Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love & Karaoke

by Rob Sheffield

did I mention I can’t sing? I can’t. It’s bad. I have loved music all my life, and as they say, you always hurt the one you love. So I have spent my whole life trying to sing, while other people try to escape. I have been described variously as a “hard trier,” a “good sport,” and a “vocal Chernobyl.”

But admitting the fact that you have a problem is the first step toward making it an even bigger problem.

The problem with moving is that you tend to take yourself with you, so when you get there and you’re still unhappy, you know the problem is you.

I felt like Keri Russell in The Babysitter’s Seduction, the one where she’s a high school diving champion who gives up her athletic career to have an affair with the dad from My So-Called Life, except she doesn’t realize until the last ten minutes that he’s not just a regular Lifetime dad-skank, he’s a psycho killer bastard maniac and he is in fact chasing her through the house with a knife and like, right now so she runs up to the roof where she blinks and gets an and suddenly where she remembers that she knows how to dive. So she dives. Off the roof, into the swimming pool, out of danger. She always knew how to dive—it just took a while for her to remember. Once I remembered how to stay out late, I did it every chance I could. I guess I never forgot how to stay out late; I just hadn’t noticed I needed to. There are things we know how to do when we’re on a roof. There are times when we have to remember what they are. If we get lucky, something reminds us to move.

I’ve seen a million faces, and I’ve rocked them all, though I’ve done most of it in front of my bathroom mirror, so I guess I’ve only seen one face, but I’ve rocked it a million times.

Some dudes are just cool, I guess. I’m so not one of them. I’m a combination of two horrific personality types, an encyclopedia-minded data-storage-facility rock geek and a cripplingly polite firstborn Irish son. It’s a deadly combo, and it means being unable to chitchat with these musicians without making it all complicated. I’m overzealous to please in the most irritating way.

You can’t plan around random attacks of good luck; you want to make patterns where lucky things can happen regularly. If you want hotness in your life, you learn to build a fire and keep it going. You don’t run around with a pack of matches in your pocket, chasing clouds and hoping you get struck by lightning.

Gertrude Stein put it best in The Mother of Us All, her opera libretto about Susan B. Anthony. “Men have kind hearts when they are not afraid but they are afraid afraid afraid.”

“Something she still doesn’t understand about me is that I’m good for about three hundred words a day. When I’ve gone through those, I’m done. Fifty years, and she still thinks I’m holding out on her.”

Pretending to do things by accident is what you do in your twenties. That pretense consumes a lot of your energy then. And it makes sense in your twenties, because it gives you a degree of plausible deniability in case you fuck it up or get fucked over. It gives you the Pee Wee Herman “I meant to do that” escape clause. But in your thirties, when you’re confident about what you want, it’s harder to talk yourself out of making the bold move that will help you get it.