Royal Fantasy

I just heard Porno for Pyros on NPR on my way home from book club.

I am willing to bet that sentence has never, in the history of ever, been said before.

I forgot how much I used to adore them. "We’ll Make Great Pets!" It was so deep. I remember thinking it was such a brilliantly dark idea, I contemplated it for days on end. Of course, this was during the phase in my life where I wore a lot of black turtlenecks and wrote poetry in BLACK INK while I cried about the tragedy that was suburban public school life. While snacking on brie.

It was a grueling time.

So I remember how awesome the ending was… I used to think it was a musical description of the downfall of humankind, of hope being dashed, over and over again while aliens put us into the human equivalent of ant farms. (Would that just be farms?)

Tonight it sounded more like a few plunky notes on a keyboard. I think I was deeper, then.

I remember the old feelings it conjured, though, the early 90s musical adaptation of the ache in my angsty, teenage heart. So Porno for Pyro, thanks. You got me through some hard, to-be-a-princess-or-a-goth-y-skater-chick? times. (If you don’t know how that battle turned out, see prior 692 blog entries. … also: title.)

Oddly enough, that kind of relates back to a discussion we had at our book group. We talked about how we can still read good books and appreciate them, but as adults, we don’t seem to be all-consumed by stories anymore, like we were as nerdy little bookish kids. We talked about how Madeleine L’Engle or C.S. Lewis (along with dozens of lesser authors) could totally entrap our imaginations and preoccupy our minds for days. We can read those same stories now, and get a delicious, fulfilling sensation from them, but not in the drunk-with-continuing-the-story-in-our-brains,-including-in-our-dreams, way.

I miss that. But as someone pointed out, we were, mostly, as kids, living in a pretty small world. As adults, we’ve seen a lot more of the world, both geographically and socially. We can live vicariously through our own lives, rather than through someone else’s written description. But I still miss that feeling I got from the Bobbsey Twins, or The Secret Garden. The total immersion in my own imagination and belief that those worlds were tangible. So I’m making a list, and going back to see if I can recapture even just a sliver of that. What was the last book you felt that way about?