Falling Through the Stars: Mike Doughty's "Haughty Melodic" and a Lost Friendship

by editor Michele Catalano

In 2005 I joined an online forum called Fark dot com, whose logo was a squirrel with giant balls. I treated the site with all the seriousness it deserved, which is to say, none. I didn’t join the forum to make friends or talk politics or anything that might be worth my time; I joined because the people on it were funny as hell and laughing my way through my otherwise tumultuous life was a good way to spend time. 

But I did end up making friends there, some of whom I am still friends with to this day. It’s inevitable when you spend that much time on a website that you will become friends with the people you are spending your day with. 

We all had funny/clever/dumb usernames on the site. Mine was “woodpecker from mars,” named after a Faith No More song. I referred to all of my newfound friends by their usernames, because our relationships were, in the beginning at least, superficial. I didn’t care to find out real names, or jobs, or family situations. I just wanted to laugh at dick jokes and post bad photoshops and spread memes. I stayed mostly at arm’s length, until I didn’t.

One night in the fall of 2005, I got an email. I recognized the name as someone from Fark. Intrigued, I read the email. It was from someone I had been conversing with a lot on the site, someone who seemed cool and friendly and funny and feisty. She opened her email very boldly:

Hi! It’s me, M, from Fark. I think we should be friends.

I was 43 years old and I suddenly felt like I was 12. Friends? You want to be friends with me? Surely this was some kind of joke. No one wanted to be friends with me. I eyed the email suspiciously, as if I was looking at M herself. What’s in it for her? Was I going to be the butt of some Fark joke?

I read on to the next paragraph, where she introduced herself formally with her real name and told me about her two kids and a little about her life. This was a sincere email. She really meant it. She wanted to befriend me. I beamed. 

I immediately wrote back, agreeing that yes, we should be friends. What was I doing? I was letting my guard down. The weird thing was, it felt good instead of risky or scary. 

We became fast friends, emailing with frequency, sometimes talking on Google Chat instead. We exchanged all the minute details of our lives. She was divorced, a single mom of two school age children. She liked hiking and running and had a special affinity for Mike Doughty as a solo artist, and also for his band Soul Coughing. He was her favorite artist, and I decided to dig into his works. All I knew at the time were two Soul Coughing songs. I wanted to be able to talk to M about her favorite music.

And so it came to be that Mike Doughty’s music—most especially his 2005 album Haughty Melodic—came to remind me of M, at first in a sweet, comfortable way.

I fell in love with the album and its jangly ruminations on life. It had an air of hope about it; Doughty himself has said the album is about redemption and happiness, and those were things I was looking for in my own life. I listened to Haughty Melodic (an anagram of Michael Doughty) on a regular basis. I felt that it further connected M and me. We did not have a lot of music in common—my favorite bands at the time were Queens of the Stone Age and Clutch, whom she had no use for—and finding some ground where we could meet musically meant a lot to me.

Our friendship deepened as my time with my then-partner was dwindling. I was in an emotionally abusive relationship, and M was a great support to me at the time, talking me down from ledges, calming me, comforting me. I never had such a good friend in my life. That we lived a thousand miles from each other didn’t matter. This friendship was deep and true. The long-distance nature of this relationship would later help me navigate a long-distance relationship with the man who would become my husband (and ex-husband), whom I also met on Fark. 

M continued to be there for me through some turbulent times, and I was there for her as her attempts at relationships started and sputtered. She carried me through the end  of my time with my partner and guided me through a budding romance with my future husband. She was there when times were tough, when times were good, when I felt on the verge of collapse, when I was in the throes of falling in love. 

I had terrible insomnia back then—a product of experiencing sleep paralysis for a period of time and then being afraid to go to sleep—and some nights I would be up at 3 a.m., listening to Doughty in my headphones and nodding along.

Oh all the days that I have run

I sought to lose that cloud that’s blacking out the sun

My train will come, some one day soon

And when it comes I’ll ride it bound from night to noon

I loved his confidence, his insistence that things would turn out okay eventually. But mostly I loved the warm feeling his songs gave me as they made me think of M. I was never one to make easy friends. The fact that someone would give me their time and energy and companionship like M did made me feel that maybe I wasn’t such a loser after all. 

Our friendship grew through our own individual turmoils, through our shared happiness when good things occurred, through parenting nightmares and proud moments. We continued to email dozens of times a day, and when I realized I was in love with my new paramour I sent M these Doughty lyrics to describe it, because I knew she’d understand:

I hear the bells, they are like emeralds, and

Glints in the night, commas and ampersands

Your moony face, so inaccessible

Your inner mind, so inexpressible

Time went on, and so did our lives. Graduations, family deaths, birthdays, engagements, and a wedding; we were there for each other’s joy and sadness. I honestly would have had several nervous breakdowns if it weren’t for M’s steady hand when dealing with my neurosis. So when our emails became less frequent and our conversations shorter, I started to worry. 

We had conversations about having time for each other, about having mental space for each other. She was going through a rough time in her long-term relationship, and I wanted to be there for her. But she seemed to shut down and shut up once things got bad. I admit it, I felt a little hurt that she would not allow me to reciprocate the helping hand, the lifeline that she always offered me. It felt like I was losing her, that I had her in my grasp but could not hold on tight enough. 

I sang along with Mike Doughty, a mantra of sorts for me now:

Don’t fall through the stars, don’t fall through them

I attempted to fix whatever was wrong, but I was given the “it’s not you, it’s me” line so ubiquitous in failing relationships. She needed space. She didn’t have the necessary bandwidth to deal with my problems as well as hers. She didn’t want to burden me with her issues. I felt like this was all so unfair, for her to loosen my grip on her, casually unfolding my fingers from her hand and letting go.

Don’t fall through the stars, don’t fall through them

My husband, my partner of 14 years, left me, suddenly and shockingly. I emailed M to let her know, to keep her posted on my life, to hopefully get some of that M wisdom that had saved me from despair before. She sent perfunctory emails, rarely answered texts. I couldn’t help but feel like she abandoned me. I surprised myself at how torn up I felt about her disappearing into the void. In some ways, losing her friendship was harder than losing my marriage. I turned Doughty’s words on myself.

Don’t fall through the stars, don’t fall through them

After my husband left, I experienced a series of medical ailments that required hospitalization and going on sick leave from work. My emails to and from M were now short and stilted. “How are you?” “Fine, kids are good. Hope all is well.” Like emails 10 years after graduation between college roommates who keep in touch only because they feel obligated. And that was just it—I had become an obligation to M. So I stopped texting to the void. I stopped sending emails to an uninterested party. I stopped hoping our friendship would survive this. I stopped listening to Haughty Melodic. 

She fell through the stars. 

It’s been two years since I last heard from M. My final text exchange with her was one in which she said she was sorry for not having the emotional space for me, but she hoped we could still continue to be friends. I answered her, affirmed her desire to keep the friendship going, and that was the end. Maybe it was me; maybe I didn’t take enough hints that she was done with me, done with us. It just hurt so much to lose her on the heels of losing my husband, who also didn’t have any emotional space for me. 

I started listening to Haughty Melodic again. I missed the album too much to let my dead friendship stand in the way of enjoying it. But I can’t help but feel a little sad when Doughty sings, when I think that maybe it was me who fell through the stars.

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