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" on the 11th of every month my friend elizabeth would say, "well we made it through another month. so do we get her back now?" we always giggled, but we really did expect to get her back. its not human to let go of love, even when it's dead.
we expected one of these monthly anniversaries to be the Final Goodbye. we figured that we'd said all our goodbyes, and given up all the tears we had to give. we'd passed the test and would get back what we'd lost. but instead, every anniversary hurt more, and every anniversary felt like she was further away from coming back. the idea that there wouldn't be a final goodbye- that was a hard goodbye in itself and, at that point, still an impossible goodbye. no private eye has to tell you it's a long goodbye.
...the loss just doesn't go away- it gets bigger the longer you look at it. "
― Rob Sheffield , Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time
128
" What is love? Great minds have been grappling with this
question through the ages, and in the modern era, they have
come up with many different answers. According to the Western
philosopher Pat Benatar, love is a battlefield. Her paisan Frank
Sinatra would add the corollary that love is a tender trap. The
stoner kids who spent the summer of 1978 looking cool on the
hoods of their Trans Ams in the Pierce Elementary School
parking lot used to scare us little kids by blasting the Sweet hit
“Love Is Like Oxygen”—you get too much, you get too high,
not enough and you’re gonna die. Love hurts. Love stinks. Love
bites, love bleeds, love is the drug. The troubadours of our times
all agree: They want to know what love is, and they want you to
show them.
But the answer is simple. Love is a mix tape. "
― Rob Sheffield , Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time
132
" Before I met Maria, I was your basic craven hermit. I spent most of my time in my room, in love with my walls, hiding out from the world with my
fanzines and my records. I thought I was happier that way. I had developed these monastic habits to protect myself from something, probably, but
whatever it was, the monastic habits had turned into the bigger problem. In my headphones, I led a life of romance and incident and intrigue, none
of which had anything to do with the world outside my Walkman. I was an English major, obsessed with Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater and Algernon
Swinburne, thrilling to the exploits of my decadent aesthete poet idols, even though my only experience with decadence was reading about it. "
― Rob Sheffield , Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time
137
" Roller Boogie is a relic from - when else? - the '70s. This is a tape I made for the eight-grade dance. The tape still plays, even if the cogs are a little creaky and the sound quality is dismal. It's a ninety-minute TDK Compact Cassette, and like everything else made in the '70s, it's beige. It takes me back to the fall of 1979, when I was a shy, spastic, corduroy-clad Catholic kid from the suburbs of Boston, grief-stricken over the '78 Red Sox. The words "douche" and "bag" have never coupled as passionately as they did in the person of my thirteen-yer-old self. My body, my brain, my elbows that stuck out like switchblades, my feet that got tangled in my bike spokes, but most of all my soul - these formed the waterbed where douchitude and bagness made love sweet love with all the feral intensity of Burt Reynolds and Rachel Ward in Sharkey's Machine. "
― Rob Sheffield , Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time
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" i’m very expressive.
i deserve to feel pretty.
i kissed the blarney stone.
i am strong. i am brave.
im a good friend. I’m a good sister. I’m a good wife. i am a good in-law. I’m a good daughter. i am a good niece. I’m a good beagle mother. i am a good granddaughter.
i work hard for it, honey.
im superfly TNT motherfucker.
im a pilot of the airwaves.
im a better third baseman that brooks robinson.
I B-E-A-G-G-R-E-S-S-I-V-E.
i have exceptionally beautiful feet, eyes, ears, hips, hair, teeth, breasts. and shoulders. and fingernails. in a different pen, she added, and eyelashes and eyebrows, plus in yet another pen, and nose. and chin. "
― Rob Sheffield , Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time