Ms. Emma-Lee has released the video for “Not Coming By”, a song of her forthcoming album, Backseat Heroine, which is to be released February 7th 2012.  “Not Coming By” happens to be my favorite song off the album.  At least for now.  And the video is flipping sweet.  Click on the picture and check it out.  Then buy her album.  It’s good.  Really good.

Bleed American – Jimmy Eat World

When you stop paying attention to time you lose all concept of it.  My first year at Edinboro was nearing an end.  The suddenness didn’t hit me until I was sitting in the back of a lecture hall, still a few days to go, half-asleep, half-listening to my Traditional Grammar professor drone on and on about something I was going to have to buckle down and pay attention the following school year when I’d have to retake the class.  Overall, despite failing my first class since Course II Math in 10^th grade, my GPA was respectable, I was writing again, and more importantly, I’d managed to prove to myself that I could survive away from home.

I had secured an off-campus apartment for the summer.  It was a move of only a couple hundred yards from my dorm but I still had to pack.  Staring at my possessions—unlike a few months prior when things fell apart with Ellen and I packed with the intention of never coming back—they didn’t look like much: clothes, books, technology, some pictures of me from a past that seemed lived by a different person.  It was uninspiring at best, and when my roommate John asked if I wanted to join him for lunch I couldn’t jump faster at the opportunity to get away from three-by-five inch sets of eyes that I didn’t know anymore.

“So what about this party tonight?” he asked.

“Should be fun,” I answered, staring at my tator tots.

“So are things good with Natalie?”

“Define good,” I answered.

“Are you screwing her again?”

“No.”

“Then things aren’t good.”

With that I looked up at John and smiled.  In many ways John was like a dog; a dog might piss in the corner every once in a while, or take a dump in the middle of the carpet, but they always have the best intentions at heart, are forever loyal, and try their best to make you happy.  I had many good guy friends growing up but I never had a brother, someone that I shared a room with, argued with for hours about sports teams, got in musical preference tiffs with.  In that sense John had become like a brother to me.  In the beginning I didn’t know how much John and I could have in common; he loved country music and living in the past, recounting high school tales at the drop of a dime that I had no frame of reference for.  But he had grown on me considerably once I gave him an honest chance.  At this lunch, like so many times this past semester, he wasn’t going to let me walk off without remembering life’s most important lesson according to John: No matter what your love life is it doesn’t suck as bad as mine.  It was true; early in the semester, to a girl who had stated her interest in John, with a straight face, in a serious tone he asked her, “Am I going to need my goggles and a weedwhacker when I venture down yonder?”  That night was the last of her interest in John; it wasn’t that he was ignorant, he was just clueless.  But that said, he wasn’t above playing the role of the dunce if it made you laugh.

The truth was I had forgiven Natalie.  One night I was looking down from my second-story window and she was standing below, outside the dorm, smoking.  It was the same look, from the same position, that I had been ignoring for weeks.  But that night, I just couldn’t do it anymore.  She motioned me to come downstairs and I did.  The first thing she said to me was, “I have something for you.”  Before I could ask what it was she reached into her purse and handed me a Symphony milk chocolate bar.  I had revealed my admiration for said chocolate in a passing conversation on one of our aimless drives.  Looking at the bar I couldn’t remember which conversation or ride it was from, but I was floored that she remembered such a disposable detail.  I’d been given awesome presents by numerous girls in the past: tickets to see Bob Dylan, scratch off lottery tickets that netted me $300, a live on-the-air singing of some sappy Selena song on Valentine’s Day, but none of them felt as grand and heartfelt as that simple chocolate bar in my hand.  Natalie grabbed a hold of me and gave me an all-encompassing hug.  “I just wanted to say I’m sorry,” she said, leaning back so she could look in my eyes.  And I was sorry too.  Whether or not I felt betrayed by her after our trip to New York City—which I still did—love was a stubborn wound that refused to heal, and looking at her that night, I knew I wasn’t done picking at it.

When John and I returned to our dorm room and opened the door his parents were sitting side-by-side on his bed, both white in the face, 2 Live Crew’s “Face Down, Ass Up” playing n the background.

“That’s an…interesting song,” John’s mother, a high-school English teacher, said.

“It’s his,” John yelled, as he lunged across the room to silence the song.  “And so are the condoms in my closet, and the dirty movies.  He was ashamed of his parents finding them so he had me stash them for him.”

As well as John meant, he also wasn’t above telling a thousand tale-tales or throwing you in front of a Greyhound to stave off embarrassment.

“Nice to finally meet you,” his father, a high school Principal said to me, standing and extending his hand.

This visit was completely unexpected and couldn’t end fast enough.  The knock on the door behind me was a welcome explosion in the otherwise deafening silent room.  I opened the door to find Erica, a friend of mine, standing there.  “Can I borrow you for a few minutes?” she asked.  I was all too eager to oblige, saying goodbye to John’s parents, before following Erica down the hall.  “Can you buy me some booze for tonight?” she asked.  It was a question often asked of me.  As the only one of legal age among my friends, I was the go-to whenever someone wanted to drink.  It was the first of many trips to the liquor store or the beer distributor I’d make that evening, more or less just exchanging the person in the passenger seat for whoever was next.  The majority of passengers with me that night were more or less in the same transitional state that I was, teetering somewhere between being in love, and at any given moment just as likely to consider driving off a cliff because of it.  Just when I thought my ferrying duties were complete, Lynn, a casual friend of mine who lived upstairs, asked if she could get a ride.  Lynn was beautiful; Kathy Ireland if Kathy Ireland didn’t only exist on posters and calendars. She had green eyes that would have driven Lo Pan from Big Trouble In Little China batty.  I tried my best to remind myself of Natalie, but it was hard to look away from them.  When we got back to the dorm and she exited the car I was almost relieved when she walked away, content with the promise that we’d talk more later, overwhelmed with the feeling that I had just somehow cheated on Natalie even though we were no longer together.

In the blink of an eye all of the alcohol was gone, consumed in one non-stop shot.  The floors of our dorm rooms were full of fallen glass and tin soldiers, and the battle ground was set.  What started as an innocent toss of a half-eaten sausage slice in one person’s room ended in complete carnage, encompassing just about every student on all three floors.  Furniture, fans, and two semesters worth of insecurities plastered the halls.  I tried retreating to different rooms but the hysteria was everywhere: petty arguments, fistfights, people bawling.  I’d consciously tried to avoid Natalie that day but when I opened the door to the stairwell I collided into her.  Without a word she tried to kiss me.  I pushed her away.  Since we got back from New York City I had badly wanted her to kiss me, but drunk as I was, everything that I couldn’t confess to her sober about feeling betrayed, and pissed, and hurt, and heartbroken finally came out in one vile free-verse, stream-of-consciousness rant.   By the time I finished, worked up and worn out, I couldn’t even look her in her tear-stained eyes.  I took the steps down two-at-a-time and let out a Judd Nelson The Breakfast Club­­­-like “Fuck You!” scream as I opened the door to outside.

I exhaled for the first time in minutes, inhaling the sweetness of silence.  It took me a minute to make out the sound of laughter.  I tracked down where it was coming from.

“I love that movie,” Lynn said, sitting on a bench in front of the dorm, a plastic bottle full of whatever on her lap.  “Sit down,” she said, pausing to hiccup, “and take a load off.

We sat in what was more or less silence for what could have been five minutes or forever, and whether it was the cool springtime breeze, or the suddenness of seeing Lynn, I started to feel sober for the first time in months. When she walked away I had this overwhelming urge that if I could have just said one more thing to her it would have really been something.

The next day the semester was officially over and everyone went their separate ways; people moved back home for the summer, to their childhood bedrooms and boyfriends, and I moved across the street.  For the first time in my life I was on my own.  I had to grocery shop, and cook.  I had to dust, and do laundry.  I was unprepared for most of it; when I attempted to grocery shop, my cart looked like a game of Go Fish gone array; no two things made sense together.  But I was free.  Free from having to wake up at 7:45 am to get to Modern British Literature class on time.  Free to strip down to my boxers immediately upon entering my apartment and not having to worry about picking up my pants until I needed to wear them again.  The first couple of weeks were an adjustment period.  I didn’t have cable: I had eleven DVDs, a few dozen VHS tapes, a couple hundred CDs, and shelves full of books I was finally going to get the chance to read.

At first I couldn’t find a job.  Because of my relationship with Natalie, I fooled around and fell into credit card debt; my faith in her, in us, a closed-eye heave of a half-dollar into a wishing well.  As those months with her went by I kept on wishing.  It got expensive; I was investing more than I could afford.  But the deeper I got, the more I thought she’d come around.  I never realized that love is like buying real estate; for every looks-too-good-to-be-true tale turned favorable there are dozens of paved-over Poltergeist realities.  The deeper into it you get, the harder you’ll try to dig yourself out, ignoring the fact that shovels don’t do much good in quicksand.  Before long, however, I found myself with four jobs .  At 5 a.m. I answered Girls Gone Wild and vacuum sealer infomercial calls at a national call center.  By 2 p.m., I was cleaning the hallways of the Hampton Inn.  At 8 p.m., I was washing dishes at Ponderosa.  Somewhere in between I tore tickets at the movie theater.  None of them paid particularly well, but something was better than nothing, and they filled time.  When I got out of work I was too exhausted to sleep; I’d drive along Lake Erie and look out into the vast expanse of the dark water.  When I’d finally get tired, I’d head back home and pass out.  A couple hours later I’d wake up and do it all over again.  That sense of false sobriety at the end of the school year was gone; absence only made me think of Natalie.  I didn’t hear much from her, but the few words that she wrote me, I clung to them like static electricity.  I knew the power was out—I was in fact the one who flipped the switch—but I couldn’t help myself.  In matters of the heart, until I had something new, she was everything I had.

