Richard Thomas’ debut novel Transubstantiate is billed as a neo-noir thriller.  The literal translation of neo-noir is “new black,” and though, in literary terms, that may be just, it seems to be selling its audience short.  Transubstantiate is like a crazy, breakneck-paced fusion of Stephen King’s The Stand, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eight-Four, and the TV show LOST.  The six central characters, part of the book’s seven separate narratives, are habitants of some unnamed island in the not-so-far-off future.  Most of them murderers, they were selected along with a hundred or so others to be part of a new government experiment on prisoner life.  If they cooperate, the promise is the hope of a new beginning.  Every month one of them will become eligible for parole.  If the board deems them worthy they will be set free.  The rules are simple:  Play your part and don’t screw up.  Or else.  Almost immediately though the central six see this society, this second chance, for what it is: a sham. Someone is watching their every move, listening in on their conversations, monitoring their digital diary entries.  There is talk of some who got out, but the postcards bearing their names all have the same person’s handwriting.  As Bob Dylan sang, “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.”  And that’s just the beginning of it.  Years pass by, a plague has wiped out most of humanity, and whether the central six are playing witness or cause to the apocalypse is still up in the air.  Danger is always looming; the foul scent of death is always hanging close in the air.  Marcy, one of main characters, sums it up, “They say cats have nine lives.  I’m down to eight now.  I hope we don’t need them all today.”  Wolfhounds run rabid through the streets; genetic-defective cannibals called Blisterheads prowl the shadows.  And then there’s the more urgent concern of not knowing which, if any, of the other survivors they can trust.  With Transubstantiate, Thomas has managed to incorporate elements of fantasy and horror writing that would normally turn the casual, non-genre reader off, and give them a pulse that caters to any reader’s tastes.  It’s a page-turner, pure and simple; every time you go to set the book down, something else happens where you can’t.  Answers only lead to more questions, betrayal and dead-ends are everywhere.  Is there any hope left for humanity, or is it all going to end?  It’s worth the $14 to find out.

For a more in depth review written by Jason Kane go HERE.

To order Transubstantiate from the publisher you can go HERE.  Or, to read up more on Richard Thomas, head over HERE.

More on this front to come soon!

So, to get started, the list of books I bought in June 2010:

• T.C. Boyle – The Road To Wellville
• T.C. Boyle – Descent Of Man
• Charles Bukowski – South of No North
• Charles Bukowski – Post Office
• Elmore Leonard – Get Shorty
• Elmore Leonard – Glitz
• Elmore Leonard – Pagan Babies
• Elmore Leonard – Tishomingo Blues
• Kenneth Silverman – Edgar Allen Poe
• Nick Hornby – Fever Pitch
• Flannery O’Connor – Everything That Rises Must Converge
• Michael Chabon – Werewolves In Their Youth
• Cormac McCarthy – All The Pretty Horses
• Andre Dubos III – House Of Sand And Fog
• Patti Smith – Auguries Of Innocence
• Mark Twain – A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court
• The Mammoth Book of Tales From The Road
• Gregory McDonald – Flynn’s World
• Peter Manso – Mailer: His Life And Things
• Tennessee Williams – Cat On A Hot Tin Roof
• Nick Laird – Utterly Monkey
• Herman Melville – Moby Dick
• Stephen King – Lisey’s Story
• Stephen King – Duma Key
• Stephen King – The Dark Tower V: Wolves Of Calla
• Stephen King – Different Seasons
• Ray Bradbury – Fahrenheit 451
• Aldous Huxley – Brave New World
• F. Scott Fitzgerald – Babylon Revisited
• F. Scott Fitzgerald – Tender Is The Night
• Anthony Bourdain – Kitchen Confidential
• James Joyce – The Dubliners
• Mike Lupica – Two-Minute Drill
• Dennis Lehane – Shutter Island
• Khaled Hosseini – The Kite Runner
• Augusten Burroughs – Magical Thinking
• American Gothic Tales: Edited by James Carol Oates
• Dan Brown – Digital Fortress
• Annie Proulx – Close Range
• Annie Proulx – Accordion Crimes
• Thomas Pynchon – The Crying Lot 49
• Elizabeth Wurtzel – Prozac Nation
• Denis Johnson – Tree Of Smoke
• Salman Rushdie – Shame
• Richard Russo – The Risk Pool
• Gail Giles – Shattering Glass
• Frederick Douglass – Narrative Of the Life of Frederick Douglass
• Joyce Carol Oates – We Were The Mulvaneys
• Zadie Smith – White Teeth
• Susan Orlean – The Orchid Thief
• Alex Garland – The Beach

Books Read in June 2010:

• Chuck Palahniuk – Tell-All
• Michael O’Keeffe & Teri Thompson – The Card: Collectors, Con-Men, and the True Story of History’s Most Desired Baseball’s Card

Ok, that looks bad, I know it.  If we’re measuring success rates, my buy/read rate is, “Quick, someone get the smart kid to figure out the percentage” bad.  Before you start hurling rotten tomatoes and copies of The DaVinci Code at me let me try and explain some of why that is.

First, I have this thing about buying books that I’ve read and really liked, that I intend to give away at a later time as gifts, extras in packages, or to people who come over my apartment and ask, “Do you recommend any good books?”  I like to have a stockpile ready to go, and this month I added a few extras to that pile (The Risk Pool, The Beach, and a few others.)  Plus, whenever possible, I also try and “upgrade” books that I’ve already purchased/read/enjoyed (and by upgrade I mean a hardcover or full-size paperback versus a trade edition, or finding a 1st Edition, etc.)  Also, sometimes I forgot what I already have.  It happens.  A lot.  Plus, for the better part of June, I was traveling across half of the US.  From Rochester, NY to College Station, TX.  In between I worked.  And tried to fight the heat.  These are my excuses and I’m sticking to them.  But those out of the way, I digress to the discussion…

I’ve never read Leonard.  Or Boyle.  Or Proulx.  Or Augusten Burroughs.  I’ve been meaning to read The Kite Runner, and House Of Sand and Fog, and Prozac Nation for a while.  I’ve seen the movie adaptations of the latter two, and liked them well enough.  Pynchon, Rushdie, and Oates are held in such high regard that I figured I owed it to myself to figure out why.  And somehow, through years of taking Lit class after Lit class I managed to avoid reading some of the classics: Moby Dick, Brave New World, The Dubliners, and Tender Is The Night.  I know, I’ve sinned, what can I say?  And I understand that the sin of not having read Moby Dick doesn’t even come close to the sin of spending money–albeit a quarter–on a Dan Brown book.  There is no defense for such treachery, I accept that.  But if there was it would sound like this: years ago and knee-deep into the hype I bought The Da Vinci Code for my then girlfriend as a Christmas present because she really wanted to read it.  I admit I too wanted to see what all the hype was about.  So when she wasn’t looking I read some of The Da Vinci Code.  I didn’t finish it but I read enough to see how Brown could sell so many copies of that book.  One, the story read quick.  Two, it didn’t take much in the way of intelligence to read it.  And three, it was rooted in Christianity.  Mel Gibson proved you could make billions on a movie if you just put Christ’s name in the title, even if the end result was a video for Devo’s “Whip It” thirty years too late.  But anyway, back to Brown, when reading The Da Vinci Code I didn’t think much at all in terms of his writing skill, but still, as someone who also likes to write, I think there’s something to be said about studying the hows and whys of best-selling writers by giving their books a chance.  Even if you think what they’re producing is crap.  I guess it’s sort of like watching The Hills if you’re a wannabe screenwriter, only without semi-good looking obnoxious rich chicks.  Or something.  Anyway, that’s my defense.

Some other ones on the “Bought” list that I’m really looking forward to are Tree Of Smoke by Denis Johnson and Cormac McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses.  I’ve read a few of McCarthy’s books and they all make me hate him because he’s so damn good.  This book I’ve always put off reading with the sole reason being the Matt Damon connection from the movie adaptation.  Matt Damon makes me want to choke midgets, and though I know I shouldn’t hold Cormac McCarthy’s novel responsible for that, for years I have.  This copy I picked up at a gem of a used bookstore just outside of Rochester for $2.98, and it came with an inscription:

A big part of the reason why I love used books so much is their collected history: who owned the book, who loved it, who hated it, where they read it, when they read it, etc.  Sometimes you get little notes and phone numbers jotted in the margins.  Sometimes you get certain passages underlined.  Sometimes those passages are highlighted.  Other times you get personal endearments.  On a side note, the first time I actually signed my name to a book with my name printed on the author page, I’ve looked different at books that are signed by names other than the one who authored the book.  I’m not saying anything against the practice of doing that, but it’s kind of strange I think, like autographing your name and super-personal message to the liner notes of Bacdafucup by Onyx.  It just seems sort of out of place, like telling your first cousin at their wedding that they are the love of your life.  But anyway…the message in this copy of All The Pretty Horses seemed especially endearing.  It was given as a Christmas present, and judging by the choice of words it seems perhaps that the giver hoped McCarthy’s words might say things that perhaps he couldn’t.  But somehow, for some reason, it ended up on the carpet in a bookstore in Spencerport, New York.  Maybe the person who received All The Pretty Horses thought it read more like an ugly dog.  Maybe the person who was gifted the book didn’t feel the same way for the person who did the gifting.  Maybe they just needed to clear room on their bookshelf for the new James Patterson book.  I don’t know.  But with used books the unknown is half the story.

