Ever since the day we met, ever since the day we met.

Found a particular album last night whilst fumbling through the cd case on my way to the Cantab - I carry around an unreasonable number of albums for a man who lives in the modern age, has two laptops (3 if one does not require function for credit) and an ipod (albeit an itty-bitty one). Three cd books of different sizes, a sturdy cardboard winebox and whatever cases that failed to make it there or the back seat strewn about the footwell of the passenger seat as a shiny, strobe-rug.

Often play a game wherein, rather than trying to find any album in particular (because this is impossible), I flip a book open or grab at random from the box and stuff that cd into the dash and have at for as long as can be stood.

This game yielded Rocket by Primitive Radio Gods - which immediately led to 'Standing outside a broken phonebooth with money in my hand'. Which in turn caused an almost violent wash of nostalgia and memorial fugue. Those images in particular fade quick - even now, sitting in the shop, I cannot recall specifically what 'Phonebooth' brings up - this is how the very best dreams are ruined by needing to piss in the morning and the long, cold walk to the john.

But it got me thinking about the songs that do this best - really explode from nowhere and return me physically to the time I was listening to them; and this is the requirement, that it effects the body - the right song makes me smell things, feel differently, not just accelerating the heart and making me vaguely emo.

To whit - I think more internet savvy people call this sort of thing a meme, but I am not sure, because I am not one of them.

Top 10 Songs I Can Think Of What Make Me Move Through The Fabric Of My Life Come Before And Where It Is They Take Me. in no particular order.

1. Showerhead - Eve 6 - Eve 6 - In that somewhat lozenge-like haze of summers I spent at St. Joe's the 'Guys' spent a lot of time driving places and feeling very deep and important; of all the ridiculous things we discussed and argued about, fought over and took far too seriously, I still feel the discussions we had about albums were on target and that much of how I look at albums as a structured idea with value is still informed by them. More specifically, Zac, Brady and myself spent a good deal of time convinced that this song was epically important.
On the rare instances I manage to find that album or roll across some indie college rock station tuned to the back rightmost portion of my skull, I find myself in Brady's Camry going....somewhere...probably too fast. It's usually a complicated visual, as I spent much of the time in that backseat (the only one I was ever comfortable sitting in for any length of time) staring out the window thinking really hard about A. Sara and B. what I must look like looking out the window. Watching oneself watching oneself is a complicated, Jungian effort at the best of times and mostly forces me to refocus on the early nature of my presumptions on love. Showerhead is not a nice song, per say, and the almost desperate way we, as a group, sought to locate songs that fit very perfectly into our lives and situations made for some choices that seem...questionable at best. More on songs meaning something different in the moment than it would later be obvious that they did to come.
I know you know Eve 6 from elsewhere, so listen.
Here's to the Night can recieve only an honorable mention here because, first and foremost, my experiences in those summers informed and strengthened my inner music snob and there is nothing tackier in the whole world than sharing a special moment with strangers when a song comes on. It happens. But seriously - if you went school in the 90s or early 00s, you aren't allowed to claim that songs like Here's to the Night or Good Riddance (Time of Your Life) (Greenday - Nimrod) really bring you back or are totally significant to you - because they were significant to everyone. 'Wow, you know, as albums go, I think Revolver is really special to me.' No.
Worse, if you did not have the luxury of being as old as I am and thus in your formatives at that time, even if you stumble onto that song on the same radio while someone you love is leaving you or your sports team won or you just 'really, like, figured yourself out' you can't make a claim on those songs. They're used up. Move along.

