first round game
(14) Mazzy Star, “Flowers in December”
SUPPLANTED
(3) Gin Blossoms, “Hey Jealousy”
AND WILL PLAY ON IN THE SECOND ROUND
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes at the end of the game. If there is a tie, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/7/26.
ryan carter on “Hey Jealousy” by The Gin Blossoms
A key lyric in this song was changed in its first recorded version. It wasn’t the line with which the song became famous: “If you can trust me not to think / and not to sleep around.” It was “If you can trust me not to drink.”
At that time the band included its main songwriter and guitarist, Doug Hopkins. Many of the band’s songs were about drinking, as was much of Hopkins’ life. His problems with alcohol and its attendant demons got him fired from the band. He had some real genius as a songwriter and guitarist. But ties were cut, and the band that eventually became famous did so without him. Out with Hopkins, out with “drink.” It wasn’t an easy time for anyone.
“Hey Jealousy” was first released on their debut record Dusted in 1989. Gin Blossoms later signed to A&M. They re-recorded the song on New Miserable Experience, their 1992 major label debut, and this time it got big label sound.
The song received a big label video budget of $40k. It blew up on MTV a while after the album came out in 1992. The video launched the song into a commercial success. Back when MTV was videos, some of them were interesting and good, like the one for “Hey Jealousy.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ah5gAkna3jI
With a major label behind it, “Hey Jealousy” was both a banger and commercially successful. (Unlike some of the songs that reach March Xness fame, regrettably.) It reached #25 on Billboard’s Hot 100, had a hit video, and still gets airplay today, more than 30 years later.
I came of age as a late Gen Xer and taught myself that commercial success was frowned upon. Sixteen year old me wants to yell taunts of “sellout!” and turn my back, which is naturally covered in a period-correct Cure t-shirt or something.
I'm bit older now. I realize that being able to pay for the stuff you need is not a given. I like to think that the success of this song enabled a lot of people to pay for what they need.
There’s a lightning-in-a-bottle quality to the song that I’ve always liked. The magic exists between the lyrics, which describe a sorry state, and the music, which is quick and upbeat.
The lyrics come from a dude who’s not doing great. He knocks on the door when it’s late and he’s well beyond drunk. The door belongs to an old flame. The flame is “the best [he] ever had.” (There’s no word on how he rates for the flame.) Now the bar is closed, he’s too far gone to drive, and he may not have anywhere to go even if he could. Their relationship is in the past, but his drinking sure isn’t. Tonight he needs a couch to crash on. He probably wouldn’t turn down sharing the bed, because at this point, why not wish for that, too? They were really something together, after all.
Maybe that memory of good times is enough to score him a spot to sleep. And maybe some hanging out the next day.
It could be a strong argument. It’s not a rational one, but it’s strong.
Tomorrow we can drive around this town
Let the cops chase us around
The past is gone but something might be found
To take its place
Bottom line: they had real, old-time fun. Maybe they could again! Why not? Driving around in cars, getting chased by cops, and having a ball with the lot of it: that’s the real deal right there.
Few of us do this kind of fun-having after a point. Driving around is a bit of a pain; we do plenty of that already. Traffic is tiring. There are other things we need to be doing. Being chased by the cops? That sounds terrible! We’ve got car insurance rates and careers to think of, to say nothing of our kids, watching what we do.
The arguments against this kind of fun are strong and rational. But the fun is real, or it was, and it can create foundational memories
Those memories of that fun can form shades of one’s identity, as memories of adolescent experiences do. Besides, the game of chase is fun. Being the quarry in this game can be a ball. Every moment you’re free is more proof of your agility, or cleverness, or luck.
So maybe the old flame shares that memory of tearing around in cars without anything to do. Maybe that shared memory of a truly fun time, if it ever even existed, is worth a couch for the night.
A fun time can last indefinitely. It has to come at the right time, with the right companions, under the right circumstances. None of which need to seem right at the time. Memory is tricky, especially when it comes to times of excitement. Memories of tearing around with friends can last, and if you’re lucky, they retain their staying power indefinitely.
