Internal Wrangler

When I was 22 I studied in Spain for 6 months. I'd left my first serious girlfriend back home in the USA, and that had been hard but we wrote long emails back and forth to each other and in a way that was its own happiness, the joy of going to an internet cafe and logging in to see an email from my favorite person. I used to print them out so I could take them home and read them later--they were that long, and I was that happy to get them.

One day her email was about a project she had in a graphic arts class, in which she was identifying albums that were references to older album art. Things like GBV's Alien Lanes, The Clash's London Calling, and Clinic's Internal Wrangler. I hadn't realized before then that any of those albums were referencing anything, and that felt...unsettling to me. Part of that was because I was older than her, I'm sure, and had been the Knower of More Music Things in our relationship to that point. And obviously there was a gender element to this, too, though I would've been blind to that idea and would have chafed at the suggestion of it at the time if someone had said so.

But I think the main thing that felt so unsettling was a sense that she was becoming a new, different person while I was away. Not that I resented her growth, but I think as I looked up the album art of Benny Golson, Elvis, and Ornette Coleman what I felt, and what made me sad and gave me a vague, looming sense of danger, of impending loss, was a new distance between us, a distance that felt much more threatening than the many thousands of miles between us, over the Atlantic Ocean, from Sevilla to Lincoln.