Every time I hear Heartbeat City by The Cars, I want to cry. Not a sniffle. Not a manly tear. I want a full-on emotional flood—the kind of crying where your upper lip gets stuck to your front teeth.
But it doesn’t come.
And then Drive comes on—Who's gonna tell you when... it's too late...—and I feel it rising, like an emotional fart trapped in the soul, but again... nothing. Nothing! Just dead eyes and a dry throat.
So I tell myself, “Luke, if the tears won’t come naturally, you must give yourself something to cry about.”
So I watch Cinema Paradiso. That’s right. I sit there like a middle-aged Orthodox Jew in his garage, waiting for a fictional Italian projectionist to break my heart. And he does. Every time. That ending montage? It's like getting circumcised again—but emotionally.
Sometimes I double-feature Love Story and Legends of the Fall. That’s four hours of sheer devastation and unfulfilled manhood. First, I get Ali MacGraw saying “Love means never having to say you're sorry,” which is a lie, by the way. Love means saying you're sorry every five minutes. Then I get Brad Pitt going full frontier Jesus and burying his Native American wife in the dirt while his hair glistens with the blood of unresolved trauma.
I cry for the fictional people I cannot cry for in real life. It's called emotional outsourcing.
You know what else gets me? British imperial music. I know—I’m not even British. But when I hear Land of Hope and Glory, I stand up and salute something. My ancestors? Empire? My own delusions of grandeur? I don’t know.
And Jerusalem? Oh God. And did those feet, in ancient time, walk upon England’s mountains green? I don't know, but I'm ready to believe. I hear that and suddenly I want to join the Church of England and repress my emotions properly.
And the hymns! Don’t get me started on Nearer My God to Thee. Titanic didn’t kill me—it was the band playing that on deck. That’s what got me. I want to go down with dignity, surrounded by harmony and passive-aggressive British stoicism.
And don't forget The Man from Snowy River. That soundtrack hits me right in the Vegemite. That’s not just music—that’s a stallion galloping through my unresolved childhood trauma.
And A Pub With No Beer? That’s not a novelty song—that’s a lamentation. That’s the Australian Kaddish. Imagine being in a pub. No beer. Just...emotional men in shorts. That’s my childhood.
Now here's the real kicker: every single Air Supply song makes me want to weep—except Making Love Out of Nothing At All. That one? That one makes me want to lead out at karaoke like I’m headlining the Yom Kippur break-fast afterparty. That song grabs me by my inner Neil Diamond and says, “You, sir, were born to suffer with melody.”
So yeah. I’ve got a lot of feelings. They just don’t come out when they’re supposed to. Like when someone dies, I nod solemnly. But when a montage hits, when a sad horse theme swells, when Air Supply drops the emotional hammer—I break like a man who’s just been ghosted by a shiksa in a Buddhist bookstore.
That’s my life. That’s my emotional landscape: sacred, profane, British, Jewish, Australian, karaoke-ready, and always—always—one sob short of catharsis.
