Caveat: 16 years ago, a termite that’s choking on the splinters

I was walking to work, and Beck's song "Loser" came around on my mp3 player.  Where does a brilliant line like "'My time is a piece of wax falling on a termite that's choking on the splinters."  It's Dylanesque, certainly.  I always liked this song.

The song evokes strong mental associations of January, 1995, when the song was getting tons of radio time.  I was working nights, at the UPS facility in Northeast Minneapolis.  I would go and throw boxes onto and off of conveyor belts for several hours, each night.  I was feeling very blue collar – I even had a teamster card, because you have to have one to work at UPS, even as a part-timer.  I was also taking classes during the day, trying to fill in some course work for my ongoing graduate school applications.  I was taking a fabulous graduate seminar on semiotics, I remember. 

The most significant thing going on in my life was that that was the point in time when Michelle and I had made the commitment "for better or for worse" to each other.  I had come back from Chile in November of 94, and Michelle and I had moved in together and decided we were most officially a couple.  In a sense, it was a time of optimism and contentment, for me.  I had "settled," perhaps, but it was that point in settling when settling was exactly what I wanted to be doing. 

Every night, driving up the 35W from our duplex apartment off Franlin Avenue, I would hear Beck's song.  "I'm a loser, baby.  So why don't you kill me."  I felt the song was deeply ironic.  I could relate.  Michelle, on the other hand, hated the song.  More importantly, she hated the fact that I liked the song.  It was indicative of low self-esteem, she would argue.  She was right – but I didn't see the big deal.  It was one of our few arguments from that period of our life, which was a sort of desperately poor married bliss, for the most part, at that stage.

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