Last, at least in terms of the “Bought” books, Fredrick Douglass’ Narrative Of The Life Of Fredrick Douglass has always been a must read for me.  Douglass is a very large figure in the history of the city of Rochester.  So much so that he’s buried here.  I figure I owe the man the respect of reading his life story considering I’ve stood six feet above his remains.  In fact, that should be a new rule or something; if you visit the grave of someone who is famous you owe them the respect to study why.  Used copies of Douglass’ book don’t pop up too often around Rochester.  It figures that I would be 1600 miles away, in Texas, where the majority of people probably don’t know who the hell Fredrick Douglass was, when I finally found a copy.

Now, in terms of the two I read, Chuck Palahniuk’s Tell-All was lackluster, predictable, and further evidence that he’s turning into the literary version of M. Night Shyamalan, while The Card: Collectors, Con-Men, and the True Story of History’s Most Desired Baseball’s Card was a riveting page-turner if, for no other reason, because I grew up collecting baseball cards, Honus Wagner’s card is the Holy Grail of the hobby, and the most famous example of this card (which makes up the bulk of the heart of this book) has such a compelling story to it that it’s like a soap opera and your favorite detective novel/tv show rolled into one. It’s really good, and perhaps the best part, I picked a copy up at Dollar Tree.  It was easily worth double what I paid.

Truth be told, Tell-All does have its funny parts, and it’s full of Palahniuk’s trademarks.  But the never-ending name-dropping (Yes, I get that was the point) of long-dead “stars” that most non-celebrity whores like myself have probably never heard of was such a distraction that I had to put the book down every other paragraph to try and refocus.  I got through it, but barely.  Add in the inevitable Palahniuk twist, which becomes see-through less than a quarter of the way into the book, and it didn’t even feel fun to read.  It felt like the novel equivalent to watching the E: True Hollywood Story on the cast of “Emily’s Reasons Why Not.”  What was that show?  Exactly.  Tell-All was “better” than Palahniuk’s last effort Pygmy but only by default.

To people reading this, if you’ve read any of the books listed above and have anything–good or bad–to say about them I’d be interested to hear it.  I don’t have a “To Read” pile of books anymore; at the rate I buy books I don’t want to risk such a pile crashing down on my foot when I’m not looking.  Health insurance costs too much, and my dog is clumsy to begin with, so help a brother out.

I realize this, whatever you want to call it, was unbalanced and all over the place.  There’s always next month and try and get things “right.”

In closing I leave you with a page from Elmore Leonard’s 1o Rules Of Writing (I lied, I have read something of his before.)  The book is super-quick to read (like less than 10 minutes), insightful, and pretty damn funny.  Anyway, to the rule, which I totally agree with:

I have this thing about buying books.  The problem is I don’t always read them.  Hell, most of the time I don’t any of them, let alone even some of them.  But that doesn’t stop me from buying them.  I think part of my “problem” is rooted in the fact that I like to collect things.  Through the years I’ve collected everything from baseball cards, to scratch-n-sniff stickers, to CDs, back to baseball cards, and so on.  More or less, given enough time to pass, I grow disinterested with whatever it was I was collecting and in one fell Ebay swoop get rid of everything.  If you’ve ever seen the movie Adaptation there’s a part where the character John Laroche is talking to Susan Orlean’s character about the hows and whys of his collecting habits:

I dropped turtles when I fell in love
with Ice Age fossils. Learned everything
about them. Collected the shit out of
‘em. Fossils were the only thing made
any sense to me in this f**king world.
Y’know?

Later in that conversation he says:

I’ll tell you a story. I once fell
deeply, profoundly in love with tropical
fish. I had sixty goddamn fish tanks in
my house. I’d skin-dive to find just the
right ones. Anisotremus virginicus,
Holacanthus ciliaris, Chaetodon
capistratus. You name it. Then one day
I say, f**k fish. I renounce fish. I vow to never set foot in the ocean
again, that’s how much f**k fish. That
was seventeen years ago and I have never
since stuck so much as a toe into that
ocean. And I love the ocean!

That exchange is one of my favorite pieces of writing/dialogue/acting in any movie ever.  Probably because it hits home.  But back to the point.

A year or so back one of the books I purchased was Nick Hornby’s The Polysyllabic Spree.  The book is a collection of monthly essays he wrote for The Believer magazine.  Essentially these essays chronicled a month-by-month blow-by-blow of his buying/reading habits.  As Hornby explained in the first essay of the book:

So this is supposed to be about the how, and when, and why, and what of reading–about the way that, when reading is going well, one book leads to another and to another, a paper trail of theme and meaning; and how, when it’s going badly, when books don’t stick or take, when your mood and the mood of the book are fighting like cats, you’d rather do anything but attempt the next paragraph, or reread the last one for the tenth time.

I’ve only read one of Nick Hornby’s books cover-to-cover (High Fidelity) but I freaking loved it, and because of that I own most of his back catalog because I love the way he writes: lots of music, lots of sport, and lots of self-deprecating humor.  I got the idea for the MixTape essays from Hornby’s book called Songbook.  Though I’ve still yet to finish the MixTape essays I figured what the hell, I’ll give writing about books a try.

Hornby goes on to explain in The Polysyllabic Spree that he doesn’t want the column to imply that he spends too much money on book (he already realizes that on his own,) that he shows favoritism to relatives/author friends of his (it goes with the territory of being a writer,) nor that he is trying to show off his literary prowess (he’s not.)  If you’re reading this I’d like those same rules to apply.  Though I rarely (think 1 in 100 books I buy) purchase a book brand new, even hitting up used bookstores and the Goodwill adds up; I realize that.  And I will probably write about books that friends of mine have written/are publishing/etc. because, well, if that’s what I’m reading, that’s what I should be writing about.  And for the last one, I know any list of anything can seem self-serving at first glance.  But it’s not meant to be.  If anything I should probably feel embarrassed about how few of the books I purchase that I will actually end up reading.  That and the fact that there will probably be a lot of books that you see that I probably should have already read.  I know.  So lets get that out of the way first.

Basically how this column will go is around the 1st of every month I will list every book that I purchased/received as a gift and then I will list every book that I read from the previous  month.  For instance, the first column will be for books I bought/read in June 2010 even though it’s currently July.  With these lists will be some sort of explanation.  Why I bought the books.  Where I bought the books.  Why I gave up on certain ones.  Why I couldn’t seem to put down others.  Crap like that.

I want this column to be fun.  I want it to serve (for me) as a way to catalog my spending/reading habits.    And perhaps most important, I think if I make this sort of list public, that might help me force myself into devoting more time to read.  If you, on the other end of this, is willing to go along for the ride, please feel free to throw the proverbial rotten tomatoes at me if I’m not pulling my weight.  And yes, you can feel free to throw suggestions my way.

The first column will be up soon.  I can’t wait to see where this goes…

Richard Thomas’ debut novel, Transubstantiate.  The neo-noir novel, released July 1st, is getting a lot of early praise, including the likes of respected authors such as Stephen Graham Jones, Craig Clevenger, and Joey Goebel.  And if that’s not enough of an endorsement you suck Richard and I share the same birthday, and it’s a proven fact that a Scorpio will never let you down.  So there.  Support a first-time novelist, as well as a burgeoning publisher, Otherworld Publications, and head over to his website or better head over where you need to be to purchase this fine novel and then when you’re done shower Richard with praise for all his hard work and dedication.  You won’t be disappointed. 

In trying out my new digital camera I took some pictures of my bookshelf(s).  Here is what I got:

I was never a big picture guy.  The future was never something I planned for, or even really thought much about.  What mattered was what I could see.  If things stayed the same, so be it; if something changed, I’d deal with it.  It wasn’t some cognoscente carpe diem ethos; I was lazy, sort of like The Dude from The Big Lebowski minus the robe and slippers.  I wasn’t happy with my situation but I accepted it; at the very least it was something, and for me something was good enough.  When Liz came into my life I started to feel different.  I didn’t change much of anything in terms of my daily routine, but she made it easier to smile.  If work went bad, oh well; if another day went by where I didn’t write a single sentence, who cared; at the end of the day she’d be there, she’d laugh, and nothing else would matter.  I thought so much about her that I forgot about myself.

One day after work I was checking my email and I saw one from a friend.  He and I had been talking a bit in the preceding weeks about the upcoming fantasy baseball season but this email was different.  “We finished the book,” the email said, “and it’s on sale now!”  I was speechless.  Three years prior I knew that he and my former supervisor had started work on a Stephen King/Peter Straub-esque, each person writing alternating chapters thing, but I’d never heard much about it once I moved to Pennsylvania.  I had always assumed it was something they were just doing for fun.  But now they were finished.  And it was for sale.  And anyone, including myself, could see it online, and buy it, and like any of the other books that were sitting on my bookshelf, read it, and quote it, and love it.  I felt like crap.  When Liz came over that night and saw that I was in a mood she asked me what was wrong.  I showed her the email.  “That’s awesome,” she said.  And I agreed; it was awesome, I was proud, and I was happy for them, which I said in my email response to him.  But looking at the website where I could order the book, it made me at first uneasy, and then outright mad at myself.  That night I couldn’t sleep; I stared off into the ceiling and thought about how big of a failure I was.  It had been seven months since I graduated, and in that time I hadn’t penned anything of substance; save for a few late-night sprawls I hadn’t written anything at all.  And now here were two of my friends, professionals in other fields, and they’d completed a novel.  A freaking novel!