Indefinite staying power brings us back to the idea of this song being lightning in a bottle. Core memories are probably more fluid than we give them credit for, but so can be lightning in a bottle. Is it always there? Does it disappear when you look too closely? Do core memories mean what you thought they meant, and did the events you remember ever happen, or happen in that way, at that time, in that place? It might not matter. These experiences and memories of them are no less fundamental for the difficulty we can have in expressing them to any satisfaction.
I like this song because it’s a perfect note every time. It’s the pink panther in the diamond, reliably. Even if you look too closely. If I let myself listen to the song, even now, I can feel the mix of contentment and excitement of hanging out with the wrong crowd and really enjoying it. The sentiment of the song is expressed so well that the feeling and its expression are nearly the same. The guitar solo is just one of those perfect notes. It was recorded by Hopkins, the tragic and gifted guitarist and songwriter, during a moment of lucidity. He didn’t last the album’s recording; by the time it was done, he was gone.
From the perspective of the old flame opening the door in the middle of the night, the argument can certainly lose its momentum. The dude stinks, he’s drunk, and we’ve been through all of this before.
At the same time, one could not be faulted for giving the plea strong consideration. Especially when it comes with that guitar solo and the early 90s shimmer of alt rock in its prime.
Ryan Carter is a research librarian. Originally from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, he now lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.
THE YEAR OF SATURDAYS: The Little Prince, particles, and Mazzy Star’s “Flowers in December” by chelsea biondolillo
When the eponymous little prince first appears in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s book, he is walking toward a pilot whose plane has crashed in the desert. His first words to the pilot are, If you please—draw me a sheep!
BEFORE I LET YOU DOWN AGAIN
When Chris first appeared to me (in person), it was at approximately 10:30 am on the 13th, a Saturday, in the Powell’s City of Books café, though he had appeared virtually two days prior, as a match on a dating app. His first virtual words to me were, You were a cigarette girl? I thought those were only from the 40s? He bought a copy of my book that day, and a book on galaxies.
Two nights later, he texted me, Fuck it. I’m falling in love with you Chelsea. I let him know I needed time to catch up. I asked him if he knew the story of the little prince, the rose, the fox, and the snake. I told him, the lesson of the fox is that establishing ties takes patience and persistence. Done right, the payoff is that everything changes, even the way the wind sounds. He asked what the snake meant, and I said it’s a sad spot in the story.
The next day, after he read the fox chapter online, Chris texted:
He was like that. Studious. While I knew him, he was an unfunded researcher at the University of Oregon gathering data on Higgs boson self-coupling.
I JUST WANT TO SEE YOU IN YOUR EYES
Though Chris said he would read more of The Little Prince, he never did, later admitting that he wasn’t interested in the story getting sad. He read my book cover to cover between our first and second dates. It was poignant rather than sad, he insisted.
The Higgs boson—a subatomic particle—was first proposed in 1964, but wasn’t discovered until 2012, at the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) facilities in Geneva, Switzerland. Chris was there, and his name is on page 30 of the resulting paper. “Along with thousands of other people,” he’d said when he dug the paper out to show me.
*
The pilot learns the little prince came to Earth from a small asteroid. To the prince it was his world, and so he called it a planet, a star.
Oh, Little Prince! Bit by bit I came to understand the secrets of your sad little life… For a long time you had found your only entertainment in the quiet pleasure of looking at the sunset.
—One day, you said to me, I saw the sunset 44 times!
And a little later you added:
—You know—one loves the sunset, when one is so sad…
—Were you so sad then, I asked, on the day of the 44 sunsets?
But the little prince made no reply.
I WOULDN’T HAVE TAKEN EVERYTHING OUT ON YOU
I couldn’t remember what color Chris’s eyes were after our first date. I thought blue, or possibly gray. But I did remember how he looked at me. His gaze had an impossible weight to it. Like he was taking in every particle of me.
A few days after our date, I asked him a series of questions. One was, “If you knew that in one year you would die suddenly, would you change anything about the way you are now living?” He said no, he was living the life he wanted to. I don’t remember many of his other answers, but that one stuck with me because it was so different from my own. If you could know which moments were going to mean everything, later, would you want to?
