The Gin Blossoms

On Friday nights I go grocery shopping. Well, usually I go to Target first and buy exciting things like cat litter and new comforters (though right now I am very happy with Target as the Anya Hindmarch bags are in stock. I've already purchased five of them. I am not allowed to buy more until they go on sale).

Anyway, so I'm grocery shopping, trying to pick out a whole roasting chicken, and the Gin Blossoms comes on - Hey Jealousy. This gets me for two reasons. The first is that they really only play Light FM tunes at the grocery store. Safe things that my parents would hum along to. So the fact that the Gin Blossoms is on at Ralphs is very disconcerting to me. Second. I spent the summer before my senior year with the Gin Blossoms. I went to their concert wearing my beat up jeans and an orange/brown/blue striped tshirt that I thought was grunge. That night I smoked my first cigarette in the car with my friend Nikki Smith.

Also, the Gin Blossoms will always remind me of Steve Stancliff, a brilliant artist/poet I went to high school with who also lived up the street from me. He was a year older, and Very Cool in a Depressed Artist sort of way, but he liked to hug me, and sometimes I'd drive him home after play practice and we'd sit in the graveyard by our respective homes and look at the stars and talk. I don't think many people knew we were friends. He was way too cool for me. He died when I was a freshman in college. He fell off a roof at his college. So whenever I hear the Gin Blossoms, it makes me think of Steve, and I say hello to him.

That was almost 15 years ago. But in the cliched way, it seems like yesterday. I've lived in lots of places since then - New York, London, LA, Nashville - and now I live in the mountains above LA with my husband and 9 cats and I have a mortgage. Steve never got to experience Turning 30. Suddenly my life is moving at warp speed, and I don't know where it's going. This year I'm Turning 33. How the hell did that happen? I'm not dealing too well with this whole Adult Thing.

Coming home from grocery shopping I was listening to Lyle Lovett. A CD that the alt-country reviewer for the Village Voice gave me when he took me to see Mr. Lovett at Carnegie Hall. I can't even remember the guy's name, but I remember I didn't think he was very attractive, but I made out with him in Carnegie Hall anyway. He gave me the prerelease CD. I listened to it when I was moving to Nashville. There's a song about a truck driver loving the open road and waht a good life it is.

So I was on the freeway thinking that maybe I should head over to Cline's Corner's Truck Stop in New Mexico. Heck, I had groceries and cat litter. I was set. I used to do stuff like that. Just take off and see where I woke up. But not now. Now the animals need feeding. Twilight, one of the cats, has an infection in her eye and needs regular medicine. Litter needs changing. Laundry needs doing. Husbands need feeding, too. So I sighed and got off at my exit and drove extra slowly home. It saves gas and it also gives you more time to look at the stars from your mountain road, above the smog, and sing along with a country crooner and imagine you're still heading towards Tucumcari.

I feel like I already have postnatal depression, and I don't even have a kid. Is it possible to have postnatal depression from aquiring 8 cats in 6 months? Who knows. All I know is that I have responsibilities now, beyond the plants I regularly kill, and I don't know that I like it all.

On the upshot, I left the dome light on in the car, and J came in and asked me if I wanted to play rock-paper-scissors to see who got to go down, in the cold, to turn it off. I said I really didn't want to, and he did. He's a good man. We have a good marriage. I just want to be perpetually 24. Is that so wrong??