Posts tagged music
The Dead End Love's Playlist

I met you by the river the first time while the mist rose from the banks like it was trying to change elements. You were more fun to run from the cops with than anyone else I’d met, and man you made me reckless. I never had to test my legs though, the minivan did it for us while Jerry blasted through the blown speakers in the cornfield. You walked 2,000 miles up the country on trail and wrote me letters back home while I watched, sidelined. I could have walked myself from Georgia to Maine with you, but it was your own pilgrimage to undertake, your season spending nights under a green tarp.

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Lithromancer

I.

It wasn’t cool to like the Backstreet Boys while attending high school in the late 1990s, and this may still be true today.

But I wasn’t cool. I didn’t care to get jiggy with it or weep to “Candle in the Wind.” The odes to drugs from Third Eye Blind and Marcy Playground were boring. I didn’t give any real shits about Lilith Fair’s tepid lineup, though I still went, quietly rolling my eyes through “Adia” by Sarah McLaughlin.

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Daylight

The first playlist I made for someone came in the form of a mix CD that I’d burned on an old Dell desktop computer. It was a summer mix, meant to be played in my best friend’s pink Sony portable CD player as we skateboarded and biked down the backroads of our small Florida town.

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Tangles

In the 1980s, I kept a blank cassette inside the tape deck of my radio, so if a song I loved came on, I could run over and simultaneously hit the “record” and “play” buttons, and add that song to the mix tape developing in its boom-box womb. The beginnings of the songs are cut off, and the DJ often started speaking before the fade-out was complete. But my collection of homemade tapes was priceless to me. And I thought I would be able to listen to them forever.

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