Accept your para-social relationships
They're not so bad. Just don't, you know, be weird about it.
When I was 15 years old I was starting life anew. For the previous few years I’d had some very bad experiences, and after some treatment and joining a vital support group, I started to walk a different path. I can look back and divide myself and my life between the before and the after of that consequential year in 1984.
As a psychically newborn person, and an adolescent, I was doing all the crying, screaming, and metaphorical diaper-shitting that a newborn baby does. It was an extremely difficult time. (Sorry, mom.) But, thankfully, I found a group of people willing to put up with me and even love me through those years. Some were just as nuts as I was, others were very put together but also patient and kind. The bond I shared with both teams saved my life.
Back in those days, before the internet, one of the ways we decided who we were was by the music we listened to. We used our preferences for music as a way to define and understand ourselves and each other. That’s stupid. But that’s how it was. It’s OK to be stupid. It better be. I do a lot of it. As long as nobody gets hurt, you have my blessing to be dumb. Be smart too, if you can. I’ve gotten a kick out of it when I’ve been able to pull it off. Most of the time that I thought I was being smart I can look back on and see how stupid I was actually being. And sometimes I can look back on times I thought I was being stupid and realize that I was being smart.
LIFE COACH TIP ONE: Be stupid, be smart. You might not know the difference. Do the thing.
In Kalamazoo, Michigan, in the 1980s, I listened to the local college radio station. They played a genuinely eclectic mix of music. I had no idea what the categories were supposed to be, so I developed a mixtape kind of musical life that spanned everything from Bahuas and Gang of Four to Bob Marley and Jimmy Buffett.
That last one, Jimmy Buffett, is a weird one. The Bauhaus kids eventually became Goths. They dressed in black gowns and wore dark makeup. I liked them. The Gang of Four folks were into punk mostly. They wore red and black plaid pants and leather jackets with spikes on them. The Marley fans smoked weed and wore rasta colors. There were absolutely no Jimmy Buffet fans.
Fun, as it happens, is very, very important. There are two types of fun: Fun that takes and Fun that gives. Fun that takes is stuff that feels good while I do it and bad after. Fun that gives feels good most of the time when I do it, but always feels good after. I never regret the fun that gives.
I wore a wig that looked like my natural hair but was longer and had an extreme case of bedhead. I discovered it at a lost & found bin at a ski resort in Michigan. I wore a green army jacket and 70s paisley shirts I bought from a costume sale at the local Civic Theater. I had no group at school to hang with, obviously. Like I said, I was a newborn. The other kids wanted to run with someone more their age.
Of all the music I listened to, Jimmy Buffett stood out as the most different. He sang funny and sentimental ballads about being a Florida drunk who liked to boat around. In some ways, he was more punk rock than many of my punk rock acquaintances. But maybe not. He advocated for a lifestyle of leaving people behind to go party. I was not partying then. Why I liked it so much, I’m not exactly sure. I think he just sounded like he was having fun, and I desperately wanted to have fun. Everything that I had believed was fun was gone from my life for very good reasons, and I hadn’t quite figured out what could replace it.
Fun, as it happens, is very, very important. There are two types of fun: Fun that takes and Fun that gives. Fun that takes is stuff that feels good while I do it and bad after. Fun that gives feels good most of the time when I do it, but always feels good after. I never regret fun that gives. Let’s look at examples:
Fun that takes: Eating chocolate cake. Video games. Scrolling the news. Gossip. Getting really mad at people because they don’t think the way that I do.
Fun that gives: Exercising — ideally playing a game with people. Cooking with someone. Writing Free Life Coach. Reading a book. Loving people because they’re people.
Being an obsessive person, I wound up listening to about a dozen Jimmy Buffett albums until I knew all the lyrics. He had some funny lines:
“Cliches are good ways, to say what you mean, mean what you say.”
“She’s got a ball park figure.”
“She’s going out of my mind.”
Now that I’m in my 50s I listen to the music I loved when I was a kid and mostly just feel nostalgic about it. Nostalgia is OK to practice, I find, in small amounts. Now and then, when I travel and rent a car, I’ll put the old music on. My family doesn’t like it, but I still do. All of it, except for Jimmy Buffett. No matter what, I simply cannot recapture the magic I felt when I listened to those albums of life as a lush, despite my being stone-cold sober.
That’s too bad. I had strong feelings back then. I have strong feelings now, just not about songs that celebrate being drunk in a hammock. Nevertheless, I had a very strong parasocial relationship with Jimmy Buffett. He never knew I existed, but his music carried me through some very difficult years. I learned this morning that he died at 76.
It’s weird the object of a para-social relationship dies. Who, exactly, do we grieve? Our past? Who we were when we ‘knew’ that celebrity? Who they were to us? Or do we feel the passage of time acutely and understand the true finality of a past to which we can never return? Not only because it’s the past, but because the people who populated it are dead?
I don’t know and it doesn’t matter. Just try to have fun, my friends. Jimmy did. He had the fun that gives making music about the fun that takes.
Your para-social friend from afar,
I remain,
Your Free Life Coach,
Sean Sakamoto