OTR, Take 62: Broken Social Scene - Feel Good Lost

Listen along via Tidal or Spotify.

March, 2003.

A Saturday, the first mid-60s blue-sky day of the year – the day commonly known as Skirt Day around Denison. I had spent much of the previous week working 20 hour days on my symposium paper, the longform work of "original" philosophy each philosophy major had to draft and present to the faculty and fellow senior majors. I was weeks away from graduation, pondering what the next phase of life would be like.

That afternoon, after a discussion with my suitemate Aru – the smartest person I've ever met, and an even better person – I decided to take a nap, head full of ideas and lusting after some rest.

I lived in a four-person suite, with each of us having our own bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen, eating area, and large common area. We felt rich that year: we had our own coffee maker, could make food without timing the cafeterias, and Aru would fry up bacon and make the best rice I've ever eaten in an old Japanese ricemaker that the rest of us didn't know how to use.

My bedroom, and I wish I had a photo of it, was probably what you might imagine: wall to wall books, a ludicrous surround sound stereo for a 10x10 room, and a small desk with a large desktop that I didn't often use. I spent most of my work time at a fortress I made in the library, complete with mini fridge and Foreman grill. My least favorite place in my room was the bed, a single mattress designed for someone at least a half-foot shorter than me. I slept poorly for all four years of college, folded up like an old road map.

Nevertheless, I shamboled back to my room and, pulling my knees nearly to my chest, fell under the covers.

It was the best rest I have ever had.

Although I did not make the connection at the time, I have come to associate that nap with Broken Social Scene's Feel Good Lost, a record so immersive and beguiling as to make laughable any real genre label. Broken Social Scene's later albums fit pretty neatly in the indie rock genre, but Feel Good Lost? It's too airy and loose and tangential to be pinned down like a butterfly, label affixed under it.

I remember a golden glow around my room, the sun seeping through the closed blinds and imbuing the rows of books with a visible hum. I rarely fall asleep easily – with my ADHD, my mind is always sprinting to the next thought, the new idea, the looming syncretic bonding of strange bedfellows. If I am honest with you, I don't know whether I fell asleep that day or not. I think so. Or I fell into such a deep trance, a reverie that presented as a lucid dream, that there is no useful distinction.

Have you ever seen Richard Linklater's film Waking Life? I saw this in a little art theatre my junior year. It's a worthwhile film, a touch on the nose but quite good. In it, the protagonist goes on a surreal quest through events that may or may not be one long lucid dream, encountering people who would be impossible to actually meet (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy's characters from Before Sunrise, for instance) and delving into questions about metaphysics, existentialism, reality, etc. This felt like a much more chill version of what the protagonist of Waking Life went through.

There's something about that floaty feeling of not being entirely tethered to "reality" that sometimes makes me anxious and other times makes me feel complete and free. That sense of everything being possible and everything having always already happened. That brief insight, that short connection with understanding that this moment is forever and not at all.

Feel Good Lost. A exhortation, a demand. An invitation, with a soundtrack for the journey to nowhere and everywhere. I think sometimes about the perpetual process of orientation, disorientation, and reorientation – and I wonder whether we are better served becoming comfortable, becoming home in that state of disorientation, with little, floating guitar arpeggios and lilting notes buffering us.

Must we reorient?

What would happen if we learned to feel good lost? If we laid, a compressed accordion, in bed and let the surreality and the disorientation embrace us?