In which the internet gets for really real.

In acknowledging the barreling pace of mortality, what have you done about it?

I went back to the gym.

It's astonishing how quickly 4 nights a week turns into none when one is not watching oneself - and how quickly one's devout adjustment in diet 180s and suddenly one is a fatty again. Like lightning! The body must be trained so long before it learns. Am still much stronger than I know what to do with - there is no small measure of joy in bouncing around feeling relatively lethal, back to the place where I am confident I could move necessary weights and pull doors off hinges if so prompted by situation. Am probably not ready to play at jaws-of-life, but it's good to feel that way - all this moving metal about and hulking around and feeling vaguely predatory. It's a good way to wash out the days.

Work has been close to horrifying - long hours and little satisfaction, it's consuming my conversations and seems to be all I think about; thus the gym and the rededication to being a bit more brutish is doubly welcome. What is missed most immediately is the energy - bouncing out of bed no matter the hour, being bright-eyed after that work day is over - life is much more lived, even if 2 hours a day are spent somewhat sweaty and in the tireless pursuit of lifting lumps of metal in tightly constricted patterns, it feels good.

Am still not pretty. Working on it.

Perhaps surprising no one, the writing has stalled - have two poems circling my head about Memphis and Manhattan, the punishing audacity in what I spent so long coloring love, how hard it is to properly eloquate what it is to act this fool. Am trying to find a balance between the earnest and less dangerous than I thought needing another person and the...blind possessiveness that seems to mark my earlier 'relationships' - which is to say the girls I pined after so miserably without a care for what they thought about the situation. I feel so young sometimes and usually about love - then so old looking back at who it was thought I could just...disregard the things in front of me, hoping on some song lyric resolution.

My love is no less unique for being my own.

Since my father passed I have been hedging around the things I feel might name me a man to whatever wind is listening - relinquishing some of these selfish ideas, adjusting the way it is I see those I purport to love, allowing a little desperate longing along the way. Think I know, now, what. But wonder how am seen in return. I'm sad a lot. I am confident when I tell myself that being alone is alright if I get this one more chance - but so scared at the time flying by if it turns out I am wrong and never get it.

All said and done, I am pretty sure it's still worth it.

Death was waiting for me. He got in the car, I said 'Want to go to IHOP?' He said, 'Sure thing.'

She is sporty and hard-line attractive, speaks well, Harvard grad - and when, after a short conversation about wine, she introduces herself I am reminded again that I am wired slightly askance the norm.

'What's your name?' she says, offering a hand, 'Mike.' I respond, attempting a not too firm, but still firm enough that I obviously go to the gym all the time because those legs says she pretty obviously goes to the gym all the time handshake. 'I'm Jessica, thanks.'

And then she leaves. Doesn't buy anything.

Why do all strange women feel like opportunity? Why can't I just be cool? Why is it when I am just cool I get worried that the girl I might spend the rest of my life with walked away and I didn't do anything? Am constantly beset by the 'be cool' and 'be confidently active'...paradigm? I think that's the word.

All my language escapes me when vague connections, so tentative, are severed. Will she be back? What if I had worn a more flattering sweater? Why am I so lonely all the time? Why doesn't anyone call me on my birthday? How can I logically assume someone wants to be romantically involved with me for the rest of our lives when I don't listen, am largely selfish and am beset by all sorts of anxieties and, for all intents and purposes, have no future.

What I meant to say was
'Hi, i'm Mike, I have a ton of problems that I want to fix without working at, I build walls between myself and those closest to me because my moral standards seem at odds with what all normal people consider morals and though I talk a great game, I'm half cling, half loner. I think you're troublingly pretty, could we hang out sometime and maybe forget everything I said?'

Perhaps the saddest thing was learning that drinking didn't help things like this. You can only fix what is broken with the sun up.

"Take this down," said O'Neal. "My name is Shaquille O'Neal and Paul Pierce is the truth. Quote me on that and don't take nothing out. I knew he could play, but I didn't know he could play like this. Paul Pierce is the truth."

I am fairly certain the first few times I read this it was 'Paul Pierce is the motherfucking truth' which is why Shaq felt the need to specify that the whole quote be preserved - somehow the internet seems to filter everything through someone else's google settings and remove the functional vinegar from these things.

Even if he didnt say it, well, he meant it.

I left off talking about how reading The Book of Basketball - Bill Simmons' new book I came to and was forced to stop after the Paul Pierce entry. Bill Simmons currently has Pierce listed as the 54th member of a ranked Hall of Fame known hereforto as the 'Pyramid'. 54 is okay - I would have listed him after DJ, also, but just before Wade? I don't know - He makes some jumps in projection that I just can't fathom, but his basketball knowledge is markedly deeper than my own, so I'll allow it.