Halfway through the summer I got an email from my friend Pat saying that he was bored at home, that he couldn’t stand the monotony of being in a town where time had passed him by.   I told him to come live with me.  It meant having to give up toiling in my boxers, but it would be nice to have the company.

One night I got home from work and the phone was ringing.  On the other end was a female voice that I knew, but couldn’t quite place.  I tried to play coy, pretend that I knew who she was.  Technically I did, just not right then.  She told me that she was at a party, that I should come.  She said Pat was already there.  I heard him in the background yell, “Come on you bitch!”  I said ok, I’d be there in a few.  When I walked toward the house, a silhouette ran toward me.  It was dark and all that I could see were outlines.  Right before impact the mosaic became clear.  It was Lynn, Ms. Kathy Ireland come true.  Tired and grumpy as I was, as she hugged me, the smell of her hair, of her skin, exotic and new, it revitalized me; I felt vacuum-sealed, good to go for months, or at least all-night.  We walked together into the party but remained only for a few minutes, until the noise became a distraction.  We retreated to my car, drove off to some parking lot, and talked until the sun came up.  We stared at each other, each seemingly looking for the other to make the first move.  That morning ended just as the night hours before had begun, with a hug; nothing more, and nothing less.

Short on air conditioning and heavy with perspiration Pat and I spent a good amount of time that summer in the campus library.  We’d sit at the computer and get caught up on the box scores of the games we didn’t watch.  Email was our lifeline to the outside world.  A few days after the all-night talk I received one from Lynn.  She had returned home, back to reality and her boyfriend, and she was confused.  Lynn and her boyfriend were having problems—serious problems—and I, through our conversation, had helped open her eyes to the fact that some things needed to change if she was going to be happy.  Her email told me that I really made her happy, and because of that, she was sad.  She wanted to say more, but she couldn’t, she didn’t know how.  She said she wanted everything to come out perfect, but she knew it wouldn’t.  None of it mattered; as confused as she was, as confused as her email made me, I was in serious lust.  I wrote her back quickly before I had time to over-think what I was saying.  I hit the Send button and went on to reading the next email, trying my best not to freak out over the extent of my level of honesty.  The next two emails were from Emily, a girl who, though we didn’t really know each other too well, from before the time we were first introduced people thought we’d be kindred spirits.  Both Emily and I were thinkers—over-thinkers most of the time—and we both loved to write.  She was good friends with Lynn, and she also just happened to be the ex-girlfriend of Pat.  Emily’s first email was a sort of catch up, telling me how her summer was going, about the guy she was interested in now, and about Dan, who she was interested in finally getting over.  The second email was the lyrics to a song, “Your House” by Jimmy Eat World.  I had briefly backed into Jimmy Eat World’s music in high school but not hard enough for it to stick.  But as I read over the lyrics I knew this was a song I had to hear:

“Well, I throw away everything I’ve written you, oh

Anything to just keep my mind from thinking

How I had you once, oh, I can’t forget that

Sometimes I wish I could lose you again.

You’re winning me over

With everything you say

You rip my heart right out, you rip my heart right out

When I let you closer, I only want you closer

You rip my heart right out.”

Good pop songs are like good lovers; they change you.  The only real difference is that good pop songs last a lifetime where good lovers tend to come with expiration dates.  A good lover will make you remember every mistake you’ve ever made with the last good lover you had.  A good pop song, if you let it be, it’s like a time machine; it’ll rewrite the history you’ve tried so hard to forget.  Though I hadn’t physically heard it yet I already knew “Your House” was a good pop song; I knew exactly what this dude had gone through by reading the lyrics.  The “Sometimes I wish I could lose you again” slayed me; a tad Whoa is me or not, this was brutal and brilliant and honest.  The next day I went to Best Buy and bought Bleed American and from the first beat of the title song opener I was in love.  I knew this album was going to change me.  In my first twenty-two years and through all of the years since, I can count on one hand how many times I’ve felt that way about an album so quickly.  Bleed American was one of them.

In my rushed honesty in that first reply to Lynn I had apparently said enough to warrant a follow up.  She ended her response email with, “By the way are you by any chance the man on the moon, I have always envisioned the man on the moon to be the most perfect man in the world and I am beginning to think that I have met him.”  It was clear to me Lynn was in lust with me too.  I was a stupid smiling mess after that, so much so that as the daily email exchange carried on I ignored how she wrote about wanting to try and work things out with her boyfriend.  The only reason she gave was because of the time they had invested in each other.  Through the screen I could tell that the mortgage rate rationale she was using was lame, but everything else about her emails, how I’d feel after reading them, it was like a high; I got addicted.  From a pure vanity standpoint this girl was beautiful, hot even, a catch all of my friends would be jealous of, and yeah, the prospect of that becoming a reality in my life, her on my arm, meant something to me.  Not everything, but something.  And her emails boosted my self-esteem; I might have been completely inept at buying groceries and mixing whites and colored laundry, but damn, a hot girl liked me enough to refer to me as “The Man On The Moon.”    I’d listen to “A Praise Chorus” and think of her, of the possibilities:

“I’m on my feet, I’m on the floor, I’m good to go.

Well all I need is just to hear a song I know.

I wanna always feel like part of this was mine.

I wanna to fall in love tonight.”

After listening to “A Praise Chorus” the prospect of love seemed redeeming again.  Somehow the song made the world seem smaller, easier to navigate.  It’s refreshing, the way good pop songs are like the gunshot to start a race; from the opening BANG! its game on, balls-to-the-wall fun; it’s almost like getting the chance to be naïve again each time you listen, before life starting bringing you lemons, and “It’s not you, it’s me” endearments.

The last email I’d read each day was from Emily, who I was realizing could just be a kindred spirit.  Unlike with Lynn where by then we were maybe, sort of, hypothesizing about a future, Emily and I would share stories of our past failures, we’d trade obscure quotes, we wouldn’t try to dance around the things or subjects that seemingly everyone else in our lives all too quickly wanted to dance around.  We could talk about a song like “If You Don’t, Don’t” with lines such as, “And I’m sorry that I’m such a mess/I drank all my money could get/I took everything you let me have/And then I never loved you back,” and without saying too much we knew that lines like these were meant for people like us; we weren’t the ones writing these songs, we were the ones a song like this was being written about.  There’s a certain bond with people of this disposition, whether it’s that misery loves company, the fact that you’re perpetual sad bastards, or something else.  Her emails always left me feeling smarter; I’d always walk away with the urge to write, or read, or sift through volumes of famous quotations to try and find one she’d get a kick out of.

As the summer bore to a close the anticipation was reaching a climax; it looked more and more like I’d get a shot with Lynn as weeks prior she had stopped mentioning her boyfriend all together.  I organized a giant “Welcome Back” party the night everyone was moving back to school.  Really, I was just using the party as an excuse to see Lynn.  Everyone at the party could see my excitement.  Every time someone knocked at the door I’d hurdle people to open it.  One knock, I ran over, and went to peek out the peep hole but a hand had it covered.  Convinced it was Lynn I swung the door open.  It was Natalie.  My heart dropped; the room fell silent; everyone sitting behind me could see through me, the look on my face.  With the conversations between Lynn and Emily, I hadn’t really thought of Natalie much late in the summer.  But there she was, and just like that, I could feel the lump wedging its way back into my throat.  We went into my room and sat down on the bed.  “I missed you,” she said, and leaned in to hug me.  “I missed you too,” I answered, giving in to the hug.  But fear washed over me.  I started looking over my shoulder, worried that the Lynn would walk in, see me sitting there with Natalie, and leave; a half-summer’s worth of work and excitement, uneventfully destroyed, like a dud bottle rocket.  “Did you listen to any good music this summer?” she asked.  “Yeah,” I answered, “Jimmy Eat World.”  “Ah,” she said, “they suck.”

Her answer was the perfect summation of everything that had happened between us, our relationship.  The things I liked the most, she didn’t.  The music I really loved, she hated.  We would try to make compromises with each other but they only lasted so long; we were like two dogs who kept crapping on each other’s carpet; it wasn’t necessarily the other person’s fault, just bad training.  I didn’t want to still love her; I was better than that.  Looking at her was hard though—she was still beautiful—so I looked away instead.  I could hear “Your House” playing from the other room.  It was poetic injustice, but it fit.  Sure that the purpose of her visit was to re-anchor herself in my heart I said just enough to make the silence uncomfortable.  When she realized I wasn’t going to bite she left a couple minutes later, one last hug to make up for a summer void of them.  When I walked out of my room Lynn was sitting on the couch.  I missed her entrance; she missed the excitement I’d been wearing on my face for a month and a half, which I promised her would be there.  She looked good, damn good, and in a millisecond I was right back to being the guy behind all of those emails.  After faking a supporting role in the room’s conversation Lynn and I retreated to my bedroom, and sat at the foot of my bed, looking at everything but each other.  After we couldn’t avoid it anymore I took her hand, leaned in, and kissed her.  This girl—this goddess who could melt the knees of whatever guy she looked at—the same girl I’d been dreaming of all summer, since the moment we sat together on that bench all of those months before, I was finally kissing her, and it was the worst kiss of my life.

I tried my best to kiss my way through the letdown.  I even upped the ante by undressing Lynn, hoping the sight of her naked would somehow right the sinking ship.  She looked every bit as breathtaking as I’d imagined she would.  But even that was futile.  Lying in bed beside her that night, I couldn’t sleep.  I stared into the ceiling, looking for shapes or patterns that I could make something out of, something to distract me.  But the ceiling was eggshell white, nothing else, and this situation was like Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet holding anyone but each other as the Titanic sank.

The night after, I sat on my floor and listened to “My Sundown,” Bleed American’s closer, for a solid hour, over and over, trying to make peace with the failure.

