Closing Time

(providing a glimpse into the way my mind works and what I was like as a child)

You may have noticed that all my titles are song lyrics. This isn't completely coincidental. But this post is actually about the song "Closing Time" by Semisonic. It came on my Pandora last night and with it came a lot of memories and disappointments.

This song came out in 1998. I was six. (yeah...) I don't know when I first heard it, but I liked the song, I knew the words. I still do. But now it disappoints me a little.

The song is clearly about a bar, "One last call for alcohol / So finish your whiskey or beer." The bar is closing and everyone has to leave and the singer knows "who [he] wants to take [him] home" Straight forward enough, right?

Apparently not.

Back when my age was still a single digit, this song had a much more imaginative and illogical meaning. "Closing time" didn't mean that it was time to close, it meant that "time" was literally closing. Mind you I never knew exactly what this entailed, but it looked somewhat like a spinning vortex that was shrinking. (I'm not kiding, this is literally what I pictured everytime I heard the song). Now, I wasn't totally delusional, this vortex was in a bar.

The people had to find a place where they would stay, as they could no longer travel back and forth between times. (I promise I'm not making this up). I think this came mostly from lyrics like "let you out into the world," "You don't have ot go home, but you can't stay here," and especially "Time for you to go out to the places you will be from," and "Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end."

I was probably 15 before I realized what the song really meant and I still like my meaning better. Not only is time travel awesome, but leaving a bar is less than epic. Also it meant a lot more when knowing who you wanted to take you home meant for forever, not just for the night.