Music Molly

i listened to a song because a quirky bumper sticker basically told me to

Hello to the blog readers and the newsletter subscribers. Here is a personal pan pizza blog post about walking, bumper stickers, college library flow state, brash incorrect music opinions, and 90s alt rock...

I was on one of my morning walks, and I was in a low mood. It happens sometimes, I take inventory of my life and there are too many things to be nervous about and not enough things to look forward to. One of my walk routes takes me up to Occidental College, a small liberal arts college whose campus reminds me a bit of my own college campus, mostly because all the buildings are painted a rustic yet studious brown. The first time I went up there I had a real is this allowed? feeling as I wound along a path that sloped past a theater and the baseball field. Was this a "closed campus"? Was it cool if I walked here? After all, I can no longer be mistaken for a college student. I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my JNCOs rolled.

When I think about college, a time in my life that began sixteen years ago, the memories have a soft '90s autumnal rom com tint for sure. I did a lot of things in college—I wrote a thesis on Ulysses, I got to watch a Jets game in the stadium suite of a wealthy and successful alumnus because I wrote and recited a poem at a "business competition" he hosted, I smoked pot out of a lot of interestingly shaped bongs—but the thing I did most often was: finish up my classes for the day, eat dinner, get a night coffee, go to the library, and work.

me senior year eating fritos and looking at my beautiful dark twisted laptop

Oh man, this was the best. Sit in my favorite spot on the second floor near the windows, crack my dingy white Macbook open, play rain sounds from rainymood.com over a free download of a Clams Casino mixtape (my homebrewed version of lo-fi beats to study/relax to, I guess), and write a 1500-word essay about how whatever 20th century American novel I was reading was "about the act of storytelling itself," or maybe a short story that shamelessly ripped off David Foster Wallace.

Or sit and write music reviews! Halfway through my education, I decided I needed to start the rest of my life and become the Chuck Klosterman I always wanted to become. I looked up writing gigs on Craigslist and a website that has since been buried in the 404 graveyard was soliciting new writers. No pay, duh. But: external validation, nice. I remember getting access to the website's FTP server, upon which I could download high quality digital versions of albums that hadn't been released to the public yet. When it came to my music writing, I was super loud and also pretty wrong most of the time, but the internet wasn't in a state where my wrongness would be amplified to people who might get mad at it. I could be wrong in obscurity—a luxury now.

One of the albums I wrote about at this old website was Thee Oh Sees Warm Slime, and I think I gave it a middling review. It was just fine, kind of same-y and blurry. Of course, five years later I'd start dating a guy who was a big fan of Thee Oh Sees, and he brought me to one of their shows, and then I became a big fan of Thee Oh Sees (and a big fan of the guy, who I eventually married). Experiencing music in person

Sometimes when I'm having a bad hair day or bad face day, I tell myself I should not have to worry about beauty because I'm living a life of the mind. That's what the college library nites were, just thinking and typing and slowly developing the seated posture of a cooked prawn. If you ask me if those ritualistic study sessions were worth the student loans that contorted my career choices for the next few years, I would say....uh...yes, yes they were. College got me in the flow state, and I've been pumping out thought leadership ever since.

Anyway, there's a car that's usually parked on the Occidental campus with a bumper sticker that says I STILL LISTEN TO MOTORCYCLE DRIVE BY EVERY SINGLE DAY. I passed it for months with only mild curiosity, but something about my bad mood on this particular morning walk made me seek out some kind of turnaround through external phenomena. "Motorcycle Drive By" is a song by Third Eye Blind, off their self-titled 1997 album, a great fucking album. I know I'm getting old and misty because late '90s alt rock just keeps sounding better and better with time (altho I'm not the only person who thinks so, just listen to the debut Wishy album). The song did what it needed to do, which was to refresh my brain and rewire a path away from abjectness. Stephan Jenkins howling about an exhilarating breakup, what could be better.

I do think the quirky bumper sticker movement has gone a little too far—I've seen a truly astonishing amount of "Keep Honking! I'm Listening to Alice Coltranes 1971 Meteoric Sensation ‘Universal Consciousness" stickers in Northeast L.A.— but somehow, I can see "Motorcycle Drive By" as a song that you could listen to every day. Maybe I'll write an old-school internet media bubble article called I Listened To Motorcycle Drive By Every Day For A Month And Here's How It Changed Me Forever. People used to do stuff like that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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