My college boyfriend sent me this tape sometime over the summer between my freshman and sophomore years. We hadn\u2019t been together long before vacation started, and what leaps out at me now is how aggressively, hilariously unromantic this playlist is. Most of it is loud, snotty, cynical, depressive, angry, noisy\u2014I mean, the first song is the Descendents\u2019 \u201cClean Sheets.\u201d There\u2019s not a lot of romantic promise in \u201cEven though you’ll never come clean you know it’s true. Those sheets are dirty. And so are you.\u201d<\/p>\n But I don\u2019t remember minding much. When I\u2019d turned up at school a year earlier I was still tangled up with a guy back home, a 17-year-old seduction artist who wooed me, persistently, with candles, cheap wine, and Roxy Music. But, by Christmas he\u2019d turned out to be a two-timing cokehead and by spring break he was history. Jon, meanwhile, was loudmouthed and funny and, conveniently, lived upstairs. He had painfully thick glasses that were, in their ugliness, a badge of honor, and a mop of curly hair that usually hung in his face. He played guitar, of course, and had emphatic, hyperarticulate opinions on every band you\u2019d never heard of, but he was from suburban New Jersey and I was from Seattle and had seen Green River. It was this (I think) that hooked him; he bided his time.<\/span><\/p>\n Burned by my amped-up Romeo, I was leery of high romance. I switched from Sangre de Toro to Genny Cream Ale. I cringed when I heard Avalon<\/em>. I\u2019d like to think maybe Jon picked up on this, but it\u2019s more likely that flowers and candles had just plain never occurred to him. I was his first girlfriend and while I can\u2019t actually remember the language with which he finally declared his intentions, I remember him being gracelessly blunt, almost spitting out the words as if to make them go away.<\/span><\/p>\n Over the summer he languished doing landscaping with his band in Atlanta while I slung espresso 2,000 miles away, but we talked on the phone here and there, guarded and full of prickly bravado. I was happily surprised when the tape turned up in the mail\u2014\u201cOh! He does<\/strong> like me.\u201d But even here, the tongue-in-cheek title card\u2014which reads \u201cBlack Flag, Death of Samantha, Yes, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Jethro Tull\u201d– is all about what isn\u2019t<\/strong> inside, rather than what is. (I thought Henry Rollins was a poseur and John Petkovic a sleazebag for hitting on me once in a Cleveland club. To this day I don\u2019t know what my problem was with Yes.) There was a letter too, pages full of bitterly funny liner notes, but that\u2019s long lost. I remember, though, that at the very end was a tiny, tender note.<\/span><\/p>\n When school started again we were a couple, and we stayed that way for another two years full of all the high drama you\u2019d expect from kids who can\u2019t imagine the future. We fought and fooled around and dealt with sad, confusing, scary things for which, in hindsight, we were breathtakingly ill-equipped. And we struggled, oh how we struggled, to communicate\u2014but when we did, there were magic sparks.<\/span><\/p>\n He graduated a year before me and moved to New York, and I fell in love with someone else. I still feel shitty about the way I didn\u2019t deal with that but by then the future was coming into at least soft-focus, and neither of us figured in the other\u2019s. Everybody moved on. Got older, got wiser, got married (or he did, at least). Whatever bad feelings there were fell away, unmourned, and without even noticing we found ourselves with a different kind of shared future\u2014the kind that springs from 20 years of common cultural ground. I don\u2019t know what happened to my Roxy Music boyfriend, but Jon and I, we\u2019re Facebook friends. I wrote to him to tell him I was doing this. \u201cI am TOTALLY IN LOVE with the idiot 18 y.o. that thought it was a good idea to put \u2018Pretty Fuck Look\u2019 on the tape of a girl he liked,\u201d he replied. And I laughed all over again.<\/span><\/p>\n Track list<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Happy Rockin’ Side:<\/strong><\/p>\n Clean Sheets (Descendents) Angsty, Dirgey Side:<\/strong> * SF band fronted by the below-mentioned Brad Pedinoff; Jon\u2019s roommate played drums for a while.<\/p>\n **I don\u2019t think Jon knew that like half my friends I had a crush on Steve Immerwahr when he put this on the tape. This was his terrifically bleak, pre-Codeine Oberlin band.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [In 2008 Jason Bitner asked me to contribute something to a project he was working on called Cassette From My Ex. A website and MP3 archive, and later a book, it was exactly what it sounds like: a multimedia celebration and documentation of 80s and 90s mix tapes and the stories behind them. I sent … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[4,260,261],"class_list":["post-1455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-cassette-from-my-ex","tag-jason-bitner","tag-oberlin"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1455"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1455\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1474,"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1455\/revisions\/1474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"happy](\"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/zkfiiodv5af9ai4ah3fyhwoz_250.jpeg\" "\\"happy")
\n<\/em><\/p>\n
\n<\/span>Walking\/I don’t need the reasons (Eastern Dark)
\nDriving the Dynamite Truck (Breaking Circus)
\nPostcard (Salem 66)
\nCheap Tragedies (Avengers)
\nBlow Up! (Dils)
\nThe Other Side (Moving Targets)
\nJak (Volcano Suns)
\nSeven Days (Offbeats)
\nJersey Devil\/Best things in Life\/Earth People (Harm Farm)*
\nJersey Devil\/Whiskey (Brad Pedinoff)*<\/p>\n
\nCurtain of Surprise\/Happy\/She Does (Lilies)**
\nAssassin (Rat at Rat r)
\nPretty Fuck Look (Pussy Galore)
\nMan in the Trees (Die Kreutzen)
\nMary had a little Drug Problem\/For Crying out Loud (Scratch Acid)
\nGoin to the Beach\/Slackjaw (Killdozer)
\nStill A Child\/Man I Love (Skin)<\/p>\n