Never Thought I'd Rememory in a Headline But It's Saturday

It's an old idea that there are many songs we love merely because they are glommed on to some seriously pleasurable nice nice very nice moments from smaller times. They're like the soundtracks in romantic-comedy montages, both the ones where the dude and the chick are improbably finding ways to love each other and the ones where the dude is remembering the improbable things he loves about her in the post-jilt moments. The songs are often 80s classics, partially because romantic comedies started in the 80s and partly because that kind of cheese is exactly what gets 30-something infantile single women all jazzed up and ready to cruise in their Saturns to the nearest singles bar or slot casino.

At risk of seeming like a mid-30s woman, I've been having maddening bouts of romantic nostalgia lately, wanting to just get all Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan on some chick who doesn't exist except as an abstract conception. But trust me she is hot and funny and far from possessed of wack music taste. She even likes to drive me to the skate park in her Passat and watch me, secretly having a crush on a couple other skaters but never going to do anything about it.

Unforgivable, right? But we've all been there.

Aaaand I'm jamming a song on repeat the way I used to do with Blind Melon in college (even though I didn't really ever share Blind Melon with anyone because no one else really seems to care about them any more).

I'm not really critically engaging the thing. It's a sunny Saturday morning and I'm not smoking cigarettes - I'm drinking coffee. I realized the other day that sometimes you just need to have some olfactory memories, be they activated by putting on some suntan lotion, sitting next to your cafe au lait, or walking till you find some fresh-cut grass (or even dog shit). I am infrequently overly sentimental, but when we fall, we fall hard - I'll go on facebook and check out the profiles and photo albums of previous ladies of my life just to see if I can bring back the smell of their hair or whatever (pervy right?).

During the teen years, I used to get back from a 7-9 a.m. swim practice on Saturday mornings and turn on the radio to some Everclear or Refreshments, sometimes Smash Mouth or that band Mark McGrath was in would even be on. But I wouldn't hate, I'd just enjoy these boneheads' company as I paged through the comics or thought about some high-school sweethearts and heard my mom vacuuming in the T.V. room. The sun would shine especially bright through the windows, painting these whitish squares on the breakfast table. Remembered moments like holding hands and secretly liking it or even the first time you see the bra come off have got those same rectangles all over them. In the spirit of that, here's some New Order.