I’ve been obsessed with Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” for a few weeks. I throw back my head and sing, “hop on the bus, Gus, don’t need to discuss much” at least 50 times a day.

1. Hop on the bus, Gus
2. Don’t need to be coy, Roy
3. Make a new plan, Stan
4. Slip out the back, Jack
5. Just drop off the key, Lee
6. Go to a deserted isle, Kyle
7. Find a new hen, Ben
8. Flip her the bird, Turd
9. Just get gone, Don
10. Blame it blight, Dwight
11. Drop off the Earth, Mearth

*Look, if Paul Simon couldn’t be bothered to write more than five actual ways to leave your lover then I’m not going to write FORTY-FIVE more ways just to be funny. Six extra ways is plenty.

The post 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover*, Ranked appeared first on I Will Dare.

I know very little about Paul Simon’s life. Jewish, New Yorker, married to Edie Brickell. That’s about it. So it’s fitting that last night while that boring SNL 40th Anniversary special was on TV and I sat in front of it vaguely paying attention while mostly reading the Internet that my brain decided that whenever I see Paul Simon I’ll be taken aback, and quickly feel the loss of the biological father I never met.

It’s been two years since I found out he died from Google and then had to tell my mom about it.

That’s probably the last time I’ve talked about him and his death with anyone, maybe even the Internet.

But last night as Paul Simon stood on stage at 30 Rockefeller Center singing “Crazy All These Years” my stomach lurched and my eyes filled with tears. Well, this is unexpected, I thought as the tear shimmered in my eyes and fell down my cheeks.

It makes perfect sense that a diminutive New York Jew would serve as the surrogate imaginary father for the 6’3″ ginger soldier who was my actual biological father. The two things I know most about him, the man called Skip, is that I look exactly like him and he loved Simon & Garfunkel. In fact, according to one of the seven things my mom ever told me about him, “Sounds of Silence” was his all-time favorite song. Or at least it was before he dumped her because he didn’t want children.

Last night as Paul Simon sang and I cried, I decided I was going to pretend it was always his favorite song up until he died and that even sometimes when he heard it he thought of that woman he knocked up in the seventies and wondered what that girl she had was like. In my wildest fantasies I will pretend like I got my Google inquisitiveness from him and that maybe he knew all about me by reading I Will Dare until the day he died.

It’s totally possible, right?

It’s also totally possible that I might burst into tears whenever I hear Paul Simon sing from now until I die, because probably human brains and hearts have no idea how to ever deal with the death of a man you never met but who is responsible for your life and the ocean of regret that comes with being too chicken to ever introduce yourself his whole life.

The post Paul Simon as Surrogate Imaginary Father appeared first on I Will Dare.

I don’t have much to say about the tenth anniversary of 9/11 (here’s what I said 10 years ago). It’s an event that still feels really raw. Not just because of the enormous tragedy of that day but because of the enormous rift it has caused in our country. It feels as though the the chasm between liberal and conservative is impossible to overcome.

The post Still remains appeared first on I Will Dare.

When your name is Jodi Chromey (and I believe their might be two of us, though the other one is Jodie Cromie or Jody Kromey or something like that, which, I am sure we can all agree, is vastly inferior to Jodi Chromey) you develop a love/hate relationship with Kodachrome at an early age, and you will feel really sad when Kodak decides to discontinue Kodachrome color film.

For most of your childhood you will be blissfully unaware of the song or the film. You’re completely ignorant of Paul Simon’s solo singing career and all you know about him is that he’s not Art Garfunkel. Even though you couldn’t name a song by Simon & Garfunkel until you were sixteen, you spent a lot of time studying their record jackets and based solely on the picture, you’re sure Art is the creative genius behind the duo. This is beginning of your career of backing the wrong horse and routing for the underdog all at the same time.

