My Blues Name is Longblog Seth

I just stood in my living room, wearing boxers and a bathrobe, and played an ebon harmonica for some quantity of time. I honestly don't know how long I was in there, but based on the progress downloading a Joystiq Podcast I think it was about thirty minutes (I have slow wireless access). I would like to state for the record that I do not know how to play the harmonica. I have a rudimentary comprehension of its general construction, which I am capable of putting into the most clumsy of practices. I know that when I expel or draw air through the left side of a properly upright harmonica, it will produce sounds of a lower register. I understand that, generally, I want to grip the harmonica in one hand, with my thumb along the bottom and my fingers resting along the top, while my other hand sweeps around from the back of the instrument to form a tight cup, its fingers pointing toward my vulnerable eyes. I understand that opening my hands when held thusly will alter the sounds produced, and that a different alteration occurs if I open my hands toward the ceiling as opposed to the floor. I know how to block certain holes with my tongue in order to produce chords.

Succinctly, I know what someone is supposed to do with a harmonica; I just don't know what I'm doing. I don't know how to play any instrument. I don't know how to read sheet music. I don't know how to recognize notes, or sharps. I don't know what the hell a sharp is- and please understand I have read definitions multiple times. The crucial "real" musical education which many children receive is something I skipped, in order to pursue anything that wasn't music, while in middle school. The joke ended up being firmly on me because the elective option which I selected in lieu of joining band actually included a few weeks of choir; I never comprehended how the school thought this was a sensible decision. They very clearly presented the elective track (which included other classes ranging from German to Home Economics to "Study Skills") as something to do if you didn't want to experience all of the coolness and glory which would be your triumphant reward for selecting band. I picked it largely because this was how the school presented the options; they actually made everyone go to band for a week before the choice was even proffered. Small though they may have been, I cherished my little rebellions. At least, until I found out I'd signed up for choir.

I never particularly regretted not taking band while in middle school. It seemed intensely competitive to me, and in general I'm not a person of competition (many, if not all, of the people who know me would disagree with this statement). Once I had sidestepped the experience, it never seemed particularly feasible to jump back in. By high school it was a safe assumption that anyone in band had been there for three years prior to hitting 9th grade, and with my perception of the competitive elements it seemed pointless to pursue an instrument when I couldn't possibly compete with their experience and exposure. I never nursed the fantasy of being a musical prodigy, probably because it had been impressed upon me so early that I was an intellectual prodigy of some vaguely defined quality- the two seemed mutually exclusive. This is also a large part of the reason I never tried out for any sport, though the other two contributing factors to that decision were Screech and Steve Urkel. A similar principle kept me from jumping into any Art classes, though I loved and love to draw; that was compounded by the majority of the Art and Shop departments being taught by a single family which hated me, personally, with the fury of a thousand inexplicable and kind of sad suns.

I don't know when I came to realize that I regretted my lack of, and hungered for, musical training. I suppose it happened at some point in college, amidst all the other personal exploration and growth I underwent there. Even still, I maintained my innate distaste for mainstream behavior, so I refused to pick up a guitar- that's what shy, emotional fellows do in college, and it helps them to woo women. I pushed through my college years with the noble and somewhat ridiculous aspiration to avoid any of the affectations which I perceived guys donned to secure the attentions of the ladies. I wanted any woman who fell for me to fall for the real Seth, not the string-strumming seducer cradling a wooden phallic symbol. That plan worked out wonderfully.

Still, somehow I ended up with a few harmonicas including the beautiful Blackbird, with its leather case, that I was playing tonight. I also had a few instructional CDs which seemed very legitimate, and I would sit in my room the summer after my junior year, attempting to practice. I say attempting because, while I have absolute faith in the efficacy of the instructional program, I approached learning music entirely wrong. I never progressed past the third or fourth track (so maybe 12 minutes into the CD) because I never felt I had truly "gotten" the lesson. I had no clue what to listen for, meaning that what I played never sounded like what the man on the cd played. I also didn't understand proper harmonica care and know that I boiled one of my harmonicas vigorously several times before learning that's a bad thing to do (I was worried about...I don't know, killer mold?).

