Tag Game

I was asked today - it was that sort of day - what was the most inspiring thing I'd ever read or heard, and I was at a bit of a loss. I'm a bit too cynical to get inspired by much so I couldn't really answer. But as I was leaving work today I remembered something.

In the late 80s I was living in a graduate student dormitory at Columbia, on 116th. It was miserable, I couldn't sleep, the place was designed so that if anyone in any of the rooms made a noise, I could hear it. For solace I used to listen to the radio, and there was a vaguely alternative station coming out of somewhere on Long Island...Garden City? Late one night, as I was hearing the guy next door, Joel, dribbling a f&*cking basketball in his room (I'm not joking) they played a Jonathan Richman song, 'Tag Game'.

I'd been, like anyone else with any sort of sensibility who'd come of age in the 70s (I know this dates me) unnerved and amazed at the Modern Lovers album, with its strange musicality and naive aggression, and Jonathan's nasal delivery. I knew that afterwards he'd gone a bit strange, songs about being a little dinosaur, a little airplane and whatnot. I only heard the Tag Game once but for years afterwards I could still remember the melody and bit of the lyrics.

Years later I found it on a CD, and I had my own copy. There's one bit in it that I felt was almost a direct challenge to me, my cowardice, lack of participation in things, my general not-being-thereness. It goes...

Well now when Paul starts up the tag game
don't let me be
someone sittin on the side sayin
'sorry, it's not for me'

And each time I heard it I cringed, knowing that when Paul did, in fact, start up the Tag Game, I would be sitting on the side making some excuse or generally trying to convince myself that I was above it all, but at the same time desperately wishing I was the sort of person who'd just relax and join in. I could picture the scene quite clearly in my minds' eye, even down to the colors and the sort of light, and the feeling of guilt and hopeless despair as I excuse myself awkwardly from the game.

I used to sometimes summon up this Tag Game thing as a way of forcing myself to participate, to let go. It worked. And I used the song as a reward too sometimes, if I'd done something particularly exciting or memorable (and this was at its height when I lived in Singapore, of all places) I'd play it in the car over and over as i was driving home.

Postscript: This makes me sound miserable, I'm not. The despair and hopelessness was enhanced for dramatic effect.