Yearbook pages followed a strict blueprint at my high school. Mrs. McPherson gave us a square of blue graph paper, and a couple of weeks later we brought it back to her, a professional photo of ourselves paper-clipped onto it, the famous quotation of our choice scribbled underneath. All the pages looked pretty much the same — lots of long hair and straight teeth and poses involving wagon wheels and lines from Billy Joel songs — and we had to get special permission if we wanted to do anything different. Well, I couldn’t decide on just a couple of quotations; I had a good half-dozen of them, including an entire verse of “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” so I got special permission to format my own page, and I coaxed the blue graph paper into my mom’s typewriter and carefully configured my little collection of quotations.

Reading them now, I cringe. “Live long and prosper”? Jupiter Christmas, that’s dorky — I didn’t even watch Star Trek, for God’s sake. Well, I watched the animated ones on Nickelodeon once in a while, but that doesn’t count. Dennis Miller? Gah. Not. Okay, he’s funny; okay, other girls in my class used to compare me to him all the time. Still. “That’s the news, and I am outta here”? Why didn’t my parents talk me out of that? Oh, right — they tried, but I wouldn’t listen. They didn’t have much to say about the line from Breaking Away, but I realized shortly after we got our yearbooks that I’d gotten the line wrong in the first place. Oops. And the Simon & Garfunkel isn’t too horribly embarrassing all these years later, but only because I didn’t use “Bookends.” God, the yearbook advisors of the world must hate “Bookends” with the fire of a dying sun. It’s lovely little song, but — seniors? Enough already. Seriously. I believe we’ve established to the satisfaction of everyone currently living that it’s a time of innocence, a time of confidences, so maybe you could preserve your memories (they are, after all, if I recall correctly, all that’s left you) with a different song. No, not a James Taylor song. Because you’ve seen rain, I believe, but fire, maybe not so much, and the song is really about…well, sure, it’s great that you want your friends to know that they’ve, uh, got a friend, but I think they know that, because they’re…already…your friends. Well, yes, it has been a long strange trip. But we lived it ourselves, so we know that it’s…oh, I get it. That’s not the point. But you could really describe any part of life as a long strange trip, because life itself is long, and strange, and frequently trippy, so it’s kind of facile, and quoting the Dead…yeah, but I think everyone pretty much knows you smoke pot. See how you’ve got a tie-dye on in your class picture? And dreads? I mean, your classmates saw the dancing bear stickers on your car every morning in the parking lot. I think it’s already fairly clear, based on the hacky-sack club you founded, that…sure. Bob Dylan’s great, but — what’s that? Well, I don’t disagree that the times are, uh, undergoing a few changes here and there, but…no, I know…and I can see how the line about the sons and daughters would speak to you, except…your parents plan to pay for your college, right? So “beyond your command” doesn’t really…fit…here. Does it? Dr. Seuss? All right, Dr. Seuss it is. No, it’s fine. I agree that you will go…places. Whatever.

It’s not just me, right? It’s always the same quotations over and over and over, right? John Lennon’s “Imagine”? James Taylor’s “You’ve Got A Friend”? The Beatles’s “In My Life”? Various blithe manglings on the theme of carpe diem, myriad citations of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off — you’ve noticed it too, right? That everyone quotes the same fifteen or twenty things over and over? When my brother graduated from high school, I actually counted the number of times lines from “Bookends” appeared in his yearbook; when I got up to twenty-five, I stopped, because it just got too depressing. I mean, hadn’t any of those kids ever heard another song? Nobody quoted the Smiths? Nobody quoted Emily Dickinson? Nobody owned a radio? Bought a CD? Read a poem? Opened a fortune cookie? Had a wacky grandparent prone to the occasional folksy expression? Lived in the world?

It didn’t get any better at the college level, either. My college yearbook quotations didn’t just send the pretension needle into the red zone; they melted the needle right off — Talking Heads, Spike Lee, and a medieval Japanese writer whose name I don’t even remember, just for starters. I might as well have scribbled “I AM TRYING WAAAAAYY TOO HARD” in Sharpie on the form they handed out. But at least I tried to include things that nobody had thought of. For God’s sake, people! You’ve got bachelor’s degrees now! You’ve spent the last four years reading books, all kinds of wonderful interesting books! Books about history, books about economics, books about psychology, books by Joyce and Fitzgerald and Hurston and Atwood! The best you can come up with is…Carl Sandburg? Enough with the goddamn Carl Sandburg! Even Carl Sandburg has had enough of the goddamn Carl Sandburg! Enough with the Emerson, too! Let the man rest! You haven’t seen a movie in four years? You haven’t overheard anything funny? You have to quote…Oscar Wilde? Again? Okay, the man’s got a certain way with a pun, but if you have to use someone else’s words, how about someone else’s words that every other someone else in the graduating class hasn’t used also? I mean, I know it’s just a yearbook and it doesn’t matter all that much in the grand scheme of things, but a couple of other people may actually have seen The Princess Bride. We know the lines. We get the jokes. Please, for the love of Pete, rent another movie, any other movie, and take dialogue from that movie instead. No, no, no, NOT “these go to eleven”! Stick a fork in “these go to eleven,” because “these go to eleven” IS DONE! Nothing goes to eleven — NOTHING! That’s the POINT of the SCENE!