“Good, goodbye, lovely time

Good, goodbye, tin sunshine

Good, goodbye, I’ll be fine

Good, goodbye, good, goodnight.”

The song is a perfect ending to a near-perfect album, and that night time stood still enough for me to write everything into perspective.  Hope is a powerful emotion to harness, and for a while there, my hope was gone.  Lynn helped me regain a sense of worth; a modicum of pride in myself, that I would have something to offer someone of the opposite sex, who hopefully would feel the same way about me.  I thought that person would be Lynn but I learned that lips never lie, as beautiful as the person wearing them might be, and you can’t choose which eyes to lose yourself in.

“If you’re listening?” Jim Adkins sings in “Sweetness.”  “Woah, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh!”

A few weeks later Emily, who’d sent me the song lyrics for “Your House” in the first of many eye-opening emails that summer, she opened my eyes to one more thing; the fact that she liked me.

“Sing it back, Woah, oh, oh, oh, oh!”

Yeah, stumble til you crawl.  Sinking into sweet uncertainty.

Reckoning/Reveling – Ani Difranco

The writing bug first bit me in 11^th grade.  I was taking a Journalism class, and for our final exam my teacher gave me two options: interview the gym teacher about the track-and-field team, or write a short story.  I had no idea what went into writing a short story, but interviewing the gym teacher about the track-and-field team sounded about as enticing as getting kicked in the nuts by every member of the track-and-field team.  So I picked the story.  Besides, when she said short story I heard only short.  How hard could it be?  For two nights after school I sat on the end of my bed, my word processor on a TV stand in front of me, Sportscenter on the television behind it, and I wrote.  The story was about a perfect nuclear family with a nuclear bomb for a father.  There was nothing memorable about the plot, and the characters were all cookie cutter, but writing it was exciting, getting in the heads of people that I’d created.  The last day, when the teacher handed the story back, on the back page she wrote, “You show a lot of promise.  You should take creative writing!”  So I did.  When you’re fifteen it doesn’t take much to convince you to do anything; someone says, “You should eat seventeen rolls of Bubble Tape at the same time” or “You should take creative writing” and it sounds like the best idea ever.

In creative writing, we focused mainly on poetry.  I didn’t care much for reading poetry, and until my teacher explained that music—at least good music; he was the one who introduced me to Bob Dylan—was poetry, I didn’t care much for listening to it either.  But poetry seemed easy enough to write.  It was short—again, I was the type of person that could get down with short—and a lot of the time it rhymed.  Girls, the few that I shared what I wrote with, seemed to like my poetry, what I had to say.  At that age that was the only validation I needed; if something I wrote could get me closer to someone I wanted to get close to, that’s a hormonal trifecta; I was off to the races.

I wrote bad poetry for a solid six or seven years before the burden of writing bad poetry for six or seven years finally wore on my psyche; I was both uninspired and unconvinced in my ability.  Though I declared my major as English-Writing when I moved away to college, it was more me being hopeful that I’d get back to the place where writing was exciting than it was me being realistic; how do you justify your major area of study being something that you don’t do anymore?  I don’t know; I didn’t have the answer, but I did it anyway.  My first semester, I took Creative Writing college style, and don’t you know it, the main focus was poetry.  Right before class began one day I started and finished my assignment.  It was supposed to be a love poem—aren’t they all?—and I remember throwing in some line about Milton and Paradise Lost; “Hey Milton, Paradise found me.”  When I read the poem aloud that line got a chuckle; my teacher even went out of her way to say she liked it.  As class ended, and I was packing up my things, a girl walked over to me and said, “I really liked your poem.  We should hang out sometime.”  I was twenty-two now, but sitting in that chair, the insides of my eyes a television watching myself time travel back to when I was fifteen; “Sounds great,” I said, shit-eating grin obvious to anyone looking.  My sense of validation apparently hadn’t changed much over the years.  Sure, I knew I was doomed; it’s like winning the lottery the first time you play it, or having the best steak of your life the first time you eat one; you get spoiled, your expectations can only go down.  A few weeks later someone else in that class wrote a better poem than I had and that girl was saying, “I really liked your poem, we should hang out sometime” to them, and I was right back where I started, a Writing major who couldn’t be inspired to write.

The first time I heard Ani Difranco she was opening in concert for Bob Dylan.  When she walked out on stage, I remember either saying to myself or aloud, “Who the hell is?” this girl with purple hair and Duct-taped nails.  Her guitar made her tiny frame look even smaller, but when she started playing, she had this massive sound; it was as if she was unleashing all Holy Hell on the world.  She was good, damn good, but that night I wasn’t in the frame of mind to get her.  Years later, single and miserable, I came across “Untouchable Face” and Ani’s music suddenly made sense to me.

My second semester, a major conference focusing on the writing of Chuck Palahniuk was coming to campus.  I was new to Palahniuk’s work; we’d read Fight Club and Survivor for my Modern Fiction class, and my teacher/conference organizer gave me her advance copy of his soon-to-be-released novel Choke, which I read in one, all-night sitting.  As part of the conference, and a requirement for class, I had to write a paper on some theme of Palahniuk’s work, and then I had to do a presentation on my paper.  I chose to write about the nihilistic tendencies of Palahniuk’s characters; the whole when everything is lost, that’s when you start to find who you are thing.  That weekend of the conference, I had also planned a trip to New York City with Natalie.  Myself, along with two other people I was grouped with who had similar nihilistic themes, lead off the first day of presentations at the conference.  The night prior to me writing my paper, to help get me rolling, a bunch of us were sitting around my dorm and we started talking about Fight Club the movie, and before long the discussion turned hypothetical; if you wanted to really hurt the US, would you aim for Wall Street (money), the White House (leadership), or the Pentagon (force).  In my discussion at the conference, I made this dorm room hypothetical a big part of what I said.  After I was done a few people, including Palahniuk, came up and we discussed what I had said a bit more.  Hurried for time—truth be told, I had ass, not Armageddon, on my mind—I handed Palahniuk my book to sign.  “Nothingness is the best place to start every time,” was what he wrote.  After he handed me the book, we shook hands, and he thanked me for my presentation, I walked back over to the dorm, loaded up the car, and we were on our way to New York City.

In the CD player was Ani Difranco’s new release, the double-disk Revelling/Reckoning.  The album was more jazz-oriented than the Difranco I was used to, but just as introspective; the perfect album for a six-hour car ride through the nothingness that is central Pennsylvania.  The opening song of the Revelling disk, “Ain’t That The Way” ends with the line, “Love makes me feel so dumb,” and that was my state of mind; not the Gomer Pyle definition of dumb, but where you’re constantly looking for the right thing to say, and that right way seems forever fleeting; the cat’s always got your damn tongue and its not giving it back.  On the ride Natalie and I talked about what we had to see once we got to the city, what type of food we had to eat.  It was stuff we’d talked about for weeks, but now that it was about to be a reality, it seemed more urgent to sort out details.  Long before the first time I stepped foot on the cracked concrete of Broadway, New York City was like my Atlantis; some mythical place where one day I’d arrive and it’d feel like I’d finally arrived.  On that trip, the transition to night almost complete, as the bright lights of the skyline came into view, it felt like walking onto a Hollywood set, script in hand, to make a movie starring us, Natalie and I, that was sure to be box office gold.  We’d been seeing each other for two months and so far our boundaries weren’t concrete.  We’d said a lot of things to each other but, “I love you” wasn’t one of them.  At night, when I’d walk downstairs from her dorm room to mine, I wondered if it would be.  As I reached across the center console and took a hold of her hand I felt the electricity that the city and her were giving off.  This weekend was going to be magic; if ever we were going to share those three words with each other it was going to come now.

I’m a good kisser

And you’re a fast learner

And that kinda thing could float us

For a pretty long time.

“Marrow” was the first song I fell in love with from the Revelling disk; perfectly serene, it’s the shining example of music as poetry, the way my teacher so many years before tried to convince a class that it could be.  We took all of the typical tourist sites that NYC had to offer: the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, the Twin Towers, Times Square, all the way down to Canal Street.  We devoured too many slices of pizza, ate too much street meet.  Our feet hurt and our wallets were empty.  We took a rest on some bench in Central Park and looked back on it all.  She asked me what it was that first attracted me to her and I said that line from, “Marrow.”  It wasn’t the first thing that attracted me to her—that was her eyes—but I was too wrapped in the moment to state the obvious.  She smiled at my response, her eyes a sparkling sheen on par with the majesty of city lights around us; that was all the validation I needed.

The night we got back from NYC, not too long after I’d finished unpacking, she called me up to her room.  So wrapped up in the revelry of the weekend I’d missed the fact the we forgot the formality of saying, “I love you.”  When I got upstairs, she told me to sit down.  She grabbed my hand.  We looked at each for a minute but the silence was overwhelming.  “I love you too,” I said.  I waited a minute before I really looked into her eyes.  They were distant; focused somewhere beyond me.  Her hand was cold, felt like bacon when you first pull it out of the package.  “My ex-boyfriend is coming up this week,” she said, “He’s staying with me.”  I don’t know how long it took me to stand up from her bed but it couldn’t have been too far off the World Record pace.  She tried her best to pull me back but it didn’t work; I was down the stairs, in my car, and halfway to nowhere before she could say, “Wait.”

That night, the miles were covered in molasses.  Every inch brought on another metaphor that somehow I’d missed; the streets were full of signs: caution signs, detour signs, the sort of signs you miss when you’re looking beyond what you can see in the two eyes in front of you, and for two months that’s just what I’d been doing.  Natalie didn’t tell me that she loved me because she didn’t love me.  Or even if she did feel something close to love, however you wanted to define the word, it wasn’t what I wanted it to be, what I thought it would be.

But as bad as I am

I’m proud of the fact

That I’m worse than I seem.

