195. Song No. 2,925: “Effington,” Ben Folds
Way to Normal, 2008

Somewhere after his breakout first band but before an aptly named side project, I fell hard for the mix of piano-stool-throwing energy, achingly confessional lyrics and offbeat sense of humor Ben Folds brings to his music, all of which are dialed way past 11 at his live shows (the absolute best way to experience his music, without question). By the time Way to Normal came out, putting college behind me meant losing the immediate, proximal community of people whose shared music taste meant that those frequent concerts, even more frequent singalongs and all the other things reinforcing the bonds amplifying the appeal of certain musical outfits, one of whom was Ben Folds, receded into the distance.

It’s getting harder and harder to enjoy the more lighthearted aspects of Ben Folds’ music, for purely associative reasons. The people I’ve traversed our once-shared tiny state from coast to coast and occasionally over the bridge with to whatever shore, city, casino, or legendary local venue Ben Folds was playing this time, whose voices all filled dorm rooms and college pubs and unsafely stuffed cars along with mine, who have band-autographed (and, sometimes, -illustrated!) set lists from the shows we shared together, have all since scattered. And most of the time it’s fine, that’s life, and a number of those people have changed in ways that are far more unforgiving than any physical distance could ever be anyway. But there are times when it just hurts to realize that such warmth, such friendly communion and such a visceral sense of belonging are all things of the past that might not even be as fondly or richly remembered by anyone else who made those moments worth tucking away.

Which is a lot to come screaming from the cobwebs of things past, dislodged as they were by a song that starts out with a lyrics like “If there’s a God / He is laughing at us / And our football team.” But maybe that collision of the ineffable and the profoundly mundane is exactly what it takes to shake rusty old memories loose for another polish before putting them back where they belong, lest you get a little too lost in them and a little more unmoored from the present you’re supposed to be living in.

The whole song is written from the outside looking in and fueled by a whole lot of what-ifs that just get easier to ask and even easier to be romanced by the farther you get from where you thought you’d land in a perfect world. And while I am largely happy with the state of my existence, too many of my nearest and dearest both past and present all being a little too physically beyond reach has been hitting me a little too hard and making me feel a little too left behind or, at the very least, something not entirely unlike being stuck in place recently, and a little too out of touch with how the normal people handle the sporadic stabs of friendships waned, if they even feel these things at all, to even venture an imaginative guess let alone know how to handle them.