The World's a Mess, It's in Our Kiss
An '80s punk rock anthem is living in my mind. Here's why.
There’s a song from 1980 that’s been living rent free in my mind lately. It’s by the band X, from their album Los Angeles: “The World’s a Mess, It’s in My Kiss.”
I discovered X when I was living — rent free — in my father’s bungalow in Venice Beach, California, 1981. Nowadays we might dress up that time in my life as a gap year, but it was more like a free fall.
I was 19. My friends were at college in places like Harvard and Williams and Duke. I’d delayed starting school and gone to work, first as a bookkeeper for Wilson’s Leather at the mall where I grew up (I can still smell the leather jackets!), then at Raupp Campfitters, where I bought a tent, a backpacking stove and some stout hiking boots on the store discount.
Equipped with all of this, my boyfriend and I lit out for Alaska.
We hitchhiked across Canada to Prince Rupert, British Columbia, took the ferry up the Inside Passage to Skagway, then hitched and camped our way north along the Alaska Highway. One morning a family of foxes sniffed around our tent. Another day we watched grizzly bears scarf up berries near Denali, eating everything in sight as autumn advanced. An eclectic cast of strangers gave us rides, including two guys who popped a bottle of cold duck and sent the cork sailing through the car's open sunroof.
So free. Just like us. Until we weren't.
In Fairbanks, I enrolled at the University of Alaska, planning to study biology. My boyfriend headed back to the lower 48 to make some money. I couldn’t stand being away from him (oh, 19! I remember you!), so I ditched school and followed him to Seattle.
Where I didn’t find him.
I had nearly no money and knew exactly no one. A group of kids more feral than I was “befriended” me at Pike Place Market and promptly stole the little cash I did have, which I kept in a leather pouch around my neck. It took some doing to steal it.
Which is how I ended up living with my father in Venice. He was on sabbatical at UCLA and had scored an extremely cool pad two blocks from the beach. I spent my days wandering Venice Boardwalk, befriending a roller-skating troubadour and weightlifters with parrots on their shoulders. Tom Petty gave a lecture at UCLA, which I found hilarious. It was just so LA.
And somewhere in there, Los Angeles arrived. Rowdy music. Incisive lyrics. Sung in a howl. Perfect. Reagan ascendant, breaking unions and calling it morning in America.
Turns out it was dusk.
Now, 46 years later, that song is still perfect. Because it’s still true. The world is a mess, and it’s in our kiss.
Floods. Fires. Seas uncomfortably warm. Mountains literally tumbling down. Political and social fracture. Democratic norms eroding. Healthcare systems staggering. Education polarized. I’m sure I don’t have to catalogue the mess.
And unlike 1981, these days we have catastrophe in the palm of our hand, every minute of every day. An endless scrolling shitshow, our attention riveted to calamity as a business model.
No wonder we feel overwhelmed. At least I do. And tired. So. Damn. Tired.
My nervous system is totally on the fritz, like static on the radio, 24/7. I keep waiting for things to "get back to normal," and I'm starting to suspect that is not going to happen. This is normal, now.
But then again, when was the world ever not a mess?
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”
William Butler Yeats wrote those words in 1919, with Europe barely out of the First World War and the influenza pandemic killing millions. In Vienna, a towering Baroque monument commemorates the plague of 1679, which killed thousands right there in one of the world’s loveliest cities
Clearly our ancestors did something other than fret during those terrible times. They fell in love. They planted gardens, cooked dinner, wrote poems and sang songs. Had sex, told jokes, sat with the dying, cooed at babies, gazed at the moon.
Life can be hard, but it sure is sweet.
Which brings me back to X: “The world’s a mess, it’s in my kiss.”
There’s that kiss. So interesting. It’s a kiss of culpability, certainly. Like Judas, we aren’t standing outside the mess looking in. We participate in the systems that got us here. But it points to a larger possibility too, a movement from overwhelm and escape into intimacy. Reverence, even.
Can we kiss this world, broken as it is, exactly as it is?
That is the horrible invitation of our times: to stay open when everything in us wants to close up, numb out, go dark and hunker down. To let the world break our hearts over and over, and come back for more. Not because we’re masochists or idiots. But because maybe this is what we’re actually made for.
Imagine having the stamina to live like that.
The stamina – or we could call it power – to remain tender. Sweetness fuels this stamina. The raw pleasure of flowers, the scent of fig trees, a hawk’s arc across the sky. Love, too, is fuel. Perhaps the most important kind. And not some lazy lovey-dovey variety that calls it all good.
I mean love as life force. As wellspring.
One day in a meditation I had an inkling of this. I saw a vast reservoir of unused love deep inside myself. Like the good dinner plates, some part of me believed this love was too precious to use. I’d better save it, I might run out. Stingy, crouching, afraid.
Yet there it was, this vast love, waiting for its moment, curdling into grief.
I’m pretty sure: this is its moment.
So I wonder: What would it mean not merely to survive the onslaught of the times, or protect ourselves from it, but to become intimate with it? Intimate enough to kiss.
I intend to find out.
If you’re interested in how we might meet these times with less crouch and more courage, this essay is the beginning of a new four-week Certain Age journey called The World’s a Mess, It’s in Our Kiss. We’ll explore what it means to develop the stamina to remain tender—to stay awake to the suffering of the world without losing our intimacy with its sweetness.
I’d love you to join me. Learn more here.
Jean Shields Fleming is founder and editor of Certain Age Magazine.
Jean at 19 courtesy of the author.
Rose on fire vertical by Gaspar Uhas
Rose on fire horizontal by Doug Kelley
This is just beautiful and I can totally relate, Jean. I remember those days of my youth so vividly. I was always focussed on the environment, the war, the fear of nuclear weapons...etc. but still I was young and excited to begin life with my beloved husband. We had to keep going, focussed on our future and our family. Now, with grandchildren whom we adore, the world's problems feel overwhelming, but somehow, we have to keep smiling and hopeful, for their sakes more than our own. As I said to friends recently, it's actually the hardest thing we've ever had to do, and we've done a lot of hard things and lived through very tough times. Every day is like…