So today Weezer’s “Blue Album” is twenty years old. I cannot let any of the anniversaries of my personal cultural touchstones go unremarked. This is one of the advantages of making it to fortysomething. You get to do this shit and not give a good god damn if anyone cares or not. Hooray for age-related apathy!

I wish I could remember how the Blue Album came into my life. It wasn’t there one minute and the next it was everywhere all the time and I couldn’t stop singing “Undone (The Sweater Song).” We often did duets of “Buddy Holly” in The Spectator office. I spent an entire spring masturbating furtively in my tiny room on the other side of the house from my roommates while listening to “Only in Dreams” through the headphones of a Walkman.

Incidentally, and wholly off topic, that room was also next to the driveway of the house next door, which was home to a few guys from a local band and a bunch of theatre majors. In the spring when the breezes blew through open windows the guys would sing 70s one-hit-wonders in the driveway. I have fond memories of falling asleep to young men singing “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl).”

While I can’t remember how it landed in my life, I do know that once it did, it stuck and has for twenty years. Right in the same spot. Forever the sound of what it was to be 22 in 1994: super fun (“My Name is Jonas”); kinda dumb (“Undone (The Sweater Song)”); and don’t forget lonely, alienated, and misunderstood (“In the Garage”)

Not that we even gave it that much thought. Weezer wasn’t about thought. It was just dumb fun. A welcome relief to all the angry angst of grunge, which I spent a few years trying to love, and aside from Pearl Jam, failing at it. Weezer was a much-welcomed change of pace. There was a bittersweetness to the angst and that appealed to me in a big, big way It sounded to me like so much of the pop music I grew up on, but with an edge, a sort of compulsion I never found in any of the Top-40 of my childhood.

Most of my life I’ve been the very last person on the bandwagon. I’ve never been a trendsetter. Hell, I didn’t even discover my very favorite band until three or four years after they broke up. However, through some quirk of luck or love or foggy memory, I caught onto Weezer pretty early. Even before the famous “Buddy Holly” video.

Back in 1994 my friend Goetz used to quiz me incessantly about why I liked “Undone” so much. It mystified him, though eventually he was won over. Probably because I played the album about 921,186 times in the newspaper. We used to have arguments about the best Weezer song (honestly, we used to have arguments about every damn thing on the planet). He was for “Susanne” off of DGC Rarities. I was all in for “My name is Jonas.”

Aside from being the anti-trendsetter I was also a late bloomer, at least personality wise. I got tits right on time like many girls, and was traumatized by it right on schedule. Someday I should tell you about the summer I was 12 with my new boobs and being continually hit on by men. Not boys, actual men, because they assumed boobs + 6-feet tall = totally legal.

That has nothing to do with Weezer. What I wanted to say about Weezer and why the album makes me feel sentimental and nostalgic, is that I discovered Weezer at about the same time I started to come into my personality. It took a few years of living outside the emotional tinderbox that was my family to start to stake claims on what I did or did not like regardless of what others thought.

Weezer was one of those claims. Even though everything after “Pinkerton” is totally forgettable, I don’t regret planting that pro-Weezer flag twenty years ago.

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Now that the weather has gotten slightly chillier than it was before, The Tibbles have totally conned me into giving them rides to school. This is not because they want to spend more time with their beloved Aunt Jodi. No, it’s because Aunt Jodi is a sucker and if they get a ride to school they get five or six more minutes of Minecraft time.

This morning after we all piled into Ruby and buckled up, The Current started playing Weezer’s The World Has Turned and Left Me Here. For some reason I decided that this very morning was the time for my young nephews to understand just how much Weezer meant to me once upon a time ago.

The world has turned and left me here. Just where I was before you appeared. And in your place an empty space, has filled the void behind my face

I started singing the song out loud before I even put Ruby in drive.

“I love this song so much,” I shouted over the music.
“We can tell,” Nolan, who was stuck in the middle, said.
“This whole album, Weezer’s Blue Album, was one of my very favorite records when I was in college,” I said, ignoring the smartypants.
“When you were in college?” Cade asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “We would listen to all the time in the newspaper office. I think everyone loved this record.”
“So, like you listened to this when you were in college?” Cade asked again.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Wow,” he kind of gasped. “This song must be really old. Probably from the 90s.”

That’s when I pulled over and made him get the hell out of the truck. But only because we were already at school. They don’t live very far from their school.

Things were better then. Once but never again. We’ve all left the den. Let me tell you about it.

After they were out of Ruby I continued to have warm, smooshy, nostalgic feelings about Weezer’s Blue Album. I mean, when’s the last time you thought about the Blue Album? Or, you know, Weezer?

The last time I seriously thought about Weezer was when the young, beautiful Grad (remember him?) told me he was in fifth or sixth grade when he first heard the Blue Album. I think it was probably that one sentence that turned me from like a regular thirtysomething into a cougar. I was advanced for my age. Now that’s I’m forty I’m just regular cougar age, right?

Enough about cougardom, back to Weezer.

Of all the records in my canon of Personal Artifacts none of them make me feel quite so dated as this one. Not Matthew Sweet’s “Altered Beast” not “Exile in Guyville” none of The ‘Mats, not even Pearl Jam’s “Vs” (which hasn’t yet secured its place in the canon).

What’s a matter, what’s a matter, what’s a matter you?

Here’s why, the Blue Album represents a very definite point in my life. It is that last yearish of college. It’s those people and that time and very specifically a night at The Spectator office when my friend Whitley and I were trading off singing lines from “Buddy Holly” and one of the other editors accused me of being mean when I sang “Oh oh and you’re Mary Tyler Moore.” Because, well, Whitley looked like a grungier modern Mary Tyler Moore and this editor, I can’t remember who it was, thought that was a slight. Whitley and I laughed for about six years picking on whomever that person was who was so uncool as to not know all the words to “Buddy Holly.” In that person’s whom I can’t remember’s defense he/she took the teasing pretty well and thought that I was super clever working in Mary Tyler Moore into the song.

There are other albums that nail me to certain points in time or certain people. For instance, I discovered this weekend that Teagan & Sara make me feel thirty again. Exactly thirty and how I felt when I was sleeping with that one guy I slept with when I was thirty. For the record, I don’t burn with shame about it anymore. Apparently I have forgiven myself for being a bitch.

But there are two thing about those other albums and Weezer’s Blue Album. A lot of them I have carried with me throughout my life. A lot of those album has become timeless, simultaneously reminding me of specific point in time and yet not being rooted to that time forever. They’ve become more than what the were.

Weezer’s Blue Album hasn’t transcended it’s place. It will always be that year in college, that night in The Spectator office. It will never be anything more than that, which is okay. Being that year is enough.

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Also, I don’t use exclamation points in e-mail because I think they make me seem like a nerdy 36-year-old cheerleader. It’s the punctuation equivalent for raising my fist above and doing that cheerleader head bob that makes their ponytails bounce. You know what I’m talking about.

Finally, I am listening to Weezer’s Blue Album today and it instantly make me feel like a 22-year-old.

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So thanks to Comcast On Demand we’ve spent all our TV time today alternating between Weezer’s “Pork & Beans” and Brooks & Dunn’s “Boot Scootin’ Boogie.”

We started out watching the Weezer video about 6,392 times, because it has the banana from Peanut Butter Jelly Time in it. We’ve watched the video so many times that Liam has memorized the song and Nolan has burst into tears while begging for no more, no more.

Of course he was singing a different tune when we discovered “Boot Scootin’ Boogie.” While Nolan ping-ponged around Supergenius HQ to the country song Liam sat on the coffee table with his arms folded and whining, “This is bad music.”

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