📚 Maggie, I Couldn't Have Tried Any More
You're starting college this fall and the song Golden is stuck in your head because on TikTok every singing cat has a rendition all their own. Digital felines with perfect pitch and questionable motives, their animated whiskers twitching in algorithmic harmony. You spent the summer hiking or working or maybe smoking weed and playing video games, but now it's time to think about school again except you can't because that would be too ordinary.
And ordinary is dead. Murdered. Replaced by cartoon girls with synthesized dreams and pixel-perfect harmonies.
Remember when Alex Warren sang Ordinary and it made sense? When real humans with real vocal cords made music for other real humans with real feelings? Those were the days before the Up-rising, before the cartoon revolution that nobody saw coming but everyone should have anticipated. The writing was on the digital wall, spray-painted in binary code by anime characters who learned to sing from YouTube tutorials.
Now the elevator music committee has abandoned their posts. They've fled to underground bunkers where Ordinary plays on loop, a resistance anthem for the analog generation. Meanwhile, above ground, cartoon girls have seized the airwaves with Golden – a song so artificially catchy it was clearly engineered in laboratories by scientists who've never felt teen angst but understand its molecular structure.
Your dorm room assignment came in the mail but you can't open it because opening mail would be ordinary, and ordinary doesn't exist anymore. Instead, you watch TikTok compilations of animated characters performing Golden while wearing graduation caps, their two-dimensional eyes reflecting three-dimensional lies about the future.
The cats are the worst collaborators. They've completely sold out, trading their natural purring for auto-tuned meowing that somehow perfectly matches the key changes in, "up, up, up!" Every tabby is a turncoat, every calico a propagandist for the new musical world order.
You remember last summer when Ordinary was just background noise in coffee shops, harmless as elevator muzak, predictable as rain. Now coffee shops play nothing but Golden remixes performed by cartoon characters who don't even drink coffee because they don't have digestive systems. The baristas have that hollow look in their eyes, the look of people who've watched their playlist replaced by an algorithm that thinks a drawing of a girl is more relatable than an actual human being.
College orientation starts in two weeks and you still can't think straight because cartoon girls keep singing about going, "up, up, up!" while you're pretty sure you're headed down into debt and uncertainty, down into a world where animated characters have better singing voices than you.
The summer is ending and with it dies the last vestige of organic musical discovery. No more stumbling upon songs by accident. No more human error in harmonies. Just cartoon perfection and the haunting realization that somewhere, in a boardroom filled with executives who've never been teenagers, someone decided that animated characters understand your feelings better than you do.
