I was on a minor John Denver kick earlier this week, which basically entailed listening to the hits the album Rocky Mountain High. On my way into the Faubourg working space, I thought about a few conversation prompts that might be fun to go over with friends there. One was John Denver: Is he cringey good, in that his songs suck but contain nuggets of goodness that make the cringeyness endearing, or is he actually good? Ultimately I never got to mentioning that, because it's a dumb thing to talk about and no one would have cared, but I have been pondering on it for a few days. When I couldn't stop singing "Country Roads," I leaned toward the latter, but there are many stinkers in his music. It's actually like 60% stinkers. A few days later, out of the Denver kick, I think I'm back to the former.
Really, the fact that one option is longer and more complicated probably means that's the one, right?
I occasionally feel the need to debase myself and tell the most embarrassing stories from my past. I think it's a way for me to be okay with previous versions of myself. If I embrace my corniness, and lord knows I've been insanely corny in the past, then I think I get better handle on who I am now. I think it makes me more kind to others if I think about times I've been stupid or embarrassing or immature. That's the way I think of it anyway.
On that note, and thinking about John Denver, I feel the need to say that after my first breakup, I listened to "Leaving on a Jet Plane" and an embarrassing amount. Not even just that I thought "Leaving on a Jet Plane" was deeper than anyone gave it credit for, because I just got dumped and the girl when on a trip to the UK, but that I spent most nights in my room in the basement of the house I shared listening to that song and "Nothing Compares 2 U" constantly. Feels like if that was a scene in a sitcom it would be too on the nose.
During the height of my obsession with "Leaving on a Jet Place," my house hosted 4/20 party. I was in the middle of taking a long break from smoking weed at the time, since I thought that it made my mental health worse and I was down bad. My solution to a crowd of mostly hot girls coming over to smoke weed at my house was to, in the genius of my early twenties, drink for the entire day. People started filtering into our house in the early afternoon and at that time I was making myself a giant sandwich in the kitchen to fill up my stomach for the day ahead. As I had done for each of the last 4 weeks, to our communal speaker in the kitchen and put on "Leaving on a Jet Plane by John Denver while I made food. My roommates were used to this. It had become my theme song for the previous month and this was a normal experience for them. All of the girls who had come over, however, we're kind of confused. I heard one ask in a loud voice after she had just taken her first toke out of a bong, "Why are we listening to this type of music? Can we put on something more fun?"
In that moment, I was a little hurt, not just because it was "my song" at that moment, or whatever, but also because, for some reason, I thought that overly sentimental populist folk music from the 70s was good smoking music. Insane take in hindsight. If we had just put on some mainstream rap music, though the situation in 2009 was pretty dire, maybe that party would have gone better for all of us. In hindsight, I think a lot of things would have been helped by me learning to just chill a bit in my early 20s, but that prob true of a lot of us, isn't it?
Lastly, I always thought it was "missed the taste of moonshine" not "misty taste of moonshine." Isn't the former more evocative? I think so.
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