A couple of days later and still feeling dejected I got a page over the intercom at work, “Please pick up a call on line 2.”  Wondering why they hadn’t just transferred the call to the department I was working in I picked up the phone and said hello.  “I need you to send me some writing samples ASAP!  Two or three fiction pieces under a total of five-thousand words would be great.  And I need them by the end of the week.”  All of that without even saying hello meant it could only be one person, a former teacher of mine who, for some reason, saw enough promise in me that almost a year after graduating, she was calling me at work to tell me about writing opportunities for me on campus.  I asked what she needed them for.  “Chuck Palahniuk is coming back to Edinboro for another conference and this time he’s been gracious enough to do a small two-day writing workshop for a few students.  Of course I’ve included you in this.”  I was speechless.  And scared.  I had exactly nothing to offer that I felt confident in.  But she isn’t the sort of person you can say no to without feeling like you’ve just bludgeoned the family dog to death, and the fact that she was seeking me out showed the synopsis of her character; she is a helper pure and simple; a teacher in the true definition of the word.  “Sure,” I said.  “And thank you.”  I hung up the phone and every inch of my body was covered in sweat.

All of a sudden I didn’t have time to wallow in my own self-pity about not having anything on par with a novel’s worth of material to show the world.  Now I had to worry about finding a couple of worthy short samples to show to a best-selling author whose work I very much admired.  Fiction was still pretty much uncharted territory for me; outside of some stuff that I had to write for a Fiction Workshop class all I had were notebooks of bad poetry.  But even most of that stuff from the Fiction Workshop was either unfinished, or nothing more than exercises to get the brain working.  Almost by default the first thing I chose was a short story I’d written that revolved around four people’s journey to get to Woodstock ’99.  I didn’t think it was great, but it showed enough promise to earn an A, and that, coupled with the fact that it fit the criteria was good enough for me.  I used the next couple of days at work to struggle over what else I could include.  I thought about writing another story that revolved around music, and during my shifts I’d sift through the CDs looking for any inspiration.  One of the new releases that week was Sing the Sorrow by AFI, a band I always sort of admired from a distance.  The price of the CD was $5.99 so I bought it in hopes that it would give me that something I was looking for.  For the following couple of nights, when I’d get out of work I’d sit at my computer, Sing The Sorrow playing on my CD player, and I’d write.  I’d get a couple hundred words in and then I’d highlight everything and delete it.  I loved the CD but it wasn’t translating itself into anything of substance.

Saturday of that week Liz had to go to Jamestown, NY to attend a defensive driving class as per part of the deal she cut to lower her speeding ticket to a moving violation.  Not having to work, and not wanting to spend another day sitting by myself, staring at a computer screen, thinking about what I didn’t have to send off in a day’s time, I decided to go along for the ride.  We listened to Sing the Sorrow on the otherwise boring ride through the bowels that are the towns along the New York/Pennsylvania border.  The album was a departure from the AFI that I was used to, far less hardcore/scream-with-me anthem driven than it was a bunch of really polished songs that cohesively sounded, well, cohesive.  Sing the Sorrow was an album that beckoned to be listened to all the way through, and we listened to it on repeat.  Though not quite a concept album it sort of sounded that way; the transitions were seamless, the progression felt so natural that the songs were like puzzle pieces.  Davey Havok broods in the miserable macabre just about better than anyone this side of Robert Smith, and on that car ride, in the days following that phone call leading up to that car ride, I could find solace in a song like “Death of Seasons” with lyrics such as:

“It won’t be all right despite what they say

Just watch the stars tonight as they, as they disappear, disintegrate”

Through my scholastic career I always worked better under pressure.  If I was given an assignment a month in advance I’d try to stay ahead of the game and get it done long before the deadline.  But I could never stay focused long enough to actually do it.  Inevitably, the night before it was due, I’d find myself in a panicked frenzy, alternating between the book I didn’t read, and the page I couldn’t put words down on fast enough.  It probably didn’t help that whatever I ended up turning in received a good grade; it was like giving a drunk just enough to keep them buzzed, and therefore they’d never think they had a problem.  I always escaped unscathed, and though I’d tell myself that next times things would be different, that I wouldn’t wait until the last minute, that I would prepare myself better, as I had done with the previous Chuck Palahniuk conference two years prior, that never seemed to happen.  But this time around I could see the writing on the wall; opportunities such as this didn’t grow on trees, especially now that technically I wasn’t a student anymore, and the only reason I was given this chance in the first place was that somehow, on some day, I got in the good graces of a wonderful woman who wouldn’t give up on me the same way I so easily gave up on myself; I couldn’t keep saying, “Next time” this time I had to do it.  In “The Great Disappointment” Havok sings, “While I waited I was wasting away.”  I was tired of waiting, but I was so inundated, so used to it all just naturally working out in the end that I didn’t know how to break the cycle.

I dropped Liz off at her defensive driving class and had about six hours to kill in Jamestown, NY.  To anyone who has been through there you know that six hours is about five and-a-half hours too much.  But I did my best, driving up and down just about every street within the town limits, parking downtown,  walking past the ghosts of years gone by, seeing nothing but the dilapidated storefronts of businesses long since given up on.  When I was out of viable options I remembered that there was a community college in Jamestown.  Years before I had gone there with my sister to watch her play volleyball , and though I knew it wasn’t much, I figured at least there would be living, breathing people walking around.  But there wasn’t; that week happened to be spring break and the campus, like the town, was a virtual ghost town.  But it was a nice day, unseasonably warm, so I figured I’d walk around anyway.  I grabbed my notebook, a pen, my copy of Palahniuk’s Choke that I’d begun re-reading after my teacher told me about the forthcoming conference, and I headed out.  I walked the entire campus in about ten minutes, but I wasn’t ready to go back yet.  I found the library door unlocked, so I walked upstairs, found an empty classroom, and read.  As is often the case when I read I started to doze off.  However long later when I came to, drool-smeared and dazed, I closed Choke, picked up my pen, opened my notebook, looked around the otherwise empty room, and started writing.  As my right hand worked its way back and forth across the page I didn’t think much about what I was writing, whether or not it was good, I didn’t stop myself to re-read the previous sentence or think about where I was going with the next one; I just wrote.  And then, like Forrest Gump when he says, “I didn’t want to run no more,” just as naturally as I started, I stopped.  I closed my notebook and made my way for the exit.  Just as I was about to head down the stairs I saw an adjacent room with the door slightly ajar.  There was a bright neon pink sign that read, Theft Anonymous, taped to it and I could hear people talking.   Outside the door there was a big comfy looking chair that I took a seat on.  For a while, I don’t even know how long, I listened to the people on the other side of the door tell their stories of how they stole things: televisions, their mother’s pearls, their first girlfriend’s virginity, the sort of things you’d never think about anyone ever stealing, and I listened until I saw that it was time to go pick Liz up.  When she got in her truck I had it on the tip of my tongue to tell her about the stories that I just heard, but I didn’t.  We rolled through another full listen of Sing the Sorrow before she finally asked me what I did with my time.  I remembered the thing I wrote, and I handed her the notebook.  I kept glancing over at her to see if I could tell how far along she was in reading it.  “This is really good,” she finally said as she closed the notebook.  “You should send this to him.”  So I did.

When the first day of the workshop finally arrived I had worried so much about coming up with some topic to do a presentation on—something my former teacher threw at me just days before—that I had forgotten altogether about the works I’d sent off to be critiqued.  I didn’t even think much about what I wrote as Palahniuk started off by going through a bunch of techniques that worked for him, which ended up taking up the majority of that first day.  It wasn’t until the start of the second day when he said that he was going to have one-on-one meetings with everyone to talk about their works they’d submitted to him that I got really nervous.  When it was my turn with him I felt like I was heading off to be judged for the most heinous sins against humanity; there wasn’t going to be a trial or anything, I was going straight to the firing squad.  When he handed me the stapled papers with my name at the top of it I could see there was something handwritten in the top right corner.  Immediately I thought of A Christmas Story when Ralphie receives the paper which he thought would warrant a costumed parade of accolades, but instead had, “You’ll shoot your eye out!” as bold as the sky is blue written across the top of it.  Not that I thought what I handed in would warrant any applause; in fact I thought just the opposite, that if anything, since I once again waited until the last minute, I would get what I deserve, a lifetime-in-the-making mark of “You’ve now shot both your eyes out.  Congratulations!”  But it didn’t say that at all, and Palahniuk didn’t have anything but praise and some suggestions of using what we’d learned in class to make things “tighter” to say about my writing.  “You’ve got a lot of talent,” he said, “and that you can’t teach.  Everything else you can work on if you’re dedicated enough.”  I thanked him and moved on.  I wasn’t exactly on the proverbial Cloud Nine but I was somewhere in the galaxy; it was one thing for girlfriends, and friends, and parents, and teachers, and even colleagues to say that your writing is good, but it was something completely different for someone who wrote a book, Choke, that I’d loved so much, to say those things.  People use the word inspiring all of the time to describe a lot of varying emotions, but the feeling I had walking back to my seat felt to be at the root of the very word.  This was the sort of kick in the ass that I needed to finally say, “This time things are going to be different” and actually mean it.

