There she was, a spoon in one hand, a bowl in the other, whizzing through our neighborhood at 40 mph with the steering wheel pinched between her knees.
She was obviously crazy. Not the harmless kind of crazy that makes people buy Toby Keith albums or get excited about watching cars race around in circles. I’m talking about the kind of crazy that leads to people biting off other people’s ears during boxing matches or trying to privatize social security.
I decided that I couldn’t keep quiet about it. No matter what the consequences, I had to let this woman know that her behavior was simply unacceptable.
So I turned to her and said, “Honey, can you please not eat cereal while you’re driving!”
But my wife wouldn’t listen.
Remember how in Driver’s Ed. class your teacher always instructed you to drive defensively? It’s because he knew that one day you’d be sharing the road with my wife.
Whether she’s putting on her stockings or trying to balance her checkbook, you can be sure that at any given point while she’s driving, my wife is performing at least one other task that requires the use of both hands and usually a foot or two. I’m pretty sure I once caught her in the middle of a yoga pose while she was driving us to the mall, although I couldn’t prove it.
You know how when people are bowling they do that little dance to help steer their ball away from the gutter? That’s me whenever I see my wife driving down the street, only in my case, the gutter is the oncoming lane of traffic and the pins are the neighbor kids. She is to a highway what a tornado is to a house of cards. If she were a professional wrestler, they’d call her “Royer the Destroyer.”
Riding passenger in my wife’s car always makes for a rather transcendent experience. Watching kitties bounce off your windshield really has a way of putting the rest of your problems into perspective. The fact that I have no clean underwear for work tomorrow, for example, seems like much less of a crisis as my wife and I are plowing through our neighbors’ trashcans or taking out a rhododendron bush.
Whether we’re speeding the wrong way down a one-way street, turning a curve on two wheels at 70 mph or ripping off our bumper as we back into the garage, I can just sit back and relax as what I thought were my biggest problems simply melt away.
There is one small problem that won’t go away, though, and that is the fact that, thanks to my wife’s rather relaxed approach to driving, our car looks worse than Michael Moore in a pair of Daisy Dukes. From the scrapes running the entire length of the car to the ominous poodle-shaped dents on the hood, this vehicle is in sad, sad shape. Any day now, I expect it to follow Vin Diesel’s acting career right into the Cosmic Crapper.
On a good day, the car moves with all the enthusiasm of a fat kid who just got picked for the skins team in gym class, which is a subject I know a thing or two about. It’s really a minor miracle that it even starts at all. Although, once you get that car rolling downhill, it’s a force to be reckoned with. Just ask our neighbors’ cats.
The only thing that looks worse than our car’s exterior is our car’s interior. I’m not sure what happened in there, but it wasn’t good. If I had to make an educated guess, I’d say that at some point a grizzly bear and a mountain cat must have broken into the car and had a wrestling match in the front seat in a vat of pudding. I mean, there are actual chocolate stains on the ceiling. But I guess that’s what happens when you take a speedbump at 70 mph with a bowl of Cocoa Pebbles in your hand.
So basically, we need a new car. The problem is, I have a hard time justifying going even deeper into debt just so my wife can have a new, more luxurious vehicle with which to terrorize our neighbors’ mailboxes. Although, for as much time as she spends in her car waiting for the cops to fill out accident reports, she might as well have reliable heating and air conditioning.
When the subject comes up – which is only as often as my wife hits something with her car, by which I mean daily – my wife swears that things would be different with a new car. She’d be careful, more responsible. No more backing into our garage when the door is closed. No more sideswiping old ladies walking down the street. She even promises to steer with her actual hands. Which is comforting, if not entirely believable.
I don’t know. Maybe I should be more trusting and just get the new car. Then again, her current car was new when we got it, and now it looks like it’s been trampled by elephants. If we get another car, how do I know that she won’t just get bored with it three weeks later and start using it to knock coconuts out of trees or something?
It’s a real conundrum. Until I get it all sorted out, all I can say is, watch your back. My wife is on the move, and the Wheaties are missing from the cupboard.
His name is John. He’s a boxer, a drug addict and a Vietnam Vet.
Her name is Caroline. She’s a poor white trash girl living a dead-end life.
The two meet at a state fair, fall in love and run off together in search of a happier life. Then they get stuck in a dark gambling town. Then John has a drug relapse. Then their relationship falls apart. And the story just goes downhillfrom there.
