Thursday, May 16, 2024

Daily Jam - Vomit

“Nights I spend alone. I spend ‘em running ‘round looking for you Baby.”

The very first time I met my wife was in March of 1998 at a mutual friend’s parents’ house in a suburb of Houston. I was a freshman in college and there to see Radiohead and Spiritualized perform in the city, crashing with a group of guys at said parents’ house. She was still in high school, just hanging out with a friend on a Friday night. I might have been somewhat aloof, lost in my own college freshman-ness…OR I might have been drunk.

Neither one of us has any real recollection of meeting the other one.

The second time I met my wife was sometime during my sophomore year (those two semesters are very, very hazy) in College Station, visiting some friends over a weekend. She lived in the same off-campus dorm that a lot of my buddies did and hung out with them periodically. She might have been somewhat aloof, lost in her own college freshman-ness…OR I might have been…not in my right head.

Again, neither one of us has any real recollection of meeting the other.

Finally in October of 1999, again in College Station, this time for a mutual friend’s 21st birthday party, my wife and I met for the third time. Neither one of us was aloof, and I finally had my wits about me. This time it stuck.

We both remember this, quite vividly.

“Looking for love. Looking for love.”

As it was released in 2011 on the Father, Son, Holy Ghost LP, the second and final full-length album from the short lived San Francisco indie rock band Girls, the song “Vomit” doesn’t have much at all to do with my story about meeting my wife. But the lovelorn and maudlin track, an epic and gospel-tinged indie guitar rock ballad, always brings her to mind, especially in the song’s finale, the almost pleading repeating of “come into my heart” as a choir of singers ooh and aah in the background. Perhaps it’s overly sentimental of me. It was probably overly sentimental of the band. But it works. And I find myself often echoing the refrain.

And yes, it is weird (and kind of unfortunate) that a song called “Vomit” makes me think of my wife.

“Come into my heart. Come into my heart. Come into my heart.”


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