From the moment I heard that line I wanted it inscribed on my tombstone.  “Grey” was one of those songs that any sad bastard could appreciate; an anthem if you were looking for the autonomy of a brooding night alone.  After that talk, at least her part in the sixteen-word conversation, I told myself that I was in for countless brooding nights alone; I needed them.  I’d sacrificed a lot for this girl, a lot more monetarily than I had to give, and worse yet, I started sacrificing my opportunities.  Instead of spending a weekend amongst people with the same interests and ambitions as I had, I passed over a major conference that was a few hundred yards from where I lived for a pipedream an eternity away.  As much as I wanted to be able to say, “This isn’t me” it was me; this is who I let myself become.  I needed to find a mirror, one that told the truth, not one of those carnival mirrors towards the end of Mask that made Rocky Dennis look normal.  Things weren’t normal; they were ugly; they felt closer to a verse in “Tamburitza Lingua.”

and everything seems to have gone terribly wrong that can

but one breath at a time is an acceptable plan

she tells herself

and the air is still there

and this morning it’s even breathable

and for a second the relief is unbelievable

and she’s a heavy sack of flour sifted

her burden lifted

she’s full of clean wind for one lean moment

and then she’s trapped again

reverted

caged and contorted

with no way to get free

and she’s getting plenty of little kisses

but nobody’s slippin’ her the key

I’d been waiting two months on the other side of a door for Natalie to slip me some key and let me in.  I had let her in on everything, I gave her the roadmap to exactly who I was, and how I got here, and for as much time as we spent in the car, I assumed we were taking in the miles together, seeing the same things, breathing the same air, with the same destination in sight.  But that wasn’t the case.  I could see the key wasn’t the problem.  It was the asshole standing at the door.

As I pulled into the parking lot in front of my dorm I took a deep breath, trying my best to ignore the sight of Natalie, who was smoking a cigarette outside.  I could see that she’d seen me, and I considered putting the car in reverse and taking off again.  But in one quick motion I parked the car, grabbed the keys, sped-walk to the side door, ignoring Natalie’s call to me, I climbed the two flights of stairs, made my way down the hallway, walked through my open door, passed in front of the television and the group of friends playing Madden football, walked over to my closet, opened it, grabbed the bottle of Absolut Citron vodka, twisted the top off, and chugged a quarter of its contents.  I savored the first alcoholic drink of my life, expecting it in an instant to get me drunk enough to forget everything, everyone behind me.  But it didn’t.  So I took another swig.  And another.  It could have been minutes before I realized the room was completely silent save the blow of a video game whistle.  I turned around and five of my closest college friends, people who didn’t know half about me, let alone what Natalie did, were staring, eyes-wide, mouths open, at me.  “Holy fucking shit,” my roommate said.  Yes, holy fucking shit.  I don’t remember if I smiled at their collective cheer, one aimed at my crossover to, as they put it, “the dark side.”  But I felt better.  Or at least calm enough to reveal the happenings of the previous couple of hours.  I started to tell the tale of what had gone on with Natalie but my friends stopped me long enough to load up on a laundry basket full of Old German 40 oz. beers.  For the first time the group of us shared an alcoholic moment together.  In a ceremonial sort of way, more people starting gathering into the room once they’d been told that I had finally relented on my promise to never drink.  As I finally started to feel the effects of the alcohol, my face warm, my cheeks sore from smiling, I looked out the front window and saw Natalie staring up at me.  Reality sank deep into my gut like an oversized burrito.  She was waving me down, and though the window was closed and semi-fogged from the cold, I could read from her lips that she wanted to talk.  And as much as I wanted to, in spite of every vile thing I had just said about her, none of which I really meant, I couldn’t let myself lose what little I had left of myself that night.  I walked away from the window and played the best smiling clown that I could muster until all of the alcohol was gone and the crowd retreated for the night.  When it was finally time to sleep I put in the Reckoning disk and listened to the title song:

we thought we left possession behind

but truth is i was yours and you weren’t mine

and now i’ve replayed a thousand times

exactly what was said

cuz nothing is as it appears

in the funhouse mirrors of your fears

on the roller coaster of all these years

with your hands above your head

Drunk, angry, and heartbroken as I was, I could still hear clearly.  My friends did their best to cheer me up, and I appreciated that.  But sometimes nothing short of anything can do the trick; sometimes misery is a pool worth wallowing in.  That night I had company, and though it wasn’t the company that I wanted, that I was in love with, it was brutally honest and sincere, the best friend that I could ask for.  And so I had failed myself.  Again.  So what.  So I had nothing.  For the first time in a long time I could feel that beautiful urge coming on; the urge to write.  At least that gave me a place to start.  I saw that I was going to have to go slowly; I would need to learn everything all over again.

The Ever Passing Moment – MXPX

Growing up I never thought much about college.  It wasn’t even so much a hypothetical as it was a non-issue.  In high school, amongst my closest friends, college was a word the same way onomatopoeia was a word; if you used it you were probably using it wrong.  There were plenty of other words we tossed around instead, words like girls, and sports, and yo, that were a helluva lot more relevant to the sort of conversations were we having.  When graduation came and went college was still the last thing on my mind.  One day, a few weeks into the summer, Lynn, the girl I was dating, cornered me as I was closing up the gas station I was working in.  That moment, sort of the early-adult version of when growing up your mother would say, “You’re not leaving the table until you eat your broccoli,” Lynn more or less gave me an ultimatum; I either went and signed up for college or I was cut off from getting laid.  Lynn knew how to bargain and her scare tactic worked.  I went to the nearest college, filled out the application, took the required testing, and within a week I officially became a college student.  It was the local community college, nothing special, but we both thought it was a something, a step in the right direction, and in the meantime I got back to focusing on what was really important.  Sex.  Not two weeks into my first semester Lynn and I were no more.  She’d moved away and found someone new.  And for me college was more like a bad case of déjà vu than a step in the right direction.  Seventeen, I was surrounded by hordes of people I’d seen since I was six; lunch tables in the cafeteria looked as they did in tenth grade; the same faces, the same who was screwing who conversations.  All of it sucked.  As far as I could see college was nothing but a marathon of bad reruns, a precursor to going where I’d already been, and to top it off I went from getting laid to not.  With taking a couple semesters off here and there it took me three-and-a-half years to graduate.  After I graduated all I wanted to do was a whole lot of nothing.  I worked full-time in a warehouse, shipping books across the world.  When I wasn’t working, the guys I worked with and I played Nintendo 64 and smoked bongs, well into the hours where people in the productive world were sleeping.  Before long I started to notice grey hair, both on myself and on my friends.  Some of them were celebrating their 30^th birthdays, some were even approaching 40.  Nobody seemed happy; everyone more or less just was.  I was barely twenty-one and not much different.  One day while playing Mario Kart in the living room, I looked through the pot-smoke haze.  It felt like the lot of us were in a closet and no one was looking for the door.  That night I started thinking about a way to get out.  College, a real college, seemed the easiest way to go about making a change.

Unlike in high school, from my experience at community college, from the flunkies who drank themselves out of more prestigious universities, I heard the stories of debauchery, of newfound friendships, and in that time and frame of mind of wanting change, college suddenly all seemed grand.  When I started looking into schools I was more excited about the prospect of living in a dorm than I was getting back into a classroom.  I had plenty of preconceptions of what it might be like; I’d seen all the movies, from Animal House to Back to School to Road Trip.  The whole process of getting in—application, acceptance, figuring out financial aid—being mostly anticlimactic and less than two weeks quick, the daydreaming felt like it became a reality when I was sent my room assignment and the name of my roommate, Jed.  I was just as scared as I was excited.  I was older than most, if not all, of the people I’d be living with and I had never lived in the same room with anyone.  I was 21 going on 22 when I packed up my life and moved away from everything I knew into a dorm room with two twin-sized beds.  Bon Jovi and Styx were carved into the robin-egg blue brick walls; there was an iron stain on the desk/dresser.  I took the good side of the room—the bigger closet, the more comfortable bed—before Jed got there.  When he did, he pointed that fact out.

Game on.

A college dorm is a lot like the way I picture Ellis Island was in the early 1900’s; a bunch of people from seemingly all over converging into one space with their bare minimum of a lifetime’s worth of possessions in tow, everyone full of hope based on their new opportunity, but the communication barrier is so daunting, a Berlin Wall-like hurdle to overcome if you ever want to get anywhere.   The most common ice breaker amongst people of that age and disposition is alcohol.  I wasn’t a drinker so I went with the next best option: music.

A week into my second semester a bunch of us went to a dance club in Erie for college night.  Dressed in clothes that pretty much guaranteed that none of us would get laid, Jed, Greg, Rick, Ben, and I set out for that exact purpose.  The five of us sat in the parking lot of the club, four of them passing a brown-bagged mixture of cheap vodka and Hi-C between them.  “We’re going to get you some ass,” Greg said to me, “So you can forget about that bitch.”  The truth was I wasn’t thinking as much about Ellen as I was the girl I had seen two days prior in the lobby of the campus University Center.  Strangers, she and I were locked in a silent staring stalemate from across opposite sides of the room.  I was in love with her in an instant, that sort of love at first sight cliché come true, but I couldn’t find the courage to close the distance between us and tell her.  Eventually her crew of friends tired of the situation and they left, and I was left to swallow another shot of failure.  “Let’s go get some ass!” Rick yelled from the backseat.  His eyes were bloodshot and his speech slurred.  It was obvious the alcohol had done the trick.