For the four days that followed (chronicled with a master’s touch in the documentary Postcards From The Future by The Cult fan site founder Dennis Widmyer) the entire experience was one big inspiration.  Groups of strangers were there to talk about their love of Palahniuk’s work, and that happened, but more than that, including the duration of what was supposed to be my presentation, people talked about what made them tick: traveling, photography, tattoos, orgies, writing, late-night benders, whatever you can imagine.  One day, as I was driving Palahniuk to one of the events, we got to talking about some of these stories, and the people behind the stories—because Edinboro is so small, and each reading so intimate, before the end of the week, it was easy to say, “that guy with the tattoo sleeves” and even if you didn’t know his name was Chris, everyone, including Chuck, would know exactly who you meant—and I sort of turned the talk back to the workshop.  I was talking about a friend of mine from the Fiction Workshop class who was also there during the first day of Palahniuk’s workshop but couldn’t make it the second day, and I was saying how he and I had talked the previous night about putting a workshop together.  “Don’t talk about it,” he said, “just do it.  Even if it’s just the two of you, do it.”  He’d gone on a lot during the first two days about the importance of the process within a writing workshop, but it didn’t really hit home until that car ride.  “We plan on it,” I told him, “a few of us from the workshop are really going to do it,” and that was the truth; a few days after the festivities, a bunch of us met up at the local coffee house and laid out a plan for a weekly, blog-based workshop.  That first week, four of us each posted something we maybe wanted to see if it would be worth fleshing out.  I chose to post that same story that I wrote in that Jamestown Community College classroom, the same one that I’d turned into Palahniuk.  In our one-on-one talk he said, “You could have something here.”  I liked the sound of that.  I had no idea what that something could be, but there was a certain confidence that came with the unknown, especially considering there were going to be a few friends who were on the same journey with me.  I had Sing the Sorrow for a soundtrack, a coffee cup full of pens at my disposal, and I planned on using them for what they worth.  It wasn’t a matter of my own self worth anymore; if I wanted to find value in that I had to earn it.  And now was my chance.

I was in one of those bloated rubber Sumo suits the first time I saw her.  There were dozens of people watching my roommate and I make fools of ourselves as we bashed into each other with a reckless abandon, trying our best to fend off laughter long enough to knock each other on their inflated ass.  But once I saw her everything stopped; the periphery surrounding her was like mosaic blur.  Her hair was jet black, her skin pale.  She was wearing torn blue jeans and a black sweater.  She had a lip ring that shined like a sniper’s scope right before they fire and you die.  Her eyes were brown the way the girl behind Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl” must have been.  Gasping for air, wiping the stream of sweat from the rubber pony-tail strapped to my head, for the first time in my life I knew I was in love.

After shedding the suit, from opposite sides of the room we stared at each other in embarrassed intervals, only looking away long enough to try and convince the other that we hadn’t caught the other looking.  She’d whisper things to her three friends who were standing beside her, and I’d lean over and say something to my friends who were standing next to me.  It was an obvious game of attrition, like some sixth-grade dance minus “Bust a Move” and the bowl of fruit punch.  I was waiting for a concrete signal from her to approach, and she was awaiting the same from me.  Both supporting casts of friends were encouraging us to no avail.  When her friends finally tired of her lack of courage, and saw this waiting game for what it was worth—completely futile—they turned to leave.  My friends and I followed just far enough behind to not look like the stalkers we were trying to be.  The January air was a punch-in-the-gut cold, and we followed them until they veered towards the opposite end of the campus from where we were going.  I tried to convince my friends to continue with the detective work but they weren’t having anything of it.  It was too cold, and as one of them pointed out, freezing our asses off even more wouldn’t change the fact that I was being a pussy.

In the ensuing weeks I saw her and her friends all over campus, and each time it was exactly more of the silent same.  I’d try and get a table in the cafeteria close enough to her with the hopes that she’d finally end the stalemate and say hello.  If my friends and I were seated first, she’d do the same.  One of her friends was even in a class of mine, and I sat closer to her than I had before I knew—at least hypothetically speaking—who she was in hopes that she’d give me the scoop on her friend.  But that too was fruitless.  To my friends the girl was referred to as, “the girl from the UC” and almost every day I gave my friends updates; where I saw her, what she was wearing, how I still couldn’t bring myself to talk to her.  Not long after that night I first saw “the girl from the UC”, I started dating a girl that I found enough false courage to talk to.  But it didn’t change the feeling I got whenever “the girl from the UC” crossed my path; I may have been riding shotgun in a Ford, but I had my mind of driving a Ferrari.

That summer, one night when driving back from the campus library, I saw “the girl from the UC” alone, walking across the lawn towards the apartment complex opposite of where I lived.  It was my chance, my silver platter; the sun was just starting to set and the sky looked prophetic; that time of night where one stranger asking another stranger if they wanted a ride would still be seen more of a romantic gesture than a creeper one, and there wasn’t the added pressure of both her and I having a cast of “Just do it” friends pestering us.  I allowed my foot to come off the gas paddle and coasted at a pace I thought would be inviting.  It wasn’t.  She noticed me noticing her and I got scared.  I stepped on the gas and tried not to look back, though I looked back all of the way until she was out of my sight.

Fast forward almost two calendar years to one day, while walking towards the sales floor after punching in, I walked passed “the girl from the UC” in the tight hallway of the backroom of work.  She was halfway through slipping her blue vest over her right arm when we noticed each other.  Both of our eyes ballooned, but we kept walking, perhaps out of fear that proximity might finally force one of us to grow a pair.  When I got to my place behind the counter I kept repeating, “Holy sh!t” over and over to myself until the girl I worked with asked, “What?”  I managed to say, “My dream girl works here,” in stuttered intervals.  It took her to put my stutters together but once she realized what I said she asked, “Who?”  And I couldn’t answer.  In two years of watching from a distance I never got close enough to get her name.  After calming myself down I did a recon mission around the store to try and find out which department she worked in.  When I saw her standing amongst a pile of unfolded clothes, I bee-lined for the backroom and looked over the expanse of the alphabetized work schedule that took up a good chunk of the wall.  I scanned through names, eliminating ones I knew, or ones who didn’t work in her department.  I whittled it down to three potential names, and checked that against who was currently on the clock.  The easiest way to get a concrete confirmation would have been to ask someone that worked with her.  But the place was like a giant high school; if someone knew that you liked someone, everyone knew it, and you could never control either the momentum or what was said by the time it reached its destination.  The wall gave me a name that I was pretty sure was hers.  But I did nothing with it.

One night a bunch of employees were gathering for the nightly team meeting.  I sat down on a bench and planted my head against the wall.  The night meetings were always pointless; self-important managers going over sales figures that nobody in their early-twenties gave a damn about.  One of the elder ladies who worked nights sat beside me on the bench.  Before even saying, “Hello” to me she said, “I know someone that likes you.”  I felt eight-years old again.  In the month or so prior I’d hung out with numerous girls who worked at the store, and a couple of them were interested enough in me to the point where I had to use lies on them to keep them away: “I’m moving soon” or “I really don’t want a relationship right now” were a couple of standbys, and for the most part they worked.  “Aren’t you going to ask me who?” the lady asked.  Without hesitation I said, “No.”  If it was who I thought it was, a girl that my excuses weren’t working on, I really didn’t want to know.  “But she reeeeeeeally likes you,” she said.  “Like reeeeeeeeeally likes you.”  “Ok, who?” I asked, more to get her to shut up.  “Liz,” she answered.  My stomach dropped; I felt like I’d just sped down the monster hill on a roller coaster with nothing securing me.  I bit my lip hard enough to where I could taste the iron of my blood slip down on my tongue.  “Liz?” I asked.  “Yep,” she said.  When she asked, “Do you like her?” I was too dumbstruck to be dishonest.  “The girl from the UC…she’s my dream girl.”

I spent the next couple of days thinking of something to say to Liz.  My entire life I was never much of a talker, and on top of that, I’d never been confused with a smooth talker.  Pretty much every girl that I ever dated, it started off by the girl revealing her interest in me, and for better or worse, me saying some variation of, “Sure” in response.  The biggest reason I hadn’t pursued “the girl from the UC” long before I found out by process of elimination that her name was Liz was because I was afraid of rejection on that colossal of a scale; if she said, “No” to me it would be worse than getting dumped, or fired, or some tangible thing that you’re probably going to be no worse for wear after it happens; it would be the utter annihilation of a dream; and not just any dream, but the sort of dream that when it dies, part of you that can never be reclaimed dies with it: hope.  Two years prior I had come to grips with this rationale and accepted it for what it was, even if that line of thinking happened to by synonymous with stupidity.  It would be easier for me to never know if she liked me than to know that she didn’t.  But now that I had confirmation that she did indeed like me, I was lost.  I had the campus sealed validation of two accredited universities to prove that I had some proficiency with the written word, but when it came to writing something that would reveal my pent-up feelings for Liz, I just couldn’t do it; it felt like trying to learn how to walk for the first time, only I had Weeble-Wobbles for feet.  Finally, after days of pep-talking myself and tearing sheets of half-written letters out of my notebook that just weren’t good/honest/compelling enough, I took the one hundred and thirty-two steps over to where she happened to be standing at work.  As I approached, she turned and walked a few feet the other way before stopping at a rack of jeans.  “Hey,” I said.  “Hey,” she replied.  After seven-hundred-plus days of silent intrigue the ice was broken.  I slipped my way through the sloppy semblance of a conversation before I finally spit out, “Do you want to hang out tonight?”  “Sure,” she said.  “Ok,” I said, and turned to walk away.  When I got about five feet away I stopped, realizing that I’d never introduced myself.  “I know who you are,” she said.  I smiled.  “I’m Liz,” she said to which I answered, “I know who you are too.”

I’ve never won the lottery, but I assume that there’s nothing you can do to prepare yourself for it once it actually happens.  I had about an hour before I got home from work to when she was supposed to come over.  I cleaned my room, did the dishes, and even vacuumed every rug in the house.  When my roommates asked what the hell got into me I told them that “the girl from the UC” was coming over.  They were just as shocked as I was; I finally had grown a pair.  When she finally arrived I made brief introductions and then we went into my room.  She took a seat on the floor while I sat on the bed.  We fumbled our way for a while until the tension was so thick I could see both of us starting to suffocate.  “What do you want to listen to?” I asked.  “Anything works for me.”

