be your teenage dream tonight

I have, of late, become unnaturally obsessed with Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream.” It is—and while this statement may hip-check hyperbole, I nonetheless believe it—the perfect pop song. The chopsticks-like piano riff, the driving drum-and-bass duo, the cotton-candy-pink vocals, and the pleasantly vapid tinge of vocoder: each new line drops this delicious pop bon-bon. It’s a melting confection, and since I downloaded the song about 24 hours ago, I’ve listened to it no fewer than 15 times.

I already copped to the unnatural obsession. I am, after all, a woman who is neither the very button on prime’s cap nor on the soles of her shoes. I live about her waist, or in the middle of her favors. In the lower belly of my prime, I find there’s not a lot of it left, but what there is left is glorious.

I can rarely simply enjoy something without subjecting it to anatomist’s analysis; thus, I have created a hydra of my obsession. Not only must I listen to “Teenage Dream,” but also I must nail down its heuristic pleasure. Meaningless pop calls for epistemological analysis; that’s how I roll. And what I’m coming up with is pretty simple, but as most simple ideas tend to be, also fairly profound and that is this: “Teenage Dream” may have all the earmarks of prepackaged pop, yet it’s completely irony free. It is perhaps the most earnest expression of what it feels to be young, free, and falling in love since the Beatles’ “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.”

Again, hyperbolic, but I’m going to run with it.

When I was twelve, my grandmother had portraits taken of me because, she said, she wanted pictures of me before I “got that cynical look” on my face. Perry’s “Teenage Dreams” embodies that pre-cynicism look; it gives that look a fetching hook and a dance beat. The world is wide open; it’s beautiful; it’s sexy; and it’s replete with love.

It’s not exactly my experience as a teenager. I was large with “going all the way,” medium-sized with the “no regrets,” but decidedly small with the “just love.” And yet, while the “Teenage Dream” experience was not my own, the feeling was. The weird thing about growing up is that you don’t lose that feeling, at least I haven’t.

This past August, I went to my 30^th high school reunion. I wrote about the more salacious parts of experience here on Filthy Gorgeous Things; I forgot to link it back in September. I had a lot happening in my life, and promoting my own writing took a back seat with the laundry and the dusting. Rereading this piece, I like it even better than I did when I wrote it.

What I don’t mention in the FGT piece is that the day before the reunion, I’d suffered some seriously sublime food poisoning. The day I flew out, I had to change my flight twice; I could not stop puking. I think I vomited fourteen times in eight hours; you do the math; it’s not pretty. Thus, I was kind of a shell of myself at the reunion. It would have been a fairly surreal experience under the best circumstances, and being a whiter shade of hurling pale, I found it to be hallucinatory. Mostly, it felt like one of those dreams you have where everyone you know is there and they’re being really nice to each other, but they’re also all dead.

To heap yet more mirage on the hallucinatory sundae, the reunion took place at the gentleman farmer estate of one of my classmate’s—and it was a house where I’d spent significant time when I was a child because friends of my parents owned it. The palimpsest of experience was so over-written as to be nearly illegible. I reeled, but it might have been low blood sugar.

Going back to Vermont is for me always a fraught experience. You can never go home again, except that, of course, you can. You go home and you see things as you see them now, and you remember them as you thought they were, and the overlay of the two experiences can be vertiginous. It can also drive you to picture taking. Memory likes evidence of one kind or another. Sometimes Proust eats a Madeleine; other times, he takes out his iPhone and snaps a few Shakeitphotos. Memory lane, as it turns out, it quite pretty in August.

This is the road where I lost my virginity in a Ford truck. The night we went all the way, it was not this bucolic. It was January, and it was at least double-digits below. There was alcohol involved, and I kind of wished I had done things a bit differently. Perhaps if I hadn’t been sixteen in a town of 750 and a high school of 600, I might have.

As I wrote in my FGT piece, I saw the man who Was There First. He has not aged well, and that’s all that needs to be said about him.

This is the road where I first received the oral pleasure. (Click to embiggen the pictures, should you desire.) While I lost my virginity in the front of a Ford truck, I first got head in the back of a Subaru wagon, and, really, if you’re an American woman, the meta-metaphor of car and sex act probably feels so true as to be over-determined. While the man who first lapped my teenage pussy was not at the reunion, I did happen to run into him later. He seems to be a kind, thoughtful, gentle and interesting man who does not deserve the apparently humdrum and disappointing life he lives.

I feel bad for him, and I feel absolutely delighted that I got the hell out of Dodge when I did. It’s better to dodge a hell than to live a life of hell in Dodge.

This is the view from the house where I grew up in Nowhere, Vermont. It’s a lovely landscape, and it’s virtually unchanged from when I was little. It also gives you a glimpse into why I read a lot, why I have an imagination of Edward Gorey proportions and why practically every day of my adolescence was an exercise in drumming up reasons not to kill myself.

It sure is pretty, though.

Looking at these pictures, thinking about how it felt to drive through those green, green landscapes in my rented Buick Something, I recall the promise of the Teenage Dream. I remember it, and in remembering, I realize that for all the sepia tinge of melancholic nostalgia, I’ve really lost nothing. It’s there, accessible, in my head: a life rich with unimaginable sensual pleasures, unutterable prettiness, endless sweetness and skintight jeans. I recollect how driving those well-remembered roads, I felt the lifting of the veil of cynicism, the gift of age, experience and Gotham. I remember what it felt like to be young, to be young still, to be young now, to be young forever. 

Digressive post-script:

This is the road where, on graduation night, I found the guy passed out in the middle of the road. I couldn't find a way to fold that story into the narrative above, other than to say that if there was a night in my life more deeply steeped in the wide-open highway of teenage hopes, I can't remember it. I was wearing a slamming fuschia dress and matching heels. I wish I had still had them. I found this dude who was dead to the world. It was a moment worthy of David Lynch.

Comments

[Pete]

CG,
As some who grew up on the east coast, I can identify with the idea that you can't go home again due the the fact that your lens has changed. Actually, I don't want to go back.

It is a fun read.
Pete

[Molly]

Teenage memories. I am not sure I have anything as interesting or wonderful to write about mine. I was bought up in central London, and I regularly pass by my previous haunts. Maybe I should try to re look at them with those teenage dreams in mind.

Mollyxxx

[chelsea g. summers]

Thanks, Pete. I can totally appreciate your sentiment and always appreciate your comments.

Molly, you just need a good pop song to provide a soundtrack. What are the London kids listening to these days?