Girls with Insurance

Blame me if you will, "Tania," but I didn't see this coming.

Twenty years ago, when I was driving around Arizona doing one odd job or other, my cassette version of Camper Van Beethoven's "Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart" was my truest companion. You were the weird song about ten in, with the careening first line:

How I long to see your face photographed in fifteen second intervals.

I didn't know what this meant--I doubt anyone knows what it means--but it was your delivery that hooked me, a phrasing as strange as anything on a Morrissey record. It sounded like someone screwing around in the studio, even getting geeky, which under the influence of fellow Arizonans the Meat Puppets I'd come to believe was the best way for rock music to sound. I would've dedicated my life to you in those days, “Tania.” There was no doubt, as I drove around the Valley delivering prescription drugs or newspapers or myself to one gig or other, that I'd always yearn for you, that you'd be with me forever.

But now when you come up at random on my iPod shuffle, I find myself skipping you. I swear this has nothing to do with your essence, which can never be doubted. But compared to the Wilco or Fountains of Wayne or Barenaked Ladies (not that I looked, "Tania") songs that pop up all around you--bands that surely heard you way back when and incorporated you into their sound--your volume is too low. This is a mistake perhaps made in the studio in 1987, leaving your overall presence below those of your future contemporaries. Oh, "Tania," who would've thought I could ever doubt your fidelity!

It wasn't until much later that I learned you were about Patty Hearst, the newspaper heiress who was kidnapped by the SLA and later join ranks with them. This is all interesting as an aside, but I don't think your affiliations mattered. We never let politics get in the way of what we had.

But a lack of zest is another story. It pains me every time you come on with your provocative violin intro and flirty reggae rhythm, which I struggle to hear from the dinner table, and it doesn't conjure the magic in me it once did. This silent treatment from you is too much, and I have to get up from my meal, stomp over to the iPod and hit the next button, getting to a tune that peaks with more sound and fury. I'm afraid to check your numbers on my playlist, "Tania," the way we've grown apart over the years too starkly conveyed in that no doubt single digit by your name. (Stone Temple Pilots have 27 listens, and they mean nothing to me!)

But deep inside, even if I do sometimes--okay, every time--skip you when you come up, I know you're still with me. I long for the days when you came to liberate me, in your words, "from boredom, from driving around, from the hours between five and seven in the evening." My memories of you are nothing but fond, if our present day reality is a little difficult to face. I could never bring myself to actually remove you from my iPod. Where would you be then? On a dusty CD buried deep in a cardboard box in my closet. I wouldn't do that to you.

So I guess we'll continue on in this way. You'll come on, I'll dismiss you, and you'll go back to your digital enclave, licking your wounds, until you try again sometime, hoping against hope I will once again recognize your vitality. It's no doubt I who have changed, "Tania," but let's be frank: after 20-some years, you could use a little re-mastering.