Midnight Media Cafe - 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover

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Blast from the past:

50 Ways to Leave Your Lover - Paul Simon

She said, "It grieves me so to see you in such pain.
I wish there was something I could do
to make you smile again."
And I said, "Well, I appreciate that..."


Her name was Tina, and she was one of my high-school era lovers. The term for her would be "Rubens-esque", I believe; although she was not that full-figured, she had the same coloring as those French ice-cream-sundae girls. She was a Paul Simon fan, and she turned me on to his witty, pensive, occasionally joyful songs. I've had a great love of storytellers, from back when my grandmother would act out fairy tales at bedtime for my kid brother and me. The musical artists that have stuck with me the longest and deepest are the ones who tell stories with arcs and characters and plots. Simon's one of those.

This song came out in 1977, the year Tina and I became friends, and I remember buying the album with her at Music+ on Vine. Listening raptly to each tune, each tale; weighing the differences between this guy and the guy I knew from the Simon & Garfunkel songs I remembered. There was an adult sensibility to his tales that I found intriguing; there wasn't anything like it in the rock 'n' roll that I normally listened to. Wry melancholy, knowing enthusiasm, weary happiness, and an occasional joyful jam - the combination is uniquely Simon, the way mournful ballads about steel mills and cars are Springsteen.

Music and scent are the two things that tap memory. Put anything to a tune and it becomes easy to remember. Play a song at a certain moment and it'll take you back to that moment every time you hear it. Some songs have people wrapped inside them, and Tina's inside this song for me.

Some useful info...

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...for the next time some right-wing dipshit starts spouting off about how these gun-toting mass murderers "have nothing to do with" them:

Limbaugh Wisdom

What has history taught us about mass murderers?
Not what Rush would like us to think, that's for sure.


Pretty much everything about wingnut dittoheads makes me want to bash my head against the wall, but perhaps the worst is the way they take everything that's loathsome about themselves and their ideology, and try to put it forth as a defect of others. It's the most extreme type of mass transference - a whole population of people completely convinced they're not in the slightest responsible for the effects of their actions. Delusional does not even begin to cover it.

But one can always arm oneself with information. Not that the batshit paranoids will listen, but at least you'll feel better about things, and somebody eavesdropping might learn something, even if the loon you're talking to doesn't.