I liked to carry a harmonica on me anyway, though, because the mere act of screwing around on it brought a light-headed joy, which may have been oxygen deprivation. Between starting to play "the harp" in 2004 and this writing, however, effectively no one has ever heard me play. I qualify that because my roommate that first summer once commented that he had heard me practicing, at which point I stopped practicing at home. I also once drunkenly brought my harmonica into an early morning jam session in my fraternity, and was promptly but politely asked to leave. It was seriously that bad; other drunk people were able to recognize my utter lack of ability and found it so discordant they asked me to stop playing. I think we had all just finished taking body shots off the belly of a young woman that I'm not sure any of us knew, but even within that setting, my harmonica was too bad to share.

The other reason I qualify the statement that no one has heard me play is because I used to wander around the small Indiana town where I went to college, late at night, playing my harmonica. I'd walk past campus, through a few residential neighborhoods, and up onto the main drag that ran past the grocers' and the fast-food joints and the Walmart. I did this fairly often, sometimes wearing headphones and sometimes not, and I just played. Looking back now that strikes me as an immensely college thing to do, and I envy the young Seth who somehow constructed a sense of self which allowed him to be too embarrassed to practice, but confident enough to play while wandering the late night streets.

Since graduating from college, I've perhaps touched a harmonica four or five times; when I first moved out to Minnesota after school I did try practicing again, and even carried a harmonica with me as I had in school. I never felt comfortable enough in Minnesota to play it, but I was once at a bar during a concert and the lead singer called out his need for a harmonica- a need I was able to satisfy. That felt pretty great, and I enjoyed feeling like a fellow musician for a few seconds. I also enjoyed playing tonight, in an empty one-bedroom house, with walls thick enough that I'm reasonably sure none of my neighbors could hear.

I Told an Untruth

So, I lied to you, gentle and hypothetical readers. Last night, after I finished my post, I didn't go to bed. I actually just kept watching videos on YouTube, while refreshing my blog in an attempt to GET the post to upload to the internet. Specifically, I kept watching Leona Naess's "Leave Your Boyfriends Behind" over and over and over. Now, I dont actually have any number of boyfriends; I do have a girlfriend, but no desire to leave her behind- in fact, given that we're attending separate graduate schools I'd actually prefer to draw her closer. The music video seems like it could be filmed where I'm living now, and cast entirely by going to the student center. The whole experience is foreign to me because the focus is a group of attractive, happy, dress-wearing women who wear hats and ride bicycles to fun parties where a man has a guitar. I have NO experience with that. I have experience with attractive women (or at least WOMAN- see for reference my mention of a girlfriend above), and I have seen bicycles and dresses and in fact own several hats. But the entire experience presented in the video seems simultaneously completely plausible and completely impossible to me. My college experience didn't include women, in the general sense; it was an all-male school, so women occurred either as professors, girlfriends (and I did NOT have one at that point [where "point" is all but about four months of the four years I was in college {where "four months" is a generous exaggeration that requires a very creative definition of the word "girlfriend"}] or entities which existed during parties on the weekend. They did not ride their bikes there, and they almost never wore dresses; or even took particular effort to dress up.

This video also features a man in a hat, with glasses, spinning a pretty redhead as they dance. The man is somewhat swarthy and has stubble; his crooked trucker's cap is green. I am currently both swarthy and bestubbled; as I am STILL the proud owner of a Mickey's Fine Malt Liquor cap, I feel that I could have been this young man. In fact, as the "young man" in question is quite possibly older than me, it's possible I still could be. That's immaterial to my point, however- and I do have one, or even several!

