I am no one, no one!

Exorcist references and Emily Dickinson poems – they go together like Doritos and chocolate. There’s novelty for you.

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you—Nobody—Too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise—you know!

How dreary—to be—Somebody!
How public—like a Frog—
To tell one's name—the livelong June—
To an admiring Bog!

- Emily Dickinson, “I’m Nobody! Who Are You?”

One of my worst miscalculations in college happened during a New England Literature & Culture seminar. The professor was polling the class for its opinions on Emily Dickinson, and I said I thought her poetry was irritating and shallow, and that her proto-gothy introspection set a bad precedent for generations of aspiring young poets. How was I supposed to know that my classmates were all female English literature majors who revered Dickinson as a god? I don’t think I’ll ever forget the sound of twenty-one skinning knives simultaneously being drawn from twenty-one German army surplus knapsacks. It still sends a cold chill down my spine.

I should have realized that the incident was an indicator of my unresolved issues with women, a problem that went undiagnosed for almost thirty-five years until it was brought to my attention last night by a snarky asshole would-be internet psychoanalyst. The diagnosis came as quite the shock to my staunchly feminist wife, who has spent fifteen years in my company and never suspected the evils that lurked under my placid exterior. I think her exact reaction to the revelation was, “What asshole son of a whore said that about you?”

As if it mattered in the slightest. In some circles, being described as “somebody most of you have never heard of” could be taken as a compliment. In the circles I’m alluding to, it most certainly is. There are worse things than being a nobody, especially a nobody who has had his work referred to by some high profile online and print media outlets. If I could find a way to market myself to the lower tier comics blog demographic, my future would be assured.

Human Beinz – Nobody But Me (from Nobody But Me, 1967) – Ohio frat rockers take on the Isley Brothers.

Portishead – Sour Times (from Dummy, 1994) – Another track for that retro-spy-electronic mix CD I keep planning to assemble, but never get around to making the effort to do so.

The Nips – I Don’t Want Nobody to Love (from Only the End of the Beginning, 1980, reissued as The Tits of Soho, 2000) – Previously the Nipple Erectors, The Nips were Shane MacGowan’s pre-Pogues punk/mod band. It’s amazing how clear his voice sounded back then. When the wife and I caught a Pogues reunion tour last year, he was nigh-unintelligible and we had to reconstruct the words to the songs from memory based on musical cues.