If this post were a song, it would be called "(Catching On) Slowly"

I'm not going to lie; Morrissey is a touchy subject for me. Which is why I'm going to bring him and The Smiths up, of my own accord. Because it's time we got into some of that touchy shit, here at Fairly Alarmed.

When I turned 15, I discovered irony, as opposed to sarcasm. Suddenly, everything I saw was in the context of whether or not I could take it seriously, and that included the music I was listening to at the time. When I was 15, I was a rabid student of pop-punk, and suddenly, Blink-182 was soooo played out. And so was Greenday, soooo lame. And Good Charlotte, and Sum 41, and all their carbon copies. Today I mostly stand by my decision to abandon those bands, except Greenday is still great. And so are Blink-182 and Sum 41, but mostly because I want to go back and tell myself to not be so damn embarassed about everything all the time. Jesus. Anyway, when I was 15, I gave up music. I stopped listening to the radio, stopped listening to new CDs, stopped watching MTv. I read, mostly, or slept.

Then, when I was 17, I rediscovered sincerity. I decided that when people made fun of me for liking what I liked, or wearing whatever, it was okay, because they were the ones with the problem, not me. I opened myself up to the world, to strange, new joys and pains, and knew exactly what I was doing. It was around this time that I started to go back into my dusty old CD collection and see if anything there still applied. I found that some of it still did, and most of it was The Smiths (or Ryan Adams, but that's a self-flagellating post for another day). I threw myself into that group anew, and into its frontman, Morrissey, with greater vigor than I had the first time around, when I was too young to really understand the point of all that beseeching. I read a book called How Soon is Never?, by Marc Spitz, and in it I read this line: "I didn't want to have sex with Morrissey any more than Christians wanted to have sex with Jesus."
It's true; I don't want to have sex with Morrissey. But I would give up meat if he asked me to. I would even honor my father and my mother.

The vigor I talked about in that last sentence really can't be described with a word. Instead, imagine this scenario: I listen to Morrissey's lyrics so much that I begin to believe he is actually talking ABOUT ME. No seriously, listen to this, doesn't it make you think of that time I was in photography class with Brian, and we were in the dark room, and it was all weird in there? And I had this big crush on him and then - no? You're not listening hard enough.
He was inside my head.

So obviously I know that's not true, but he's still in my soul (a word that makes me cringe, but which I use here for lack of a better one to describe the seat of my non-physical being, where the most precious memories and secrets are kept), to a degree that is so profound that even I don't get how delicate I am about it until someone makes fun of it. So forgive me if you mock Morrissey all in good fun and I call you a shit-for-brains dickless chump. I'm just harkening back to 17, the age of sincerity, and protecting the sweet, most tender side of myself.



Found, courtesy of Merlin Mann, at Kung Fu Grippe.

Thank you, Sir.