Saying you like music is like saying you like food. It's something that we all need. It's something that serves a primal need, underneath all the cellophane packaging, to express all those things we don't have words for otherwise. I used to think that I was going to be a composer when I was younger. I got rejected at the only college I wanted to go to (twice) because I insisted on applying as a music major. During my second audition, the proctor cut me off after three minutes. "Thank you, that's enough," he said. I'm a better fan of music than I am a musician. Yet, music hasn't really been a big part of my dating life. Thinking back on it this afternoon, I was a saddened to realize that I've only been to one concert on a date.
Since all the shows I've been to lately wind up on YouTube an hour after they've finished I thought I might be able to find a clip from that night (Gerogie James playing an acoustic set at Café du Nord, the night I asked my date to formally be my girlfriend). That night has, apparently, been wiped from the annals of the internet and only a lousy seventeen second clip of it remains. This might have been an omen as the band broke up a few months later.
Then I stumbled on a video that I used to send out to women I was emailing over Hooksexup earlier this year. I don't much like sending out winks and am not a fan of reading other people's profiles (always artfully incomplete) so I would fire off a short missive about being attracted to the person and give them a link to the "Peacebone" video by Animal Collective. It was a calculated gamble that they wouldn't find the part where the phallic alien baby shoots out of the woman's mouth too presumptive.
I sent out about ten emails like that. Not a single one got a response. It was right after Strawberry Jam had come out and I was listening to the album every morning on the walk from the bus stop into the office. Scooting across the freeway off-ramp kitty corner from my office building, under the milky winter sun in San Francisco this song would be a happy little bright spot in my day. I thought that would be worth sharing.
It's probably a bad tactic for hitting on people. Honesty without context is an invitation for all of the worst assumptions. I can only imagine what all those women must have thought, watching a video of a slimy monster and a zombie woman fawning over each other, and trying to connect it with someone who isn't a freak in some way or another. I wonder if my percentage would have gone up if I had linked to The Proclaimers instead.
Previous Posts:
Sex Machine: My Kingdom for a Boner
Date Machine: Don't Make Poopy in the Office
Hooksexup Confessions: Fat and Skinny, Ugly, Pretty
Crying In Public: Some Corner in Brooklyn
Dating the Web: Don't Google Fisting and Why Women Apologize So Much
Date Machine: The Woman in the Coffee Shop and The Woman at the Bus Stop
Love Machine: Your Mom Will Do
Date Machine: Scary Movies or I Peed My Pants
Date Machine: Rate My Ethics
Love Machine: Let's Just Be Friends
Love Machine: Must Be Willing to Lie About Where We Met
Sex Machine: Why Women Are Great In Bed
Sex Machine: Why Women Suck in Bed
Date Night: All By Myself on a Saturday Night
Sex Machine: Spank My Ass
Love Machine: Infidelity or How Long Can You Go Without Cheating?
Date Night: The 45-Minute Walkout
Date Night Redux: H's Version of Our Night Out
Celebrity Confession: Who is Lauren Cohan and Why is She Hitting on Me?
Sex Machine: My First Muff Dive
Crying in Public: Remember the Cheerleaders
Sex Machine: Masturbating Upside Down
Date Night: Two Women in One Night
Hooksexup Confessions: Rate My Penis Size
Crying In Public: The Sichuan Night Train
Love machine: How I Date On The Internet
Sex Machine: Rate My Blowjobs
Crying in Public: My Cubicle