♪♫ ♪ ♪♫

Swamp Thing
Artist: The Chameleons
Album: Strange Times
Year: 1986
♥: This isn't even close to the song I planned to post this week (though that'll show up soon), but.
Meg asked how Saturday was when I got back from brunch, Sunday. I just stared, still embarrassed. "Harder than I thought it was going to be," I finally replied -- but Meg knows me pretty well.
"Really?" She eyed me, raising her eyebrows. "You take all the songs that meant most to you from an entire year -- you, who can't listen to Placebo if it's November -- and you listen to them all in a row?" She smiled, kind of sadly. "What did you expect was going to happen?"



I woke up Sunday morning running through things I'd said/done the night before, feeling pretty stupid. My room felt too small; my throat was killing me; blinds drawn; headphones carelessly tossed on the floor. I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling for awhile. Wincing. Impressed that I didn't have a hangover, angry that I didn't have an excuse. I'm a mess when I'm too honest.

Then something sparked, and I sat up. Pulled up my blinds, which I haven't done in awhile, and threw open my window. Fresh, cold air filled my room for the first time in months, and the sun was reflecting brightly on the crisp snow outside, and I breathed in and felt myself...stretch. Not physically, but emotionally: parts of myself I'd forgotten were there, waking up with fresh air. Until Sunday morning, I had no idea how fundamentally important it is to me to open my windows. Just like me, my personal space needs airing out (carefully-concocted scent bouquet & Hydro bill be damned!).

So as I breathed in the air, on my knees and staring outside wide-eyed, this song came on at full volume in my head, and it made my stomach flip.

This is another 'discovered-at-Saph' song. February 2010, the weekend before Stage #4 started, Meg and I went dancing to celebrate the end of classes, and "Swamp Thing" played upstairs for all the new age goth types. I'd never heard it before, but as the plinking began and the electronic layers of the intro started building, that underlying throbbing pulse ---- well. Then the melody killed me, and then the lyrics destroyed me, and I hurriedly texted them to myself, and then this song became my theme of sunny, just-this-side-of-warm winter on the cusp of spring.

It's not spring yet, but this song makes me feel like it is. I love Saph so much for playing it as a dancing song, I love the goth kids for dancing to it, I love remembering myself (and Meg) dancing to it on Feb. 19, 2010, losing my shit, my stomach flipping, in love. I love how it still makes me dance like my feet are air. It vibrates with life, despite all those heartbreaking lyrics: "Now the world is too much with me / Please leave / Just go away."

The feeling of the song is so different from the lyrical content, so incongruous, that it's uplifting. Yeah life sucks sometimes. Yeah you do stupid things you regret the next morning. But that's never all there is; that's never the complete picture; there is light, somewhere ------ everywhere. I need to remember that: if the room feels too small, I have to open the goddamn window.
"All around you walls are tumbling down
Stop staring at the ground."