Day 66: "Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie" - Alanis Morisette (1998)

I don't blame any of you for thinking I had forgotten about this.  The truth is both more profound and prosaic than me losing interest - sometimes, life gets in the way, and over the last 3 weeks I've been to America and back, participated in two World Championships, been horrifically ill, and orchestrated a 40th Birthday Party for my significant other which was as successful as it was mentally and fiscally draining.  And in all the time these other tasks have been taking over my life, I've looked back at The Pile knowing that there are only 2 albums left in the first stack for me to write about.

So now, the dust has settled, a degree of normality has returned to my weekly schedule, and I find myself with time again to sit back at my PC, listen to a whole album, and write about it some more.

Today's album is a combination of misguided, puzzling, and inevitable, a kind of melange of bad decision making which to this day comes back to haunt me, but rarely in musical form.  I think it's possible that you could ask anyone of my generation with a significant CD collection, and they would probably have an Alanis Morrisette album in their CD racks somewhere.  But probably not this one.

Listen to me here

It's impossible to deny that Alanis Morrissette's "Jagged Little Pill" album was a landmark album for the mid 90's.  There's a reason that when you scroll through Alanis' album listings in Spotify there are nearly as many versions of Jagged Little Pill (Original, 2005 Acoustic version, 2015 Collectors Edition, 2015 Remaster, and 2015 Spotify Landmark Edition) as there are other studio albums of hers over the past 20 years (Seven in total, including a 7-part choral symphony from 1999 which is entirely weird enough to make complete sense that that is what she did after releasing this album).  I'd imagine everyone over the age of 32 knows at least one track off that album well enough to sing along to from start to finish, and it's still the number on place to go for angry young women owning Full House's Dave Coulier to musical accompaniment.

Somehow, I don't own a copy of Jagged Little Pill any more.  Maybe this is why Spotfy has 5 different versions for me to choose from, they can sense I am missing a critical piece of my Gen X identity and are overcompensating on my behalf.  What I do own is the massively underwhelming follow up to it, and honestly, I can't quite remember how I came to own it.  I have a hunch though, and a strong enough sense that it might be correct that I'm just going to go with it, as it seems highly unlikely that anyone is going to come forward to contradict me at that point.

Now, while Millenials these days may never be in a position to own their own home, receive a state pension, or be able to better themselves through education without accruing a life changing amount of crippling debt in the process, they don't know how easy they have it now that the existence of Spotify has solved the tricky problem of what happens when two people in a relationship move in together and they have to co-mingle their CD collections.  You've no idea how easy you have it, Millenial readers, because that conundrum once required the wisdom of Solomon to navigate those choppy waters.  My current partner and I manage through a system I devised where all my CDs are in my office where I can hide my shame, and all of her CDs are in our front room because she's come to terms with the fact that she loves Shakira and Ricky Martin and doesn't care who knows it.  But when I began co-habiting with the Girl Who Broke My Heart, she and I both had a sizeable CD collection, there was some crossover between us, and precisely one room in the house where our CDs lived.  This meant, as part of the juvenile adult nesting process, there was a point at which we sat down with all our CDs, decided how we were going to display and sort them, and figured out what to do with duplicate albums we both owned.

Now I, as has been discussed before, am incredibly loathe to dispose of any CDs at all, so the second question was answered by my taking all of my copies of our duplicate albums, putting them in a couple of plastic bags, and putting said bags under the bed in the guest bedroom, which turned out to be one of the few wise choices I made in those four years.  The result of this exercise was a shelf full of co-mingled CDs, initially sorted by some system (I'm a fan of divided by genre, then alphabetic by artist, but I am sure at the time I probably made some noises in that direction, then just did whatever she wanted in terms of sorting), and then progressively becoming a mad jumble of CDs as cases were taken out, listened to, and replaced haphazardly.

I'm almost certain this album was a part of that interconnected CD collection, and I'm almost equally sure that I wasn't the person who originally brought it to the table.

Fast forward four years, and we find ourselves in the pits of my deepest misery.  We had managed to break up, or rather I had been broken up with (to be technically correct), with 3 months left on the lease on our rented house.  I, with no-where else to go (my parents in Spain, my sister in Manchester, and me with a job I needed to hold down) was priced into staying there until the lease expired in order to look for and find a new place.  The Girl, who's mother lived 10 minutes down the road in a house with two empty spare beds, also flatly refused to move out, which meant I had the exciting experience of spending 90 days in a home with someone experiencing a combination of guilt and loathing every time they saw me, and my emotional reaction to them was not much better.  During that time, I spent a lot of time in that guest bedroom which had become my defacto actual bedroom, enjoying the company of the CDs I had stashed beneath that bed.  

When the time came to move out, there were no goodbyes.  I knew she would be out of the house one weekend, and I'd managed to line up a place to move into - too expensive, and small, but I was desperate and out of options.  I arranged a removal company, and when I heard her leave the house on the Friday evening, I began frantically boxing everything which was mine, knowing that in about 30 hours, removal men would arrive to transport me from this hellish existence into one which might also have been far from ideal, but was at least different.

Whatever system we had put in place for CD sorting had, by this time, long since given way to madness. I knew which duplicates not to take by virtue of the contents of the bags under the bed, so I skimmed through the collected albums, frantically plucking out those which registered in my head as "mine", rather than hers, or even any I might have considered 'shared'.  At the same time, there wasn't a lot of careful consideration exercised in this process, and the outcome was just a couple of boxes full of relatively unsorted CDs and a set of half-empty shelves.

Come Sunday morning, I'd boxed everything up, dismantled the furniture, wound cables on electronic goods and was ready for deliverance.  I left, without fanfare, without leaving a note or forwarding address, and was whisked away to my new flat to contemplate my choices.  The foresight I had shown with CDs had not extended to things like kitchenware or pans, the old ones of which I owned prior to moving in all long-since thrown away, and I arrived at my new home with 2 mugs, a plate, a couple of glasses and a frying pan to my name.  At least I had a full CD collection.

And now, here this album sits, a relic of my desperation to leave that place that made me so miserable and empty and frustrated for such a long time that even writing about it has left me feeling tense and on edge.  It doesn't help that the album is a turgid monstrosity which, by comparison to the razor sharp and punchy Jagged Little Pill, seems full of nonsensically whimsical self-help codswallop that it feels totally at odds with the emotional gutpunch the circumstances of my acquisition of it brought home.

If there's a redeeming feature to it, a spark of the brilliance of the previous album on here, it exists only in "Joining You", which spins the hippie positivity of the rest of the album on its head in a song where she explains to a suicidal teen how thin the line between coping and maintaining balance and spiralling totally out of control can be, something I can relate to both in my own experience and in watching close friends go through the same thing.

So there we have it, a terrible album from a terrible time with a single moment of brilliance hiding at the tail end of it, a winding tale of my depressing young adulthood, and more importantly, one blog post closer to finishing this first pile.

I am going to finish this thing if it kills me, dear reader.