Yearlong Song Challenge, Day 165: Joe

Prompt: "A song featuring a lyric that you totally used for your AIM away message at one point"

Selected by Joe

"Four Winds"

Bright Eyes

Cassadaga, 2007

I stared at the empty blog page for a long time for this one, cursor blinking as I became lost in thought. It's tough to remember so much about this thing, but I am surprised to remember how long AIM was part of our lives. Felt like only a couple years but I'm pretty sure it was the better part of a decade. I certainly don't remember when I first created a screenname, but it was early enough that my mom encouraged it and helped me set it up, on our Windows 95 desktop computer. I also don't remember when AIM suddenly became not vital, or why.

The earliest and latest solid memories I have with AIM both involve romance, naturally. I got my first girlfriend through AIM, a relationship that didn't even last till I was able to actually talk to her in person. That was seventh grade. And then I remember my second college girlfriend calling me out on using one of her favorite song's lyrics as my away message; this was spring break freshman year, and I don't know if my theft helped or harmed my chances with her. Probably a moot point.

So that's a solid seven years, covering the entire length of high school, and all those painfully cringeworthy AIM conversations I had during those years. The tense words, the dancing around emotions, the jokes and jabs, the sudden impact of an unknown screenname messaging you out of the blue. It was the wild west out there. What killed this? Facebook and texting, I guess? We lost something when we lost AIM.

The downfall, as far as I can recall, was swift. I'm trying to remember the timeline here. My most recent unironic memory of that Washington Social Club lyric snafu. Only two years later, I was on AIM for probably the final time, but this time as an ironic statement. And interviewee Hannah mentioned that AIM was out of date at that point, so we can pinpoint AIM's death to sometime within that two-year period. I guess it doesn't really matter when, or why. It just matters that it's long gone.

AIM's lifespan covers most of my formative period, as it relates to music, and so there are probably endless options here, re: YSC prompt. I don't remember too many specific quotes, unfortunately, but it could have been fucking anything, honestly. I'm sure there was a lot of Bobby Dylan in there, he's always good for a faux-intelligent lyric. We've all passed around that dumb fucking Beatles quote from "The End," I'm sure that made the cut at some point. What else? Maybe Pink Floyd? Eventually, indie rock was folded in. Probably some Broken Social Scene and the like. I don't remember being obsessed with curating my AIM presence, but who knows, maybe my rapidly aging brain blocked all that out. 

I chose a song with a lyric that I am 99% certain that I used as an away message, since it's the PERFECT mix of teen angst and pseudo philosophy bullshit. The line: "The Bible's blind, the Torah's deaf, the Qu'ran's mute / If you burn them all together, you get close to the truth." This time period closely aligns with the years in which I had questioned my religious upbringing and had more or less cast it aside (more like we were "on a break" like couples usually go on breaks—I was testing out the idea of being single from god before actually making the break permanent). "It's all fucking bullshit!" is a total eighteen-year-old sentiment, and I'm glad that I had the lack of self-awareness to capture the histrionics on an AIM away message.

The release and falling in love with this song and this album was happening around the same time that I had one of the toughest AIM conversations I'd ever or would ever have in my life. It involves a friend also questioning her faith, but for different reasons.

This was the end of our senior year. I would say that I was generally well-liked in the social circles that I ran in. The primary social environment I chose to be in was that of the theater program, which was cool, because it was an easy way to meet girls (which was important, attending an all-boys school). And it's the theater program, so for reasons that you may or may not be able to surmise depending on your general understanding of the people who are drawn to theater, I would say that I was generally appreciated by the women who were in the program with us. I'm trying to paint an accurate picture without lacking humility. I wasn't a stud or slut or Mr. Popular or anything, but I also wasn't lonely or without options, romantically speaking. 

There was one cute girl that I was interested in, and it seemed like she was interested in me, and we did our little dance and you know how that goes in high school. But here's the other thing. I was very much aware of the ticking clock above all our heads. I knew that when the clock hit zero, we'd all be scattering to the four winds of college. I liked making connections and kissing girls but I was pathological about not wanting to involve heartbreak in that countdown. I loved high school but I was obsessed with the idea of tabula rasa at university. I wanted no baggage, just a toothbrush and some pocket change for a couple beers. In 2007, a summer romance was not in the cards.