I ONLY THOUGHT YOU COULD UNDERSTAND
Our second date was the following week at the Newport Aquarium. Saturday, 10:30 again. He brought a paper he’d written as a primer on particle physics. I’d complained during the preceding week that I’d had nothing to read of his. Afterwards, while driving back to my mom’s, I texted him.
Three days after our second date, he took the morning train from Eugene just to kiss me for the first time, even though he had to take the next train back. After that, he called me sweetheart.
THEY SAY EVERY MAN GOES BLIND IN HIS HEART
In science, specifics are required for any story. Sometimes it can take thousands of people to tell an incredibly short story, because of how much can happen in the proverbial blink of an eye.
THEY SAY EVERYBODY STEALS SOMEBODY’S HEART AWAY
The discovery of the Higgs boson confirmed the existence of the Higgs field. The particle is like a wave and the field is like the ocean the wave is moving upon—when we can see and measure the wave, we can get a sense of the ocean beneath. The Higgs field was predicted by Standard Model Physics, and even though there are researchers trying to find where the holes in the Standard Model are (and Chris was one of them), it is the best model we’ve got so far for describing how the smallest components of matter interact with one another. In other words, the Standard Model describes how things in the universe come together and fly apart.
AND I’VE GOT NOTHING MORE TO SAY ABOUT IT
The little prince has left his home, we learn, because of a broken heart. He’s been traveling a while already when he meets the pilot. When he asks for the sheep, we don’t know it yet, but we are almost at the end of the story.
I know very little about the research Chris did, or wanted to do. After the Higgs discovery was announced, it seemed like everyone around him was grabbing lucrative corporate gigs, as though the work in their lifetime was done and there was nothing but reaping left, as though there wasn’t so much more they could discover. Some people who knew him then say this is when ‘physics broke his heart.’ Others say it was only ever people who did that.
NOTHING MORE THAN YOU WOULD ME
“Flowers in December” doesn’t exactly exemplify our story, but it’s a mood, and because he loved Mazzy Star, it reminds me of his room and his eyes and the soft stubble on his head after he shaved.
The first night he stayed over was the third Saturday of our acquaintance. In the middle of the night, from a blanket in my backyard, he pointed out three stars directly overhead, called the Summer Triangle. He was happy talking about celestial declination and dark matter and black holes.
After that, it was every Saturday at 10:30, whether we were together or not (though we were together more than not) and every 13th of the month.
SEND ME YOUR FLOWERS OF YOUR DECEMBER
Happy 1 month!
Happy week 5!
Chris lived in a house full of books and art. He loved jazz and the Criterion Collection. He also loved sci-fi and detective noir from the ‘60s, Jared Hess and Christopher Guest movies, The Office, Regina Spektor, REM, and Mazzy Star.
Happy week 11!
He had a long bank of east-facing windows, lined with giant monstera, rubber plants, crotons, dracaena. He loved watching the setting sun as its point of disappearance moved, month-by-month, from one side of the windows to the other.
SEND ME YOUR DREAMS OF YOUR CANDY WINE
Happy 5 months!
Early in our relationship, I noticed a photo printed on a piece of tin tucked behind a plant in one of his bedroom windows.
“Is this… Hope Sandoval?” My incredulity sounded like scoffing to him. I asked if he was a big fan—and he got tongue-tied. She’d helped him through some dark times, he mumbled. Teasing, I looked her up on online and asked if she was as “helpful” now. He grabbed the picture and bent it in half and made to throw it away.
“What have you done to Hope!” I tried to take it from him, but he held it out of reach. “You can’t throw that away. It matters to you. I was just kidding! I’ll stop!” I pleaded until he handed it over. I folded her back into shape, placed her back in the window.
One reason stories about heartbreak can be hard to sell is because in love, while the specifics are the story, too many specifics don’t leave room for a reader or listener. Hope Sandoval and Dave Robeck, in writing “Flowers in December” for Mazzy Star’s third album, avoid this problem by leaving nearly every specific out. There are flowers, it’s December, someone has been let down. Listeners write their own sad story into this spare outline, guided into their memories of loss by the minor chords and Hope’s melancholy voice.
I GOT JUST ONE THING I CAN’T GIVE YOU
Happy week 22!
