The Soundtrack of Your Life

I've done this a couple of times before, once in 2007 and again in 2014. The game is to set your music library on shuffle, and each song that comes up is the one that will play during a specific scene in the movie of your life. I've added quite a few things in the last 5.5 years, so let's see how it goes.

Opening Credits: Let's Spend the Night Together, Rolling Stones - A song about a guy trying to convince someone to spend the night with him, because of how badly he needs them. It's a little odd he starts out saying they can just take their time, but then it's all about satisfying each other's needs. Not exactly the sort of thing that puts a person at ease from where I'm sitting. So a major part of this movie is going to be me trying to convince people I care about of the sincerity of my feelings. Or I could be lying, and just telling them sweet nothings to get what I want from them. The former feels more accurate for me, but the latter seems more in line with the song.

Waking Up: Hardware Store, Weird Al Yankovic - Being incredibly excited about the grand opening of a brand-new hardware store? When I was a kid, this would have felt perfectly fitting for my dad, who was seemingly always dragging my ass to Westlake's for more screws or some other damn thing. I feel like with a song like this, you have to just take it at face value. So I am, for some reason I can't fathom, waking up to go to the hardware store. Meaning I either work there, or I've developed a taste for home improvement projects. Or I guess I could be a contractor or something. I'm trying to picture myself roaming the aisles of a hardware store looking at stuff with excitement and awe, rather than confusion at the sheer number of different bolts and washers, and it's just not happening.

First Day of School: Doing It All For My Baby, Huey Lewis & the News - I normally try to picture these movies as moving chronologically from childhood to my inevitable demise, but between the previous song and this one, that's hard to manage. I can't picture this working for Little Kid Calvin. Unless it's really about my one of my parents' day, all the crap they have to do to get me ready before they go to work, but it's worth it because I'm such a swell kid. Either that, or it's about me as an adult going back to school to further my education so I can make more money for my sweetie who believes in me. Or I want them to believe in me, if we're going with the "trying to convince people of my sincerity" approach to the opening song.

Falling In Love: Shaolin Styles, Bar 9 Nero RMX - I don't know, this is like a half-version, or sped-up version of a Nero Remix of "Shaolin Style" I got from Alex randomly a decade ago. It's a thumping beat mixed with dialogue from some old martial arts movie, I think. I have no fucking clue how that plays into me falling in love, unless there's something soft or quiet playing in the background. Then I see the person I fall, this hits loudly, and it's like everything got flipped on its head. I don't think this being the falling in love song bodes well for the relationship, though.

First Love Song: Wanderlove, Mason Williams - At least this is about love. This would be a good song to transition from for what I described in the previous song. It's very soft, with the acoustic guitar, a few other instruments chipping in gently. The guy is singing about 'the wine of loving' and visiting meadows where cold winds never blow. If this is what's going through my mind during the relationship, somebody must have slipped something into that wine, because I'm fucked up.

Breaking Up: Shoop, Salt-N-Pepa - Thank you, Deadpool soundtrack. Anyway, considering this song is all about the ladies ogling various dudes, I'm assuming one of us got a wandering eye and the other was not OK with it. Or one of us thought they were in a serious relationship, and the other was just having a good time. Which would play into the Opening Credits song, either because I was in it for real, and she didn't realize it, or she was, but I was just using her and I got bored, depending on how much of an asshole we're making me in this movie. I'd rather it was the first option, but the last time I did this, Movie Calvin was kind of a creepy weirdo so who knows. Or we could play up the contrast between this and Wanderlove, to show the two of us are just too different to work.

Prom: Papercut, Linkin Park - Oh dear, that doesn't bode well at all. I'm going to cause a huge scene as all my insecurities show through and I self-sabotage to an extent even Deadpool would consider excessive. I'm not sure if I try to bring another girl to prom to make the ex jealous and it fails, or I humiliate myself, or something else, but it's not gonna be pretty. No big surprise, considering the next category.

Mental Breakdown: For a Few Dollars More, Hugo Montenegro - I have no idea how this relates to a mental breakdown. Best I can figure is I've tried to focus entirely on work and maybe transient, fleeting pleasure, while shutting down entirely on any deeper emotional level. All that "feelings" stuff was too much work, so I'm just not going to bother. Sincerity is futile, so just forget it. Probably a lot of me sitting at home alone, eating cheap pizza and watching Clint Eastwood movies.

Driving: Carry On Wayward Son, Kansas - If we're being optimistic, a song about not giving up yet. There's still people and things out there worth caring about, and it's a matter of figuring out what those really are. Not letting myself get fooled or bogged down with pointless crap. I'm picturing deciding to get out of the apartment and drive someplace out in nature, a nice grassland or a bluff overlooking a river. And it turns out to be a beautiful day, great drive, not too much traffic. I end up sitting wherever I went for a long time, just appreciating the scenery. It makes me decide to do more of that to try and find something I'm excited about.

