"Undone - The Sweater Song" • Weezer (by Colin Brightwell)

I’m so uncool. 

I have a tooth gap that I can spray water from, garden-hose style. My hair gets shaggy. My laugh sounds like a hyena cackle before shifting into a pig snort. Shirt tucked into baggy jeans with dad shoes. I’m white bread suburb dweeb stomping on the same streets my scuffed Chuck Taylors did a decade ago. You stick around long enough, you see everything else around change. On walks in the neighborhood, I count the new cracks on the sidewalks as Rivers Cuomo screams through my headphones. Little angsty white bread dweeb twisting in his threadbare sweater. I step on each sidewalk crack. I’m coming undone.

Everyone’s got their own fucked up song. I’m not talking, like, depraved songs. I mean songs they blast when they’re fucked up. Buzzed, pissed, blazed, blitzed. Songs they scream with when the world kicks them when they’re done. Songs that get you through the fucked up. The world keeps pulling the loose thread of my sweater, and I keep wishing the volume could louder just one notch for this song.

Sometimes my neighbors might catch me dancing on my walks. It’s extremely possible. Doesn’t matter if it’s at night, there are plenty of street light. I mean, you couldn’t really call it dancing. Uncool, remember? Mostly it’s thrashing about in the fall leaves, stomping on a loose chuck of asphalt, snapping a twig, all while Weezer reaches a thunderous guitar crescendo once Rivers’s sweater has been pulled into nothing, little dweeb dude laying there in Superman skivvies, fetal position at the party with drunken onlookers thinking, what is this guy’s deal?

My buddy Drew and I used to blast Weezer’s Blue Album constantly in high school, two uncool dudes doing cool things like underage drinking and thinking we’d be rock n rollers. Under the stars, it was easy to howl along with Rivers. Back then, everything is so easy. You don’t even know how uncool you really are.

I’m convinced now that everyone is coming undone. Invisible fingers are pulling the strings of everyone’s sweater. It’s just that some of us have less threads than others. Not everyone can afford cashmere. Me? I gotta get my sweaters at the thrift store.

In grad school, I was king of the Irish Goodbyes. House parties hated seeing me coming because they’d never see me leave. Didn’t matter how many lovely folks I knew, or if the beer was aplenty. All that mattered is that I knew those invisible fingers were coming for me, fingers pinched and ready to tug at my sweater. I had to run out of there before I walked too much and my sweater unraveled, and there I would be on my buddy’s living room floor with nothing but my skivvies. I’m not even cool enough to have Superman ones.

My sister says I have a delayed angsty streak. I don’t know, she’s not a psychologist. But in my early thirties, I still find myself being so uncool, white bread dweeb, and blasting that song every chance I get – fucked up or not. Because at this point, everything’s fucked up. We are all walking away as someone pulls the thread. Listen closely, hear that guitar shredding? It’s reaching its crescendo. You’re going to be lying there, too. And of course, someone’s going to ask you if you knew there’s a party after the show. Are we gonna go?

Colin Brightwell is a Kansas City native. His fiction has appeared in BULL, Reckon Review, past-ten, Dark Yonder, and Rock and a Hard Place. His debut collection, Nothing Good Ever Happens in a Flyover State, is available from Cowboy Jamboree Press. He teaches middle school English outside Kansas City. Insta: cbwizzy