My point is that I was not this young man in college, and I did not go to parties where well-dressed young people (who had ridden bikes) enjoyed acoustic guitar music and fancy dancing. The parties I attended involved rap music- not hip-hop, mind. The parties I attended involved T-Pain or Lil John suggesting that one thrust toward the window, and then perhaps the wall, until perspiration occurred. I was also not this young man after college; there were no bikes, and social activity seemed to revolve entirely around various bars. I participated in a drinking league, quarterbacking my team to an impressive third-place finish. I played a lot of Big Buck Hunter. I regularly purchased drinks for the various bartenders, because they were my friends. On those occasions where a subset of the bar population including me made their way back to someone's apartment, things were usually so hazy that I'm not sure anyone could have recognized a guitar if it were presented, let alone play them.

I was not this young man, and I did not know this young man. While I knew, and know, many wonderful young women, few of them are the regular dress wearing type, and almost none enjoy hats. Bikes are also not in high demand. Had I not moved to Santa Fe a few weeks ago I would probably have posited that the people featured in this music video simply don't exist- now I realize that they not only exist, they all appear to live here.

But the point I'm attempting to reach, having reached my point about the fellow in the hat, is that despite being completely outside of my experience, the video somehow manages to make me nostalgic. It makes me nostalgic for a young adulthood that I never actually experienced; and furthermore, as someone content to sit at home and type entries for a website, am not attempting to go out and experience. It's nothing that's ever been a part of my life, but as I watch these cheery, oddly dressed people gyrate about an apartment my heart does a little lurch and stumble, and I find myself wistfully thinking "Ah, those were good times."

What's even STRANGER (should I increase the font size for that strange? I've used the word so much I feel like I need to kick things up a notch) is that all of my positive associations with "Leave Your Boyfriends Behind" really have nothing to do with the video. They were set months before I ever saw the video, which I only sought out because work had stopped playing the cd and I suddenly realized I missed the song. In fact, I didn't even register this particular song the first forty or so times I heard it, because Barnes and Noble had it on rotation and I worked there five days a week. An eight hour shift usually meant that you heard any given cd at least four times, but what was strange was how the cds seemed to always play more often than they should. This is to say that I would hear a song, and then when I next heard the song would feel as though I had just heard it. It wasn't a continuous sense of deja vu; I didn't feel as though I was trapped in this torturous, endless loop. I don't even know that I felt that way about songs I particularly liked, or particularly hated. It just...happened.

For me, the hook is a product of two factors. One is Leona's vocal delivery, which manages to be simultaneously wistful and self-satisfied. The way she purrs out the end of each word conveys a certain self-aware regret, particularly in light of lyrics suggesting that she and her friends perpetually defy societal expectations. Those same lyrics celebrate the very lifestyle she recognizes is questionable, and the decisions that quite likely lead to a number of regret-filled mornings. The song's chorus proposes that we all leave our significant others and traipse into the night, where we will consume copious amounts of alcohol and stay up far too late. It's as though she manages to conjure the actual voice that spurred me to go out and drink too much (though, as previously noted, I was leaving no girlfriend behind at the time); the voice that managed to acknowledge the near-certainty of a hangover and an exhausted morning, but somehow turn that into a great idea.

The real killer, though, is the chorus in the latter part of the song, when a steadily increasing number of people sing along with Leona while the music gradually fades away to nothing- just like people join in with a favorite/popular/extant song playing at a bar or party. Although the video conveys this message quite effectively, it's the vocals themselves that really sell the concept. The backup singers aren't in tune, or even unison, but they make up for this with volume and exuberance. If you listen closely at the very end of the song, when the music has fully faded but the chorus continues, some of the signers actually muddle the words! Adjusting magazines in a relatively quiet bookstore, and then hearing what amounts to the 4am close to a packed yet intimate party, was jarring. And, again, I don't even have experiences with the kind of party this represents! I just feel like I do, because of the song.

The only conclusion I can draw from all of this is that Leaona Naess is some sort of dimension-spanning siren, and she manages to recollect an existence that I recognize because some OTHER Seth, in an Elsetime, very much enjoyed it. Is enjoying it. Somewhere, a Seth is twirling a redhead in a dress on his bike in a guitar-playing man's apartment...and all I got was this lousy trucker's hat.

And a girlfriend- I should probably make note of that.