Woody Allen delivers a monologue at the beginning of Annie Hall recounting an old Groucho Marx joke that goes "I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me as a member."
Allen goes on to say, "That's the key joke of my adult life, in terms of my relationship with women." That idea kills me, that a single joke, a single anything, can be the key.
So let me tell you about my key: my favorite song. It's by "The Only Band That Matters": The Clash. It comes in the middle of this roaring torrent on London Calling. Eight songs deep, when everything is starting to melt together and become indistinct, the key song of my young life shows up.
Amid the greatest punk album ever comes this moment of quiet reflection. It's the same gimmick The Rolling Stones use for "Torn and Frayed" on Exile on Main Street, and it kills me there too. But nothing can compare to "Lost in the Supermarket." It comes on with this almost whispered guitar line. It's simple and rhythmic and then the chorus comes puttering out, "I'm all lost in the supermarket."
That's it: A simple line that conjures a relatively nonsensical existential image of a guy wandering around trying to find ketchup in a jumbo-Food Lion.
And the words that follow are perfect and knock me down every time. Here is this guy railing against society, expressing his angst in the most famous, violent words of his times, and he takes the time to settle down, to look back and say, "I wasn't born so much as I fell out. Nobody seemed to notice me."
He examines his guts and his past and he screams against the feelings he had as a little kid and the way he was made to be the man he is now. But he screams in a saddened whisper, like he knows he's already lost and can't change it.
He remembers being a timid little kid when he "heard the people who lived on the ceiling screaming and fighting most scarily," and the memory makes him want to curl up inside the bass line, which came up with the verse and is now powering the song and which wants to protect him as much as he wants to be protected.
You know that he is what he learned as a child when he says, "hearing that noise was my first ever feeling" and he evokes the truth: It's the last feeling he'll ever have, too, one he can't escape at this point.
"I empty a bottle, and I feel a bit free;" "Long distance callers make long distance calls, and the silence makes me lonely." These aren't normal words to me; these words sum up my fears and the cobwebbed recesses of my mind.
Not that I was neglected as a child or surrounded by anger and screaming. I wasn't.
But I am a human being and usually proud to be who I am, ready to speak my mind about things around me, to express my heart and soul in whatever capacity I can. I want to tear into the world around me, and the stupidity of people like The Clash do on the rest of the record, but in the quiet moments there is always the shadow that everyone should have, the desire to become the person that, deep down, you want to be.
What "Lost in the Supermarket" tells me is not to rely on the outside world to "make me noise for company." And I think about Duke and my life and my major and sometimes it is easy to blame the world. If only ARAMARK made my chicken tenders a little moister, and my TA didn't lose my paper, and Frat X hadn't cut me, and girl Y hadn't dumped me-everything would have been perfect.
Then the song seems to end with a few repetitions of the chorus. "I'm all lost in the supermarket. I can no longer shop happily. I came in here for a special offer: a guaranteed personality." But there are these barely perceptible words near the end. "But it's not here. It disappeared. I'm all lost."
These words dismiss the world around you as a source of your unhappiness, explaining that, if you are lost, you are responsible for finding yourself. Duke can't provide you with a "guaranteed personality," nor can your club or fraternity. The Clash is urging you to look inward and backward. But they have an ultimate sense that you have to move forward, that "the powerful play goes on and that you may contribute a verse," and that you can must change and become better.
Jordan Everson is a Trinity sophomore. His column runs every other Friday.
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