Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., Joe

The Bleecker Street Boys! They're coming to get me! Oh god, help!

I'm chased around a corner, down an alleyway. I try pushing trash cans over in my wake to trip them up, but the young Bleecker Street Boys nimbly hop over them in their sharply polished shoes and shorten the distance between us. With a stitch in my side, I give up. I lean flat against a brick wall, my hands above my head, asking for mercy. They quickly swarm, and the burliest of the bunch, clearly their leader, clicks a switchblade and holds it up to my jugular.

I try to explain my point-of-view, but they're not having it. They are, after all, a gang of hoodlums who so love the '60s folk-dork duo Simon & Garfunkel that they have named their gang after one of the least terrible songs on their shitty debut album. My protestations fall on deaf ears. Even the thought of them finding out I used the phrase "shitty debut album" in a review makes me pee in my pants, just a little bit. I am used to defending my negative opinion about this dreck, but not under such dangerous circumstances.

As the cold shiny tip of the blade begins to delicately poke my neck, I start to consider that maybe this isn't the hill to die on (we're in a dark alleyway, not a hill, I'm not speaking literally, but you get it). Maybe Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. ain't so bad. That I could see the positives of such an artistic endeavor. Two then-young men, innocence dripping out of their pores, singing frail, pretty songs about the calm world around them, and Jesus, and silence. Perhaps I've seen it all wrong. Perhaps I've been too conditioned to the rough and tumble of this fucked-up modern world that I can't seem to reach that place of calm that is required to appreciate soft, tender folk music like this.

The fact that I am surrounded by passionate (and violent, sure, but perhaps violence from passion) fans in this current predicament could maybe be seen as a symbol of the true problem that lies within me, and that is that the perception of art from others has a way of affecting my own perception of said art. In other words, the fact that so many people seem so enamored with this is the very fact that makes me so cold about it. It's the same reason I roll my eyes at Rumours or Pinkerton—good art, when overrated, curdles in my brain, and turns toxic.

"Trying to come up with a reason not to die, mate?" says the rugged leader, and he cackles, like he made a joke, but he's not wrong. I really am trying to come up with a reason not to die at the hands of homicidal Simon & Garfunkel acolytes. I thus turn the criticism inward. Yes, I'm wrong, to feel the way I feel, but sometimes I can't help how I feel, and I don't deserve to die because of it. Do I? I ask this last part out loud: "Do I?"

Oh god, how did we get here. It's been such a long road. Such an arduous journey, all of it leading right here. I first had to grow into the idea of love. That's where it started. In order to love something, you need to make peace with the fact that you can't love everything. This is how we process art. There are some pieces of art that make you feel good, and some pieces of art that make you feel bad. And the journey consists first of acknowledging this, of finding the words within yourself that speak to those dual ideas of good and bad. The journey consists second of doing the labor of moving as many emotions as you can from the bad side to the good side. You shouldn't like feeling bad, and if you are normal and you don't, then you discover that there is a precious alchemy that allows you to turn the bad into good. You work hard at it, and you get to a point in your life where the good feelings greatly outweigh the bad. You look around and you realize that most art makes you feel good, and that in itself feels good. That's satisfying. That's where you wanna be.

But the third and final step in the journey is not total good, because, if you recall from the very beginning, the duality of good and bad is what makes the good, well, good. You need to feel that comparison. If everything feels good, then nothing does. And so in this final step, you choose totems that will keep the good alive. These totems are symbolic of the art that you hate. It's not that you actually hate them, and it's not that, were you to encounter them in a vacuum, your first response would necessarily be "I hate this." It's more that you are just trying to feel, and in order to feel good about good art, then you need to do the opposite too. You need to feel bad about bad art. This is for balance.

The Bleecker Street Boys could never comprehend any of this. They love Simon & Garfunkel because they are slaves to their own appetite. They hear something that is nice, and they have no capacity to think critically about that feeling within them. They follow what they think feels nice, without understanding what it means. They refuse to know that opinion is a choice, and it's a choice that we sometimes make under trying circumstances. I have made a choice, to hate their music. I hate it, not because it is of poor quality, but because it brings peace and balance to my life. I can love the art I love, but only because I can hate the art I hate. I hate Simon & Garfunkel. I say this last bit out loud too: "I hate Simon & Garfunkel."

And this unruly swarm of young strawmen collapse upon me, and all goes black. My life seems unreal, my crime an illusion, and yet, when this is all over, I will stand. I will stand up and I will walk forward into the great unknown, clear in my heart of one thing. I was right. This is some lame-ass bullshit made by a bunch of white-bread Bible-thumpers. To hate this means that I love life, and goddamn it, do I love life, and always will, for as long as I have life within my grasp. I'll take any beating I get from this, I'll take the pain and ask for more, because I was right.

GRADE: 1.5 pukes out of 5