I’d only been in a handful of clubs in my life and they were all more or less carbon copies of one another; blinding neon beer signs, the stench of stale urine, and the ear-deafening bass thump of whatever fly-by-night rapper was popular that week.  This place was no different.  Since the vast majority of people there were underage the bar was used strictly as a leaning post for those who weren’t brave or drunk enough to gyrate on the dance floor below.  None of my friends could dance but that didn’t stop them, first picking out a space on the periphery, and then song-by-song working their way towards the attractive women in the middle who could dance.  I watched for a while but it was too embarrassing and soon my friend Rick joined me at the bar.  From the other side of the room we noticed two girls glancing at us.  “Dude, she’s…” Rick started to say.  “I know,” I said, “Hot.”  The taller of the two girls was blonde, with blue eyes accentuated by the neon Labatt’s sign beside her.  She had on skin tight jeans and an assassin’s smile.   She and I took turns glancing at each other, both looking away right before being caught.  Life is full of second chances and here was mine; I either had to man up or move my eyes elsewhere.  But I still couldn’t talk myself into it.  In all of my years of dating I was never the one to approach the girl; I had no clue on the logistics involved in telling someone you’re interested.   Luckily Rick was drunk and in no mood for stalling.  “Follow me you pussy,” he said as he grabbed my hand and lead me across the room.

The four of us fumbled through syllables and conjectures before the blonde looked me in the eyes and said, “I thought you would be too big of a pussy to come talk to me.”  We laughed; Rick’s eyes widened at her bluntness.  It was obvious her ball-breaking ways would go over well.  As it turned out she lived in the same dorm as my friends and I, a floor above us, and she was new to the college last week, having transferred after spending a disappointing year and some change at her local community college.  I took this life parallel, the fact that she was an art major, and intrigued that I was a writing major, as promise; I wasn’t really looking for fate, but I was going to answer if it came knocking.  A few days prior, with the girl in the UC, I hadn’t answered the call; that wouldn’t happen again.  “Do you want to hang out sometime?” I asked.  “Isn’t that what we are doing now?” she answered before sticking her tongue out at me.  “I’m kidding,” she said after I let silence linger for longer than she felt comfortable.  Two could play this game; just because I had never baited the hook didn’t mean I wasn’t good at fishing.  “What room are you in?” she asked.  She wrote my room number on the back of her hand, and we went separately into the winter night.

The next day there was a knock at my door.  Natalie asked me if I wanted to go to lunch with her.  Sitting in the cafeteria, picking at cold pizza, we talked about the previous night, how awkward it was, watching drunken strangers make asses of themselves, watching sober guys not have the balls to say hi to pretty girls.  Before long the conversation turned to music.  She asked me what sort of music I liked, who were my favorite bands.  “I love MXPX,” she said.  MXPX was a band I’d heard of, but didn’t know much about.  Within an hour we had returned to her room, grabbed her CD case, and set off for a drive in my car.  Her choice for the ride was The Ever Passing Moment, MXPX’s most recent release.  The album opens with a simple guitar riff and within seconds the drums and bass join in to bring the toe-tapping “My Life Story” to fruition.

Don’t hate me forever,

I’m better late than never

I failed you

I’m sorry

That’s simply my life story

In an instant, as I looked across the car at Natalie bopping her head along with the beat, I understood the appeal of both.  This was pop-punk at its most pure: simple rhythms, simple lyrics, and fun, the sort of music you didn’t need to think about, or concentrate on, that didn’t ask anything of you, organic in the purest sense of the word.  With Natalie, in less than twenty-four hours I could see she was beautiful but that she didn’t let that define her.  She wasn’t brilliant, but she was sincere, and she was never going to try and be more than who she was.  Sometimes simplicity can be serendipity; this was my chance at my John Cusack moment, and it made perfect sense.

So where do we go? And what should we do?
And why is the table set for two?
Is the answer in the question?

I didn’t decide to give myself to Natalie so much as it simply happened.  A few days after meeting we set out on a road trip with two of her friends in the backseat.  We had no real destination, just a purpose, which was to experience something different, away from the familiar that, truth be told, neither one of us was that familiar with yet.  I let the road dictate our path and hours later, without intent, we ended up driving the streets of my adolescence.  We passed my house, my high school, and the places I went when I needed a place to go.  If she was disinterested in the entirety of everything she wasn’t showing it.  Somewhere along the way she grabbed my hand and it felt like this was the first time a girl had ever touched me.  I could see her friends were getting restless so I pulled into the parking lot of a bowling alley I used to frequent in middle school.

“Are we really going bowling?” her friend asked.

“Hell yeah we’re going bowling,” Natalie said, “And I’m going to kick his ass.”

“Oh really?” I asked, playing along, having had no real intent to bowl as much as I did to give the tired tires a rest.

“We should make this interesting though,” she said, “We should bet something.”

Her friends could read the situation better than I could, and they set out to find shoes.

“What do you want to bet?” I asked.

“If I win I get whatever I want.”  Just getting to know her I had no idea what the spectrum of such a statement could entail.  “And what about you?” she asked.

“How about a…kiss?” I answered.

I was at a loss for words before and after I spoke, but the fact was we hadn’t kissed yet, and I was fairly confident that limited as my bowling abilities were, I could still beat her.

“You’re on,” she said, smiling, “But I would have asked for more.”

The bowling alley was more or less empty with the exception of the four of us.  With the first game half-over I realized that I was the only one trying; there were so many zeroes on the screen from the never-ending gutterballs that I worried I looked too desperate to win.  This wasn’t lost on Natalie and her friends as they started ripping on me.  Unintentionally, my slightly-better-than-mediocre play tanked and I stood a serious chance at losing.  With the game, and my chance at kissing her on the line, I needed ten pins to win.  My first ball went like a missile into the right gutter.  The catcalls from behind me made it so I didn’t even want to turn around; I felt like a teenager again, playing baseball, the game on the line, two strikes against me, and the winning run on third.  My entire life I’d been good in the clutch, but at this moment, I could feel my chances slipping away.  My right palm was sweaty; it stuck to the ball when I grabbed it from the ball return.  As I took my place in the center of the lead up to the lane, my knees shaking, I looked straight ahead into the center pin.  I could hear the girls yelling behind me.  I tried to focus on something, anything, from hot dogs, to puppies, to cherry Dilly Bars from Dairy Queen to erase the possibility, which I thought more than likely would become a reality, that if I failed I would never get to kiss Natalie.  I took one deep breath after another, the ball getting heavy in my right hand.  I tried to drown out the noise by thinking of MXPX’s song, “Undeniable.”

There’s a willingness that comes alive
When you begin tearing down the walls
But the first step is so very hard if you take a first step at all

I stepped forward and threw a rocket down the middle of the lane.  The force of the ball exploded the pins into submission.  After the audible crash there was complete silence behind me.  I turned around.  Their adopted cause defeated, her friends lost interest in heckling me, and ventured off towards the snack bar to devour overcooked nachos.  Natalie was smiling.  “You know you don’t have to pay up,” I said, “if you don’t want to.”  I was serious, and by the tone of her response, a little too sad bastard.  “Oh shut the hell up,” she said, walking up to me, pulling me by the chin to her level, and planting her lips on mine.  Every cliché that literature, cinema, and music has come up with, from fireworks, to flashing stars, to oversized pounding hearts, to air horns going off, I heard and saw none of it.  But I could feel my life change.  Her lips were far softer and more sincere than I’d ever felt before and when she finally backed away, looking up to me, my stare said everything my voice couldn’t.  “If I were you I would have asked for more,” she said after a quiet minute, before walking away and joining her friends at the snack bar.

The four of us spent the night in a hotel room, her friends sharing one bed, and Natalie and I sharing the other.  We kissed several more times before she, like her friends before her, passed out.  I lay beside her, her back against my side, the television flashing muted Star Trek scenes in the otherwise dark room.  I couldn’t sleep; I just kept looking over at her, the lyrics to “Without You” running through my mind.

I got a confession to make
That my heart would break
To hear you say goodbye
You’re my every dream
You’re the threadwork to my seams
And you know that I can’t lie, when I say

I can’t stop thinking about you

It was ludicrous to think that I could feel so much for someone I met at a dance club the previous week.  But the more I lay there and thought about it, the less it made sense to think too much about any of it.  A little more than a year prior than that first night in bed with Natalie I was at a Barenaked Ladies concert and all I could think about was a way to get out, away from everything, from everyone I knew.  Though that hotel was technically in my hometown I felt a thousand miles away.  This is what college was supposed to be about.  Taking chances.  Stepping out of your comfort zone.  Finding where you fit in.  New beginnings.  This is why I wanted to give college an honest chance in the first place.  And as far as I could see, watching as Natalie lay silent, fast asleep, thinking of lyrics from an album that I started to think of as our album, the last thing I wanted whatever this thing was to be was an ever passing moment.  I was going to do whatever I could to make this moment, this feeling last.  Whatever the cost.

The Marshall Mathers LP – Eminem

Confidence is like a mountain.  Standing at the bottom, the apex looks a mile away.  When you’re down, the higher up you have to look, the more unreachable it seems.  Some like the challenge; they feed off it.  Others, it’s just as easy to say the hell with it; why bother, misery loves company and there are a lot of miserable bastards mulling aimlessly in the overgrown shadows.  There’s comfort in numbers.  Comfortable doesn’t always breed contempt, but if you’re looking for change something has to give; sooner or later you have to start climbing.  When you’re at the top it’s like you’re a cliché; you almost can’t miss: Michael Jordan when he got in the zone seemingly at the end of every important game, Bob Dylan when he wrote “Blowin’ In The Wind” in five minutes on the back of a napkin in some dingy diner, Bernie Madoff for decades before he got busted.  If you listen to what a wise man once said, and the secret to success is paying attention to details, when you’re standing atop the mountain, everything is that much easier; life gives you 20/20 vision.  The execution of things is almost a formality; you become a virtual hot slot machine; with each pull of the lever you hit another jackpot; everything you touch turns to gold.  Even when you misstep the potholes all seem to be filled in.  The people at the top of the mountains, they’re the CEOs, the All-Star athletes, the people who smile.  The people at the bottom, they’re everybody else.