2. Everlong - Foo Fighters - The Colour and the Shape - I started a different list once, about the songs I was in love to girls during, a song being so much more than the span of it's minutes and really, for those who work like me, rather more like tiny eras in the vast annals of one's life. It got kind of dodgy because love can be very dreamlike itself, once you wake up from it, it can be difficult to recall all the details and almost impossible to do so in any reasonable order - I found myself being vaguely aware of having really liked a few girls I went to highschool with and not really understanding why or for how long or what years were involved. I am pretty sure I was getting over Beth Sorce in Rob's basement playing Final Fantasy VII when this track came into my life. What is particularly confusing was that that era ended because of Beth Sorce. See? Convoluted.
It should be noted that the amount of time we spend thinking about things in the moment and immediately after has much to say about how long we remember having done or been something in the first place. I distinctly recall that FF7 period of my life (punctuated by a few savage drinking experiences, the soundtrack to 'Last Man Standing', Mrs. Bono deciding it was alright to hit me with spoons and the first burgeoning steps of my cool) lasting...years and years, far longer than even I spent in highschool. Which is saying something.
Everlong, more than anything, recalls the perilous hours I spent reading Stephen King's It - I listened to that album over and over for the vast length of that book, which, due entirely to how scared I was, took forever to read. I always get these flashes of the water tower and the sewer grate whenever any track from 'The Colour and the Shape' comes on, the wholly sepia-toned pall of terror just comes out of the speakers - due largely to inscribing myself into songs I think girls would like me more if I had written, Everlong always came as that late respite - though, again, I've no clear picture of who it was I was longing for while trying to ignore the inevitable clown lurking in my closet or at the foot of the bed.
Longer I go, I suppose, the less everything will be about someone I loved who isn't around me anymore. Here's hoping.

3. The Recluse - Cursive - The Ugly Organ - I really liked living in Waltham. As far as eras of questionable duration go, it's pretty much the best. Lost my virginity, cemented what I would come to think of as 'my cool', got in my first real relationship, ruined my first real relationship, fell in love, very hard, made out with a number of really pretty girls, began a fairly trecherous cycle of not just being okay with, but actually enjoying being a fallback boy and tried hard to see how many ultimately regrettable things I could do my poor, stupid heart.
I have not, exactly, recovered from that time - lying around on my big bed, alone or not, with the fan thrumming in the window, rain going hard outside, the particulars of that summers outrageous weather stay with me still and all these things informed a huge chapter of my writing - this reflexive longing for simple air forced into a room by a box fan, my as of yet unresolved over-appreciation for jersey sheets and all these mornings I woke up very comfortable with where I was. Everything was pretty alright - I was emotionally bankrupt and kind of a bastard and realize now that I have a long history of getting precisely what it was I wanted about 3 months before I knew and losing it trying to trade up on little internal monologues about 'only living once' and 'while im young' and other things I assume other people do when they are scared and dont understand how it is to give back.
Two things rush at me in the opening measure of this song - waking up Saturday mornings in Lauren's room, which I recall being blue or purple and being remarkably happy, cool or warm, content - it were always getting to her place that was my issue. Some nameless smell, a strong desire to have my Morphine cd back, and a stomach-twisting volume of guilt. The other were waiting on Kate to come around, that intense trepidation I can only label as a 'fat kid anxiety', which never really leaves you, no matter how skinny and cut one gets - that a good looking girl was a calling. Things were pretty good and there is an easiness that comes back I find myself longing for.
What's astonishing myself is the funny catalogue of other songs that I can hear again - that each of these periods owns a particular jukebox and these single songs are just quarters. Rolling around the back streets of Waltham listening remains 1976 - RJD2 off of 'Since We First Met', I listened to a ton of Howie Daywasnt that great, all said, the apartment cost too much and the neighborhood was a bit questionable, but I still think of myself there so very often.

4. Closing Time - Semisonic - Feeling Strangely Fine -This falls perilously close to a song that everyone remembers dancing to at some time in some teenaged amorousness, and I am sure that you did and I am sure it was really heartbreaking in an okay sort of way, which is sort of the benchmark of that new wave emo sound and why the song was so...good for things...like dancing to at some time. For me it highlighted one evening in my highly talked about but actually very short career as a DJ - whenever Declan used to close out Saturday nights, which was every Saturday night, I would come over after closing down the shop, set up my laptop while drinking a beer and, if the crowd was right, plug said laptop into the speakers and go at it.
I had a really solid mix, which I liked to refer to as 'NHS Halloween Dance' - a lot of songs no one will admit that they like in a non-ironic manner, but do, for the 'I grew up in the grey space bewteen the 80s and the internet' set of which there were 20 or so in a pretty excited, pleasant pack that evening, buying a lot of drinks and being generally fun.
Once it became fairly obvious that I was controlling the music, a chain of drunk people started coming up to me, requesting songs - a lot of Michael Jackson, a lot of odd, off-party tracks - but many of them were very attractive girls and so I eventually stopped playing my own mix and just started downloading tracks on the fly to put them on the speakers. Dec turned the lights down a bit, people started dancing (which is not common for the restaurant), it as pretty cool.
Dec and I were at one end of the bar, pretty much the only people not in the party in the room, talking about....role-playing games or something...when a handful of folk come up and thank us, fairly profusely, before telling us that they are all from across the country collecting in Boston to mourn the passing of their very young friend from college, and that I had been playing, by request, some of his favorite songs all night. They were throwing down in his honor and wanted us to know how good we'd made the night, with the songs and the stiff drinks.
We stayed open, I think, an hour longer than we were supposed to and it was probably the one night I 'spun' or what have you that I didnt finish with Closing Time, instead we capped it with I Want You Back by The Jackson 5, because the guy who passed was, apparently, the biggest MJ fan in the world. They streamed out into what was fast becoming morning all smiles and thank yous and Dec and I cleaned glasses and put tables back in relative quiet.
It was a good night and I never ever think about, save when that song comes on.


