Fuck That Mess

Post caught me at a peculiar time in my life, right when life was the one thing I didn’t want. Let’s dismiss the two elephants in the room. I was not thinking of ending life, and Post didn’t save it. The album did something deeper and richer. Here’s the thing. Taking one’s life is redundant if you’re already at the end of yourself. That phrase I picked up in church, meaning that I, at the ripe old age of twenty-five, had run out of capital A answers to life’s big questions. What is life? Why am I here? When does it stop hurting? Why do I like boys? Why doesn’t Jesus like boys who like boys? Post didn’t reply to any of these questions. Instead it gave answers to shit I didn’t even ask.

It’s cliché to say that a record sounds just a new as the first day one hears it. Except Post, and perhaps no other album (except Björk’s own Homogenic), is so relentlessly present tense that every time sounds like the first time you’re hearing it. Wide-eyed and childlike yet world- weary and aged, it creates a whole new present tense by smashing past and future together. And not just because it has both Tin Pan Alley and techno. Talking Heads did this too, but it never even occurred to me that I could live life this way. On my left, the past as garden of delights. On my right, the future as world of wonder. In the middle, a gloriously messy uncertainty.

But I wanted certainty, damn it. Uncertainty meant God was never going to play fortune teller and reassure me that my life was going to be normal, normal being the only measure of happiness. Uncertainty was not going to tell me that I would end up heterosexual (I didn’t), or even make it out of my twenties alive (I did). Post pretty much said fuck that mess. Not knowing what’s going to happen, and embracing both happiness and catastrophe as equally anticipatory outcomes, created an appreciation not of the outcome, but of the peace of mind to celebrate a future that could never be guaranteed.

“Possibly maybe,” she sang. But the real kicker was the line that followed. It started with “probably,” a million times more likely than possibly, if I remembered math class. And after that came a word that made me realise that there was one thing closer to certainty after all, a thing I never thought to expect, never thought I deserved.

Love.