In late summer of 2000 my confidence was all an all-time high.  I was at peace with my past, the fact that I was leaving everything I knew behind.  I was moving away to college; a college I’d never physically seen, but couldn’t wait to get to.  Outside of Ashley, who told me about the college, I didn’t know anyone there.  I’d never been so excited.  The already-beaten-down-by-life people talk about new beginnings as if they’re strictly a hypothetical; a pipedream.  My new beginning was a reality.  Financially, though I was leaving a decent enough paying job to become a non-working college student, I was stable.  I was single and damn excited about the prospect about being a single guy in college.  I was counting down the days, each morning crossing another yesterday from my calendar.  I felt as ease, comfortable in my own skin.  It was easy to smile.

The big social event of that summer was the wedding of two high school friends.  From the group of us invited, I was the only one without a built-in date.  I had to find one.  I wanted to go with Karen, but a few days prior she told me couldn’t go.  Strapped for a second option I swallowed my pride and asked Ellen, a girl whom I worked with in the warehouse that had moved home after having just graduated college.  Throughout the summer Ellen had made her interest in me well-known in more than one drunken email, in more than one stone-sober hint when we passed each at work.  More than once, knowing of the forthcoming wedding, she informed me that she’d like to go; all I had to do was ask.  We had become good friends, she was really easy to have fun with, but I was perfectly content to remain just good friends.  Stonewalling her advances only seemed to intensify her feelings for me.  I knew that by asking her to the wedding, I stood a serious risk of abandoning my pledge to keep it just friends.  But I needed a date.  So I asked her.

The wedding was a bomb, the chicken parmesan like a tire covered in melted cheese.  My friends and I, an entire table’s worth of guests, when the bride and groom were turned we made a jailbreak, reconvening at the Olive Garden.  Over spaghetti and tossed salad we poked fun at each other.  With a decade or more worth of ammunition they tried their best to embarrass me.  Ellen, she didn’t hold back, piling on me with the rest of them.  More than once we all laughed until we had tears in our eyes.  My friends loved her.  By the time we left the restaurant I knew my fate was sealed; this battle of attrition I was trying to fight, it was no use, my white flag was painted across my forehead.  On the way back to my house we listened to the CD everyone was listening to that summer, The Marshall Mathers LP.  Ellen mocked me, throwing up the four-fingered Westside salute, but she couldn’t hold back her laughter when Eminem said, “Skibbedy-be-bop, a-Christopher Reeves/Sonny Bono, skis horses and hittin some trees.”  It made me smile; Ellen’s sense of humor, the fact that she could laugh at a lyric like that as easily as I could.

I was a late comer to Eminem; as a suburban white-male, in terms of white guys in hip-hop, we’d been burned too many times before: 3^rd Base, Vanilla Ice, Young Black Teenagers, Snow.  In the car, “The Way I Am” booming from the speakers, I started thinking that like Eminem, maybe I was a late-comer to Ellen too.  A summer earlier, I was madly—and silently—in love with her sister, Charlotte, who home from college, had worked in the warehouse.  But I never pursued her; I was a coward, awed by her beauty, but I had the built-in excuse of still being in a relationship with Ashley, so I left it at that.  I knew I still had strong feelings for Charlotte, despite the fact that I hadn’t seen her since the previous summer, and that was yet another reason to not pursue things with Ellen.  By the time we pulled into my driveway, however, and Ellen decided she wasn’t ready to go home yet, that she wanted to watch a movie, even if I still felt something for Charlotte, if I still had reservations about my feelings for Ellen, it wouldn’t matter; no wasn’t a word Ellen would accept that night.  People like winning trophies.  For the first time in a long time—maybe ever—I felt like I was someone’s trophy.

A week after the wedding, with a couple that we worked with in the backseat of my car, the four of us cruised the streets of Niagara Falls, as The Marshall Mathers LP, a common language between us and our two Puerto Rican friends, bounced from the speakers.  We rapped—badly—along with Eminem as we looked out on the Technicolor-lit Horseshoe falls.  “The Real Slim Shady” will never be confused as a romantic song, but it felt that way; four people, two couples, hand-in-hand, looking out on a force so powerful that it left Wordsworth speechless.  As we got out and walked around the side streets humming “Bitch Please II” Ellen pulled me aside.  “What’s my middle name?” she asked.  Three days earlier, in a tear-stained confessional that came out of nowhere, Ellen told me her life story, from her insecurities and the reasons behind them, to the number of guys she’d slept with.  Somewhere in the tale was her middle name.  I could tell that Ellen thought I wasn’t exactly listening, as so many others before me apparently had not.  Without hesitation I told her.  She smiled.  “I love you,” she said.  I smiled and bit my bottom lip.  A fear the force of the nearby falls washed over me; I could hear my heartbeat in my ears.  This thing, after this moment it wasn’t going to be a casual thing anymore; it would either have to turn into something or it would have to end.  College, my chance at a new beginning with no commitments to anyone other than myself, it all started to look like the picture of Marty McFly’s fast-fleeting family before George McFly picks himself off the dance floor and reclaims his future wife from Malachai’s clutch.  The dotted-line we’d been carelessly crossing since the night of that wedding, it was being painted solid black underneath us; I could either cross it or turn away.  I’d finally reached the pinnacle of the mountain, stepping forward meant stepping to the edge; I’d have to trust my balance.   “I love you too,” I said.

It just so happened that two weeks before I was to move away to college, Ellen was moving as well.  And it just so happened that where she was moving was fifteen minutes away from where I was going to college.  That’s the kind of coincidence that gets confused as fate when you’re starry-eyed and you think that, “In the third grade, all I used to do was sniff glue through a tube and play Rubix cube/Seventeen years later I’m as rude as Jude, scheming on the first chick with the hugest boobs” is good poetry.  And we did; we were.

Four months after the move Thanksgiving break rolled around.  The break was officially supposed to begin after the conclusion of classes on that Tuesday, which happened to be my 22^nd birthday.  That Monday was unseasonably warm; my friends and I wore shorts when we played our weekly football game.  That night, I went to sleep around 3 a.m., the rain kissing my window.  When I woke up five hours later I couldn’t see my car that was parked twenty feet in front of my dorm.  The snow had covered everything: bushes, signs, Chryslers; the scene looked like the tall tales of your parent’s youth, about the great blizzards where they had to walk thirty miles uphill through chest-high snow to get to school.  It took three hours to dig out my entombed car, and those of my friends who were leaving, and another hour to make the typical ten-minute drive to her apartment.  When I got there Ellen wasn’t home.  I spent two more hours digging a path for Ellen to get her car in her garage.  I went inside to thaw, to breathe, and the phone rang.  “I don’t think I’m going to make it home tonight,” she said.  I asked if everything was all right, if she was ok.  “Yeah, it’s not that.  It’s just the roads are really bad.  I should just stay where I am,” she said, her voice trailing off.  “But it’s my birthday,” I said.  “I know,” she said, “I’m sorry.”  Two hours later Ellen was home, convinced that if she didn’t come home, I would take it personally.  I did, regardless of the fact that she made it home just fine.  The next morning, the roads passable, we drove to Buffalo to catch our flight to my sister’s house in North Carolina for Thanksgiving.  Four days later, we flew back.  After a somewhat rocky time, by the time we touched down things seemed to settle back to normal.  The next morning, after returning from my gym class, my phone rang.  “I think we should take some time apart,” she said.  “I just need to figure some things out.”  Ellen used the standard anti-Hallmark line: “It’s not you, it’s me.”   I said, “But…but” too many times, but after five minutes or so of trying to sell another chance Ellen decided she didn’t need time.  Two weeks later, I was wrapping presents while cooking dinner at her apartment.  Ellen was to be home any minute; we were going to have our Christmas together early so I could drive home for the holidays after classes ended the following day.  As I stirred the taco meat the phone rang.  “So I’m not coming home tonight.  I need space.  This isn’t working.  I’m sorry.  I really am.  Goodbye.”  The phone went silent.  Five months prior I was at the pinnacle of the mountain I’d spent a lifetime trying to climb.  As I listened too long to the hum of the dial tone, I was back at the bottom, just like the yodeler guy from Price Is Right when he takes a header off the cliff.  I wanted to throw up.  I wanted to scream.  I wanted to call her back, but I had no idea where she was.

I drove back to the dorm looking for someone, anyone, to talk to, just so I wouldn’t have to listen to all of the horrible things I was saying to myself in my head.  It was a Friday night though, everyone was out partying.  My roommate had gone home for the weekend.  I stood there, staring into the collage of pictures of my friends from back home; people I hadn’t talked to since I moved away.  The silence was overwhelming.  I sat on my bed and felt like an outsider in my own room.  In the months that I’d lived there, in this new town, in this new bed, with these new people, I realized that I didn’t know any of them.  And none of them knew me.  The one person who did, Ellen, an hour earlier she told me that she wasn’t coming home.  I knew what that meant; her vagueness was crystal clear.

That night, I packed up everything; my clothes, my TV, my laptop, my life.  I drove back to her place and did the same; I grabbed whatever was in view that was mine and threw it into a trash bag.  On the highway, on the drive back to school, there’s a stretch where the falloff from the road to the valley below is pretty steep.  For a second that seemed more like an hour I considered veering beyond the yellow lines, the rumble strips, and the concrete, through the steel barriers to see just how steep that drop-off was.  I knew those thoughts weren’t really me talking, but at that moment I could rationalize that voice.  It was my fault; I went against my better judgment with Ellen, I threw caution to the wind, I compromised what I had worked for and it backfired.