Actually, that last bit is total bullshit, I dont agree. Wade is an electric creator, a good defender, a stout competitor - but his greatest achievements in basketball to date is that he plays harder than his body can hold up to and that he figured out the refs would give him the Finals if he kept throwing himself at the floor. Pierce might be the toughest player in the modern NBA, with stories relative to Reed and Bird as far as 'how the hell did he come back from that' injuries mixed with high end pressure performances - so that's not even a rub, that's a blow out.

And Pierce, after his long and troubled career is finally getting credit for taking a championship - replete with his Game 1 omigodpaultorehisknee (though it should be noted that was in line with Paul's odd sense of the dramatic...let us not recall too hard the bandaged head incident...) - and it was taking, I know Ray played amazing, I know a lot of people wanted him to get the MVP, but that would have been ridiculous. Pierce owned that series on the defensive end and in the clutch over and over. It was...breathtaking.

Here is my major issue - what has Wade gone through? When did Wade become a man? Do Miami fans know? I don't think so. He hasnt been around long enough, he hasn't really dealt with adversity, per say - yes, knee injury, yes the team imploded after he wont the Championship....AFTER, HE WON ONE at, like, 24? Cry me a river.

For a moment let's ignore that Dennis Fucking Johnson is only 1 place above Wade...how can you compare Dwade's career with Pierce? I dont think that's realistic...here is a player....I'm going to start babbling. Listen. I am a fan of the New England Patriots. I enjoy pre-08 Red Sox baseball. Once upon a time I watched the Bruins.

I like Basketball.

I love Paul Pierce like he is a sibling. Or my very good friend - or like he was my hero. Because he sort of is - but not in a relatable way. I dont relate to him. We lack parallels. But more than any single athlete of the modern era, more than anyone I have ever watched in film, or on tv, or in the pursuit of athletics, he is a real, honest to goodness, person.

We, as Celtics fans, have watched his star rise, gutter, fall and come alight in redemption like no other - it takes a certain franchise to stick by a guy who is destroying himself and his career in front of the widest stages possible...and a certain player to realize it and respond. Paul Pierce suddenly realized that he wanted to retire in green. That he wanted that banner - the organization mattered to him.

I'm a young man - he is too - but this relationship bears no resemblance to any other I have as a fan. I'm proud of him. I cried and cried when they won the Championship, the body just reacted - I was teary, the game just ended the Ray Allen commercial played and I started weeping. They came back and Paul was named MVP and..oh man.

I wonder if I will ever appreciate a player this way - his glorious splash into the NBA as a high-energy scoring tweener guard/forward (with a ridiculous high-top fade he wore but never really owned), the odd providence that had him fall to us at 10. His promise, him almost dying in that nightclub, his return, the sullen, darker player that he became, the burden of all those banners, of the crumbled franchise, of expectation - watching his legacy tarnish and the effect it had on him, melting down against the Pacers, his anger, his petulence, and then all this.

How many athletes recover from the first fall? Especially in the NBA, so much money, so fast, such a destructive lifestyle - so many talents for the game are ruined because there is no one teaching classes on how to go from being impoverished or struggling to inconceivably wealthy. To suffer those emotional pitfalls and also the physical - to recover from the stabbing, to be the heart of a badly damaged organization, floundering through it's worst years - let alone to think of losing another star so tragically - we have the unparalleled luxury of watching his success, of having stood by, of having been there the whole time.

If you were from a different town, I doubt it would make sense - in the same way that it is difficult to understand the quality of someone's game without watching them all the time to see the subtle nuances, the breaks in the step, I imagine it would be much harder to notice changes in character, seeing Paul go from all that was left of the Celtics to just...a Celtic. It took a long time, years, and it is time not often granted a player. And to be so instrumental in returning meaning to that word, that jersey and our town.

Am profoundly moved by Pierce's story - I cant think of anything quite like it, how narrowly he avoided being just another tragic figure in Boston's basketball history, and came to be one of it's favorite sons. And if not that, at least mine - I dont have a proper description for my reaction to his success, when Paul Pierce lights it up in a game, I get silly - it's like my little brother, supposing I had one, was tearing it up down the lane for a series of improbably ugly and-one drives. I like it when national announcers recognize some measure of his game - it's hard to deal with someone not from here appreciating his preternatural ability to get his defender off the ground, or the way he finishes drives desperately looking for contact - just his toughness.

Because that's what I appreciate most, I think, is all he managed to endure to find himself, now, suddenly accepted, suddenly fully appreciated.

Observations -

1. Bill Simmons is my favorite sports writer by a long shot - there aren't really any comparisons, which speaks, in part, to how integration between the media and the athletes they cover has tempered the quality of storytelling dramatically; the members of the media with the greatest access (and Simmons touches on this in his book, which helped solidify for me some of this idea particularly) begin to think they are part of the act, develop relationships, start worrying about keeping their spot - think about, say, Senators or 'Nebulous Public Officials', who become engrossed in the mechanism of government, the money and ease that it brings, then have their aspirations for public good neutered by the phrase 'political suicide' - which is code for standing up for something you actually believe in and losing your meal ticket.