Flashback: 100 Years From Now, Huey Lewis and the News - This feels like a joke sequence. A song about the future, playing during a flashback. I guess it's really about how people wreck their relationships by getting hung up on petty shit that doesn't matter in the long run. If the relationship really matters, I wouldn't let those things make me throw it away. So let's revise. The previous song will strictly be for the driving portion of that trip to some natural splendor. Then this plays while I'm sitting there, my mind drifting from the scene in front of me to points in the past where I made too big of a deal of something that wasn't worth it, and understanding what I threw away as a result.

Getting Back Together: Ten to Twenty, Sneaker Pimps - There's a nice echo effect to the guitars in this that I really like. Although in general I like songs that have that aspect to their music, I don't know why. Just hits some part of me right. I'm not entirely sure what this one is about. Insecurities and flaws. The song mentions fear, contempt, vanity. Things being too fragile to say. Maybe me searching the places I know the significant other liked to go, still thinking about how I tripped myself up. Or trying to explain that to her when I find her. Honestly, it doesn't feel like a song about two people who would get back together, so much as two people who figure out they don't fit. Because they feed off each other's worst tendencies. And yet. . .

Wedding: Rich Girl, Hall and Oates - See? This is not a good song for a wedding! A person who has always relied on someone else's wealth or whatever to take care of everything. Who is indifferent to the suffering of others because their life has been so easy they don't understand what suffering is. I guess it's possible that, assuming this isn't about me being a sociopath (fingers crossed), it's about my significant other having gotten engaged to some other person while I was having my mental breakdown and whatnot. And this other person is a domineering prick, so I'm going to do the big "I OBJECT!" thing during the wedding a make a complete ass of myself. Probably by barging into the wrong wedding.

Birth of a Child: Mudshovel, Staind - *Maniacal laughter* Is our child the Anti-Christ? Although the song is about one person being unable or unwilling to feel the other's pain, about that person just being a taker. I'm kind of picturing a comedy pregnancy sequence where the mother-to-be is not having a good time of it and is yelling at me in a nearly demonic voice about how this is all my fault and she's going to castrate me so it never happens again. I'm going to point out I didn't even want kids, and she's going to throw me through a wall.

Final Battle: If This Is It, Huey Lewis and the News - Oh come on, I have 12 Huey Lewis songs out of more than 900 total songs. How the fuck did I end up with three of them in this thing, but no La Roux, Gorillaz, or Blood Red Shoes? Apparently between the questionable wedding, and the outbreak of violence and accusations at the hospital, we're going to be breaking up again. She's avoiding me and ducking phone calls, basically ghosting me. I'm hitting the bottle, not that I would have to hit it very hard for it to take effect, and just wishing she would tell me the truth. That it's over again. We can't get past our hangups. Our poor child, product of a broken home.

Death Scene: Don't Take Your Love Away, VAST - Great, I'm trying for a last second, deathbed reconciliation with her. That feels kind of cheap on my part, try and get her to make up with me when I'm about to croak. Unless she's dying, and I'm torn up about it, because now I'm out of chances to fix my past fuck-ups. Maybe there was someone else I really fit better with all along, but we kept missing each other, and that's gone. But maybe at the end, she really knows how much I care? Don't know if that's better or worse, to not really know it until it's too late. What are you left with then, after all? Thoughts of what could have been? Can't get anywhere like that. Maybe I shouldn't be typing this at 1 in the morning. I'm more morose than usual.

Funeral Scene, Believe Me, Fort Minor - There's a line in this I like: 'I was on the right track, but I was on the wrong train.' Not entirely sure what that means, but it sounds good. A song all about someone finally realizing the other person is not what they thought they were, is only dragging them down, and so they're just done with that person. Well, I'm dead now, so yes, they're done with me. I guess it's finally sunk in on everyone that I'm never going to be what they expected/hoped I would be. Or maybe I've always been frustrated that they didn't live up to what I expected, and I happy to be done with them. Just couldn't handle all the imperfections that come with dealing with other people.

End Credits: Touch Me, The Doors - And we're back where we started, a song about a guy trying to convince a lady to move pass a threshold of some sort with him. He's making promises, this time about loving her until the stars fall from the skies. At this stage, this song would almost be mocking. Like people couldn't touch me, because I couldn't lower the barriers enough for them to do that. We may or may not have loved each other endlessly, but if the distance between us is greater than between earth and those stars in the sky, it doesn't matter a heck of a lot.