I’ve only seen Spinal Tap once all the way through. I liked it. I didn’t love it. I just liked it. Do you know why I merely “liked” it? Why I didn’t find my socks blown clear across the room by its unique genius? Why I didn’t run out and buy it and watch it a hundred more times? Well, I’ll tell you why. Because I didn’t need to watch it a hundred more times, because everyone else born between 1968 and 1980 has the entire movie memorized, and can quote it at will, and does quote it at will, every day, all the time, on every subject from beer to Rilke, so by the time I got around to seeing it for myself, I knew all the lines already and I knew all the jokes already. And I still do. Know them. Because I saw the movie. And so did everyone else. And everyone else keeps telling me about it. Yes, it’s a good movie. Yes, it’s a funny movie. Yes, I get it. I GET IT. I know why it’s funny, I understand that you enjoyed the film, and you can stop telling me about that ANY TIME NOW, and NO, that is NOT your cue to begin quoting Monty GODDAMN PYTHON instead! Saw those movies too! Had them ruined for me by the endless quoting too! Would like to have an actual CONVERSATION instead of a meaningless exchange of catchphrases!

And come to think of it, just once, I’d like to see a trailer for a movie set in the sixties that didn’t use that Buffalo Springfield song. You know the one. “Stop children, what’s that sound, everybody look what’s goin’ down.” Yeah, “that sound”? That’s me screaming at the screen, “Use some Hendrix for once, dipshits!” You’d think that every other song written and recorded during that decade got destroyed in the Visigoth sack of Rome or something, because film editors never, ever use another song for a sixties movie. Ever. And when it’s time for wackiness, they use “I Feel Good.” Because James Brown isn’t just the Godfather of Soul; he’s the Godfather of Wacky. Apocalyptic sci-fi? Time for “Carmina Burana.” Lots of pratfalls? Cue “Walkin’ On Sunshine,” which is a great song, but do we have to use it for everything? Did Blink-182 and Sixpence None The Richer have every other band in the world killed or something? A million different songs out there, and it’s always the same ten songs in the movie trailers — that, and the guy intoning, “In a world where blah blah blah, So-And-So could count on blah blah blah to blah blah blah. [Pregnant pause.] Until fishcakes.” In a way, it’s kind of funny, but it’s sort of depressing at the same time. Movie executives don’t trust us to react to the trailers the way they want us to, so they slap the same songs on them over and over again so that we know how to feel, because we can’t think for ourselves. It’s offensive, sure, but our culture reacts with Pavlovian predictability to any phrase containing the words “the truth” by bellowing in fine Nicholson style, “You can’t HANDLE the truth!” Don’t deny it. You’ve done it. I’ve done it myself. The movie execs have a point.

It’s like people don’t want to say anything that’s not attributable; we’d rather just repeat what other, fictional people have said. We could say that something’s gone wrong or isn’t working, but we’d rather say, “Houston, we have a problem.” Yeah, I’ll say we have a problem. We have a problem crafting an original thought and uttering it in our own words. We have a problem with annoying, overused, past-the-sell-by-date pop-culture flotsam cluttering the spoken language. That’s my final answer, which I would like to vote off the island, because the tribe has spoken, and you are the weakest link, goodbye. In-con-THEE-vable! (D’oh!)

It’s not that I dislike the songs and films and shows I’ve referred to on their own merits. It’s that they’ve all earned a lengthy hiatus, and said hiatus needs to begin now. We can’t miss these things if they don’t go away. I mean, remember “HOO-hah”? Yeah, exactly.

So, you want to say something? Then say something. Say something that you think. Say something that has meaning. Don’t rely on the same old tired pop-cult snippets and clichés to express yourself. Find a quotation that’s significant to you, that reflects your interests. Stop rasping, “Look what they did to my boy.” You don’t have a boy and I ain’t looking even if you do, so shut up. Stop shouting, “We were ON A BREAK!” I got it the first three hundred times, so shut up. Stop wailing, “You like me — you really like me!” Not anymore, I don’t. Shut up. Stop asking me to show you the money. It’s tired. It’s annoying. It’s done. Let it go.

CAN YOU SMELL WHAT THE SARAH IS COOKING?

October 22, 2001

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