The first day after break had ended, after class was over, I tried my best to sneak out before my friends could see me but I ended up running into every one of them.  At first I tried to conceal my intention but after a while I just told them the truth: “I don’t think I’m coming back next semester.”  They asked why and I told each of them a different version of the non-truth.  When I was through with my goodbyes I got in my car and drove off, taking in the scene as if once I left it, I’d never see it again.  I felt a tear creep into my right eye and I tried my best to fight it off.  I couldn’t.  Furious, beaten, and on the verge of full-blown hysteria I did what anyone who is lost does: I called my mother.  She told me to calm down, that things would be alright, and that she’d have spaghetti and meatballs waiting for me at home.  I knew that I should heed her advice, that she was right.  But it didn’t work.  Driving eighty-miles an hour towards home, towards everything that months ago I was so happy to drive away from, I hated myself.  I was a failure; a complete and utter failure, on par with Crystal Pepsi and Pat Boone going metal.  I was a bad joke, and now I had a 160 mile drive to ponder over the steaming pile of “I told you so” shit that I was going to have to eat; the pile that I was going to force-feed on myself because I deserved it.  This was nobody’s doing by my own.  Everything I told myself not to do I did; I blew my second chance before it even started.

My thoughts were anything but rational, and all of them were soaked in anger.  As I drove I scrolled through the phone book on my cell, looking for a name, any name that I felt I could talk to, that would understand me, the things I was saying, the things I couldn’t.  But there wasn’t anyone; the names all looked like those of strangers.  As far as I could see, the only one who had that power that I was looking for was gone.  I pushed all of my chips to the center of the table, she called my bluff, and that was that; I was busted.

I tried to drown out the thoughts by putting on a CD.  I’d get thirty seconds into the first song and get pissed off at myself for not picking the right CD.  Nothing worked, I couldn’t even be a good DJ; Pantera didn’t work, Billy Joel didn’t work, Bob Dylan didn’t even work.  My one constant, music, my all-time best main squeeze was abandoning me too.  I was one CD away from completely blowing my top when I heard:

“This is another public service announcement brought to you, in part, by Slim Shady

(Tell ‘em I don’t give a fu@k)

Slim Shady does not give a fu@k what you think

(Tell ‘em to suck it)

If you don’t like it, you can suck his fu@king co@k

(Tell ‘em they kissed my ass)

Little did you know, upon purchasing this album You have just kissed his ass

(Tell ‘em I’m fed up)

Slim Shady is fed up with your sh!t and he’s going to kill you

(Yeah)

Anything else?

Yeah, sue me.”

And literally, like that, in an instant, the tears turned into laughter.  Hysterical—the first time you watch the outtakes to Grumpy Old Men—laughter.  In the months since I’d bought The Marshall Mathers LP I’d listened to it a hundred or so times and each listen brought something new: a verse I misheard, a diss that passed me by.  But I’d never heard it, really heard it for what it was; a masterpiece; a scattershot collection of emotional rants that run the creative gamut of someone who, at the height of his creative prowess, is royally pissed off.  And hurt.  And scared.  Eminem dealt with it all the best way he knew how; he spit it back at everyone, including himself, that did him wrong.  Hurt, betrayed, and angry I really listed to “Kim” for the first time and it floored me, the vulnerability behind his voice.  The easy laughs—“Will Smith don’t gotta cuss in his raps to sell records/Well I do, so fu@k him, and fu@k you too”—were just as easy as every previous listen, and I was grateful for that.  But it was the balance that I needed that night, on that drive, and I got it.  I was at the bottom of the mountain again, a certified failure, on my way back to my past.  Things didn’t go the way I wanted them to, the way that I expected them to turn out.  And it sucked.  But I had a friend.  His name was Marshall Mathers.  He knew what I was going through, and he wasn’t going to let me ride alone.  And I wasn’t going to let myself become just another Stan.

(**This is entry #2 of the ongoing A Decade Under The Influence essay collection**)

The Stranger Will editing soundtrack

This is a guest post by Caleb J Ross as part of his Stranger Will Tour for Strange blog tour. He will be guest-posting beginning with the release of his novel Stranger Will in March 2011 to the release of his second novel, I Didn’t Mean to Be Kevin and novella, As a Machine and Parts, in November 2011. If you have connections to a lit blog of any type, professional journal or personal site, please contact him. To be a groupie and follow this tour,subscribe to the Caleb J Ross blog RSS feed. Follow him on Twitter: @calebjross.com. Friend him on Facebook: Facebook.com/rosscaleb

Last year, Justin Holt was kind enough to post my Charactered Pieces: stories playlist. The chronology of that book and Stranger Will is transposed in terms of when they were written vs. when they were published, so though Charactered Pieces found shelf space first, Stranger Will was actually written first. This is all to say that the following playlist reflects a much earlier, and in some respects much more embarrassing, time in my life.
I wasn’t yet aware Tom Waits, Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ scores, or Bohren Und der Club of Gore, at the time, so what now makes up about half of my writing music simply didn’t exist as far as I was concerned. But, I pushed through with what I had. And per unconscious influences, I am certain Stranger Will would have been a much different book, and not necessarily a better one, had I been piping in then what I listen to now. I have the following to thank for what would become my first published novel.

************

Nirvana
Nirvana was my first music obsession, so of course it makes sense that the band would find its place in any of my creative endeavors. When I was learning guitar, Nirvana’s music was the first I played. When I was learning to skate, Nirvana was there. When I wrote, Nirvana kept me focused. The notorious apathy of Nirvana’s lyrics may well have influenced the overall theme of Stranger Will. However, I assure you nobody marries Courtney Love in my novel.

Deftones
Deftones remains one of my favorite bands of all time. Their music, even as it has changed over their almost two decades of production, simply does not disappoint. That being said, I honestly don’t know how I was able to write to it, especially the music they were producing during the early 20-aughts. Some of their later stuff is much softer and more appropriate for a writer’s contemplation than the earlier crunching guitar riffs and pounding drums. For example, Saturday Night Wrist has some great instrumental stuff and vocalist Chino Moreno’s side project, Team Sleep, had some beautiful sounds.

Korn
I was that guy, the one with dreadlocks who preached Korn as the second coming to stale, hair metal enthusiasts. They had poppier bass and deeper percussion than any band before them and any band after. And for those reasons, like Deftones, I don’t know how I wrote to their music. But I did. I remember playing it softly, though, and letting the deeper caverns sort of rumble my floor. I think that sense of impending earthquake is what fueled me.

Tool
Tool’s more symphonic songs were really my first introduction to the magic of lyric-less music. To me, every single Tool song, in the hands of less bands, would be stretched and thinned into an entire album. The way they cram so much into every song consistently amazes me. This over-stimulation I think is what keeps the neurons firing and the words flowing.

Kaki King
Quite a jump in style, right. Kaki King was probably my second introduction to the magic of lyric-less music. This was the Legs to Make Us Longer days, not the follow-up shame, Until We Felt Red… She is stunning to watch as a performer, all that sound coming from a single guitar, and perhaps it is my association with her live visuals that allows me to fully appreciate the sounds, and in turn feel like a worthless sack of crap if I don’t at least try to produce something magical as well.

So tomorrow, August 3rd, there will be a guest post by writer, Caleb Ross, promoting his debut novel, Stranger Will.  Caleb is an awesome writer.  And from what I’ve read of Stranger Will so far (about 40% through it) it’s an awesome ride.  You should order it.  And then tomorrow, you should read his guest post.  Or do things in reverse order.  Whatever your fancy.  You’ve got choices.  Except when it comes to ordering Stranger Will.  That is an order, and this is my R. Lee Ermey Full Metal Jacket “Only two things come from Texas!” voice.

Silver & Gold – Neil Young

If you want to get technical, the 2000s for me started in downtown Buffalo, NY.  I was in pleather pants and a long-sleeve purple velvet shirt, smack dab in the middle of 18,000 people at a Barenaked Ladies concert.  I was neither drunk nor high, despite my choice of apparel.  I was barely 21, surrounded by most of my best old friends who’d I known since middle school or earlier.  I’d recently broken up with Ashley, a member of that group, the sister of one of my best friends.  Doug Flutie, the football hero, namesake of his own cereal, and midget quarterback of the Buffalo Bills, was on stage playing drums.  The Y2K scare was all the rage, the impending doom of what could be the end of the world, or at the very least the assumed possibility that the free world would suddenly go dark at 12:00 a.m.  It didn’t happen of course; Armageddon never seems to come when it’s supposed to.  Always entertaining the previous five times I’d seen them perform, beyond getting pelted by a monsoon of uncooked macaroni and cheese during the “We wouldn’t have to eat Kraft dinner” refrain of “If I Had a 1000000 Dollars”, nothing was out of the ordinary for a BNL show.  We went, we saw, we came home.  But that night was one of the last nights, if not the last, we’d all be together at the same time.  Nobody died.  As people do we just sort of grew apart.  Before that night the signs were on the wall.  Something had to give with my breakup with Ashley; it was either her or me.  I didn’t much care if it was me.  In fact I wanted it to be me, my eyes had been on the door for a while; I was ready for it.  But when things happened the way I expected them to I didn’t know what to do.  My cell phone was silent; my pager didn’t vibrate with sweet cryptic nothings past midnight like it had for so long.  I was lost, my routines and livelihood things of the past.

People say taxes and death are the only guarantees in life, but the weather in Rochester, NY four to seven months out of the year is just as predictable.  Freaking cold.  Lots of snow.  During those months if you’re not a skier or snowmobiler, you become a virtual turtle, at the movies, at home, nestled away somewhere warm.  I spent a lot of time at home in the months following that concert.  For a social life I turned to chatrooms on the internet.  It was a means to no particular end.  But it was something.  The people weren’t real in any physical “I can see you” sense of the word.  But the conversations passed time; misery was company, and I was content to use it for what it was worth.

After a while though I wanted something more.  Something that was real.  So I decided to wing it.

