Day 01 → Your favorite song

I'm writing this blog having been inspired by Novella from Boards.ie. I've lifted the 30 blog thing from her too. I really recommend checking her blog out here. So, out of respect for her inspiring frankness, I am going to be totally honest here too.

I don't really have any one favourite song, but I have lots of songs that I love for a variety of reasons, when I'm in different headspaces. The song below is probably one of my long-term favourites though.

Del Amitri - Driving With The Brakes On.

I was 17 and I was insane about a man who was twice my age. His marriage had just broken up. (His wife cheated on him three times with men she had found online on Faceparty.) His life was falling apart. I was going through a really odd, self-indulgent, semi-depressed stage in my life where I didn't fit into anything and felt like I had no friends. The people I had been friendly with through secondary school seemed shallow and disinterested. Conversations stopped when I got involved because they moved in odd directions disconnected from any of us, and once we left safe triviality nobody cared anymore.

I have a huge weight problem (badum tish). I have had from childhood. So it wasn't that I wasn't interested in boys, it was more that they were completely disinterested in me. It didn't help that I am hard work, immediately grating and spikey, a cross between a hedgehog and an armadillo if you will. Talking about boys and associated intimacies embarrassed me because I had nothing to contribute. I didn't know any boys, I had no male friends. I knew the theory, but none of the practise.

The people I related to most closely were friends made on a particular message board. I still keep in vague contact with some of those people, many of whom I owe a large debt of gratitude to because they gave me somewhere that wasn't quite so self-destructive to channel my energies.

I fractured my foot during this time, and the doctor prescribed a visit to a child therapist - at 17 I thought this was a bit ridiculous. Not the therapy thing, the child therapist thing. The woman I went to see was based in a private hospital in Limerick. Her room was fully furnished with little chairs like the ones we used in baby infants in primary school, low tables laid out with colouring books and crayons. I, a size 26-28 awkward teen, 5' 11" in height, on crutches, felt cruelly out of place. I couldn't get back up after sitting down on the midget furniture with just one leg. To add insult to injury the therapist insisted that my foot injury was as a result of my "psychological distress". I slipped on wet steps in a nightclub while ossified after a litre of a homemade cocktail that could only be described as vile - we were celebrating the 18th birthday of one of my aforementioned school friends and door policies were pretty flexible in our area at the time.

I missed a month of 6th year because of my foot. The school I went to was very inflexible, and climbing three flights of stairs to the 6th year classroom worked for a whole two days. On the second night, sitting on the stone steps to the staff entrance waiting for my dad to collect me, I resolved not to go back to a school that couldn't accommodate me, when a third year's classes had been moved to a ground floor room to accommodate a similar injury the year before. I was missing more than half my classes as it was, and I was a health and safety risk. If there had been a fire, I'd never have gotten out. It was easy to justify my escape from life to myself. I sometimes wonder if I'm paying for that a little to this day. In the end I didn't go back to school until I had lost one of the crutches and could bear weight on my foot, even though it still looked ridiculously swollen.

During my time off I got particularly attached to one poster from the message board I mentioned earlier. We both stayed up all night online (my parents phone bills were insane, we had dial-up at the time) and tracked each other's days with text messages. He was funny, interesting, and made me feel like I was interesting too. Of course I didn't realise he was in his mid-30's with a broken marriage and a young son. By the time I found out, I didn't particularly care.

My friend (lets call him Bob) probably didn't realise I was quite so attached. Maybe he liked the attention. We went for drinks a few times and that was about the size of it. We were friends. I shared my awful, angsty-teenager poetry with him. (I know that this is quite a sweeping statement, but I don't really like poetry. I hate any poetry I've written most of all.) He sent me CDs he liked to listen to, part of my musical education. We wrote letters to each other, largely because neither of us had anything better to do.

I had always liked Del Amitri, even though I didn't know that I knew who they were. Roll to me and Nothing Ever Happens were familiar, I enjoyed them, they fitted into my 80's/ '90s childhood, along with Seal's Kiss From A Rose, which reminds me of rainy summers, hanging a tape player out a bedroom window, Wimbledon, swing sets and Atlantic 252. Bob said that Driving With The Brakes On reminded him of his situation, he could empathise with the narrator of the story, his relationship had ended on his wife's terms. The first few times I listened to it, it made me cry. It still gives me a punch in the gut, 7 or 8 years on. It reminds me of how stupid and cringeworthy and awkward I was, how much I felt and that I had nowhere to channel it, so I poured it into self-indulgence and a stranger who couldn't, wouldn't and didn't do anything with it. It's a shame song, a cringe song, but it also makes me feel compassion for someone who ultimately isn't in my life anymore. Bob had some life-changing epiphany and decided that being friends with 17 year old girls (there were a few other girls my age he was friends with, people I'm still friends with actually) was not a good idea.

I still miss him, he was my friend. Whenever I hear that song I think of him. Obviously thinking of him is not exclusively linked to Driving With The Brakes On, but it's one of the big triggers. I don't think you ever really get over your first real, rock-hard crush.