santamonicaI’ve never been much of a devotee of the idea of ‘love at first sight’. Lust at first sight? Absolutely. I’ve ridden that train to its terminus more times than I care to count.Usually with predictable results.

But love at first sight is the stuff of bad fiction and the fantasies of teenage girls. Love takes longer to brew. It steeps slowly over days and months and years until attaining a maturity that is the stuff of life-long relationships. Right?

Right.

This belief that love at first sight was bollocks stood proudly among my canon of truths – gravity, evolution, the superiority of American rock music, that the Republican Party is full of morons, sadists or both – for most of my 20’s.

Until I fell in love. At first sight. At a drunken smokey ‘recruiting party’ that I was hosting for potential Ph.D. students at the University of Missouri.

I’ve told this story before, in bits and pieces, and there’s no need to tell it again. And, hell, you already know the ending.

sparkleandfadeAfter a swirling weekend of infatuation and parties I realized that one of my core beliefs was going to have to be discarded. I was hooked, inextricably.

And then she went back to San Diego and I stayed put in Misery.

I think of that time – the half a year of pining, courting, begging, pleading – in musical terms. I think of the songs that gained new meaning for me, or that Dr. O’C helped me to discover. I think of sitting, lonely and yearning, listening to music and writing longing e-mails that I fired West to the woman I loved but could not have.

“I am still dreaming of your face
Hungry and hollow for all the things you took away…”

All this springs to mind because we played Everclear for A Free Fetus the other day. “Santa Monica”. That was one of the songs that got heavy rotation in the months between when I met the foot dragging fetus’ mother and six months later when I finally convinced her to join me in the heartland.

‘Santa Monica’ isn’t a love song, nor is Everclear a band that one associates with love songs. Everclear came out of Portland in 1992 as grunge started to hit MTV screens around the world. Art Alexakis and Co. started to get some attention at the same time as a lot of other post-grunge poseurs – Bush, Silverchair, Stone Temple Pilots. Christ, Stone Temple Pilots were awful. But I always thought Everclear’s music rang a little bit truer than a lot of their contemporaries.

But they certainly weren’t playing love songs. Not in the classical sense anyway. ‘Santa Monica’ is an ode to escape in the vein of Chet Baker’s “Let’s Get Lost”. At the time, though, that’s what I was after. I was fighting through the tail of an unfortunate relationship, trudging through the third year of my Ph.D. and the woman with whom I had fallen in love lived halfway across the continent.

atthebeachI wanted out. Out of the relationship. Out of my Ph.D. Out of Missouri. And this gorgeous red-headed Australian with a coy smile and an easy laugh was what I wanted into. So to speak. And Art Alexaxis’ lyrics summed it up perfectly.

“We can live beside the ocean
Leave the fire behind
Swim out past the breakers
Watch the world die…”

I didn’t get out. Well, I got out of the failing relationship, but I stayed put in Columbia. Finished my Ph.D. But I did so with Dr. O’C at my side. She’s always had the knack of bringing out the better parts of my personality.

In the last eight years or so, I’ve found that escaping from the world isn’t necessary if I’m going through it with Dr. O’C.

I still wouldn’t mind living beside the ocean, though. But we’re getting closer. We’re within sight.

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