Dear Darling Ones,

Here is the hazard of essentially spending a year alone + having a 20-year-old blog + being a forty-eight-year-old perimenopausal woman: your memory is not as reliable as it used to be.

Every day when I get ready to write I have to think really hard about whether or not this is something I just wrote about. It seems everything I think seems vaguely redundant to me as though I recently had a conversation with someone about it. Most days I spend a good chunk of time searching I Will Dare dot com for words I plan on using to see if I have, indeed, written about it.

For the record, I could not find the word bergamot anywhere on this site, nor bergamont as I like to misspell it. Weird, really, considering I had a huge crush on this lavender & bergamot hand soap from Target for a long time, and because of the song “Find the River*” by R.E.M., which is why we’re here today.

This afternoon two of my twitter pals were having a conversation about songs they’ve probably listened to more than all the other songs. One of them mentioned “Find the River” by R.E.M. and I got the wavy vision with the far, off dreamy stares.

A long, long time ago I can still remember how the TTHM would sing that song all the time. In my memory he sang it to me, though as I have demonstrated above I’m not exactly sure if that is true. What I do know for sure is that he sang it all the time and it made me super melty inside. The TTHM had a really good voice, the way really tall men frequently do and if I close my eyes i can hear him sing Me, my thoughts are flower strewn, ocean storm, bayberry moon. I have got to leave to find my way. Ugh, I get goosebumps remembering it.

“Find the River” is one of those R.E.M. songs that is super underrated in my life. I forget about it all the time. It gets overshadowed by all-consuming love for “Nightswimming.” It also gets forgotten because it sometimes lands in the “ceases to exist” file I keep a lot of things related to Exs.

Today, however, it was a small, lovely thing to recall the song and how I felt when a tall, tall, handsome man sang it to me.

And if I told you all this before, humor me. I’m a boring spinster who never leaves the house. I have to repeat myself.

All of this is coming your way,
Jodi

P.S. The shitty picture at the top is the actual, factual Minnesota River. I took it a bunch of years ago when I spent summers Tibblesitting. I had to crop Nolie out of the picture because my heart. My heart couldn’t take it.

•If I could smell like a song I would choose this one. Bergamot? Vetiver? Ginger? Lemon? Yes to all of this.

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This random flashback brought to you by hearing ?(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville ? by R.E.M. on the radio this morning.
In the Fall and Winter of 1994 Amy Skal and I took to the townie bars in downtown Eau Claire. We eschewed the college bars on Water Street because we were just so sick of that scene. Instead, we preferred to drink at the establishments where actual grown-ups drank. Our particular favorite was a place on Gibson St. called the Diamound Lounge. I’m not sure why it was spelled that way.

Amy Skal was a beautiful, lithe blonde who was so cool she didn’t live in the student ghetto like most of us, instead she lived downtown Eau Claire with her boyfriend in an apartment that had a spiral staircase that led to a loft bedroom. She was gravelly-voiced and worked part time at the Mousetrap, a bar near her apartment. She was the most sophisticated and worldliest person I had ever met up to that point and I was more than happy to be her chubby sidekick.

Skal and I would hide out at the Diamound Lounge where there were no throngs of college-aged kids fighting to get a Leinies. Instead we would shoot pool and play the jukebox at the nearly empty Lounge. Just us and a handful of old men who were retired or laid off from the nearby Goodyear tire factory.

What made the Lounge the best aside from its unpopularity with the college crowd was the shag carpet on the floor and the wall-size mural/photo of a deer in the woods. Also, it was easy to get a drink there.

Skal and I became regulars at the Lounge. We were so regular that the old men looked on us as kind of pets. Often buying our round of drinks or giving me money to “go play your song on the jukebox, honey.”

The jukebox at the Lounge wasn’t the greatest, but it had Weezer’s “Undone” and R.E.M.’s “(Don’t Go Back To) Rockville.” The Weezer songs was mine. That’s the song the old men expected me to play when they put the quarters in my hand.

But, it’s ‘Rockville’ that instantly transports me back to the Diamound Lounge. Me, Skal, and the old guys. The two of us smoking cigarettes, shooting pool, and her singing along, talking about how much she loved Michael Stipe.

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First, I think this 2005 thread about which is more annoying “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It” or “We Didn’t Start The Fire” is my favorite thing on the Internet today. That’s saying a lot, because I fell pretty hard for The BBC’s The Women of Watergate package.

I discovered the thread because I realized that even though I’d probably come down on the R.E.M. side of this debate, I know all the words to “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” I know about 1/4 of the words to the other song.

At first I thought, “hrmm, perhaps you can discern something insightful about a GenXer’s personality based on which song they were more familiar with.” But then I decided the Billy Joel song is easier to remember because it’s a chronological listing of events and R.E.M’s song is random set of lyrics that may or may not make sense based on your feelings about R.E.M.

With ‘Fire’ you can make a pretty educated guess based on the music and rhyme scheme and history what’s gonna come next. ‘End’ not so much.

Also, I think MTV played the shit out of the video when it came out in 1989 and I don’t recall MTV playing any R.E.M. video back then that wasn’t “Stand.”

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