to be cont.

So what do you keep standing there for?

Am trying to recall the last time I had sex that didn't seem as an unfortunate accident or the result of a cleverly lain and successfully sprung trap. It's certainly happened, but it has been so long since I could look back on the self that I were and say 'decent fellow, nice girl, they deserve eachother.'

Recent have come unglued with new idea - cavalier old notions about all the things the girl I have purported to love 'deserves better than', yet not a whit of an idea what it were she wanted. Similar spend all this time reviling against the idea of needing something other than breath and water - but no idea if I were something could be wanted or what of me could.

Maddening.

It's getting much colder and all of a sudden.

Those flashing lights come from everywhere

Something about the rededication to improving the body is leaving me quite dull.

I feel so good. Waking or lying about, walking, running - I can feel the ease coming back and I feel amazing, as if my lungs worked, that my heart were strong, that I might see myself again. But it is all I can think of, all I can manage to dwell on - the reforging, here, the liquid relief of shedding my days in sweat - the only drawback comes when I sit and try to think, or to listen, im so jumbled, so unfocused.

Am a fair listener when it strikes me, but my mind is wandering - my days are lasting forever, I sleep like an old cat, I'm happier, after a fashion, but it is difficult to express and the huge anxiety of failing to write remains; sitting at the Cantab last night, reduced to just reading things I had manage before and wondering how it happens.

Am stuck on this song



as have been for ages - though this a stranger version of.

She called back. Who knows what happens now.

I'm never gonna write you a letter, never gonna call you on the phone

Follow up to last post.


Eyn - if somebody does that to you they probably aren't paying close attention to the transaction at hand. If they pay with credit card, fake like the credit card got rejected. Better, let the transaction go through but "accidentally" leave their credit card on top of something magnetic (they won't find out until they try to buy something somewhere else). If they pay cash, reserve $1 tip their change as a friendly tip to yourself.

Me - The problem, Eyn, is that I try to live my life by a fairly strict moral code - generally if my mother found out I did it and would hit me with a soup ladle or a whisk, then I try not to do it.

Stealing and wiping credit cards would, likely, get me beaten. I used to work at just being overly polite, but they don't notice. So I now I peddle from the supposed moral high ground. I don't know if it's working, but it makes me feel better and I like to think they'll be so angry they'll think about it a lot and eventually reform and teach their children that talking on cellphones in places of business is gauche and tacky and terribly un-American.

Eyn - I respect that, but you're looking at a lifetime of being a doormat. IMO the Golden Rule should read allow for retaliatory strikes...

Old version: "Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you"
New version: "Do unto others as they do unto you"

Me - I hardly consider it life as a doormat - I'm striving against the new status quo of civility in modern society, not taking whippings from the town bully.

The very thing that galls me is that most people don't seem aware that there is anything rude about it - this has much, I believe, to do with the dissolution of the American family structure, i.e. the trend over the last 2 or 3 decades of completing one's education and then moving as far away from their parents/grandparents as physically possible - we are seeing, now, the 20-something offspring of the first people who didn't have their parents around to help them raise their children, and it was these same people who were first able to afford the luxury (now faux-necessity) of the cellular phone. Without the rather more brusque nature of familial governing to tell people what is what, a new culture arose with the cellphone, where no one was ever around to tell anyone else what was and was not proper use.

