Bloodbuzz Ohio — The National
#365Songs: April 1st
I walked into a swarm of bees yesterday. An actual swarm, tens of thousands — no shit — dancing on the outside of a house, above the sidewalk, over my head. Synchronized, forming patterns together, a collective in search of a commune. I thought immediately of The National’s 2010 masterpiece, Bloodbuzz Ohio.
Stand up straight at the foot of your love
I lift my shirt up
I was carried to Ohio in a swarm of bees
I never married, but Ohio don’t remember me
Lay my head on the hood of your car
I take it too far
Lay my head on the hood of your car
I take it too far
I still owe money to the money, to the money I owe
I never thought about love when I thought about home
I still owe money to the money, to the money I owe
The floors are falling out from everybody I know
I’m on a blood buzz, yes, I am
Bloodbuzz Ohio is vintage The National, a band that has steadily built one of the most impressive catalogs of any modern indie band. Fellow native Ohioans, they also fled for better pastures — though they share a pride of their hometime I don’t possess. At least up until the Bush years, when Ohio fell into a blood red Republican hole it hasn’t shaken since.
I’ve felt this way for a long time, way before the politics clouded my understanding and tolerance. I left “home” when I was 18, and never looked back. For the first decade or so, I felt a light nostalgia for certain things — childhood moments, the comfort of conversation with my Mom, my early-years admiration for my older sister, playing catch with my Dad, some old friends with whom I’d lost touch. And then I’d return, and immediately be afflicted with a listlessness, a fatigue, a restlessness that sent me on long late drives through other parts of town, hoping to conjure some affection for a place that raised me.
I don’t go back often now, but when I do I still fall into that same malaise — the remnants of a former pothead sleeping until noon, ordering late night mediocre pizza, sighing my way through family reunions, counting the moments until my departure.
That’s the beauty of Bloodbuzz Ohio, the way it mirrors my own experience. That no matter how much I’ve changed or accomplished, no matter who I’ve become I’m always seen as I once was in the eyes of those who thought they knew my younger self. In truth, nobody there ever truly knew me because I never showed them who I really am, either because I also didn’t know myself or because I knew, deep down, that I’d always be a foreign object to them, a distant planet, the “different one.” My old hometown is a world where time stands still, where change isn’t a commodity, where one generation bleeds into the next with no discernible difference between them. But on a deeper level, I grew more progressive, more “woke,” more literary and critical while they grew more conservative, more in need of preserving the ways things have always been.
And that was before Trump arrived, before I became the sort of person who detached entirely from the past.
In an interview about Bloodbuzz Ohio, guitarist Aaron Dresner said, “To me it was a lament, an existential nostalgic love song about where we’re from, about family and the way America is so frayed and divided. So you can be family in blood but estranged because of social values. Obama had just gotten in, but we were coming out of the Bush years and the financial crisis had meant people had worked their whole life and watched their savings just disappear. Hence “I still owe money to the money to the money I owe.”
Frontman Matt Berninger said, “It’s about being stuck between an old version of yourself and the one you’re becoming. I was trying to shed my skin. That’s what the first line about lifting up my shirt means to me. I definitely didn’t feel like the same person I used to be. I didn’t feel like an Ohioan any more.”
That’s it! That feeling of being stuck in place, in time, between two versions of yourself. It wasn’t just that I was no longer an Ohioan, I never felt I belonged there to begin with, and my family and old friends felt that about me, too— even as they encouraged me to move back, to be one of them, to shrink the world and fall backwards in time.
Stand up straight at the foot of your love
I lift my shirt up
I’m on a blood buzz
I’m on a blood buzz, God, I am
I’m on a blood buzz
I was carried to Ohio in a swarm of bees
I never married, but Ohio don’t remember me
I still owe money to the money, to the money I owe
I never thought about love when I thought about home
I still owe money to the money, to the money I owe
The floors are falling out from everybody I know
I’ve been to Cleveland exactly once since Trump was elected. Last summer, after seven long years away, I went back. I ran through my old neighborhood, drove through past memories, and felt absolutely nothing. I couldn’t picture my younger self hitting baseballs in the park, couldn’t feel the wind against my face as I biked those old streets, couldn’t recall what it felt like to be that kid in those fading photographs, couldn’t remember the last time I felt at home in this place I once called home.
Life is weird that way, the way it recedes as a tide does during a Full Moon, the way nostalgia comes and goes and leaves us wondering how we got from there to here. As if on the backs of a swarm of bees, carrying us through time from one foreign place to another in search of something that no longer exists, if it ever existed at all.
I’m on a blood buzz, yes, I am
I’m on a blood buzz
I’m on a blood buzz, God, I am
I’m on a blood buzz
