On never losing your edge because you've never found a home.

LCD Soundsystem at Hollywood Bowl, photo by me.

I was thinking about LCD Soundsystem's "Losing My Edge" the other day—as is the wont of most middle-aged men, I suppose—and realized my read of the song, and here my sometimes embarrassingly intense identification with its seemingly tall tales, is based in loneliness and not the realm of the ultra cool.

For years I felt bad for identifying with the song to much, since so many others view the song as a tongue-in-cheek takedown of the hippest cat in the land. But I realized that to me, the song is evidence of an extremely lonely existence, narrated by a man never at the center of the scene, but constantly drifting through scenes. This isn't the tale of someone so cool he is at the center of every monumental happening and historical trend, it's the perspective of someone with no constant community, who finds himself drifting into these situations through his constant but never fruitful search for belonging. 

You generally can't experience a ton of disparate experiences when you have a solid social circle or are rooted in a found family, because those roots help keep you somewhat grounded and on a firm path. Then there are those of us eternally cursed to surf the edges of endless different scenes with the bittersweet payoff being we actually do get to experience fractured planets of history firsthand, but it's only because we are constantly in a wobbling and ever expanding orbit, doomed to never have a true home to call our own.