Downhill is a familiar direction for Aimee Mann. Often cited as one of the finest songwriters of her generation, Mann has a knack for picking her way into the middle of a tragic story and finding the little bulb of humanity that makes it tick. Her new concept album, The Forgotten Arm, which details the adventures of John and Caroline in a dozen technicolor tracks, is no exception.
“I’m more into the in-depth profile than the short vignette,” Mann says with a wink from her studio in California. She sounds animated, a little mischievous, and overall nothing like the gloomy girl she’s made out to be. In fact, for someone who’s given nicknames like “Ms. Misery,” Mann sounds downright chipper.
“Truly, most of my friends are comedians who think I’m kind of funny. I mean, somebody of my circle of friends has got to think that I’m a reasonably entertaining person to be around,” she protests. “But I don’t know. I always hate when people go, ‘No, no, I’m really funny! Trust me!’”
In all fairness, The Forgotten Arm is much more than just a mood-crushing story. It’s a masterful, sweet, slow-rocking album that offers redemption in its own weird way. It’s also her most intriguing release since the 1999 soundtrack for “Magnolia,” another fine tale of misery and salvation.
The majority of The Forgotten Arm was recorded live in the span of about a week, which gives it a more open, more summery feel than most of Mann’s recent work. “The themes on this record can be kind of tough themes, and I wanted the sound of the record and the vibe of it to be kind of a bright and fresh and sort of spontaneous feeling, like a more optimistic feeling,” she explains.
One of the main themes concerns that longing everyone gets from time to time to throw everything he owns into the trunk of his car, hit the open highway and start a new life somewhere where the grass is greener. It’s a great American storyline, something for which Mann has a real weakness.
“I really see the pathos in that idea, that people have a life that they’re unhappy with, and they have a desperate hope that by changing their location, that they can change their life somehow. And of course it never works,” she laughs. “I totally know it can’t work. But still, when I think about it, I’m like, ‘Aw, really? Can’t it? C’mon! Mexico, totally different country – surely that would make a difference! Sombreros and margaritas! It’s gotta be paradise!’”
It’s the kind of daydream that sounds very romantic until you’re actually out on that highway, broke and hungry and running on fumes. “Until you have an upset stomach and a flat tire and the two of you are fighting in the front seat about whose turn it is to drive!” Mann giggles.
You’re doomed to fail, but you try anyway, because failing is better than doing nothing at all: there’s the crux of The Forgotten Arm. Not exactly feel-good material. But Mann throws in a surprise at the end by actually giving the story a kind of resolution, if not a happy ending. The sun is poking through the clouds, and you can almost hear Mann squinting in the light.
“I tried to write a happy ending. I don’t think it’s a sad story,” she admits.
“But who’s really cheerful anyway? Who really writes cheerful, happy songs?” she whines, betraying herself with another giggle. “Besides that song ‘Walking on Sunshine’ by Katrina and The Waves. That was my peer group when I was in ’Til Tuesday! I remember she was beating us on the charts!”
These days, the only beatings going on in Mann’s life take place in a regulation boxing ring. The petite songstress recently started sparring as hobby, which sounds cute until she lands a right hook on your face. As it turns out, Mann has a natural gift for boxing, and it’s become her favorite off-stage activity. So go ahead, call her “Ms. Misery” one more time to her face.
“I had met somebody that I became very good friends with, and he was a boxer, and he kind of gave me a casual boxing lesson. And he was very encouraging. He was like, ‘You’re a natural!’ So I had enough encouragement to actually start taking lessons for real,” she explains. “I sort of based some of the character of John on him, because he’s also a drug addict, and he had relapsed, so I was kind of trying to deal with that a little bit.”
The Forgotten Arm (named after a boxing move), like all of Mann’s albums, was released through her own label, SuperEgo Records. Because of that, it will sell only a fraction of what it potentially could on a major label – but the fact that she gets to maintain complete creative control, plus the fact that she makes a ton more money than she would with a major-label deal, makes it a pretty good tradeoff.
“I think if I was on a major label and getting a gigantic promotional push, to me that kind of pressure makes you sort of uncomfortable,” she says. “There are certain artists that to me are almost like athletes. It’s very sporty almost. Like Britney Spears, she’s like a sports figure almost. She gets out there and she dances and she sells it and she does a million tours. She appears everywhere and she’s all dressed up. It’s very sporty. It takes a lot of muscular energy that I just don’t have.”
Even after all of the boxing lessons?
“Well, the boxing is like, all I want to do is fight,” she says guiltily. “I never do all the conditioning stuff that they tell you to do. I don’t do any of the rope work. All I want to do is spar. It’s terrible. I just want to get to the good part!”
