The Afternoon Ramblings of a Sleepy Lunatic
Ever since I discovered alternative music (which in my day meant Haircut 100 and the soundtrack to Breaking Glass, not the Pearl Jam-wannabe crap rock flooding the “alternative” airwaves these days), I’ve been a collector. Buttons, posters, t-shirts: if they represented something or someone that was important to me, I’d buy it.
Now, I guess there’s nothing wrong with that. I mean, I’ve always been collecting something–books, for example. On vacations, my mother and father did everything in their power to steer me away from Waldenbooks and B. Dalton, but eventually I’d find ’em. Four hours later, they’d have to drag me out of the store–me and the 25 pounds of Newberry Award-winning novels I’d just purchased. The same went for Atari games, D&D paraphernalia, and all things Snoopy.
But my urge to pocket everything that was even marginally related to Alison Moyet or the Cocteau Twins was different from my bibliophilia. In these cases, the urge to collect stemmed from the overwhelming fear that these artists/groups didn’t really exist outside my room. Sure, I had physical evidence that they did–an album cover, complete with contact information for copyrights and agents–but the music’s unique sound and the effect it had on me were so special, so particular, so personal that I thought I’d made it all up in my head.
Maybe it has something to do with being gay in the small-town South. I often felt isolated, so maybe I bonded with music created by people who were so completely different from everyone I knew (I mean, there were no Anabellas in Mississippi) that…well, this is going to sound really hokey and completely queer, but it was almost like they were my friends. Since I could never see them or talk to them, though, I collected everything I could about them–kinda the same way Catholics do with relics–and I learned to be satisfied with that.
Sometimes I feel the same way toward myself. If my name is mentioned in passing in a program or a newspaper article, I save the whole damn thing. My father’s attic is piled high with photos and passed notes and school notebooks–anything to document that I Was Here.
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