This is a project that’s been floating around since my high school days in the late 80s. It’s gone under different names over the years (Belief in Fate is the one I’ve mentioned the most, dating back to 1988-89) but Decline and Fall was the title I came up with in late 1995 after the dreaded move home from Boston. It’s a title that maintains a certain Gen-X flair: it’s a riff on Penelope Spheeris’ documentary series about rock and roll excesses, The Decline of Western Civilization — itself a riff on Edward Gibbons’ The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire — but it’s also a riff on the frustration and ennui of growing up in a run-down small town that one desperately wants to escape. It’s not that I hated my hometown, I’d just outgrown it yet had to wait my turn to leave. It’s jaded humor because that’s what we Gen-Xers do best.
Mind you, this was never a project like Isaac Fitzgerald’s 2022 memoir Dirtbag, Massachusetts — interestingly a book about my same hometown, though I’ve never read it — as that is not the kind of book I want this to be. It was never going to be about partying and taking drugs and underage drinking because there’s fuck-all else to do. Sure, that definitely existed then as now, but that wasn’t my life. I did my best to avoid that because I’d seen firsthand where that road led and I was just too damned stubborn to give into it. It’s a big reason why I latched on so tightly to college radio and writing at that age; if I needed that escape, music and creativity was where I went. The depression and confusion and frustration ended up on the page, always with a soundtrack.
Decline and Fall might have started out gloomy, but as I got older and wiser — and calmer and happier — I started realizing that this story would benefit not as a dire memoir or a gloomy roman à clef focusing only on all that bad stuff (which it originally did during its Belief in Fate phase), but as a story about finding a way out of all that. Thus it’s about that brief time when I discovered college radio (and myself) and found friends that changed my life considerably. [Come to think of it, this might explain my current obsession with the manga The Fragrant Flower Blooms with Dignity which has a similar plot, in which Rintaro’s life is changed for the better when he finds his own solace of love and friendship.]
I bring this up because I’ve been thinking about finally taking it off the back burner to give it another go. Hell, I’ve even made multiple playlists for it recently! It’s become somewhat of a companion piece to Walk in Silence the book project which focuses on the ‘college radio’ music of the mid to late 80s. It’s a story idea that’s never quite completely left my mind, even despite being trunked a few times. That tells me that this isn’t merely an obsession with a half-baked idea, but an idea that needed a lot of time and distance (and maturity) between now and the time it took place. It’s no longer just a story based on vibes but one that speaks of a deeply personal moment in time.
Now, I’m hoping that it doesn’t stall again, but I’m going to be optimistic.
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