One of my favourite songs ever made is How Much I Feel by Ambrosia, and those of you that know me well know this about me already. I have posted about it a lot over the years in various places. Chances are, on any average day in my life I’m singing this song at some point. I like this song not just because it’s catchy and sounds great etc, although that’s one aspect of it. The main reason I like this song has always been because of how well written it is, and what it’s able to say in such a short span of time. Economy in writing is really important to me, and this song is a perfect example of that. I appreciate the writing aspect the most probably because I’m a writer, but it’s also simply just because the writing is so brilliant I can’t believe someone did it. To me it’s one of those rare works of art that feels like some kind of higher power sent it down here, and it wasn’t just made by humans. I only have this feeling with a couple of artists and works, so when it happens it’s special. If you’ve never heard the song before go listen to it right now while reading the lyrics in another tab.
If you don’t have time for that, I’ll just get into it here (but you should still seek the song out, because it’s a masterpiece). The lyrics involve a guy telling the main narrative of his romantic life: he has a girlfriend at the beginning of the song, they break up because she thinks he was cheating on her (which is never really confirmed or denied by the narrator), he can’t stop thinking about her over the years, and then at the end of the song we hear the last verse. It’s a shocker: it’s now years later, the guy meets the ex-girlfriend again (the circumstances for this meeting are not explained, and don’t really need to be), and he reveals that he is now happily married to some other woman. But that’s not the crazy part, there is still the real kicker, the part of the song I have never been able to shake from my mind over the years. During this last verse, after he tells the ex-girlfriend about how he’s now married, "There's just something that I've got to say. Sometimes when we make love, I still see your face.”
This line is absolutely incredible to me on several layers. First of all, the obvious: it’s insane to admit that sort of thing out loud. It’s something that is probably natural if you’re a human being and you’ve been having sex with the same person for like 50 years straight. That’s just how the human brain works, you think about lots of shit in an average day. But to admit it, say it out loud, and tell it to the person you’ve been thinking about for that many years is wild. I get chills thinking about this, I’m getting goosebumps right now even. Secondly, the thing about this line that’s so great is how adult and mature it is. It’s a great example of “they don’t make em like that anymore” in music; to think that they put this line in a song that was just randomly on the radio is insane to me. People in the 70s were built differently. And thirdly, the thing about this line that is so thought provoking to me is what I wanted to get into with this post, which is the recurring idea I keep having: is it better to yearn for your whole life about something? Or is it better to just get what you want and not think about goals ever again? This is something I cannot stop thinking about because I seriously do not know the right answer. I think about this almost every day and I don’t know what to tell you.
Another way to think about this is the cliche line, “It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” I don’t know who said this, and I don’t think this is necessarily true. Is it really better to have a dream, accomplish that dream, know what it’s like, and then it’s over? To give you an example of what I mean: my goals in life have always been to get married to a 6’2” blonde Dutch woman with Farrah Fawcett hair, own a white Dodge Challenger like Kowalski in Vanishing Point, have a giant house, and make a living off artistic work. But then what would happen if that all worked out? Let’s say I ended up becoming super rich and got everything I ever wanted….what next? I’m sure my happiness probably wouldn’t be sustained every day, and after awhile I’d probably end up being miserable about something else. But on the other hand, with the life I have now (the dreaming about having a better life, or “yearning” or whatever you want to call it), I at least have something that has never been ruined. I have something to work towards. Do you know what I mean? In other words, the blonde wife, the Dodge Challenger, the house, etc….they’re all dreams that haven’t been sullied by anything yet. That’s why I don’t think that “better to have loved” shit is true necessarily.
The world is sort of filled with guys who got everything they ever wanted and don’t really seem to look all that happy. I mean look at guys like Drake or Kanye West: they have much more than myself, and yet they’re not people I would really aspire to be. Or look at people like Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos; they’re rich, and have way more resources than I ever will. But something about them just seems tragic to me. What do you do when you get everything you ever wanted? Do you just sit back and get your dick sucked by your Asian or Hispanic trophy wife for the rest of your days? Isn’t there more to life? And that’s my whole point: even when you get the shit you want to get, you still have to deal with your own bullshit and misery afterward. I feel like there’s almost no point to getting exactly what you want in some cases.
But then again, who knows. (That’s why I said earlier I think about this all the time and have no clue which answer is the right one. I go back and forth about this one quite a bit). I could be wrong about everything I just said. There have been girls I banged in my early 20s who I still think about, and when I find myself in a stressful situation, a bored moment on the subway, or a depressing time in life, I think back to my time with them and it puts a smile on my face. These girls were so pretty and perfect it still just cheers me up to think about them. I could be having a terrible time, and then I’ll think back to some girl I was with when I was like 22 or something and I feel a little better to know I lived through that. Or sometimes I’ll think about the first time I made it to Amsterdam after years of dreaming about it, and how it lived up to all the hype and visions I had of it in my mind. I heard somewhere once that when you think about a good memory in your life, it activates reward areas in your brain or something like that. So nostalgia can literally be good for you.
Still though, I keep going back and forth on this one. What happens after you accomplish a dream, and after you have gone back to reminiscing about it? You obviously can’t live in a state of nostalgia forever. It’s nice that it happened, but it unfortunately ends. So then what? To be completely honest with you, there are certain things in life that I am kinda happy about it not ever working out. It sucks that I’m not married to a super hot Dutch blonde girl and I’m not driving a muscle car, but at the same time I’m kinda happy I don’t have this in my life because I can still dream about what it would be like. If it were to happen, the dream would be dead.
There’s another way to think about this that I think about from time to time. If you have ever seen the film Midnight in Paris, I am referring to the Ernest Hemingway monologue. He says, “I believe that love that is true and real creates a respite from death. All cowardice comes from not loving, or not loving well, which is the same thing. And when the man who is brave and true looks death squarely in the face like some rhino hunters I know, or Belmonte, who's truly brave. It is because they love with sufficient passion to push death out of their minds, until the return that it does to all men. And then you must make really good love again. Think about it.” In other words, in terms of the original topic of longing/yearning and so forth, what he’s saying here is you basically must have a dream, and then if/when you accomplish the dream, do it all over again from the beginning with another dream, then accomplish that dream, and on and on. You have to constantly be doing the work for yourself of inventing reasons you want to stay alive.