He said finding me was like winning the lottery. I was more than family, his best friend. He said I was a badass, smarter than I ever gave myself credit for, and talented. He said over and over that I had to write another book, until I cried that I couldn’t, that my biggest fear was that I maybe never would. He comforted me then, saying I should just stop trying if the trying was breaking my heart so much. Like the little prince, there were parts of Chris’s story that he’d only ever speak of obliquely, if at all.
Happy half-iversary!
JUST ONE MORE THING OF MINE
Since we lived two hours apart, much of the evidence of our love was texted while we navigated our separate lives.
THEY SAY EVERY MAN GOES BLIND IN HIS HEART
On the weekends, we lived a third life together. In Eugene, I watched him play soccer Saturday mornings. I bought a sketchbook and began filling it with drawings of him. He read while I studied Korean. In Estacada, he would often do yardwork—mowing, chopping wood, fixing things, while I cooked elaborate meals for him. He’d say, “Your boyfriend grew up in Nebraska. He knows his way around tools.” He taught me chess and I taught him gin. We went to bed early and got up late.
Happy week 30!
THEY SAY EVERYBODY STEALS SOMEBODY’S HEART AWAY
Once, after dinner with his two sons, I mentioned that he was a Hope Sandoval fanboy. Later, for Christmas, they bought him a Mazzy CD.
“Of course it’s one I already had,” he told me, “but this is the first time they bought me something related to one of my interests! They used to be inert blobs. They are these two fully awake souls now.” He was crying. He told me his biggest fear was that one day he’d be gone and they’d wonder if he ever loved one of them more than the other.
AND I’VE BEEN WONDERING WHY YOU LET ME DOWN
Happy 8th month!
Happy week 40!
It was not perfect. We argued. He could be jealous and cold, while I was quick to sob and cling. He was terrible at giving gifts. I always interrupted. He was stubborn; I was contrary. I could be impatient with our routine. He felt I lacked discipline.
AND I’VE BEEN TAKING IT ALL FOR GRANTED
But we believed in one another. He always wanted to hear what I had to say. I loved the way he took long seconds to think before answering questions. He changed the way I saw myself and my possibilities.
Saint-Exupéry’s pilot worries that his drawing skills haven’t captured the little prince or what knowing him was like. I worry my words can’t capture what Chris was like when he was with me. What we were like together. I worry I’m not accurately portraying his work or how he felt about it. I worry that in retelling this story, I’m hoping a mountain of facts will fill in not just our how but our why, too
Happy this-relationship-goes-to-11!
Happy week 51!
*
After the pilot has finished repairs on his plane, he finds the little prince sitting on a wall, speaking out loud to no one, about a meeting later that evening, about poison. When the pilot looks to the foot of the wall, he sees one of those yellow snakes that take just thirty seconds to bring your life to an end.
—What does this mean? I demanded. Why are you talking with snakes?
—I am glad that you’ve found what was the matter with your engine, he said. Now you can go back home. I, too, am going back home today…
Then sadly—
—It is much farther… It is much more difficult…
The Higgs boson is incredibly small, compared to the rest of the universe. It is also highly unstable, decaying into other particles within a tenth of a trillionth of a billionth of a second. This is only slightly faster than a zeptosecond, the shortest amount of time every measured.
SEND ME YOUR FLOWERS OF YOUR DECEMBER
I felt myself frozen by the sense of something irreparable. And I knew that I could not bear the thought of never hearing that laughter any more.
—Tonight it will be a year… My star, then, can be found right above the place where I came to Earth, a year ago…
—Little man, I said, tell me that it is only a bad dream—this affair of the snake, and the meeting-place, and the star…
SEND ME YOUR FLOWERS OF YOUR DECEMBER
After we fell in love so hard like that, after so many happy week’s, and eleven months’ worth of mini-celebrations—
BEFORE I LET YOU DOWN AGAIN
On a Saturday morning, 364 days after we met, and not even 26 hours before our one-year anniversary—
Chris sent me a text, Good morning, sweetheart like he had 164 times before, and then a picture of the soccer field, where he was playing his usual Saturday game—
SEND ME YOUR FLOWERS OF YOUR DECEMBER
And then, a few minutes later, his teammates would tell me, in the middle of a play, with no warning or reason, he collapsed. There was a retired cardiologist on the team who immediately began chest compressions. When the paramedics arrived, they got his pulse back, but only for a few minutes. He never regained consciousness.