Figure that 'polite' society rarely speaks out when a mother slaps her child in public, when people argue violently in the streets, when people get dangerously drunk in public - it's terribly improper to ever mention anyone doing anything unseemly to their face. Further, the evolution of the retail community is such that cashiers and clerks stand only to suffer for ever speaking up when someone is being actively rude to them, let alone some so banal as simply failing to recognize them or being 'impolite'. I think most people are terrified of being seen to act or speak out of turn, so the larger number go on chatting and ignoring the world around them, being awfully imposing on other peoples quiet without ever suffering even a questioning remark, let alone some form of rebuke.

This is all aside from the eerie precedent set wherein no one ever chances to meet a stranger on the street or in a shop, because they are always focused entirely on the voice of someone else who is similarly walking around a shop or a store - and it rarely seems the sharing of important information, it's often just....describing what is happening right that minute. There is a concern I have that his says a lot about where we are as a nation - very scared, very concerned with being and of appearing to be alone or unimportant.

I said before that I tend to rudder myself by asking what my mother would think of what I was doing - if my momma saw me walk up to a cashier in the midst of a cellphone conversation and fail to acknowledge that person or inquire after their well-being because of it? Beating. Not a hickory switch or anything, maybe a shoe upside the head. Because she would be disappointed. It should be noted that my mother walloped me but one time - and I yelled at her for it - when I was small, but it was quite enough for her to tell me what was what about whatever it was I did. I am lucky for that sort of parenting. What shocks me is that these people I encounter, their parents never gave them that rudder, obviously never stopped to tell them what could be construed as being uncivil - and while someone might think it brash of me to think so, thus it falls to me to affect small changes in the community around me.

Causing people harm, fiscal or otherwise, wont stop them from being rude - it will simply mean that they grow angry at the next shop they go to and start being flustered with some other poor clerk who can't tell the person why their card doesnt work, half because they dont know and half because that person is still on the phone, ranting to their friend about 'how ridiculous' this is and not really being aware enough to comprehend. The cellphone has left so many people detached from the world around them, sowing more grief and confusion into that...it appeals to a certain highschool sensibility of revenge, but it wouldn't help anybody. Certainly not if they have no idea why it is that harm is being levered upon them - better the slim chance that someone might take a look at themselves in a different light, or think twice about doing the same thing again; in this case, being more conscious of talking on cellphones in neighborhood shops because at least one guy asked them if they thought they were being rude, in a fashion that implied quite distinctly that they were. I am well within my liberties to throw people out of the store for, really, any old thing I like - but again, tossing someone out and saying 'because you were on your phone' is not as delicate a mechanism as pausing them, asking them a question and then telling them to have a good night and take care of themselves.

I am fairly confident it is the first time that girl had even thought of it and the whole point is to make people think.

So no, I don't see it as 'door mat'ish behavior - rather a series of small actions taken against a problem of unfortunate size.

I know i've been tolerant 'til now, but here comes a warning,

I've chewed out 2 people today for coming into my shop yapping on cell-phones.

Generally I satisfy myself with just giving them baleful, disbelieving looks as they jabber away and shove credit cards at me, but it's getting to me. Because they are wholly oblivious to looks and to slower, poorer service (which I am hesitant to provide because I have standards and also because it keeps them here longer, which serves no one) I find I have no leverage to delicately suggest to them that they are acting in a fashion I deem untoward for my quiet, pleasant little wineshop.

So I have just started calling people out. Some vaguely pretty, suspiciously business-like mid-20s broad stormed in tonight talking at the top of her lungs as she made for the back wall and the recently popular S.American wines. I stared at her from the start as she failed to say hello, despite my store being roughly the size of a bathroom stall, and was dismayed to find her talking louder because my Anthony Hamiliton cd was being played at a comfortale, warm volume.

She grabbed a bottle, walked over, chatting loudly about something MITish and failed to look up when I asked for her identification, which she thrust at me after she shoved her credit card in my face. I checked the ID, ran the card, looked at her with mild disappointment for a bit while the credit machine processed and then handed her a slip to sign, which she did. She might have muttered thank you, im unsure, but as she took her bottle and made to leave, I asked her if she was aware what she was doing was rude.

