156. Song No. 2,393: “Dear Sir,” Lotion
Nobody’s Cool, 1996

My fondness for Lotion, like all the best deep affections, starts with a cocktail of selective completionist tendencies, utterly convincing apocryphal proclamations and Pynchonesque nonsense bleeding into the meatspace.

Thomas Pynchon is, by far, my favorite living writer and an inarguable national treasure. I admire the tenacity of his hermit tendencies and am convinced that the proximity of our birthdays means something cosmically ordained but, above all, I credit him for my infatuation with sentences that double as their own paragraphs, over-the-top slapstick humor maximizing the impact of counterweighted heartbreak and novels that require their own wikipediae to fully appreciate their seemingly impenetrably arcane but absolutely perfect meaning.

He’s also the perfect example of my favorite literary trick: turning the mundane into something transcendent if not demonstrably, deconstructedly inane and somehow always also more authentic and better in the end. Which is fitting for the guy who’s the reason no Pulitzer Prize for fiction was awarded in 1974: The panel couldn’t get behind recognizing Gravity’s Rainbow, which aside from being one of my all-time favorite books is the post-WWII novel that ambitiously and effectively crams a world of history, politics, physics equations, international relations and lack thereof, and utterly human storytelling into a veritable dying star of a densely packed package that also commits the apparently hellworthy trespass of intricately detailing an act of coprophagia, thus shooting down its eligibility on account of being too obscene.

(I have so many tabs open for this post, which is also fitting given the aforementioned dedicated Pynchonopedia required to get the most from sauntering onto his wavelength.)

Okay, so how the hell does literature’s most famous living recluse relate to Lotion?

That, my loves, is where the stuff of legends comes in.

Yes, Pynchon has been hiding out in the greatest city in the world. Yes, that’s where his path crossed with that of ’90s alt-rockers Lotion. Yes, he was an admitted fan of the band. Yes, he wrote an Esquire article about/interviewed them.

No, despite all appearances and long-spun yarns to the contrary, he did not write the liner notes to Nobody’s Cool. But is believing otherwise why I bought this album and started listening to Lotion in the first place? Oh, FUCK yes.

Do they bear his name? Do they read like his writings? Did he quietly play along for years? You’re goddamn right that’s affirmative on all accounts. And rather than ruin a ruse that the band themselves finally revealed for the fiction that it is, I maintain that the whole debacle actually improves as it fully and finally unfurls.

(FWIW, Pynchon actually DID legitimately pen some other liner notes, so that’s a whole new music-acquisition adventure on the horizon.)

Even though I was introduced to Lotion via some charmingly hilarious deception, my adoration of them is fierce and true. And this, the lead-off hitter for a home-run of an album, is a big reason why it was love from the very first song.

“Dear Sir” sounds like high school, or at least the very beginning of those four years when being in high school is still a reality you’re adapting to so you’re not really sure if this is an improvement or just a superficially different serving of more of the same. I fucking hated high school and spent the first two years of college in secret, breathlessly grateful disbelief that I’d never have to endure that cumulative horror again, but that doesn’t mean that era was wholly without redemption.

Unfinished, tangential and incomplete thoughts are a pretty apt verbal corollary to how surreal high school felt at first, the gobsmacking debut of a feeling that would underscore almost every day of the 23 years since: the unshakable sense that I might be old enough for this but I’m in no conceivable way ready for any of it. Feeling elevated to a level of responsibility beyond my grasp is an old friend now but, jesus god, it’s no more welcome nor comfortable than it was those first days of being late to every single class because my high school experience coincided with the sprawling district’s peak attendance years, and the crush of teenage creatures scurrying and making out and idly chatting and hurrying just as frantically in opposing directions through those undulating sardine-can halls was mightily overwhelming to an introverted people-watcher who was already on the periphery of everything here, too.

And the meandering, loosely connected train of thought masquerading as the lyrics to “Dear Sir,” somehow, capture that feeling, and the way there was always that crush or that friend or whatever oasis of camaraderie, familiarity, butterflies or comfort that made the intertwined anonymity and hyper-insecure fear of coming much foo into focus via the most mortifying scenarios possible a little easier to handle, the face in the crowd that made you feel like you might actually belong here after all and some part of this is gonna make it all worth it.