I grabbed the first disk I saw, Wiretap Scars by Sparta, and popped it in the CD player.  “This sounds like the guy from At the Drive-In,” she said.  “It is,” I answered, and knew in one instant that my first premonition two years prior was correct; I was in love with this girl.  There’s that scene in High Fidelity where John Cusack’s character Rob is talking about first meeting a girl and he says, “I agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what you are like.  Books, records, films; these things matter. Call me shallow but it’s the fuckin’ truth.”  As far as I was concerned that’s the spot-on gospel.  When dating a girl it’s easy to look beyond something such as she hates to wake up before 7 a.m., or even that she’s a vegetarian when you like to eat meat.  But when you come across someone who thinks Pearl Harbor was a good movie, or thinks that Nickelback a) has musical merit b) is hard rock c) is good, you’re going to have a rough, if not impossible, go at it.  With Liz, right away, I could see I wouldn’t have to deal with that; the mere mention of At the Drive-In was as sexy as anything Victoria’s Secret ever produced.  “Air,” the second song off Sparta’s Wiretap Scars has the line, “What would the oddsmakers say?”   I didn’t know what the oddsmakers would say—until we put on the album I didn’t know what I was going to say—but once the ball got rolling even I couldn’t believe the odds of how similar we were.

We both liked Ani Difranco and Fiona Apple.  We loved John Cusack movies and thought him holding the radio over his head in Say Anything was about the most romantic thing of our generation.  She was an art major that loved to read; I was a writing major who loved art.  We both loved Knorr’s Spanish Rice, hated our job, and liked to fall asleep with the TV on.  I was from Rochester, NY and she grew up just south of there.  When she asked me what my birthday was and I told her, she said, “Shut up!” and demanded my driver’s license.  Wouldn’t you know it; we had the same birthday.

Wiretap Scars was an album I had purchased just a few weeks prior to that night with Liz, and I hadn’t really given it a spin yet.  But immediately I loved it.  Sparta’s debut is more accessible than At the Drive-In’s catalog.  Whether or not that made it better or worse didn’t matter; Sparta was different, and they had a sound that was perfect for two people who had waited two years to have this conversation.  There’s a sense of urgency in Jim Ward’s voice on Wiretap Scars but it’s never overwhelming, and his guitar work is hypnotic, even when it gets chaotic.  But you’re more likely to get lost in the songs than buried in the sound.  Liz and I were enamored with songs such as “Cataract” and “Glasshouse Tarot” right away.  Every time our conversation would approach the natural transition to the next topic we’d relax for a minute and listen.

“Light Burns Clear” opens with the couplet, “Looking back with perfect symmetry/Mistakes were you, mistakes were me” and talking over that line with Liz, we had another starting point to get back to the starting point we both clearly remembered.  I shared my stories of “the girl from the UC” with the Girl from the UC, and she told her tales of “the Turquoise Ring Guy.”  Every instance I mentioned of seeing her, of passing by in my car, or her running by my dorm, she told me what that exact story looked like through her eyes.  For years we were both looking in the same mirror, we both saw the same thing, but we couldn’t stop staring long enough to say something.  Wiretap Scars was helping to push us in that direction.

We didn’t go to sleep that night.  We listened to countless albums in their entirety but every other listen we’d come back to Wiretap Scars and listen again.  After covering a lifetime worth of memories in those first few hours, in a moment of silence while Liz and I were lying beside each other she asked me, “Why didn’t you talk to two years ago?”  I could feel the pain behind her voice, the ramifications of what she was asking.  The first two years in college are another lifetime unto itself where mistakes and misfortunes multiple like sea monkeys.  As I let the question linger I thought of what heartache, and scars, and failed relationships she might be referring to.  Then I thought of myself, my own scars, and how I’d more or less discarded hope the way that people discard chewed gum before that lady said, “I know someone that likes you” to me.  It was on the tip of my tongue to ask her the same question but I didn’t; the song “Collapse,” which has since become one of my ten favorite songs of all-time, said things perfectly:

“The host had his mouth sewn shut

All in the name of trust

When the blood goes thin, he’s given in

You can spare us the formal toast

The drunken anecdotes

From this day on…goes on and on…”

Whoever either one of us, what we did or didn’t do before this conversation, we weren’t going to be able to change that, for better or worse, and if we were going to have the sort of bright future both of us knew from the moment we first locked eyes on each other, we were going to have to look beyond the past, the heartaches and failures, and look only to each other.  Only this time without fear of failure.

A couple months after our first night together we went to see Sparta in Cleveland.  It was the first real concert I’d been to in three years, and it was the first concert I’d been to with a girlfriend where I didn’t have to worry about whether or not they were having a good time or enjoying the music.  We were both there because of the music, because we both loved it.  It only made it better that we both loved each other.  When Sparta played “Collapse” live I looked over at her and she was looking at me; it was one of those scenes, one of those moments that Cameron Crowe invariably turns into an “Awwwww”/Why can’t that happen to me moments in every movie he writes/directs.  For the first time in my life I felt like I had a solid foundation, one which I could build something off of, and I had someone that, no matter what direction I wanted to go in, she’d be along for the ride.

[Writer's Note: I should have given the people within these stories names by now; it would have been easier for both of us.  Starting with this essay there will be names given to the characters important enough to earn the random pulling of them from a baby name book.  Also, when possible, there will be pictures to coincide with the essays.  Why?  Because all of us to a certain degree like picture books.  That's all]

I was sleepwalking through life.  Graduation and the Summer of Me came and went.  As my friends started in on the new semester I was working full-time, stocking CDs and DVDs, describing to blue-haired biddies what a FM Modulator was, and why they needed one if they wanted to upgrade their movie collection without having to upgrade their television.  I don’t know if I was avoiding “the future” but at the very least I wasn’t thinking much about it.  I woke up, I went to work, I came home, downed a MD 20/20, played video games with my roommates, listened to some music, thought about writing, didn’t write, and then went to bed.  The next day I’d wake up and do the same thing over again.  Isolated from a social life that going to classes naturally provides, and even more isolated by the location of our house in relation to where the action happened, aside from the girlfriend of one of my roommates I didn’t have much in the way of interaction with the opposite sex.

From time-to-time one of my ex-girlfriends, Natalie, would come over, we’d have a few drinks, watch a movie, and then she’d leave, go home to her boyfriend, and I’d lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling.  One night we had a party, and one of the girls who showed up was another ex-girlfriend, Vanessa.  Before long we had isolated ourselves from the rest of the people, we got talking about the past, and how our relationship ended.  When we hugged as she left old feelings started to wash over me.  I went in my room and made a mix-CD of a bunch of songs which reminded me of her.  The next night, after spending my entire work day thinking about Vanessa, I sat down at my desk and wrote a sprawling thought that I called The Late Night Confession:

Sometimes, the shadows of life become extremely hard to escape.  These lonely, desolate places take shape in some sort of hypnotic, addictive way and before we know it, we’re stuck like flies to a window on a mid-summer day wanting with all of our ill-willed might to get back outside, away from the captivity that has squandered us for so long.  When little in life goes right it becomes hard to distinguish the things to strive for.  Somewhere on our paths to peace and inner bliss we get sort of sidetracked, a fallen compromise reflecting the dreams that we think inevitably, and matter-of-factly are going to pass us by.  I was in one of those moments—well depending on how long a moment is gauged—until the other day when I saw you smile at me from across the porch.  I knew all at once that I’d remembered you and all your magnificence all along.  Trying to forget you, or get over you was hard.  But it wasn’t as hard as the refrain to jump up out of my seat to hug you, and tell you how much I missed having your eyes to lose myself in, was.  Ok, I’m not as prophetic, or outright, as I’d like to be.  Hell, my attempts always seemed to fall a little shorter than I had intended.  But when you’ve got one foot dragging behind—whatever the reason may be—it’s hard to focus forward, no matter how much you want to.  When you smiled at me, your laugh reminding me of all the things I meant to tell you on rainy nights in July, I can’t believe I let myself, the opportunity to grasp the most obvious feeling that honesty has ever brought to me, slip away.  I wanted redemption in an instant, spread cautiously out over whatever time it might take.  Somewhere in your voice I sensed that our thoughts were walking hand in hand again as they did long before we ever let ourselves admit that we wanted to do the same.  I don’t know why I didn’t tell you the other night everything that I was feeling.  I don’t know, perhaps words like that—or this—would have just gotten in the way, adding pressure, or some unnecessary expectations, to a situation, to a feeling that has always simply and inevitably come naturally.  Images of the yesterdays that I laid awake thinking of you; the countless days that we went without a word betraying our thoughts, or ambitions, to attempt to right the fictitious wrongs, raced in and out of my head during those silent but comfortable moments where we traded short, hopefully unnoticed, glances at each other.  If it would have been a full-fledged game of staring I know I would have lost.  I was always lost somewhere in your being you.  At that moment, and all these moments since I wouldn’t, or didn’t, expect anything different.

A day or so later I gave Vanessa my written confession, along with the CD.  In the days after the party I had allowed my mind to fill in all of the spaces in between the time we were together and the present, and I thought what life would have been like if we hadn’t taken a left-turn on each other a year-and-a-half prior.  The situation, what I was feeling, it seemed organic the way that beginnings—or the rekindling of relationships—do, and it didn’t feel like I was walking down a one-way street.  We traded emails; we talked for hours at night on the phone.  But for everything we were saying to each other what I was waiting to hear never came.  Before long we were back to being strangers.

