2. When You Get a Girl

I was utterly clueless growing up, which is probably par for the course. The cluelessness, anyway—I think I may have scored unusually high on the Utterly scale, fairly consistently through at least age 16. I could say I was sheltered, and in practice I was, but as much as anything I sheltered myself; my parents did not push me to be social, but neither did they offer unreasonable resistence to social things. But as an adolscent I rarely paid much thought to my parents' perspectives; I can neither fault nor praise them, in retrospect, for that.

And so I learned about the world from context and overhearings and the things I gathered on the playground. I was a smart kid, but credulous and awkward and hungry for social reciprocation, and so I hung out with whoever would let me hang out, and took to heart the pictures they would paint of the world without nearly enough critical judgement. I learned things that didn't make any goddam sense from an informed perspective, but I didn't have an informed perspective.

What you learn about girls on the playground is like what you learn about anything: ninety percent bullshit. Third-hand info from ebullient blacktop confidants who didn't know shit from shinola but were more than happy to pass it on in hushed tones. So girls, sex, guns, politics—nonsense passed from unknowning mind to unknowing mind like a great big game of Telephone. A real epistemological trainwreck. The first time I heard a joke about boners, I didn't know what a boner was and neither did the guy who told it to me; and I must have told it a half-dozen times to other kids before I ever found out.

The received wisdom of the ten-year-old, then. The mythos of misunderstanding—the belief that somehow all the dissatisfaction and confusion in life would be toggled by some weird combination of rites and achievements. That's what the song is about: every half-baked, half-grokked, grasping analysis of a strange and inexplicable world, every mistaken assumption and half-believed preposterousness, building up one on the other until at some point you just crack on through to the other side, or don't.