#tryst theory

and all I think of is you

if I get out of this alive

I’ll make everything right

“Alpha Dog” was originally released as a partial demo on the “Welcome to New Administration” mixtape, part of the publicity campaign before the release of Folie a Deux in 2008. The entire song was released on the Believers Never Die album, released in 2009 just before FOB announced their “indefinite hiatus”.

As it’s never been covered before in the curriculum of the Peterick Institute, we decided it was time for a lecture. Please take your seat and hold your questions to the end.

Once upon a time, @shatteredmirrors-and-lace23 and @allkindsofplatinumandpercocet and I met up in New Orleans for the last show of the MANIA tour. An amazing time was had by all...and after the show, we took an Uber to bourbon street, and Shattered and I got ourselves some red beans and rice and some daiquiris. Very STRONG daiquiris.

The night went on and we ended up at Cafe Du Monde, eating beignets and (at least in my case) getting progressively drunker. I apparently considered asking a random stranger if he was wearing a butt plug, and tried to sing “Saturday” very loudly but replace pertinent words with other words like “beignet,” “powdered sugar” and “alcohol.”

This all culminated in me sitting on one of the traffic pillars on the side of the road, singing this bastardized FOB song as we waited for our Uber to take us home. I was apparently struggling to stay upright and take a selfie at once....so this photo happened:

Then our Uber arrives!!

And then my drunk ass starts to tell him that his life would be changed if he got a sandwich from Verti Marte (which is apparently called, affectionately, by the locals, “DirtyVerti”), and also that I promised not to throw up in his car, because “that’s not the kind of person I am.” This also was accompanied by me trying to hug him from the backseat.

So, in her infinite wisdom, Platinum realized a distraction was necessary. So she loudly asks me as she pulls me away from my attempt to accost our Uber driver,

“So, what are your thoughts on @shark-myths Tryst Theory?”

Which had it’s intended effect, as I promptly forgot all about the Uber driver’s need for a hug, and proclaimed loudly:

“ITS TRUE!!! And you know it’s true because it’s a POWERPOINT! ON THE INTERNET!!! That means it MUST be true!!!”

And then for the rest of the drive, I alternated between proclaiming why Den Mothers like @sn1tchesandtalkers are so important telling the world about Lube, and that Tryst Theory was ABSOLUTELY real. And true. Because you know...it’s a PowerPoint on the internet.

All I remember afterwards was Platinum and Shattered each pulling off one of my boots each, while I sang “Box blondes have less fun” over and over and over again.

So remember kids. Don’t hug your Uber driver. Get a sammich from DirtyVerti. Use lube for God’s sake.

And if you know the truth, put it on a PowerPoint on the internet!

Things we should discuss:

Pete’s sexy metal Viking princess unitard, he’s waiting to be rescued by a barbarian, I can only presume he is a bride-prize for the hero who can save him

The Folie-ness of it all, the ship at sea but not doomed, not this time; instead it is a vessel of hope

The mythology-of-the-band frame narrative

How the title references back to Sending Postcards from a Plane Crash

Stardust stardust stardust and Pete’s fear of space objects

What do Field of Dreams and The Princess Bride have in common?

For those expressing concern about Joe’s absence both on Sunday and in this video—he writes in his recent book, None of This Rocks, about emergency back problems during the latter end of this pandemic, compromising his ability to walk for a brief post-surgical time, exacerbated by overworking. He writes about learning boundaries, learning to rest, and asking his band for accommodations for his health. It seems likeliest that he’s recovering from a back-related issue, rather than conscientiously abstaining from participating in this record as he describes doing with MANIA.

General ranting about lyrics:

DISCLAIMER: It’s not me, okay, it’s the text, it’s Pete being incapable of writing anything that doesn’t sound like it’s about forbidden queer love, I could not make this shit up, I truly could not

“Model house meltdown”

Reminds me of walking through the house in your shoes, I’m supposed to love you; reminds me of I’m just playing house, no idea what I’m doing now. It’s a very dark Tim Burton-y sentiment from an outwardly happy man living a domestic fairy tale.

“We were a hammer to the Statue of David, we were a painting you could never frame, and you were the sunshine of my lifetime.”

THE PAST-TENSENESS HERE

Right from the start, this sets us up for something universally perceived as perfect and beloved being destroyed. This could be a reputation, a cultural relic, a profound piece of history, a narrative, a love. We were a hammer that destroyed it, that perceived thing… 

We were a painting too profane to be displayed in a museum, hidden and damned? Or we were larger than life, uncontent to be contained by a frame, always in motion, chimeric and twining, together apart, together apart, a tesselated image you can only see if you zoom out and unfocus your eyes.

You have all read my opinions about twenty years of Patrick = sunshine metaphors, which seem to be getting pretty FUCKING literal here at the end of days.

“Nowhere left for us to go but heaven, summer falling through our fingers again”

Among other things, this seems to be a VERY explicit reference to Heaven’s Gate.

I am feeling the hope of MANIA (you know my manic poly dream reading of that beautiful, purple beacon of hope) replaced by what the pandemic / apocalypse did to us all. So much for stardust, indeed.

Summer symbolizing touring, festival circuits, linking to the recent FOB instagram post that showed video from the Hella Mega Tour with the caption “take us back here.” The liminality and fleeting-ness of those spaces, those selves, that unmoored time of doing nothing, being everything. The way they want to be home when they’re on the road and the way they want to be on the road when they’re at home. Summer slipping through our fingers again, like the sand in the bottom half of the hourglass, gone past, gone past.

