16 Horsepower in a Louisville nightclub, but it's easier for me to believe, while listening to the Southern gothic unease of Folklore, that somewhere out there bandleader David Eugene Edwards and his unmerry men are playing a country dance in a backwoods village where the plague hit the week before or most of the young men are now skeletons cluttering up some foreign soil. Late at night I listen to the punk rock disco on Moving Units' self-titled EP, convinced they're somewhere in the club where I danced at 14 and don't pose like the Strokes for publicity shots and live in San Diego, a town I associate with a good music scene but also an infestation of naval recruits, bad politics, and too many winter tans. Their songs leave me feeling disgusted and turned on, convinced that sex and dirt and cynicism are irrevocably strung together. On "Between Us and Them," Blake Miller sings about feeling seedy and assures someone that it's "natural to feel unfaithful when you're going to be anyway." I feel guilty and slightly seedy myself, like I've made some grave mistake I can't account for.

It's time, it's always time, to retreat to the dance floor, where you never feel as guilty as you will the next morning. Everything I hear tells me it's the right thing to do. But why is that? Each day I learn something increasingly unpalatable about the world outside my window. The Castro District, for example, voted into supervisorial office a man with a computer monitor for a head, and there's a new reality-TV show called Extreme Makeover, in which lucky participants get sliced and diced for the entertainment of the home viewer. Everything is so wrong I've exhausted my attempts to produce hope for the future, and to be honest, I'm not sure I really deserved any of my Hanukkah presents, so how did I end up sky-high drunk and singing out loud at 26 Mix as if the sheer power of electropunk would get us all out of this mess?

Morning comes, and I return, for solace, to the sweet-voiced ballads on The Creek Drank the Cradle, composed by one Samuel Beam, who lives in Miami and writes songs like he sits on a back porch in the country, staring gently at the birds flying across the sky and the wind drawing crop circles in the fields. He sings about love's generosity and the way the earth's climate changes when his sweetheart laughs. He sings about a garden they planted and an empty side of the bed where love still resides in memory. I decide it wouldn't be so bad to settle down. I'm in deep now and can't be trusted on anything anyway, but these songs make my heart melt and run out onto street corners, where it drains into the sewers and makes the fish in the San Francisco Bay gag at how corny I've become. Perhaps they'll be consoled by how inconstant I can be.