There She Goes

Listen while you read:  Again

There she goes, there she goes again
Racing through my brain
And I just can't contain
The feeling that remains

There she goes, there she goes again
Pulsing through my veins
And I just can't contain
This feeling that remains

There she goes, there she goes again
She calls my name
She pulls my train
No one else could heal my pain
And I just can't contain
This feeling that remains

There she goes (ad infinitum)

Lee Mavers  (for The Boo Radleys)

Well. Where to begin? First of all, this song is not to be confused with The Velvet Underground's "There She Goes Again," despite their similar theme. And although I chose The Boo Radley's version (because I like their name for obvious reasons), the song may be known more widely in versions by The La's (a single that was released four times) and Sixpence None the Richer. To complicate matters further, Bob Marley has a song called "There She Goes," but it's a different song.

And yes, the song is about heroin addiction. That's not why I chose it.

I chose it because my wandering daughter (Jenna) is off again. To sum up: I picked her up at Fort Lauderdale on June 14th, and then she and I drove north to New Jersey with three stops on the way. She was home for one day, and then I drove her to Newark International Airport for a flight to Detroit, where she was participating in a conference on environmental literature. I picked her up at Newark late Saturday night, and after doing the fastest packing in the history of packing, she drove off to Vermont at 1:00 yesterday for training for a summer job. Tomorrow, she flies off to Amman, Jordan, for that job. There she goes again.

So I am fortunate to have kids with a good work ethic, a sense of adventure, and confidence in their choices. I do not take that for granted. But I also have friends and relatives whose children were raised in loving and supportive homes, but who have succumbed to the destructive power of heroin. I struggle to understand the rising popularity, affordability, and access to this horrendous drug.

I'm a child of the Sixties. In my later teenage years, there was pot, there was LSD, there were mushrooms, and later, cocaine. But the one drug we knew to not go near was heroin. What happened to that ethic? Opioid addiction is rampant in this country, with certain geographical pockets taking a major hit from its infiltration into our culture. From what I hear, it's cheaper than pot and easier to come by. (And yet we still treat marijuana as if it were the devil.)

We all self-medicate, so it is somewhat understandable that there is a market for opioids. Whether your drug of choice is alcohol or nicotine or pot or acid or prescription painkillers or food or candy or caffeine, nearly all of us turn to something to help us navigate the difficulty of living. I'm not judging anybody's choices. But why choose heroin, the one that may very likely kill you? And why would a health care plan refuse to offer treatment for addiction to this scourge? America is screaming out for help in this area. There is human pain that government can seek to lessen, and perhaps if/when it does, the need for life-threatening addictions may ease.

I don't think I ever heard this song until a couple of years ago, when it was used as the soundtrack to a TV commercial for Ortho Trip-Cyclen Lo birth control pills. I cannot explain this. Can you?