I Have No Idea What's Been Going On Lately

And I just wish you would come over and explain things.

One afternoon in college, my roommate Ben came home from another blowout fight with his on-again off-again girlfriend, this time about an ice tray. 

My other roommates and I were in the living room, setting up the volcano vaporizer one of them bought online. I was trying to add the mouthpiece to the overlarge aftermarket balloon we got off Craigslist, so that we could vaporize more weed than was normal. Normally the vaporizer would fill a balloon the size of a pillowcase, but this aftermarket one could fill to the size of a person. Like we could smoke a human’s volume of weed.

Ben looked at our setup, didn’t react, and said, “Jenny can’t fill an ice tray!”

“Like she doesn’t have an ice tray?” I asked. “There’s no ice in her apartment?”

“No!” he said. “There’s ice. Well, she ran out of ice because we used it for drinks, so she took the empty tray and asked me to fill it. I said no, she was right there by the sink--she should do it.”

Ben said that she took the empty ice tray, turned on the faucet full blast, and moved the tray so fast under the stream that water splashed everywhere and nothing was accomplished. She looked at him, asked for his help again, and the fight boiled over from there.

“She grew up rich, she’s rich, so she’s stupid,” he said.

I thought that was unfair. Back then I wasn’t awoken to the socially just particulars of feminism or class, and besides I was fumbling with the mouthpiece on the human weed balloon, so I didn’t stand up for her. Though the rest of us regarded Ben’s on-again off-again girlfriend situation--today we would call this a situationship--as a proximal and thus exhausting soap opera, I liked his girlfriend. She was kind to me in writing workshop.

It is hard to be kind in an undergraduate writing workshop. Her feedback was pointed, she asked questions. For a story I wrote about a cloister of nuns struggling under the authority of their Mother Superior, whose recent injury put her in a wheelchair and made her prickly and severe, Jen asked, “Do you think it’s because everyone in the convent knows that their leader no longer believes in God?” A good peer in writing workshop will help you discover new lines of thinking in your piece. They will be there in the abstract when you go back for revisions. It is a service of care, like when a waiter refills your glass Of water though you hadn’t asked yet.

If I could have defended her in the moment, as Ben continued on about her inability to fill a regular 14-cube ice tray--“What else can’t she do? Pump gas? Microwave popcorn?”--I might have posited that growing up wealthy in the leisure class would have given her less time to stress about the regular bullshit chores us commoners have to endure and more time to develop empathy, to deepen her sojourn into the humanities, to fill her cup beyond the brim with what we call the milk of human kindness.

And then Ben would have said, “Shut the fuck up, Anthony.”

What happened was I half-listened to his rant, fixed the vaporizer, and we all got high after we marveled at the full body bag-sized balloon of vapor. What happened was then I sat on the living room floor and played Bioshock on Xbox, got too freaked out, and had to go lie on my bed with a pillow over my face until sunset.

I didn’t keep up with Ben. I can’t imagine his situationship lasted beyond the end of the first Obama administration. Last I heard of him, another college friend told me that Ben had gotten into the chemtrails conspiracy theory, believing that overhead planes were purposefully dispersing toxins to the population. I expressed pity. This was in the mid-aughts when that kind of conspiracy was cute, almost harmless, when we didn’t yet know about the lube-slick pipeline of conspiracy theorist to venal fascist.

I mean how could you gaze up at the Firmament and not feel overcome with awe--I thought--how could you see the vapors of Heaven, the miraculous endeavor of human flight, and conclude that the government has aerosolized fluoride and is raining it down on everyone, and that’s why we all now have autism? Isn’t it easier to just believe in God? There’s less reading.

But Jen--I think of her maybe two to three times a week, depending on how often I need to refill my own ice tray. I hope she learned. Or I hope she installed an icemaker in her freezer, the kind that dispenses cubes from the door. It surprises me how often I think of her. Some neuron trips in my mind when I’m at the sink, and I picture her forcing the plastic tray under the faucet’s heavy stream, ignorant of cause and effect, shaking like she’s panning for gold in the South Yuba riverbed.

We have these kinds of looping memories, I believe, and we have no control over their constant recollections. Like how the smell of a July rainstorm can bring you back to the childhood summer you spent in the White Mountains, chasing toads, your knees scraping across the pine needles under the porch, these are memories tied to external triggers.

They fill a space too, because a mind so capacious as ours will go bonkers if left empty or idle. I think of Ice Tray Jenny so often because the alternative is frightening; what the fuck else am I supposed to think about when I’m at the sink and filing an ice tray. It’s boring! All of these chores are. Am I supposed to stare into the mirror and dissociate into the void when I’m brushing my teeth? Get out of here.

Up until a few months ago I thought of another Jenny as often as Ice Tray Jenny: the singer-songwriter Jenny Lewis, and her flawless, no skips, monumental indie rock band Rilo Kiley, which has reunited after an almost 15-year hiatus.

The thought came unbidden at least once weekly: “I miss Rilo Kiley.” But now that thought has expired and I am what you would call bereft. How can I miss them when their reunion has been so perfectly calculated like this?

Do you have bands that have stayed with you throughout young adulthood and into this ante-middle age? For me it's RK, a band that was dormant and quiet enough to weather the  oft-cresting waves of cancellation and problematic behaviors, at least as far as I know. They haven’t succumbed to the easy thought lines of conspiracy, haven’t tried to sell me essential oils via a shop link on their Spotify page. They don’t have a podcast or a substack. They are them: a distillation of the early aughts, invisible to everyone except the Seth Cohen set.

These days I listen to a lot of indie pop and rock with jangly guitars, stuff that is rounding the 20- or 25-year anniversary mark--familiar and comforting because it reminds me of just before childhood’s end, before true heartbreak and dorm rooms and insurance premiums and the regular bullshit chores us commoners have to endure. Rilo Kiley is this kind of music’s apotheosis. No other band matches my heartbeat so.

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