The great thing about breakup songs is that you have absolutely no control over what they are; they just happen to be playing in the background, clamped into the CD player or turntable by some tinpot DJ who has no idea the sheer level of emotional damage you’re either enduring or creating. Sometimes this random process creates entertaining non sequiturs; sometimes it creates a moment so jarring that even Patrick Swayze couldn’t make it more awkward.
“Nobody Puts Dunphy in a Corner”
By Dw. Dunphy
The fact is that very often the song you recall has nothing to do with being dumped. It just becomes the soundtrack by happenstance.
So we’re taking this back all the way to 1988, the year I graduated high school. I was nuts for Kim, but in all honesty, my confidence level was bottomed out and I didn’t step up as well as I could have… I see a lot of my inclinations in women embodied in her: big hair, seven or so shirts on all at the same time and linebacker shoulderpads, an unhealthy obsession with Dirty Dancing — but, again, it was 1988. So when she told me things were not so fantastic in her life and she didn’t want to go to the prom with me, I didn’t understand, yet said I did.
“S’cool,” I imagine I replied. No, things were not “s’cool,” and that was it for me and Kim.
Fittingly, the song that totally emasculated me was her favorite — the completely inescapable “(I’ve Had) The Time Of My Life” (download) from the Dirty Dancing soundtrack.
Comments