—When your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend.
No one knew how to reach me, so I spent the rest of the morning sending dumb memes to his phone, as was my habit.
—I shall look as if I were suffering. I shall look a little as if I were dying. It is like that. Do not come to see that.
SEND ME
—You understand… It is too far. I cannot carry this body with me. It is too heavy.
I GOT JUST ONE THING I CAN'T GIVE YOU
I’d already gotten out the clothes I was going to wear for our anniversary date the next morning. His card was written, his gift, wrapped. We’d planned to meet at Powell’s at 10:30, like we had all those thirteenths before, and I was going to wear the same dress. It’s orange and summery, and a couple of hours after that first date, he’d texted that he liked it very much and had wanted to say so at the time.
—But it will be like an old abandoned shell. There is nothing sad about old shells…
Around 5 in the afternoon, I saw an email from his nephew. It said to call him ASAP, that it was about Chris. I called, not understanding what I should have from those few words, not understanding even after his nephew said, “Chris had a cardiac event today… and he didn’t pull through.” Pull through what, I asked. What do you mean? We have a date tomorrow…
AND I’VE BEEN WONDERING WHY YOU LET ME DOWN
That night, when it was dark and I felt his inarguable absence blowing through the new, hollow space behind my sternum. I played Regina Spektor and REM and Mazzy Star loud enough to drown out my ugly, ungraceful sobs. The only person in the universe I wanted to talk to was Chris, and I could not. I went outside and watched the Summer Triangle move across the sky.
It’s tough to visualize a number as small as a zeptosecond, but if you apply that fraction (a tenth of a trillionth of a billionth) to the full lifetime of the universe, 13.8 billion years, which is the largest known amount of time, it turns out to be 43.5 microseconds. A whole year, on the other hand, is seventy-two trillionths of the life of the universe, or 0.0000000072%. Even though it dwarfs the lifespan of the Higgs, Google’s AI says that compared to the life of the universe, a year is a number so small, “it rounds to nothing.”
SEND ME YOUR FLOWERS OF YOUR DECEMBER
In the days and weeks that followed, I knew a consuming grief that is difficult to recall, now. His family was polite, but I had no place in their process. They gave me a few of his books and several plants. I asked for one of his t-shirts, a hoodie. I was just another guest at his celebration of life, and our relationship didn’t even merit mention in his obituary.
When I got home with three vases of the memorial flowers, I dug out the sketchbook that was supposed to be filled with drawings of him. Over the next several weeks, I drew the flowers, first as fresh blooms, then shriveled.
I GOT JUST ONE THING I CAN'T GIVE YOU
Maybe we came together just when we were supposed to, and flew apart that way, too. If you could choose how to spend your last year, would you pick falling in love?
JUST ONE MORE THING OF MINE
Does it seem uncanny—we celebrated every week and month, as if sensing we’d never get an anniversary? Another question I asked Chris in that first week, was “If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone?” Chris had lost both parents and his only sister and he knew that one doesn’t always get tomorrow. He told me he loved me nearly every night I knew him. He told his boys he loved them every night they spent with him.
SEND ME YOUR FLOWERS
We couldn’t talk that final Friday night—a sharp stone I carried in my throat for weeks after he was gone—but I texted I love you! (like I had 86 times before) Xoxo. Luckily, he had read receipts on, so I know he saw it just before he fell asleep.
SEND ME YOUR DREAMS
Before he returns home, the little prince learns that what is essential is invisible to the eye. Though it’s not what Saint-Exupéry was angling at, Chris’s work on subatomic particles taught him that lesson well. But too, the fox tells the prince that it is the time spent on the people and things we care about that make them important.
That we celebrated 51 Saturdays and 11 thirteenths made our time together important.
Now, I buy flowers on the thirteenth of each month. There have been seven since Chris returned to the stuff of stars. As the little prince predicted, my sorrow has been comforted some. As Chris promised, I do not regret it.
Chelsea Biondolillo is the author of The Skinned Bird. She lives in Oregon.