prompt: swim, title: the picture in reverse in misc. flash fiction

Most creatives secretly wish they were also brilliant at some other form they’re terrible at, which frustrates them, suffusing their works with myriad references to those other mediums. How often have recording artists vamped about as terrible actors or vice-versa? Bruce Willis released a truly feculent wad of white-boy harmonica blues. Britney Spears was lead in a feature film, somehow!

I personally lament how I’ll never be a rock star endlessly. I may be on some odd sci-fi analogue bullshit or expounding on my inverse Forrest Gump life as memoir, but references to music seep through, like puss from the scab of not being Axl Rose or even Leonard Cohen. I’m not so picky.

I often wander off, thinking about things like what the least bad song by a bad band is. “Soul To Squeeze” is certainly the Chili Peppers’ least bad. Billy Joel’s “My Life” at least connects to the awesome weirdness of the sitcom Bosom Buddies. U2 stumps me, of course. They’re all equally awful in a terrifying rainbow of slickly produced mediocrity and smug self-satisfaction, anyway.

I also hold a fascination with bands whose best songs were actually their radio hits. Most bands have super-fans that will tell you all about the B-sides or deep cuts that were their “really good” stuff and most of the time they’re right. Then there are the rare bands where the hits really were their best songs. Like Tom Petty, like The Doors or, my whole point here, like the group R.E.M.

Nightswimming does indeed deserve a quiet night, Mr. Stipe, you were right. Unlike years ago, the fear of getting caught is gone, we got old. Still restless but for vastly different reasons, now.

I only skinny-dipped once my entire life, I probably never will again. I’d just turned twenty and had just met the woman I’d lose my virginity to in the next couple months, who I would end up spending my twenties and a chunk of my thirties with. In the azure moon-light of August, some creek between Little Falls and Dolgeville, dragged in by friends and only going through with it to impress my friend’s hot college roommate. I basically only do rash things to impress women, I’m a big old play-it-safe coward-boy otherwise. But for her, I risked it. The both of us, stealing sideways glances of each other naked in the restlessness of our ever-rushing Adirondack waters.

Nightswimming required that quiet night and twenty-five years passing, half of them with her, half of them after her, don’t change the beauty and potential of the moon in her eyes and mine.

Now, middle-aged but weirdly slightly-thinner, despite the pain of how it ended, the memories make me smile. Remember that things like that happened and still again can with luck, maybe.

Even a story like that, however, I still have to lace with my frustrated-musician obsessions, but what the hell. Maybe I too am like R.E.M. and the hits really are the ones worth playing again.