I’m from the future!
Want proof? I named this chapter after a song by the Supersuckers yet to be released at both the time of publication and the timestamp of this blog post.1
Anachronism or not, it’s a pretty succinct summary of what’s about to happen / where this story was inevitably heading. If the inspiration for Local Boy Done Gone was imagining “Won One” as the most important song of all time I had to deliver on that promise. The epigraph playfully calls it a traditional folk song of unknown origins (actually written by my college roommate Chris Evjy in the mid-1990s) though it’s followed Local Boy across two books. Here those two timelines of fact and fiction merge.
Traditional Folk Tidbits (Author Unknown):
- Erwin Schrödinger didn’t die at 27, but he did coin the term “quantum entanglement.”
- “When we get to where we’re going I need you to play it.”
- The contraption Local Boy hasn’t ever seen before in the back of the van is the prototype time machine found at the creepy hospital in Timely Persuasion. A tan van was also connected to that hospital.
- “She draped a pea-green cardigan sweater over my white dress shirt…”
- I still giggle at the “speaking of minor hits” segue.
- My friend Neil invests in real estate, specifically self storage. His gig indirectly inspired the setting of this climactic chapter.2
- “This might’ve been the most beautiful version of ‘Won One’ I’d ever played” references a Jens Lekman performance at the Masonic Lodge in Hollywood on 9/28/11. He performed what I thought was the most beautiful version of “Black Cab” I’d ever heard, and no sooner had I thought it than he said the same thing aloud.3
- Hazy as my actual memory may be these days, the scene here is more or less a play by play of the first time I heard “Won One” in real life including my pitch on what to title it. (The working title was “Turn Up The Rain” — later changed to “Turnip” at my dumb suggestion before eventually landing on far better wordplay in my final suggestion.)4
- When I finally tracked down an old recording of “Won One” years later, I couldn’t make out if the lyric was head/hand/hair. I think the ambiguity is a big part of the charm.
- Speaking of ambiguity: While Timely Persuasion is sometimes described as being overly explainy, Local Boy Done Gone skews towards intentionally unexplainy. The redhead continues to hand wave when confronted, but consistently sticks to her story of “updating memories” even as the rest of our understanding evolves. Here the Schrodinger’s cat metaphors help her have it both ways, updating two distinct memories simultaneously without creating a paradox.
- Sistine gets crossed off the list by being present for the writing of “Won One” at an appropriate age to be inspired by it. In contrast, Local Boy’s ticket off the list involves him not being somewhere.5
FOOTNOTES
- Confession: I saw them play it live on 12/15/23 (and 2 days earlier for that matter) and started writing this chapter on 1/7/24 with it still fresh in my head. ↩︎
- This is neither financial nor investment advice. ↩︎
- It was also the final day of the 2011 baseball regular season. On the way to the concert an epic comeback by the Rays over the Yankees gave me hope the Red Sox had a chance, but an epic collapse vs Baltimore a few hours later made for an emotional rollercoaster of a music + sports fandom day. ↩︎
- It also may have briefly been called “No One Won” — which definitely would have triggered my aversion to noone as a too common misspelling. ↩︎
- Technically not being somewhen: 1977. ↩︎
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