In the weeks after I spent more time alone in my bedroom, listening to Blood On The Tracks, thinking about the possibilities of winning lotteries I never bought tickets to, watching High Fidelity too many times.  One night after work I was climbing the steps to the living room, ready for another uneventful Wednesday night when my roommate handed me the phone.  I asked who it was, and he said it was, Kara, a friend of mine from Erie, who I had a Fiction writing class with.  When I said, “Hello” into the phone I heard the voice of someone from my long ago past in Rochester.  Molly called me by a nickname that only she, her sister, Charlotte, and a few other old time friends used.  I was in shock; my mind or mouth had no idea what to say.  “Holy shit,” was the best I could come up with, and I said it a few times until the voice on the other end said, “I know.”  Apparently Kara was out at a bar when she overheard a conversation about Rochester.  Admitting her eavesdrop Kara told Molly and Charlotte that she had a friend in Edinboro who was from Rochester.  When the girls asked, Kara told them.  Of the tens of thousands of people in Erie, Pennsylvania, and the million or so in the Greater Rochester, New York region, three girls, one of whom minutes before was a complete stranger, all happened to know the same person: Me.  Disbelief, laughter and a phone call ensued.  An hour or so later, with my roommate and his girlfriend in tow, I met the three of them at the bar.  The first person I saw was Molly, then my friend, Kara, and then the Charlotte.  I was dating Charlotte when I moved to Edinboro and she to Erie, but I always secretly loved her sister Molly.  I hadn’t seen either of them in three years, and Molly was just as stunning as I remembered her; eyes like cut glass, a smile that made that cold October night feel like mid-July.  My knees went cliché on me; I couldn’t take my eyes off of Molly.  So much so that I didn’t see Kara kiss me.  For most of the night I was using her as a sounding board, telling her what my feelings for Molly used to be, how uncomfortable it was to see Charlotte, how much I still apparently cared for Molly.  Kara heard exactly nothing I said, flat out just didn’t care, or was turned on by the competition.  In the back of my mind I always thought Kara had feelings for me, but I never thought too much about them.  With her lips planted against mine I didn’t have a choice anymore.

A couple days later Kara and I laid on my bed and watched High Fidelity.  Nothing physical happened but the tension was thick in the air; ever since she forced her lips on me I thought a lot about her; her assertiveness was a turn-on, and my mind started in on the possibilities.  That night we talked in hypotheticals, off-handed one of us said something about one-day going to New York City together.  A few days later we went.

It had been just over a year since 9/11 but the city was still covered with missing faces, love messages written in crayon by the hands of parentless children, and flower bouquets that had long ago rotted, but nobody had the nerve to remove.  Kara and I stayed in a hotel I’d stayed in many times before, sometimes with other girlfriends.  Since I started staying in hotels I had done that a lot, stay at the same places where I’d stayed with someone else before.  It wasn’t out of spite, or trying to relive memories that had passed me by; it was always a matter of comfort, going with what I knew.  As we checked in I tried to drum up certain memories, certain faces, and it didn’t work.  That made me smile, and for that I found Kara more endearing.  That night we ventured out into the city and for a few hours just took in the sights, the smell of a place both of us loved so much.  We didn’t go too far, choosing instead to save it for the next day.  After we got back to the hotel, we ordered a couple of pizzas, and ate until we couldn’t eat anymore.  With our backs to each other, lying on the same bed, I listened to the silence, tried to gauge if there was the possibility of magic in the air.  She was living with another guy, a guy that she’d been with for years, but she said they were having the sort of problems that don’t get solved.  I thought about that, getting involved with someone who was involved enough with someone to be living with them, and it bothered me.  Not enough to not sleep in the same bed with her, but enough to where I didn’t initiate anything.

The next day we covered a big chunk of the city, from tourist staples, to seedy Canal Street backrooms chock full of knockoff designer purses.  We snuck into the grand ballroom at the Waldorf Astoria, rode the elevators up and down.  Outside of the hotel we met a guy with a dog named Bob.  To complete the self-made Serendipity tour Kara wanted to go to Central Park and see the ice rink where John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale fell in love.  In the park there was a tent set up and a small group of people were gathering to go inside.  We asked one of the security guards what was going on and he said there was a concert, some guy he’d never heard of, but apparently good enough to have a record deal.  Kara and I decided to check it out.  The guy’s name was Howie Day, and neither of us had heard of him either.  But we decided to give it a shot.

We took a seat on the grass of Central Park, and silently felt out our level of interest in one another under the cover of an obtrusive, uninspiring tent.  Using loop pedals, some digital effects, and his guitar, Howie Day made the half-empty room feel full, like a blanket-wrapped embrace in mid-December.  Kara and I kept looking at each other, giving silent validations that indeed we were both in on the secret, in on the moment, that what we were experiencing was, and would probably forever remain, one of those moments, the ones that exist as clichés in movies like Serendipity but never seem to make the jump into anyone’s real life, where time stops, facial expressions freeze their way into your memory, where you fight the cynical urge to blink because you’re sure it can’t really be happening.  But it was happening, and after the first couple of songs I didn’t want to breathe because I didn’t want that moment, or Day’s singing to end.  I was trying my best to write his lyrics into my memory; I wanted to remember everything.  But eventually the last strum of the last song came and I couldn’t remember anything: the names of the songs, the atmospheric rhythm that him patting his guitar gave off, the clever wordplay, what the hell brought us there in the first place.

We filed out into the Manhattan night, high on life and short on words to describe what we both just experienced.  We took turns saying some variation of “Wasn’t that awesome?” to each other as we meandered our way through the Saturday night traffic.  We came across a Virgin Megastore and went in.  I thumbed through the CDs until I came across Howie Day’s Australia.  The album cover was a lot like I felt: the blurred silhouette of a guy looking out on someplace specific to him and the person taking the picture, but a mystery to anyone else trying to find something familiar to root themselves in.  When Kara and I returned to reality, and we tried to describe this night to our closest friends, no matter what we said our words were going to be midgets—even if we used Australia as a backing track—because words always seem to diminish the most important moments in life to anyone on the outside looking in.  We tried our best to stretch that Saturday for all it was worth, fighting through tried feet, and heavy eyes.  I sensed this was going to be our pinnacle; there was nowhere else to go but down, but I tried my best to purge the cynical thoughts that were storming the gates of my heart.  She was going to return to the unhappy life of living with her boyfriend, and I was going to have to go back mine, stocking CDs, and watching John Cusack movies until I was blue in the face.  Love or something like it wasn’t going to be as easy as finding Central Park was; you don’t just ease yourself out of a year’s long relationship into the arms of someone else, no matter how infatuated you are with them, or how much you tell them you want it to happen.  If I wanted the chance at something more with Kara this was the situation I was going to have to deal with.

That following week Australia became my soundtrack.  I listened to “Ghost” as if it were the only song anyone had ever written.

“Lately i’ve been thinking
Lately i’ve been dreaming with you
I’m so resistant to this type of thinking
Oh now it’s shining through

I was alone for the last time
before my nights’ vacation with you
alive from the first now I’m denied
by the ghost of you”

I hadn’t lost Kara—how do you lose something that was never yours to begin with?—but it felt that way, despite our plan to hang out Halloween night.  She made it clear she was going to spend the night, and in not so roundabout terms inferred what would take place between us when she did.  But plans or promises didn’t matter, as concrete as they seemed, I couldn’t shake the situation, her living with her boyfriend, and I didn’t see how us sleeping together would do anything but throw more fuel on a fire I had no power to put out.

As Halloween drew near, I put on my Howie Day blinders, and tried to lose myself in the memory of that night through the songs of Australia.  As I was getting ready to leave work on Halloween, Rachael, a girl that I worked with, walked up and asked if I wanted to hang out for a bit.  For months we’d been talking about doing such, but nothing came of it.  Figuring I had hours before Kara was supposed to show up, I figured what the hell, why not; it was making good on a promise to hang out, an excuse to pre-game, and on a purely vain level, Rachael was hot.  We got a bottle of booze and she followed me back to my house.

It didn’t take long for inhibitions to fall by the wayside, and we found ourselves on the deck discussing people that we worked with.  She was telling me how much she liked the one guy who worked in my department and half-joking/half-serious I asked Rachael why she didn’t like me.  She smiled before leaning in to kiss me.  The next thing I knew someone was shaking my foot.  “What’s up?  Why aren’t you ready?”  Kara was standing above me, in full costume, an overnight bag in her hand.  I had no idea where I was, what I was supposed to be ready for.  “Ok,” I said, and stumbled off to my bedroom to change.  This next time I came to Kara screamed, “Who the hell is that?”  I looked around the room, had no idea what she was talking about.  “Who?” I asked.  “That bitch with the purple hair!” she yelled.  Pants around my ankles, my shirt wrapped around my head, I turned and saw a half-naked Rachael in my bed, passed out, deep asleep, or dead, I didn’t know.  I was in no state of mind to comprehend the situation at hand, beginning with the obvious which was Rachael and I in bed together at different stages of undress.  Whatever I said, it set Kara off into a hysterical rage; if it wasn’t nailed down, she did her best Roger Clemens impression with it.  When the storm calmed—or her arm tired— I tried to follow her out the door, but only got about two feet before I fell to the floor and gave up.  From behind me I heard Rachael ask, “Was that your girlfriend?”  “No,” I answered.  “Does she know that?” she asked.  And the truth was I had no idea how to answer that question.

