Downset: “Anger”
In the early days of pining for girls I thought it so improbable that I’d ever actually land a girlfriend that I started making in-jokes about it in my diary. As a result, when I hit junior high and actually started to date a girl from my science class, I was completely dumbfounded about what to do. “I guess I should take her to a nice restaurant,” I thought. “Maybe I should get her a… a necklace?” So we sat together at lunch and awkwardly ate sandwiches at each other, until she got sick of it and asked me if I’d write her a note. A note! Shit, I could do that. I loved to write! I was twelve pages deep into a fantasy novel about a talking stick and a space goat; a note would be no problem.
But then I sat down and realized: I didn’t know anything about this girl. I knew that she was pretty and liked soccer — wait, I think it was soccer. Maybe it was floor hockey? Shit. Maybe the note should be about what she likes? No, no, I didn’t want to come off totally clueless. I’d been dating her a week; there were things I should probably have picked up on by then. Staring at the blank page, I turned on the radio, which was somehow playing Downset’s “Anger,” a song I don’t think I’ve heard even once since then. The stupid little chorused vocal part started up, and it somehow managed to serve as momentum, and I started writing the note.
And here’s where I made my mistake; I mistook the easy buoyancy of a song with an old-fashioned 4/4 jud jud for a way into my girlfriend’s favor. “Well, I’ll just write these lyrics down on the side so she knows I’m a cool dude who loves music,” I must have reasoned. And so, amidst two pages of absolute nothing, jotted in the margins and inserted inline, decorating the whitespace around the paragraph where I inexplicably asked her to call me by the nickname “Sugar,” I wrote the lyrics to this song. And, as is the case even today, the only lyrics I could make out were:
ANGER!
HOSTILITY TOWARDS THE OPPOSITION!!!!
AAAAANGEEERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
The next day, I handed her the note (carefully folded into a paper football, a trick I had learned from one of my female friends). A few days later, she lied and told me her mother wasn’t allowing her to date anyone. Three years later, my friend Scott, who played junior varsity hockey, told me she had asked him out the same day. And now, thirteen years later, I’m listening to this song for maybe the second time ever in my life, and all things considered, I only have one question: Why did I think this song would make me seem cool?
