The Joe Jackson girlfriend

When I was in high school, I had the idea that someday I would become a corporate lawyer and move to a big city such as New York. I listened to far too many Joe Jackson records in 9th grade--not the early ones that everyone knows, but the later ones like "Body and Soul" and "Big World." I'd listen to the instrument "Loisaida" repeatedly and imagine what I thought my life would be like in 15 years or so. I knew I'd have some kind of girlfriend that was some kind of professional and we'd go to fancy parties and it would look like the opening montage of Saturday Night Live [the one they had back in the late 80s.] A world of all night restaurants, diners, and jazz clubs. We'd have dinners with friends and I'd make funny remarks. The complete opposite of life in rural Oklahoma.

I figured my future girlfriend and I would fight and eventually break up, since that's what always seemed to happen in Joe Jackson songs---lovers were always under stress and tired. It was a fast changing world, and love rarely could withstand it. I remember constantly listening to "Not Here, Not Now," and mourning the end of a relationship I didn't even have. The fantasy really grew for me once I started reading Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney [though I never could quite get into him as well.] I didn't really know what a corporate lawyer did, but I figured I could do it.

Of course, none of that exactly happened. I can't remember when I lost interest in law school, but it was pretty early in my undergraduate career--though I considered it again in my late 20s at once point in a potential escape from the Post Office, which thankfully I ended up not doing after looking into it more and realizing how bad the outlook was for most law school grads. I also took a practice LSAT and bombed it...not just in the "didn't study well enough" sense, but in the sense of "have no idea what this is even about" sense.

So now it's nearly 1:30 AM here and I am going to be a bit closer to 50 at the end of this month and I'm listening to some of those Joe Jackson songs for the first time in probably 20 years or so. I think about what an odd duck I was then even outside the normal realm of oddness. I enjoyed punk rock records and other things weird kids in smaller towns liked, but I had this weird affinity for the jazzier Joe Jackson records--basically white people jazz. I wanted to be a yuppie because it seemed completely different than the world around me, where very few people even worked in offices or had jobs at all. I feel fortunate to have escaped that, and to have escaped my life at the Post Office. I also admit to myself that I am much happier being single again. I became an accountant and at least was able to work in areas where I cared about the mission of my employers. I live in a large city that I enjoy so far, though it doesn't seem that big.

No real point to this trip down Memory Lane, though sometimes I think I'm still looking for that worldly, difficult woman so we can break apart and leave me with with a life of torture and regret.