"A Cry of Love in Several Parts"

I've had quite a few different living situations since I moved to Austin, but I have to admit that the one I look back on most fondly was about six months in.

I had only just found a (minimum wage) job, and I'd used up all of my savings, so I could no longer afford to live with my buddy from mortuary school. Jenny's solution was obvious: come stay with her in San Marcos.

I hadn't had the college experience. I briefly attended the University of Houston, but that is a distant, dim cry from living in a college apartment complex in a college town. We lived on ramen and 'wine product' (no Boone's for these classy broads - it was all about the Arbor Mist tea parties). We were poor - even poorer than we are now, which is impressive - and we were sad, but for the first time ever, I was experiencing the kind of freedom I'd only ever written, read, or dreamed about. We ran wild and free. This was as feral as I'd ever allowed myself to be.

Unlike many of my friends, I was not raised on the Beatles. My mom listened to Motown, to Elvis, to Led Zeppelin. It wasn't until this period of my life that I was exposed to much - or indeed really any - of their oeuvre. Obviously, I was impressed.

I was terribly in love at this time, the big number one. The one where you finally understand that, no, this has never happened to you before. So the first time I heard "I Want You (She's So Heavy)", I was awed.

Sometime thereafter, Jenny read to me from an article that mentioned how at the time of its release, some felt it a step backward in terms of quality. The song was repetitive, simplistic. It had only fourteen words.

That, I felt - and still feel - is the point. With only a handful of lyrics, the song expresses a common experience, a symptom of the human condition, an underlying ache that everyone has felt or will one day feel. The layering gives it weight; the burden we bear carrying this feeling. The distortion of the guitars represents our confusion. The song, like us when we are trapped in and by these emotions, feels like it will go on forever.

When I write, I tend toward being fairly concise. As I've gotten older and therefore done more of it, I've become less stingy with my words, though admittedly I am not exactly a literary libertine. It really resonated with me, how much one can express in just fourteen words.




Years later, I've found something that further speaks to me. Like the feeling of obsessive, covetous love, the song circles the same path, gathering intensity, becoming more frantic and frenetic, and - like the feeling, finally, finally comes to an abrupt,
unexpected
halt.