The same applies to sportswriters - this is why there is so much boy club butt-slapping and softball questioning - I think everyone wrote something direct about Kobe's rape trial while it was going on, but the same folk wilted into ZAMGIT'SKOBEANDIMINTERVIEWINGHIM mode in the years that follow - folks from LA dont even talk about it, it never gets mentioned, ever. Same with Ray Lewis, you know, stabbing two men to death in front of a church. Ostensibly in self-defence. Ostensibly with the power of god guiding his hand. No sportswriter today will even bring it up while a stadium full of fans in Baltimore, who should know better than anyone about random stabbings, goes completely bananas.

But I digress - I disagree with Bill Simmons on one point in particular - Lebron is not very good at basketball. A streak shooter with...questionable range, poor decision-making skills, an unparalleled ariel game and tremendous, game altering physical gifts. He really is a unique animal - I doubt a human being has ever been born more ideally suited to the pursuit of athletics, 6ft8, but dimensionally more similar to a well-built man at 6ft2 - there's no weakness in his carriage, sound joints, broad shoulders, long arms - but also a barrel chest, good hips - Lebron is built like a new-era superhero. He might legitimately be the fastest player in the league in a straight line, has an as-of-et undetermined max game height for leaping, has great timing from the ground to the point of conflict - be it the basket, a block or a ball.

Everyone who watches the game knows these things even if they dont know they know them - his gifts are so obvious. But he isnt a great shooter, and worse, he picks odd times to let people know; sometimes he appears to get bored, taking long jumpers when he could easily drive the basket - against the Celtics he almost never goes to the hoop against Pierce, who is not a good enough defender to rule that move out, though definetly good enough to make top-tier players question it...but that's it, he's supposed to be the best player, and yet when facing another star who can almost hang with him, who will take a charge, he defers or takes oddly placed jumpers - oddly because he doesnt yet (this is from an outsiders perspective, I dont watch him play everyday) have hot spots on the floor where he is going to hit from everytime - like having go-to post moves, shooters have spots where opponents grimace when they get the ball, if Pierce gets the ball at the top of the key, you could literally jump on him and hit him with a bottle, and he'd drain it, thump his chest and go to the line. It just is. Lebron doesnt have that, maybe it will come with age, but I wonder if it will have to.

What Lebron does have is the leagues most coveted 'Platnium Free Throw Pass' - where he can, at anytime past halftime, take the ball, run directly into the pack of defenders inside of ten feet from the basket and draw a foul. Part of this is that unreasonable athleticism, there's some argument, im sure, that he *could* score, so that must have been a foul - but James as a late game threat is mostly the constant threat of free-throws - points off the clock. Kobe has this, Pierce has it, Iverson did...thing is, they put the time in and earned it. Lebron was bequeethed his title long before he'd put the minutes in to earn it - it's one of the ugly things about the NBA and why I am so worried referees are going to carry a really unbalanced Cavaliers team to the Championship because it's time for Lebron to win one.

It's not a good team and he's not actually as dominant as MJ ever was or Kobe can be - he's just remarkably athletic and is so shocking to behold, no one talks about the weird 3-point shots and why he only drives on Ray Allen when they play the Celtics. It's not hard to score 41 pts when no one else on your team is capable of scoring and that's where they are at now. Yet this awful team with no chemistry WILL make the playoffs and I dont want to see them.

Simmons ranks Lebron up there with the greats already and I just dont understand why - I dont think he's earned it. I'll not question his impact on games or the things he's capable of - it's the way in which he is deferred to simply because Nike demanded his ascension to that questionable NBA throne.

Anything is possible.

It's that time again.

There are not a sufficient number of words in elegant order to properly express how excited I am that it's Basketball season - or that I am not at work on a Thursday night so that I can watch an arguably meaningless game between the Bulls and the Spurs.

This is what is amazing about the NBA - it's always on. The product is great, the game is beautiful and IT NEVER STOPS. The Celtics are loaded, McHale is a studio analyst and I am just so ready for this season.

In perfect timing, Bill Simmons - the Sports Guy - just released The Book of Basketball and it's amazing. In short he describes the evolution of the modern game, explores the somewhat tenuous balance between collapse and destiny in that game and seeks to reorder the NBA Hall of Fame - or rather, to start one, as the current Hall of Fame is for Basketball in all it's decidedly less exciting than the NBA forms.

The format for the redesign is a 96 player Pyramid and I am nearly halfway through that list with very few complaints at this moment. I stopped reading after the Paul Pierce entry because I was crying. More on this after I get back with party favors from I-party.

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.