Thursday Night and Friday Will Be on Tuesday Night Instead

The clocks will all run backwards, all the sheep will have 2 heads.

We met on the 4th of July. On the Esplanade in Boston. We'd gone to school together, but didn't know each other; she'd come with a mutual friend.

An entire gang of us spent the afternoon playing Trivial Pursuit, a game I loved (except for Geography) and she hated (including Geography).

Over the course of that summer, I spent more and more time with her, but quickly realized that everything she said was wrong. She was wrong about the time of day, about the number of moons rotating around the Earth, about how many states there are, about what the capitol of South Dakota is, about who sang lead in Paul Revere & the Raiders, about which side Italy fought on in WWII, about whether Max Yasgur ever played bass with the Grateful Dead, about what color her car was, and about too many other things to mention. (Link for Gmail subscribers.)


But, while she was almost always wrong, she was never uncertain. And it was exhausting after a while responding to her pronouncements (CDs will never replace vinyl, Alice Cooper was going to replace John Lennon in a reunited version of the Beatles and tickets for the Shea Stadium show went on sale Monday at 4:15am, no baseball players would be crazy enough to take steroids, etc.).

The one thing she was right about was that World Party was a great band. At first I didn't believe her (just because she was so often wrong), but when I listened, I had to agree. Although maybe she was partially wrong, because Karl Wallinger (formerly of the Waterboys during their brief synth period) played almost everything on the first World Party album (and even went so far as to invent aliases so other "musicians" would be credited on the sleeve).

A couple years later, she became convinced that she had a brain tumor. So she spent tens of thousands of dollars on tests, spent weeks visiting dozens of doctors, and never believed anyone who said she was healthy.

We broke up because she was too wrong, too crazy (and maybe always had been. A few days before World Party played in Boston, she had a friend of hers call and give me a supposed new phone number for her in California. She called back herself the next day and apologized for her friend, but wanted to make sure I had the number in California. By then, World Party was a real band and her crazy wrongness was no longer as attractive as it seemed with several hundred thousand people, alcohol, Trivial Pursuit, fireworks, and the Boston Pops. So I threw away the California phone number (which, probably was wrong anyway), and went to see World Party with my new girlfriend.