“What would you trade the pain for? I’m not sure”

Isn’t that a fucking question, my friends!!! The pain of longing, unsatisfied, love, unrequited or unconsummated, forbidden and forsaken? The pain of not-having, or of having-had? The pain it was to be together? Welcome to my glossary of suffering

And what would you trade it for? Is this a question of, what is it worth and I can’t imagine giving it up? Or is it a past-tense question—a way of saying, I traded that exquisite pain to get what I have now, and I’m not sure what it was for, I’m not sure if it was worth it.

“Every lover’s got a little dagger in their hand”

Tbh someone smarter than me will have more to say about this, I am sure. Tarot and betrayal and the way love has thorns and anything worth having always hurts, everyone you trust with love will hurt you and let you down at least a little bit, imperfections and prices paid. But it’s also a very classic, very catchy and poetically deep sounding chorus of the type FOB loves to use and do not always hold a deep reading. 

“I saw you in a bright clear field, hurricane heat in my head.”

More field-of-dreams invocation and playfulness! If there is not a stadium show at that field, I am going to light something on fire, it is the only pilgrimage I care about from this day forward.

“Inscribed like stone and faded by the rain: Give up what you love before it does you in”

LITERALLY what can I even SAY about this and the past tense and the DECISION, the question popped by MANIA that was answered only by global cataclysm and forced separation, the way they began work on this album in early 2021 (per Joe’s book). I can only hear this in conversation with the tracks on that record.

“The kind of pain you feel to get good in the end”

I was all prepared to do some read about morality and queerness and what you give up for the people you love, until @carbonbased000 said, “I love the pain line and I want to give it a kinky read so badly but we both know it’s about tennis”, and you know what. She’s right.

did you see his latest insta post, with his NYLON interview pics, where the caption is "you want it all but you can't have it, it's in your face but you can't grab it"? because i feel PERSONALLY taunted by pete wentz. he's like, just telling us he's in love with patrick but they aren't going to be together, he's putting ME as a CONSPIRACIST in the exact same position of thwarted frustration he himself is in. IT'S FINE I'M FINE.

2/2 -shot' ergo the smfs lyrical lean of 'I love you so much but this maybe really isn't our time'/ mixed in with all the other very project-written-during-covid ~vibes~ (which I love). But anyway there's a lot of time that can and did (if they started in 2021?) pass between writing lyrics and releasing music and working on the album after all that isolating introspection led right back to 'fuck it lets just be together life is short' hence The Way They're Acting now. *shrugs* idk

*

Love this, love you, thanks for the conspiracy ask!

we know from this kerrang interview and a few other casual mentions, like in patrick's album commentary from the release parties (still haven't listened to that myself but @leyley09 is an excellent on-the-scene reporter) that some of the writing for SMFS actually started before the pandemic, with Patrick dreaming up the music for What a Time to Be Alive right after the release of MANIA and Pete writing the lyrics that paired with it before the pandemic. so if the writing process went dormant in lockdown, we know many of the threads were connected before covid hit the US. (i'm also remembering the cute zoom sing-a-long pete & patrick did at the beginning of the pandemic where they were clearly in the same room but on separate video feeds so that we, viewing, could feel like we were all alone together)

I stand by my thought that MANIA's ask symbolizes open doors that are open-ended--the queer poly happily ever after is floated, and maybe it's answered and maybe it's not but i don't think any of those doors were closed, even by lockdown. i take the backwards-looking in SMFS as a way of acknowledging what's gone past and is no longer possible: having their whole lives being entwined together, maybe even raising a family together instead of with the lovely women they've chosen and built something beautiful with, not letting the fear of being found out determine the unhealthy shape their relationship took for the first 15-odd years of its course. i find this deeply relatable as a mid-30s bisexual, honestly, whose life could have looked really different in some really joyful ways if the culture had been more hospitable and open to queerness when i was growing up, but who also doesn't regret or want to change what i have now.

SMFS doesn't feel like a frantic too-lateness to me, it doesn't feel young; it feels plain and true, like, well, it is too late for some things, but that might not have worked out anyway, and as it stands we're everything to each other--patrick can't write songs without pete and pete feels like he's a painter who can't paint without fall out boy (the kerrang interview is giving me life, truly)--and it isn't so bad, having a soulmate, whether that manifestation is currently romantic or not. it's too late to change what's gone past but it's not too late for the entire future.

i've just never seen them so comfortable together and so matter-of-fact! like their closeness hasn't looked this easy since pete was making patrick squirm on vh1 by describing them as husbands nearly 20 years ago. i love the way no one's rushing to disguise or define or defend anything, they're just sitting there plainly like, this dude is everything to me, and it frankly is so beautiful and refreshing after the no-homo panic that characterized the early aughts.

VS

Kiss my cheek, baby, please/Would you read my eulogy? (Heaven, Iowa)

… thoughts?

god d you just have to twist the knife (again, twist the knife again like we did last summer), don't you? you just COME AT ME LIKE THIS

honestly though we should look at all the last rites / death related requests pete has made lyrically over the years, because it's such a theme in their discography now, and i bet sometimes pete writes it that way and sometimes they're unrelated lines and it's just patrick arranging it that way, and--it's such an extreme level to blow love up to, where it's happening in foxholes and chapels in hospitals, isn't it? like on your deathbed, you can finally admit something, you can finally ask for the tenderness and overt love-yes-love you have been wanting the whole time, only you had to pretend you didn't want it, because of celebrity or masculinity or the rules you made up in your head about how you're not good enough, only copper-plated, and you'd tarnish gold.