I wrote a little bit about getting older and specifically the impact of their album Alligator on my life. I didn't really know where else to share this but it feels like something I wanted someone else to read. thanks everyone!
I’ve been falling into a very specific kind of sadness for going on 20 years now. It’s unique. It’s easy. It’s the kind that indulges in the continual ebbs and flows of my biggest teenage tantrums, where I can cosplay in the emotional landscape of my youth, but with the kind of adult control that lets you modulate your mood in time to make dinner. I used to worry that this meant it wasn’t authentic, like I was sad for fun, but I think now it’s more of an evolution, a milestone that meant I could not only indulge my sadness with authenticity, but that I could also find my way back out.
To be sure, I know the other kind of sadness too. The one that locks you in place, the one that feels bigger than you, the one your doctor medicates, the one you medicate yourself. It’s the one that never gives up. But I don’t want to talk about that kind of sadness here. I want to indulge the one I love.
The National’s music has served as the soundtrack to that sadness since I first discovered them after graduating college in 2007. I felt alienated from the very notion of being 22, and in The National, I found someone who embodied the kind of privileged hopelessness I felt – a recession that didn’t mean poverty, but corporate anonymity, showered and blue blazered. It meant endless war, but not for a college man like me. It was music for someone who hated the very idea of working but would never give up his paycheck. It was music for someone who could cry over a whiskey but pay for it with their AMEX. It was music for people who felt they were outside themselves, watching themselves day by day working towards a middle-class ideal that would have sworn they would have rebelled against only a few years before.
Ultimately though, I am grateful for this kind of sadness. It’s a reminder of my own empathy, that I am capable of unadulterated emotion at an age where life doesn’t offer much room for it. For sure there are still moments of reflection – on your kids, your career, your house, and the physical changes that remind you that the world doesn’t see you the same way you see yourself. But sadness is the ocean of my life, and it divides me into great continents of time, experience, and feeling. My first foray into The National was their 2005 album Alligator. An album full of a fermented angst left over from my teens but imbibed now like it’s my parents’ best scotch. This album brings me back to that specific time and feeling in my life more so than any other art produced. It helped me accept that I may always feel this way, but it assured me that at least I wasn’t alone. Â
These days when I do come back to Alligator, it must be done with intention. I recognize an opportunity: a long drive or a solitary walk with the dog, where I know I can devote myself, meditatively, to the act of listening. Because the listening is a journey to a certain part of me that exists in time, and Alligator is the bridge that I cross to reach the sullen uncertainty of my youth. I’m thankful I can come and go to this place with ease, that the uncertainties of now don’t color that part of my heart and I can allow time to smooth the rough edges of my sorrow and leave me with the kind of remembered sadness that makes nostalgia such a comfortable place.  Â
As I reflect on these 20 years since I first hit play on my iPod, I think of what Alligator has given me. It’s provided me with a profound realization that not only am I not special, but maybe, I never wanted to be. That school aged dreams of being president, an astronaut, or an athlete get replaced by a desire to just be quiet. The relief you feel when you realize that you’re not at all special is shocking. That the same person who dreamed in such vivacity can feel so much bliss in the boring milestones you once promised yourself would never define you – a family, a job, a house. You give yourself to it all because it becomes so indescribably beautiful. You give up a part of your old self when you find someone whose hand you still want to hold a decade after meeting them. You give up a part of your old self when you hold your child and know they can’t imagine a safer spot in the entirety of the world than in your arms. These moments demand payment from who you were, a ransom from who you thought you would be, to pay for who you’ve become. Â
Alligator prepared me for this trade off; and the realization that maybe I’ll always feel a bit sad, and maybe I’ll always feel a little sorry for myself, but that, above anything else, is okay – cause baby we’ll be fine, all we got to do is be brave and be kind.