In 8th grade band you’re the first chair alto saxophone player, which means that you sit right in front of the trombones. Jason Kneizler plays the trombone. On that fateful day when Mr. Campbell hands out the sheet music for the new song you’re learning (apparently having grown tired of “New York, New York”), Jason will be the one to first realize that Jodi Chromey is a lot like Kodachrome, the song on the sheet music. For reasons that can only be explained by the fact that you’re thirteen and hate everything that isn’t Sweet Valley High, Dance Party, USA, or Cam Anderson, you decide to detest the name. In fact you take such a disliking to the name that you write about it all the time in your journal, though secretly deep down you kind of like it because for about a week in November you have a crush on Jason. Besides, in your mind Paul Simon is a nerdy dud. It will be another year until you really fall in love with the song “You Can Call Me Al,” again for reasons that cannot be explained.

When you’re a junior in high school you watch Kenny Rosen and Mike Obremski sing “Sounds of Silence” for a choir concert, re-igniting your interest in Art Garfunkel and that dopey Simon guy. You spend the entire summer between Junior and Senior year discovering the music of the 60s, developing a serious Bob Dylan fetish and an annoying habit of thinking every song Simon & Garfunkel wrote was about you. This leads you to scrawl the lyrics to “I am a Rock” and “The Boxer” all over you journal, the cover of which you decorated with a hundred peace signs. Eventually you will discover Paul Simon ain’t so bad, and that you really dig his greatest hits.

You’ll forget all about Paul Simon and band and Kodachrome once you leave for college because you’ll be too busy discovering Pearl Jam, the Gin Blossoms, the Spin Doctors, and beer. However, eventually you’ll take that color photography class and be subjected to hour long lectures about the pros and cons of using Kodachrome over Fuji Film. Since you are now twenty, you have decided that you need to be a tragic heroine of some sort. This silly notion will plague you for most of your twenties. For your favorite kind of reasons, the inexplicable ones, you will decide being called names in Jr. High is your big tragedy, ignoring, of course, that you’re a fat, 6’5″ virgin from an abusive home. Instead, because of your great tragedy, you will eschew shooting Kodachrome on principle and instead use the more expensive Ektachrome (Paul Simon should have wrote a song about that because calling Sister #2, whose name is Ericka, Ektachrome would have been funny), until your pocket book wins out and you begrudgingly use Kodachrome, and it is good.

In your thirties you embrace your completely psycho relationship with the word, the song, the thing — Kodachrome. You will embrace it so much that whenever you listen to Paul Simon’s “Kodachrome” which is a lot, especially that one summer you were unemployed and only listened to 70s music, you sing your own name instead of the actual words. You’re weird like that.

The post Jodachrome on the demise of Kodachrome appeared first on I Will Dare.

The song’s staying power is really quite amazing, because I’ve been trying to knock it out with Jackson Browne (having developed a Browne fetish as of late, especially after I noticed he and I have become hair twins, though I have to say his a bit more mulletty and greyer than mine). You would think “Doctor My Eyes” or “Somebody’s Baby” could easily out earworm (which I always want to call an earwhig) Paul Simon.

Wrong.

If I could remember exactly how and when it got stuck in there, I would go back in time and change the channel, skip the song, do something to avoid this from happening.

It’s not that I don’t like Paul Simon. I have a special tender spot for Simon (and Garfunkel, of course) because of a tenuous connection it makes me feel with my biological father. But for some reason the song is just hitting my buttons in a weird way, most of which have to do with my birthday on Saturday.

Maybe the lyrics are bugging me. You know, sitting home watching the cars, not being the kind of (wo)man who socializes, being crazy. . . it’s never a good sign when you start seeing yourself reflected in the lyrics of pop songs.

So this is all just a very long way of telling you I was a little stunned to flip through the channels this evening to see that our local PBS station was showing a special where Paul won a medal of honor for being cool, or something like.

Now I’m not a new age hippie yoga freak by any stretch of a most-skeptical imagination, but I do believe there is magic in the world and sometimes the universe sends you signals of some sort. Of course, I’m not smart enough to decipher what all this Paul Simoness means, but I recognize. And that’s got to count for something, doesn’t it?

The post I seem to lean on old familar ways appeared first on I Will Dare.