seeing red

On this, the most glorious eve of Weezer's latest release, I turn my gaze back to my favorite band's body of work, which has both inspired and enraged me through the years.

You see, my dog died recently. Yogi really was this man's best friend, and she represented both stormy times and painfully new and bright times in the last 12 years of my life. She came to as a present in Christmas of 1996. "A boy should have a dog," I remember my mom saying. We'd picked her out a few months earlier from an accomplished Basset breeder who lived up a precariously steep and muddy hill, akin to the Grinch's peak. At the time, Yogi was too young to leave her own mother, so mine assured me that my present would be present by February. And indeed she was. I remember marveling at how huge and cumbersome her paws and ears were (they seemed to remain at that size while the rest of her struggled to catch up to their advanced growth), and the white question mark etched in her fur, just above her tail. She was beautiful. And mine. The first thing I'd ever had that required responsibility. And certainly the only thing I've ever had that loved me no matter how badly I attended to that responsibility.

I had moved to North Carolina a few months before from Ohio in the wake of my parents' divorce. I've been told that I use the word "miserable" to describe far too many things in life, but I can't quite think of any other term for how I felt then. My dad was half a world away. My friends were that same distance (and later further, when some of them left Ohio, ensuring that no matter how much we said we would, we'd never meet again). I was in a hick town that didn't know culture from q-tips. On top of everything, I had no idea how to express any of the things I was feeling. My brain was throbbing in a hot bath, stoked by my tear ducts, and my mouth had all but sank away into a third cheekbone. Part of me shut down in those days.

As the school year began and I slowly made friends, Yogi was the one constant, however new she was, that kept me anchored and focused. I was never as nice as I could have been (she may have been scolded a bit too harshly for messing in the house a few times, or kept out from underfoot by being locked up in her kennel too often during that first year), but I can scarcely think of any relationship I've had that came close to how much we loved each other. This is good, because I was socially (miserable) during high school. Girls hated me, I confounded myself with how I behaved around them, and my friends were all in the same boat. I needed someone to confide in and be myself around. Yogi was the perfect listener.

I didn't know much about music during the first half of high school, a fact which I lament to this day. However, towards high school's end, I'd picked up quite an eclectic taste of music, ranging from progressive rock to trance, from musical theater to japanese pop. I began writing music and discovering how to externalize the sordid soup of emotions I felt internally. It was my own little renaissance, peaked by my discoveries of Devo, They Might Be Giants, the Flaming Lips, and others.

Finally, as graduation loomed, my best friend Funk spoke of a band he'd mentioned before, only this time I listened to him. They hadn't had an album in 5 years (for a contemporary band, I knew this made them practically off the map of the known universe), but a supposedly triumphant return was to come soon. He loaned me their first two albums so I could try 'em out, presumably in hopes that I'd take to them and be psyched and prepared for their third.

Maybe it was the carefreeness of those last remaining days of high school...feeling those few surviving responsibilities and ties slip away before a summer of assured debauchery and cavorting settled in (seemingly for good). Maybe it was my growing understanding of what makes music good, and what I most enjoy from it. Whatever it was, when I heard the Blue Album and Pinkerton, my mind dug its teeth into the heart of Weezer and never let go; I'd found my soulmate.

Here, in this music, were melodies that paled everything else. Here was emotion that would have blown my heart's mind if I'd heard it two years earlier! Here I was both rocking out and emoting like a loser because I was finally realizing that those aren't mutually exclusive concepts! These guys wrote about Dungeons & Dragons and being an outcast as well as talking like they were King Shit but still admitting that there was no hope for them to ever find a woman. They wrote melodies that sounded like they broke straight through the roof of my little split-level NC home, and built layers of burning guitars that felt like they scorched miles and miles of land in a radius around my stereo. I was alone, in a broken home, listening to music that felt more like it came from me than from 4 guys named Rivers, Matt, Pat, and Brian.

Yogi was in my car recently thereafter for a second listen (coulda been the first, but I'm doubtful). Following the breakup I went through right around the same time, Weezer began to represent my heartache and I found myself writing more and more, and wanting more and more to express all the guts that were swirling around inside me. And Yogi was there.

When the Green Album was released, summer was just beginning. Funk and I whisked around parking lots in our cars, blaring "Don't Let Go" as if it was just as good as "Why Bother," though I think deep down, we knew it wasn't. Yogi was there, in the back seat, slobbering on my window and getting knocked off balance when I made a turn too sharply, and listening along (albeit perhaps begrudgingly).

Then college. Maladroit came out at the end of my first year in Boston, and I was on cloud 9. When I went home for the summer, Yogi and I spent even more time together than usual, the weight of all those lonely months crunching us closer when we were finally together. We swam together in the river off the field in my neighborhood, and spent daylight hours chilling out at home while I waited to go to my dreaded night shift at the axel factory (4 pm - midnight). My friends all worked other jobs that had decent, human hours, so we rarely brushed shoulders. When I switched to the morning overtime shift at the Volvo plant (6 am - 4 pm), I was too tired to see my friends, so Yogi would curl up beside me on the futon as I drifted off to sleep. In the few waking hours I had at home, we would play together and I'd ceaselessly excavate the internet for Weezer videos and interviews from their heyday, as well as download bootlegged tracks and outtakes from their more recent work.