We were in Drew P.'s backyard one night for a gathering of young theater minds. There were a few nights up there at his parents' house, so I might be conflating a few, but I'm pretty sure that there was alcohol at this one. Not an excessive amount, but I'm just painting a picture here of this being skewed more toward "party" than "hangout." Me and Katie R. took a little walk around the block. You know what that means. We certainly did. But before anything happened, I was pretty upfront with her, as open communication is my go-to style: "This is nice but I'm not interested in an ongoing thing."

Fuck, I don't remember exactly how I worded it. I can't come up with a combination of words here in this blog post that doesn't sound cold or cruel, so maybe I'm misremembering, maybe it was just actually cold and cruel, to say what I said. I was just trying to be upfront though. I recall clearly that her response was affirmative, though. She indicated that she didn't have a problem with that. That she understood my intentions, and was willing to match them. And then we did ya know ya know yadda yadda, right there on a side street in suburban Hatfield, PA.

Then the next day, she's instant-messaging me. And I can tell. I can tell by the tone that my words didn't land the previous day. I'm not the worst at reading people. I could read her right through the goddamn AIM screen. She wanted me to be her boyfriend. At the end of the spring of senior year of high school! She was going to college in New York! I wanted this to be a carefree summer before we all went our separate ways! None of this was a secret to anyone!

So I reminded her, in an instant message. About what I had said. And about what I was hoping out of our friendship. Maybe it was seeing the words written out in the pop-up AIM box that made them finally connect, but they did this time, and... it was not a reaction that worked in my favor. She cursed me out. She tore me apart. She indicated that she was crying. Worst of all, she said that I was the reason that she didn't believe in god anymore.

I've told this story plenty of times in the past seventeen years. At first, the story was told as a sort of self-defense to mutual friends: I was upfront with what I wanted, she didn't believe me, and now she's clearly overreacting because now she doesn't believe in god wtf?! After a time, especially when our mutual friends all started to drift away, I would tell the story as some sort of humorous self-own, almost like an ironic badge of shame: I fucked up with someone so badly that they told me they didn't believe in god. Or maybe even like whatever the reverse of a humble-brag is. The worst thing I ever did was make a girl not believe in god anymore (but you see this really isn't even that bad so I am clearly a GOOD GUY if THAT is the worse that I've done etc. etc.). Humble-deprecation?

But now that I'm finally writing this story out on the blog, it just seems... I don't know. Sad, I guess, in some ways. Not boo-hoo sad or even depressing sad, just more of a melancholy sad. Sad for the woman I left behind all that time ago. Sad that I caused grief in someone, no matter the circumstances. Sad because I had heard through the grapevine that she had a rough go of it in college for a couple of specific and private reasons, and that maybe if she hadn't gone down the way it did, I could've been there for her, at the very least through some kind words lobbed through AIM to her NY college campus. And also sad that if she was saying that some guy not wanting to date her was grounds for atheism, that maybe she had to become more resilient really quickly later on, quicker than others who had already built that in high school through cynicism and detachment.

Mostly sad because I've spent so much time dismissing this story as silly, ya know? It was one of those rare times when I could point to a potential romantic partner and say, "I was NOT in the wrong here," and maybe I leaned on that a little too hard in telling and retelling the story over the years. As I get older, and wearier with the world, I'm finding that there's a huge fucking difference between being right and being kind, and here's another great example of that phenomenon. I didn't have to say I was right to anyone. I could've just been kind to a friend. Maybe things would've worked out in other regards beyond romance. Maybe I'd still be friends with a good person, all these years later. Maybe I could've gone to her wedding, celebrated with her and her new husband. I would have noted the irony if the ceremony was in a church, of course, but the irony would've been nice and warm like a bath. She had lost god through innocent teenage heartbreak, and she had found god through the love of a good man. Something like that. I'll never know. I haven't talked to her in a really long time.

This is a cringeworthy story too, and I hope there are a lot of other ones today. Because that's the kind of shit that we did on AIM. We told a legal adult named Krimpetman88 that we didn't believe in god anymore. That was normal! And all of a sudden, that all went away. Now no one has a healthy outlet for the cringe. Except Blogger, I guess, but we are a dwindling crew, and our time here is short.