Nostalgia (or RIP, Athens, GA)

Too much time on my hands at work the other day led me to hunt around the Internet for a rare recording of REM's "So. Central Rain" and thus began for me a long, strange trip into the past that left me astounded by the way a song can take you back to a time that wasn't so great and make it seem golden somehow.

I know that it's only the song that's golden. It's stood the test of time, sounding as fresh as ever nearly 25 years after it was released, while I've moved on, utterly altered by my Athens experience. Living there with the "cool people" taught me some valuable lessons--for example, the cool people are seldom cool. What I thought was a creative, friendly town where I could blossom wound up for me a tomb to the girl I'd created. Good riddance to her, anyway.

I was too star-struck, too happy to be in a place where "weird" was okay, and too willing to trust the wrong people. I loved the wrong people. I utterly lost myself.

So why does a song take me back to a place I never was? If I hear an old REM song, I'm remembering rundown group houses, vintage clothes, seabreezes (the drink, not the winds, for those of you aware of how land-bound Athens is), friends dropping by unannounced at 3 in the morning, and the humid afternoons that lasted until you thought the night, when everything began, would never come. I'm not remembering the breakup that woke me up and sent me packing to DC, nor the false friends who dropped me when He Who Shall Not Be Named (it's a legal thing) stopped speaking to me. I'm not remembering that instead of freedom from Southern narrow-mindedness, I found instead a harsh regime of its own kind. Certain bands weren't cool. You couldn't be seen in your office clothes, or no one would respect you. Under no circumstances were you allowed to like REM's music--but bragging about hanging with them and doing their drugs was de rigeur.

I don't mean to sound bitter about all this years later. I'm over it. It's just so odd how the music bathes it all in a flattering light. Jeff says it's the same kind of amnesia women get about childbirth. If we could remember how painful it was, we'd never slog on and have more than one kid.

By that logic, if we could accurately remember the past, would we keep slogging through life?

I never did find the version of "So. Central Rain" that I wanted, which I think is perfectly fitting.

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