Kara came back two more times that night and when she’d get there, it became more of the same: Premeditated chaos.  As the haze slowly lifted from my head I started thinking about the totality of our time “together,” from that first night in her car on the last day of Fiction class, to that night at the bar, to our trip to New York City, the Howie Day show, all the way to the present.  Where at first I felt like a complete pile, the more I thought about it, it wasn’t a matter of me being mean, but more the end being justified by an entire case study of mutual means towards each other.  I thought of Day’s song, “Slow Down” and the lyrics:

“An actress
Sooner the better for me
You should know by now
I’m not your friend
You’re raveled up
Just take some time to come undone
You look so tired
I know your type
You storm out
And tear the walls
The portraits down
It’s what you want
It’s how we are”

That was our relationship in a nutshell, but I’d been oblivious to it.  As we sat together on that Central Park grass I’d looked beyond the fact that the first time Kara kissed me I was telling her how much I was still in love with another girl.  I’d looked past the countless times where she’d call me, screaming at her boyfriend, promising—and making good on it—to throw whatever she could find at him.  I completely ignored myself, and how just weeks prior to the beginning of what would become this end with Kara, I was pining over Vanessa, and before her, Natalie.  Apparently it didn’t matter who the girl was, I was more or less shopping when I was hungry; everything looks like the best thing ever; you ignore recalls, and expiration dates, and common sense.  You settle on something because anything has a devious way of looking like everything you ever wanted.  You get hypnotized; captivated by a moment you start thinking that you can turn into forever; infusing qualities into someone as if you’re building a love castle out of broken Popsicle sticks.  In that way pop songs and girls are very similar; you can easily manipulate your tastes for whatever tastes good at the moment.  Who Kara was, at that point in my life she couldn’t be what I wanted.  Howie Day, his music was never going to have a lasting impact on me.  But sometimes, when the moon, the stars, and your hormones align just right, anything can sound like magic.

So during yet another a brief hiatus from the December January Album essays I’m taking a few minutes to list my Favorite Albums from the first decade of the 2000′s.  If you want to get technical, I suppose this is a Best Of list for me, considering I liked these albums the best.  But really, it’s an opinion-based list; I don’t pretend to have listened to enough in the past decade to give an honest, all-encompassing Best Of list that’s 100 albums deep.  This list will reveal that I’m not pretentious enough to put out a list like Spin, not “Indie” enough to be “cool” like Pitchfork, and not mainstream enough to be in the class of Rolling Stone; I’m just a random schmuck from Rochester, NY who loves music enough to take the time to compile a Best Of list of Albums that he loved that were released from January 1st 2000 to December 31st 2009.  Unlike the Album Essays, these ARE the albums I liked listening to the best.  So, to that list, in no particular order:

1. Arcade Fire – Funeral
2. At The Drive-In – Relationship Of Command
3. Eminem – The Marshall Mathers LP
4. Flogging Molly – Swagger
5. Elliot Smith – Figure 8
6. Neil Young – Silver & Gold
7. Ani Difranc0 – Reveling/Reckoning
8. Bob Dylan – Love & Theft
9. The Strokes – Is This It?
10. System Of A Down – Toxicity
11. Aimee Mann – Lost In Space
12. Dredg – El Cielo
13. Flogging Molly – Druken Lullabies
14. Sigur Ros – ( )
15. Sparta – Wiretap Scars
16. A.F.I. – Sing The Sorrow
17. Kasey Chambers – Barricades & Brickwalls
18. Alkaline Trio – Good Mourning
19. Coheed And Cambria – In Keeping Secrets Of Silent Earth: 3
20. Bruce Springsteen – The Rising
21. Dropkick Murphys – Blackout
22. The Mars Volta – De-Loused In The Comatorium
23. NoFX – The War On Erroism
24. OutKast – Speakerboxxx/The Love Below
25. Lindi Ortega – The Taste Of Forbidden Fruit
26. Street Dogs – Savin Hill
27. The Strokes – Room On Fire
28. 50 Cent – Get Rich Or Die Tryin’
29. Action Action – Don’t Cut Your Fabric To This Year’s Fashion
30. Alexis MacIssac – Inspired
31. Jimmy Eat World – Bleed American
32. Jimmy Eat World – Futures
33. Keane – Hopes And Fears
34. The Killers – Hot Fuss
35. Killswitch Engage – The End Of Heartache
36. Madcap – Under Suspicion
37. Modest Mouse – Good People Who Love Bad News
38. Ray LaMontagne – Trouble
39. Regina Spektor – Soviet Kitsch
40. Bloc Party – Silent Alarm
41. Bright Eyes – I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning
42. Damian Marley – Welcome to Jamrock
43. Fiona Apple – Extraordinary Machine
44. Ludacris – Word Of Mouf
45. Franz Ferdinand – Franz Ferdinand
46. Weezer – Make Believe
47. Amy Winehouse – Black To Black
48. Angels & Airwaves – We Don’t Need To Whisper
49. As Tall As Lions – As Tall As Lions
50. Bob Dylan – Modern Times
51. The Decemberists – The Crane Wife
52. John Mayer – Continuum
53. Justin Timberlake – Futuresex/Lovesounds
54. Killswitch Engage – As Daylight Dies
55. M. Ward – Post-War
56. Mastodon – Blood Mountain
57. Nas – Hip Hop Is Dead
58. P!nk – I’m Not Dead
59. Pearl Jam – Pearl Jam
60. Red Hot Chili Peppers – Stadium Arcadium
61. Regina Spektor – Begin To Hope
62. The Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band – Big Damn Nation
63. Silversun Pickups – Carnavas
64. Sparta – Threes
65. Tenacious D – Tenacious D
66. Thom Yorke – The Eraser
67. Johnny Cash – American III: Solitary Man
68. Against Me! – New Wave
69. Bad Religion – New Maps Of Hell
70. Bon Iver – For Emma, Long Ago
71. Clutch – From Beale Street To Oblivion
72. Coheed And Cambria – No World For Tomorrow
73. Down – Down III: Over The Under
74. Once Soundtrack
75. The Hives – Tyrannosaurus Hives
76. Kate Nash – Made Of Bricks
77. Lindi Ortega – Fall From Grace
78. Nicole Atkins – Neptune City
79. Radiohead – In Rainbows
80. Thrice – The Alchemy Index I-IV
81. Emma-Lee – Never Just A Dream
82. Lil Wayne – Tha Carter III
83. Metallica – Death Magnetic
84. My Morning Jacket – Evil Urges
85. Nas – NaS
86. Opeth – Watershed
87. Ray LaMontagne – Gossip In The Grain
88. Sarah Shafey – Tiny Music Box
89. Bat For Lashes – Two Suns
90. Dredg – The Pariah, The Parrot, The Delusion
91. Alkaline Trio – From Here To Infirmary
92. The Irish Tenors – Ellis Island
93. Johnny Cash – American IV: The Man Comes Around
94. The Postal Service – Give Up
95. Sigur Ros – Agastis Byrjun
96. Tom Waits – Alice
97. Jay Z – The Blueprint
98. U2 – All That You Can’t Leave Behind
99. Outkast – Stankonia
100. The White Stripes – Elephant

Ok, if listing them at random is a cop-out, here at least is my Top-10:

1. Flogging Molly – Drunken Lullabies
2. Dredg – El Cielo
3. Arcade Fire – Funeral
4. Emma-Lee – Never Just A Dream
5. Thrice – The Alchemy Index
6. Eminem – The Marshall Mathers LP
7. Sigur Ros – ( )
8. Bon Iver – For Emma, Long Ago
9. A.F.I. – Sing The Sorrow
10. Sparta – Wiretap Scars

So there’s that.

When you’re a kid time has a way of passing with the speed and urgency of an elderly turtle with four broken legs on his way to visit his proctologist.  Important events—Christmas, your birthday, the end of the school day—always seem forever fleeting, forever away.  In fact, “This is taking forever” seems to be right up there in the adolescent lexicon with other standbys such as “I hate this” and “This sucks.”  Patient, kids of the wayfaring world are not; the journey for all intents and purposes hasn’t been invented yet, and even if it has it’s just an annoying means to get to what really matters: The finish line.  You don’t and can’t appreciate the process because you’ve always got your eye on the prize.  Studying for the test, the day-long car-ride to get to Cedar Point, writing letters to the girl in hopes she’ll first circle “Yes” and then somewhere down the line take her clothes off for you, they are just necessary evils; if life could be like a DVD everybody at that age would just skip to the “good” parts and say screw off the build-up.

I don’t know the age when that changes, when the second hand of life’s clock finds crack and gets addicted to speeding everything up on you.  But it happens.  Life turns into an hourglass and the more you try and slow things down the quicker the sand disappears and the conversation, or embrace, or night you’ve waited a lifetime for goes cold in your arms; turned from touchable to a tale you’ll end up telling over and over because it’s the only thing that can make you feel close to that moment again.

By the time I got to Edinboro I already had two-and-a-half years-worth of community college in tow.  Those two-and-a-half years took a total of almost four calendar years to get through, and they felt every bit of it.  But the two years it took me to finish up my Bachelor’s Degree at Edinboro flew by.  What seemed like an eternity in the making, before I knew it I went from carrying my things into the dorm, hot girl wearing a black thong in see-through pants on the stairs in front of me, to waiting for hours in a sweltering gymnasium to hear someone call my name in congratulations, hand me my quasi-diploma, immediately drive back to my apartment, carry my things out to my car, a fat woman with fat-lady underwear pushing out the top of her jeans in front of me, so I could move a quarter-mile down the street into an apartment with three friends to start the unabashed Summer of Justin.