The look on the face is priceless, because being called or assumed rude is still so horrifying to most people - despite, in my observation, most people I encounter at my places of business (and really, wherever else am I?) are tremendously uncouth and bereft of most of the basest measures of grace and politeness. She actually didnt seem to know what to say other than 'hold on' to the person on the phone. I asked her again if she was aware that walking through a store talking loudly on her phone and ignoring hte patron of said establishment might be considered rude. She responded 'I said hello' as if that were all that could be expected of her in these tough economical times.

I managed to eek an apology out her - which would have been more touching if she had taken the phone away from her ear at any point during the conversation, but I suppose I must take what I can get. Without reservation, I feel that what is left of polite society is being ground under the heel of iphones and the rampant douchebaggery that accompanies them.

Tom Petty and the

MSTRKRFT – Featuring John Legend from vincent haycock on Vimeo.

I have been listening to this song non-stop for days. I never saw the movie, but I am either Cuba Gooding Jr. or Tom Cruise and it is whatever completes them or, in this case, me.

Mom hosted a house concert tonight down in Providence, RI. It was a fairly whirlwind emotional experience - most of Providence is written over by the time I spent there with Becky, most of what I know of the city is from the windows of my car with her curled in the passenger seat, I count 3 whole albums I can't listen to because of that time. So troublesome this memory.

Called her from there, am aware how...heavy I can make these acts to myself, and in the end landed somewhere around 'I want to', so I did. Sat awhile in the sunken garden behind the house where my mother takes an apartment - all brick and ivy and wrought iron pockets of furniture, tucked out of the wind; the Secret Garden started somewhere like my mother's backyard and in the dark with the insistent and tallowfat moon...easy victim I am for these urgings at connection.

She did not answer and it was not a shock.

Declan's mother was at the concert also. Hugged and kissed and hello and then I avoided her the rest of the night - hard enough to explain to my own mother why it is I refuse to have him in my life now that he has moved away, I can't imagine his mother would consider me anymore sensible.

Such an odd evening - would have stayed longer, though I managed the whole set, but back continued to ache and the ride home began to feel worse and worse in anticipation. So I left. There is a bit more good news, great news, but I am hesitant to even breathe it aloud til it is finished.

music from a motion picture by the same name

Fortuity.
Sitting in wineshop - a loosely slow day, long weekend and weather we havent seen in a year and accordingly the city of Cambridge is ghostly - lamenting the blank screen before me.
As of late have sought to set aside a portion of the week, if not day, for some measure of creation - writing, mostly. Am too far from comfortable with words, with their dispensure, with their...purpose and in having strayed now seek to reacquaint myself with the habit. That was mostly the point of this but I wonder if I am no longer cut out for this kind of voyeurism.
Type for a bit, erase, type more - it is, I think, simply that it is no longer easy to write. There is much more brow furrowing than I recall. The good things, that always takes effort, but describing my day? No. No no.
A customer, informed of the situation, said 'something will happen today' and I told her I hoped so.

Hours pass, am tidying the shop, walk up to the front bins and sitting atop a lid I had no removed when the sun began to set was a book called 'Art and Fear: Observations on the perils (and rewards) of Artmaking'

Huh.

The book was dog-eared to a page with this passage -

If, indeed, for any given time only a certain sort of work resonates with life, then that is hte work you need to be doing in that moment. If you try to do some other work, you will miss your moment. Indeed, our own work is so inextricably tied to time and place that we cannot recapture even our *own* aesthetic ground of past times. Try, if you can, to occupy your aesthetic space of a few years back, or even a few months. There is no way. You can only plunge ahead, even when that carries with it the bittersweet realization that you have already done your very best work.

It goes on and there is a thought in me that it is talking about something different than the qualing terror in my chest that the reason none of these poems of mine will coalesce as I desire is because I am simply no longer the one who wrote the poems I and others liked and cared for.

If that is the case, what changed and when? I panic while writing, now. Past my usual hard edge of criticism, I feel desperate. It is not easy. None of it - but it also does not return on labor. A hard night's work yields....nothing. Nothing I want to show around. I am not sure I am trying to write from the place that I was - or maybe that's the problem in precise.

I think I am lonely in a way I don't really know to eloquate. Before it had always been some melancholia stemming from a girl and there is still that - but this feels, when I pause to regard, wholly different. Bleak? A little less color than there were. Perhaps this is getting older, unsure.

The book seems an odd providence - it reads all around that bit of text like I will not agree with it's politics of art, but to show up there...obviously it struck someone else the same. I wonder if someone left it for me.