I like the Mountain Goats. I like the Mountain Goats a lot. I recently bought a used car with a CD player and no iPhone jack. The four CDs I burnt to play while I drive around town (yes, the year is 2001 and I am burning CDs) contain eight Mountain Goats albums, and nothing but eight Mountain Goats albums. The two or three times that I’ve seen John Darnielle in concert, I’ve been wooed by his energetic, earnest, and adorably nerdy love of being a guy on a stage. As a word geek myself, I swoon over the stark, sad, silly poetry of his songs. I follow him on Twitter, where he posts about sandwiches and feminism just like a real human being, and it brightens up my social media feed with surprising sincerity.
To be honest though, it’s daunting to follow someone you admire on Twitter, especially someone like John Darnielle (@mountain_goats), who’s inclined to actually respond to tweets from fans. I’m used to thinking of famous people, musicians or writers, as far off concepts, not concrete bodies with whom you could have a conversation about lunch meats. Sure, talking to them would be great, but I’ll never have the chance, right? Twitter gives me that chance — and it makes me realize that I have absolutely nothing worthwhile to say. “I love your music. Today I listened to The Sunset Tree for the seventeenth time.” Great.
So I decided to try a different approach: I started a Twitter feed composed entirely of strange dreams I’ve had about John Darnielle (@dreamsofgoats). Well, none of them are actually dreams I’ve had about John Darnielle, because I’ve never dreamt about John Darnielle, but you get the idea. Somewhere between stalking and surrealism, there’s a random fan who created an entire Twitter account just to barrage you with inane statements like: “Last night I dreamt that for Valentine’s Day John Darnielle got me a red, heart-shaped cake. ‘It’s not romance,’ he said, ‘It’s anatomy.'” Or: “Last night I dreamt that I told @moutain_goats how ‘Pale Green Things’ always make me cry, and he was like, ‘Oh, I wrote that for my cat.'”
Darnielle himself has yet to reply. Has he noticed? Is he weirded out? Does he already have a pool of admirers exploring interpersonal contact through social media via creepiness? At the least, I’m having a good time dreaming up dreams. Frequently they involve candy. Sometimes they involve small dogs in leather hats. The account doesn’t have many followers, so in a very real sense I’m talking to myself a heck of a lot more than I’m talking to John Darnielle. That’s oddly comforting though, because the man I admire as a concept is back to being a concept, and the bizarre twists of Twitter aren’t changing a heck of a lot after all.