Around this time, I realized that my thing with Weezer was never going away, and that it was so strong an attachment that it made me sad...someday, Weezer would cease to make music, or otherwise cease to exist in some form. Their music had had such a profound effect on me that I couldn't bear to imagine what it would be like to know that there would never be anymore of it.

Bookending things as they seem wont to do, Weezer released Make Believe around the time I graduated from Emerson. I remember joyfully drinking in "Perfect Situation" and "Hold Me," and having rabid conversations with Funk and my friend Matt about how much better this was than anything on Maladroit. I had recently begun seeing a girl named Molly, and I distinctly remember cleaning my apartment before she came over, "Haunt You Every Day" thundering all the while. I brought the CD home with me to North Carolina when she came to visit, and we spent several afternoons taking Yogi around Hendersonville with Make Believe serving as a soundtrack. It was all too brief, however, as I had to stay in Boston for the summer to make money before beginning Urinetown and the impending move to New York. We had a few days with Yogi.

Rivers released his solo album of home recordings just in time for Christmas this year. I flew home Christmas Eve (Work not being very understanding about granting time off for this particular holiday), and left the morning after Christmas. It was my shortest trip home yet, and therefore my shortest stint with Yogi. My 12-year old Christmas Present, though as beautiful as she was all those years ago, was visibly old, and, I think, visibly sad that I was not around for long. We spent as much time together as I could manage, and I even put off listening to River's album until I got back to NYC. I sometimes regret that...I think she should have liked, "Superfriend," most of all.

When Weezer released the "Pork and Beans" single two months ago, my mind very nearly suffered a cardiac arrest all over again. It was a single that harkened back to everything I loved about Weezer's golden age...a beautiful melody, blistering guitars, hilariously goofy but sincere lyrics, and a general mood that doesn't match anything else on the radio. I called my friends immediately to see if they'd heard it, and followed up with each pre-album single release they had. When the Red Album was officially announced (and pushed forward), I freaked out. All I wanted to do was have it in my hands, feel the jewel case...read the liner notes and the lyrics..and cruise around North Carolina listening to the album, a cream soda in my hand, and Yogi in the passenger seat, her ears flailing out the lowered window like muddy comets.

But I got the call from my mom on wednesday. Geez, almost a week ago. My family's out of town in Europe. Yogi's cancer seemed to accelerate overnight. The kennel owners tried getting her to the vet's to put her down. She didn't even make it in time.

Yogi died without me there. Without me telling her how much she meant to me, how much I care about her, and how good a dog she'd been. Without me singing, "Longtime Sunshine," a song we found together, to her. She died. And she died alone.

The days immediately afterward were a dark blur. I was so overcome with guilt that I rapidly descended a path of depression that I knew wasn't called for, but that didn't steer me off it. Yogi was gone. My connection to overcoming those 12 years of pain, awkwardness, loneliness, as well as my tether to the good times, was gone. I was cut loose, lost in some frothy sea that bore no resemblance to the waters I'd been sailing only hours before. North Carolina began to sound less like my home. Everything began to sound less like my home.

Then I thought back to Pinkerton. Nothing comes close to the way I feel about that album...I don't think there's anything more cathartic or perfectly crafted than Pinkerton, and the fact that this type of music has since been absent in Weezer's output has made me depressed, no joke. But just because it hasn't continued doesn't mean it's gone. And even if Weezer dies off, or becomes a poppy abomination that no self-respecting Morrison or his dog would listen to, their older music is still alive. It really is. When I listen to the "god damn" mental breakdown of "Across the Sea," I feel just as anguished yet full of hope as I did when I first heard it in 2001. And although I wish I had discovered Weezer sooner, it doesn't matter when I came into my own with them. It's music. It behaves the same if I listen to it ten years ago or tomorrow. It's unconditional. It's me who isn't built that way.

But I did come to treat Yogi better. She was the best friend I'll ever have, and nothing can take that away. Even when her dogbowl is thrown away, and when we take down the length of red zipline she ran along, and when the last bit of her remaining fur is swept away; when all the last traces have been erased of the first thing I had that required responsibility and that loved me no matter how badly I attended to that responsibility; when all that's gone, she won't be. I love Yogi, and she loves me. She knows how much she meant to me; I could see that even in our brief moments together this past Christmas. She was loved, and she recognized me as clearly as the long, wet nose that hung down below her brown eyes. She represented a huge chunk of my life, and just because she's left doesn't mean my connection to those days is gone. At midnight, when the Red Album downloads into my computer, she'll be right beside me listening to it. I don't feel silly saying that...it's just the way it is. I can't imagine it any other way.

Life is a mystery, as the question mark by her tail suggested way back when. But she wasn't. She was beautiful. She was my friend. The mystery is what did I do to deserve such a present?

"I've got your letter,
you've got my song."