Officially, I was an adult.  I was twenty-three and a two-time college graduate.  I never thought much about the future, but I suppose in the back of my mind I assumed it would be bright.  Growing up the people who are put there to help guide you through your formative years say things such as, “The sky’s the limit” and “If you put your mind to it you can accomplish anything” and I was still buying in to what they had sold me.  There’s a danger in using such vague terms on daydreamers who see the world in such vague colors.  But I wasn’t there yet.  Enough people asked me, “What’s next?” at my graduation party a few week later and I more or less told the lot of them that I was keeping my options open.  I wanted to write.  I might want to teach writing.  Most of all I wanted to experience life a bit more, see what else it had in store for me.  I wanted to find some inspiration.  And I meant all of it.

I’d wake up early and go to bed late.  Two of my roommates worked at a restaurant and would bring us home buckets of chicken wings that we’d eat after a long night of drinking.  When we weren’t at the bars we were sitting on our living room floor or on our balcony looking deep into the nothingness of shrubs and bushes and trees that smelled like cum, talking about everything and nothing in particular.  I listened to a lot of music that summer.  I was down to one job, and a big part of that job was stocking CDs.  I’d spend most of my shifts thumbing through them.  Some of the more interesting CDs I’d set aside and when it came around to payday I’d buy as many as I could afford.  One of the ones I bought early that summer was John Mayer’s Room For Squares.  He had one song, “No Such Thing” on the radio and more were soon to come.  The first time I heard “No Such Thing” I heard the voice of a man who sounded to be at about the same time and disposition of life as I was:

“Well I never lived the dreams of the prom kings

and the drama queens

I’d like to think the best of me

is still hiding up my sleeve

They love to tell you, “Stay inside the lines”

but something’s better on the other side

I want to run through the halls of my high school

I want to scream at the top of my lungs

I just found out there’s no such thing as the real world

just a lie you’ve got to rise above”

Ok, he was singing about someone who’d accomplished enough to give him the confidence to stand on a table at his ten-year reunion, in front of a bunch of douche bags that probably shunned him along the way, and give them all a one giant “F U!”  I wasn’t there yet; the truth was the only thing I accomplished was that someone gave me a piece of paper with my name on it.  But I was the first college graduate in my family.  The statement alone made me proud.  Perhaps too proud.  Saying it was enough for me; I could rest on the laurels of my “accomplishment” and be ok with it.  And I did.  I still had rebellion in my heart.  I didn’t exactly know what rebellion meant to me, but as the summer wore on it was on the tip of my tongue whenever someone at work asked me what was next.  I just knew I didn’t want to be part of “the real world.”

One hot summer night two of my roommates and I were at the bar and a girl who was in one of my English classes came over and sat with us.  She and I talked about graduation, about the burden of people asking us what we were going to do with our lives.  She was working as a waitress and had no real plans that would make anyone blush either.  It was a redeeming quality the way deep eyes, great conversation, or a nice rack is at other junctures in time.  She came home with us that night and after my roommates went to bed this girl and I stayed up most of the night.  We listened to Room For Squares on repeat and though she thought John Mayer was “a pussy” she could understand where he was coming from and it sounded like a comfortable enough place to visit.  We kissed just enough for both of us to want more, but stopped just short of regretting it.  The alcohol was talking and for once, for both of us, we decided not to listen.  Or so we said.

The next night I took out for the back country roads and thought about the previous night.  This girl wasn’t everything I wanted.  Truth be told she wasn’t anything that I wanted.  But in the Paula Abdul “Opposites Attract” sort of way she was.  She was a warm body, a good enough kisser, and she was at the same crossroads of life as I was.  She didn’t have a plan—didn’t want one—and that fact alone was enough to make me want her.  I went back to the bars for three nights after in hopes that she’d walk in, we’d have a few drinks, and pick up where we left off.  But she never came in.  After the third night I started to take it personal.

The third song on Room For Squares is “My Stupid Mouth” and in the ensuing days that became weeks I adopted it as my anthem.  I thought our night together had ended well enough—I couldn’t remember anything that might have set her off the tracks—but the fact that I couldn’t find her made me reassess everything I couldn’t remember saying that night.  Did I say too much?  Did I say too little?  Should I have reacted with more persistence?

“I’m never speaking up again

it only hurts me

I’d rather be a mystery than she desert me

oh, I’m never speaking up again

starting now “

My confidence took a nose-dive.  The Summer of Justin started to feel lonely and cold; the late-night talks and devouring of chicken wings suddenly didn’t hold the same promise or weight that they had at the beginning of the summer.  I stopped taking pride in the fact that I thought of myself as Mr. Not Have A Plan and started seeing myself as College Graduate: CD Stock Boy.  I wasn’t even appealing enough to keep someone I wasn’t appealed to around.  So I turned more to the music.

There’s a Catch-22 when it comes to putting your faith in the words of people who have succeeded when what they’re selling is failure, hope, heartache, and second-chances.  Once upon a time the only redemption Bruce Springsteen might have been able to offer a girl was beneath his dirty hood, but he’s been an uber-rich rock star for so long now that it’s hard to hear “Thunder Road” without thinking about the valet who is going to park his car when he gets where he’s going.  That’s a reason, I think, why true art will always be a young person’s calling.  That’s not to say that lasting art is impossible to create when you get beyond a certain age because it doesn’t; Bob Dylan’s work in the past decade and Johnny Cash’s American Recording series is all the proof anyone would need that art doesn’t die once you secure Social Security.  But there’s an honesty, an earnestness, a desperation when you’re young; what you have to say always feels like it’s the most important thing that anyone will ever say.  When you lose the platform to say it you want to fight for all you’re worth to get it back.  You might be jaded by people but you’re not yet jaded by the world.  Masterpieces are created.  Love is found.  Crazy nights are had.

One night towards the end of the summer, a few days after I’d moved into a new place with two of my closest friends, I went to the bar with the intention of drinking myself into the sort of inspire-minded stupor where I could leave my inhibitions on the bar stool when I was good and drunk and go home and start my masterpiece.  As I was getting ready to leave I felt a warmth ease into the barstool beside me.  It was the girl, in all of her “I’m sorry for avoiding you” glory.  I was just angry enough to avoid mentioning it all together.  When she suggested that we go back to her place I couldn’t think of a better thing to invest a “Sure” in.  When we started kissing her lips felt better than I’d remembered and I kissed her as if I’d never get another chance.  Her room was hot when we arrived, but as the session went on it started to feel like an interrogation room.  It was hard to breathe.  After a while, it got hard to concentrate.  Her body felt like sitting right next to a fire.  I leaned back to catch my breath, resting my head against the small fan she had beside her bed.  The next thing I remember the room was dark, except for a bright light across the room.  It took me a minute to gather my bearings, to figure out where I was.  When the situation came into focus I looked towards the light, which I realized was her computer screen, and I saw the girl sitting naked in her chair, a shiny object in her hand.  At first it looked like a stone; some obsidian rock you’d find washed up on some beach in the midnight moon.  But I couldn’t figure out why she’d be holding a rock in the middle of the night in her bedroom in some college town in Pennsylvania.  Just before the shiver of light met her skin I realized what it was: a knife.  Either out of fear or shock I watched as she made several small slices to her legs.  I watched her face in part to see how she’d react to the steel piercing her skin, but also to see if she was going to look on me.  The one time I started to see her turn her head in my direction I closed my eyes and pretended that I was asleep.  I opened one of my eyes just enough to see if she was creeping towards me, with knife in hand, ready to strike.  She cut herself a couple more times, wiped the blade clean with a Kleenex, set the knife in a sheath and tucked it into her bookcase.  She made her way over to the bed and laid beside me.  My eyes still closed, I felt her wrap her arm around me and let out a sigh as if she’d just walked through the door after a hard day at work.  Her breath was warm, almost comforting if I hadn’t just seen her cut herself multiple times with a knife as she sat in her computer chair.  In an instant I found myself believing in God, whispering in the dark that if I made it through the night with my head, manhood, and life intact, that I would change my ways for good.

I don’t remember falling back asleep but I remember waking up.    She was staring at me, her blue eyes looking deep into me.  “Good morning,” she said with the sort of quite confidence you have with someone you take pride in waking up next to.  “Morning,” I said, trying on my face to not show the “Holy Fu@k!” feeling I had inside.  When she leaned in to kiss me I was like a dear in headlights about to get smashed by the oncoming car.  It felt like I was kissing a girl who, just hours prior, cut herself five feet from me.  “So what do you want to do this morning?  Do you want to get breakfast or something?” she asked.  I heard myself say “No!” a decibel level below screaming it before I could stop myself.  “I’ve got…ah…ah…stuff to do.”  She asked if she could drive me, and she was wearing desperation better than she was wearing her own naked skin.  I didn’t want to look for cut-marks but all I wanted to do was look for cut-marks.  “No thank you” I said, and I could see the disappointment on her face.  I could see it in her eyes, all she wanted was the right answer.  And I was pretty sure she could see what I was thinking in my eyes; the “Get me the hell out of here you crazy bi!ch!” I was trying to fight.

When she dropped me off I sprinted up the driveway, through the front door, and went straight into my room locking both doors behind me.  Sitting on my bed, I looked around the room.  The silence was overwhelming, all I could see, all I could hear was the striking of her knife.  So I turned on my CD player.  The solace that I’d found in “Why Georgia” for that entire summer was gone.  That is not what he meant by a “quarter-life crisis.”  It couldn’t have been.  But that’s exactly what it felt like.