this would only be an experiment in things that could have been

the post title seems to leave nothing for me to say really. it's from an old 97's song by the way, and a great one at that. makes me wish i were an actual musician, who knew how to play guitar and could hence not have to write incoherently and instead could put down incoherent words into song. i hate hope. because hope makes revelations that are inevitable painful.

i realize that when i get really upset, i always revert to 'under the bridge'. i'm listening to it now, which is a good indication of my current situation. i guess now i'm glad they didn't play it when i saw them, because then i'll associate it with a joyful moment, before i got on a 2 hour long, freezing cold journey back to hyde park.

so let's talk about that song. i freely admit that i heard the All Saints version first. the original came out in 1991, and back then the only music i heard were old chinese songs they put in between talk segments on 95.8 (does that radio station still exist?). the cover was made in 1998, when i was 12. at some points the music video came on and being too young to know any better, i thought i was great. the fact that it was a double A-side with 'lady marmalade' (another perfectly decent song that has been destroyed over time) was something that i was blissfully unaware of.

in 1999 came 'californication'. i was 13 and it became embarrassing to like the Spice Girls (oh the horror), so a bunch of us started listening to limp bizkit cos they swore a lot. it was amazing. at some point, after months of pleading, my dad bought me a portable cd player and that was the start of my journey into music (which at this point is stuck in first gear, somewhere between old oasis and travis, wilco and the foo fighters). 'scar tissue' was on the radio way more than it really should have been and i was hooked on the Peppers. here i was thinking: these guys sounds pretty cool, and they don't even have to say 'motherfucker' all the time. well i guess i didn't really think that. long story short, i bought 'californication' and became a fan.

this was back in the days of napster and audiogalaxy, where file sharing took place with relative impunity. somewhere along the line, i realize that 'californication' wasn't the debut album of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, so i decided to download a bunch more songs to see if i should invest my (then meagre) allowance money on their back catalog. and clearly, 'under the bridge', being one of their most popular songs, showed up frequently in searches. i'm not sure when i made the link between the All Saints song and the original, but i must have when i first listened to it. and clearly, the original was the winner. (oh random trivia, one of the girls from All Saints apparently got knocked over by an explosion when filming the video for their version of the song. amusing.)

it took much longer to figure out what i liked about the song. the choir section at the end (which just came up on this, the 7th play through) always sounded a little goofy to me and it gets pretty repetitive. it's not really that great of a song musically either. but i know i like the guitar opening (which the All Saints cleverly decided to sample in its entirety, and was probably the reason why i liked the song in the first place).

but i suppose i identify with the song. not the shooting up under the bridge part clearly, but how it is a ode to a city. the song is, at the start, about anthony kiedis turning to the city of LA for relieve. and that's what i always got out of that song. it might be heavily about drugs, but that was escapism. LA was real and that's what he had, and somehow i always thought that was the important thing.

and that's how i feel sometimes. i jokingly say to people how i feel weird if i'm out of a city for too long, and as much as that might be exaggeration, it's also entirely true. there is perhaps nothing more important and nourishing to me than the anonymity of the city. there is something about the loneliness of being in a city that makes everything seem alright, that amidst all the nonsense that is life, or that is my life, i am, like everyone else here, fundamentally lonely, and somehow, that's alright. in the city i can look at people who are happy and be glad for them, knowing that their happiness has nothing to do with my lack of it, and that human life as a whole is good, even in the inhospitable canyons of steel and concrete that humans have created to oppress ourselves.

because for all its faults, the city is a pure entity. it does no harm. humans do all sorts of things to hurt each other, and the city is merely a venue for such wrongs to be concentrated. here you choose to do what you will, and you live by your own choices. there is freedom in the city, because no one knows who you are unless you choose to let them. and somehow that's as safe as it is sad.

i'm running out of things to say. i had expected for this post to end with me cycling through the shallow emotions that i have always felt, but there's still that sinking feeling at the pit of my stomach which makes it difficult for me to concentrate. somehow a post which began with my trying to control that dull psychosomatic ache around the region of my heart, and succeeding for the most part, has failed to achieve its objectives.

i stopped listening to 'under the bridge' at the start of that previous paragraph. it wasn't really helping. it never really does. that's what life is. coping with that bad. and i guess right now it feels pretty bad.

it's no one's fault but my own. i have such bad timing.