In Rochester, when the weather finally breaks, people look like birds that have just hatched.  In a moment of weakness—or it could have been clarity, sometimes it’s such a fine line between the two—I decided to meet up with Karen, a girl who I’d “met” on the internet.  Karen was about my age, seemed to have enough of the same interests as me, and she thought I was cute, or at least she said she thought the picture that I emailed her was.  The night before I was supposed to meet Karen, the nervous energy driving me crazy, I drove out to Media Play and thumbed through the CDs for an hour or so.  I came upon the new Neil Young CD, Silver & Gold.  The cover looked like a sepia-tinted pixilated guy with his hands on his hips.  For some reason—perhaps for no reason—that cover made sense to me and I dropped $15 for the album.

My generation’s Neil Young was the especially grungy one; always clad in some tired-out plaid, every time you saw him—which for a while, all you had to do was turn on MTV—he was on stage with Eddie Vedder rocking out “Rockin’ In The Free World” like it was his job.  Well, I suppose it was his job, but still, for a back catalog like that man has you only really ever heard him sing one song, and he never really sang his song as much as he shared it.  As much as I loved Pearl Jam I never cared much for grunge—the sound, the scene, the smell—and Neil Young, “The Godfather of Grunge” as the MTV vee-jays called him, exemplified everything that I could do without.  I liked my relics just fine—grew up on classic rock—but I just couldn’t be bothered with the ones who, by their own doing or that of their record company, were trying too hard to be relevant.

But Silver & Gold was different.  Immediately it was different.

That first night that I purchased Silver & Gold I took the long way home.  Part of the rite of passage from winter to spring in Western, NY is the return of one’s ability to aimlessly drive the endless miles of backcountry roads.  A major component of those drives is music, and it just can’t be any music, it has to be the right music.  Silver & Gold was it.  Heavy on harmonica and the harmonious highs of Harvest-era Neil Young, Silver & Gold is an album built of tunes that sound like they would write themselves on such a drive.  There are songs of longing and outright loss, yet they all share the commonality of love, what it feels like to relish in the highs, what it feels like when love leaves you behind.  You ride long enough on those roads and you’ll see just about everything Silver & Gold: hay piled high against the faded red barn, the broken fences fronting overgrown yards where peoples’ possessions, rusted and tattered, have blended into the landscape, the splattered remains of lives that ended too abruptly, the For Sale sign in front of a dream that died the death of a dream not worth believing anymore.  Happy or sad, all of it is somehow endearing if for no other reason because all of it is true.  On Silver & Gold, Neil Young doesn’t sound like a man who is trying to say something like he does when he sings a song like “Rockin’ In The Free World”; he’s just saying what he sees, what he feels.  When he sings, “I’m looking for a job,/I don’t know what I’m doing,/My software’s non-compatible with you” it says enough.  Taking in the sights on the outside of my fog-covered windows, I knew that feeling.  I was less than twenty-four hours from meeting Karen, a girl who for all intents-and-purposes was a complete stranger, and I didn’t know what to say, how to act, let alone what to wear.  It’d been seven or so months since I’d had a girlfriend and those seven months felt like an eternity.  I felt thirteen again, my own freshly-hatched bird covered in so much gunk that he couldn’t see the world, let alone observe the ways in which it worked.  It felt as if I’d never experienced the touch of another; the prospect of a kiss was as perplexing as trying to figure out a Rubix’s Cube with your eyes closed.  I was terrified.

Music has always been a voice of reason for me.  In a world that could otherwise be completely silent—and I’ve always hated silence—music’s been consistent, a comforting whisper, an embrace, something that I could invest myself in.  The best music makes you think, not always about what they’re saying, but often about what you can’t for one reason or another bring yourself to.

“Horseshoe man’s been working his magic

Fixing heartbreak everywhere

He’s the one we all can count on

When we’re lost and don’t know where love is

He takes the pieces in his hand

Shakes them up like he doesn’t care

He says there will always be heartbreak

Because love is everywhere.”

Going into that first meeting I wasn’t necessarily looking for the “Horseshoe Man”, and I definitely wasn’t expecting a ringer—a leaner perhaps, but not a ringer—but hearing about his existence helped put me at ease, it helped me remember what I thought I’d forgot; love, the whole journey leading up to it, the peaks and valleys, all of its aimless backcountry roads, it’s more or less a crapshoot, a horseshoe toss into a head-on wind.

The first meeting with Karen went well enough where we decided to have another.  It was a good forty-five minute drive from where I lived to where we’d meet up after that first night; a drive that more times than not Silver & Gold served as the soundtrack to.  And for the most part, whenever we did hang out, it consisted of us aimlessly driving around.  Where we were, there wasn’t much to do other than drive.  Gas hovered around $1 per gallon, the weather was good enough to crack the window at night, and the pavement felt right.  We gave each other the tour of the roads, and fields, and woods of our youth, we’d talk about life, and what exactly those roads, and fields, and woods, meant growing up.  We talked a lot about music: Bob Dylan, Ani Difranco, Bob Marley, and The Beatles.  One night, Karen told me about this college that she was enrolled at, a place I never heard of.  I told her that I was thinking about going back to college, that I was really looking for a change of scenery, a way to get away from everything I’d known.  Karen said I should look into it.

That night, a warm one, after I dropped Karen off, I rolled down the windows and took the slightly longer than forty-five minute drive back home.  I listened to “The Great Divide”, “Razor Love”, and “Without Rings” over and over, alternating plays of the songs with each intentional wrong turn I took.  I was hung up on couplets.  In “The Great Divide” it was “On the carousel/You’re gonna like the way you feel.”  For the first time in a long time I did like the way I felt.  My mind was free, I felt at ease.  The horizon didn’t seem far off anymore; it wasn’t mythological.  I felt like I was a car ride away from wherever I wanted to go, not too dissimilar than Lewis & Clark or Sal Paradise when they headed west, or Bob Dylan when he set out for New York City.  In “Razor Love”, one of Young’s all-time most beautiful songs, my couplet was, “Trying to find something I can’t find yet/Imagination is my best friend.”  When I first got into writing, when I started to take it as serious as it seemed to be taking me, my imagination was my best friend, and the words came as easy as breathing did.  They weren’t always good together, but they were always something, and even when they weren’t always something prophetic, it felt good enough that I was saying something.  In those first months of 2000 I wasn’t writing at all anymore.  But that night, on that drive, listening to that particular album, my mind started writing.  I could hear it, I could imagine the words coming out, my pen going across sheet after empty sheet in my dusty notebook.  I remember smiling; to this day its one of the few times I remember the physical act of smiling.  And then there was “Razor Love”, a song which since those days has eased its way onto my All-Time Top 150 Song list.  Also one of Young’s all-time best, the song is stripped down to almost nothing but a guitar, a voice, and life.  When he sings, “I’m picking something up/I’m letting something go” I felt exactly the same way.  I was ready and willing to let a whole lifetime of somethings go.  And I finally felt like I had something worth picking up.

That night, when the ride was over, I sat down at the computer and looked up the college Karen had told me about.  A week later my acceptance letter for that college came in the mail.  A month or so after that I had a new home, a new beginning.  I decided it was time to be my own horseshoe man.  I threw caution directly into the wind and I didn’t look back.

Towards the end of 2009, while reading Nick Hornby’s collection of essays called “Songbook”, I got the idea to write a series of essays revolving around music, or more specifically, the albums that meant the most to me in the first decade of the 2000′s.  Actually, that’s not exactly accurate, the albums I was to write about weren’t necessarily the ones that meant the most to me as much as they were the ones that seemed to linger at some of the most important moments/periods of time in my life from 2000-2009.  Where Hornby’s “Songbook” focused on songs–not just a clever title right?–the essays I had in mind to write would revolve more around the album.  And not so much in a critical, introspective on the artist way, but more in terms of my own experience(s) with them.  Selfish, for sure, but that’s part of the true appeal of music; another person’s poetry helps you understand or put into words those words or moments you can’t seem to fully grasp or appreciate on your own.  Or something.

I made a list of 31 or so albums to write about, or one album essay for every day of December 2009.  I stayed on task for about 4 days/essays.  All told I think I “finished” 11 of those essays.  Sometimes I suck at life.  Like so many other ideas/projects I’ve started I put the essay collection on the back-burner of life.  Years passed by.  The urge to get back into writing those essays was always in the back of my mind.  From the beginning they were fun, from sitting down to write about something that I didn’t have to think too much about, to thinking about things I hadn’t thought too much about in years.  And listening to the albums again, some of them for the first time since the era I was writing about, that was fun too.  But as much as I wanted to get back into writing them I never did.

Until now…

I’m not going to give myself the same sort of deadline that I know will do me in again.  But I plan on being prompt with these.  Part of the fun of writing them was how quickly they came out.  Sort of the same way that hearing a certain song can bring you back to a exact moment in time.  Or something.  I’ve revised the list a little bit from the first time I attempted this.  Right now, and this is always subject to change, the list of albums that I will write about is:

The Albums:

1. Silver & Gold – Neil Young
2. The Marshall Mathers LP – Eminem
3. The Ever Passing Moment – MXPX
4. Reckoning/Reveling – Ani Difranco
5. Bleed American – Jimmy Eat World
6. The Places That You Come to Fear The Most – Dashboard Confessional
7. Hybrid Theory – Linkin Park
8. Stillmatic & The Blueprint – Nas & Jay-Z
9. Room For Squares – John Mayer
10. Drunken Lullabies – Flogging Molly
11. Everything You Want – Vertical Horizon
12. Love & Theft – Bob Dylan
13. Australia – Howie Day
14. Wiretap Scars – Sparta
15. Sing The Sorrow – AFI
16. Barricades & Brickwalls – Kasey Chambers
17. Swagger – Flogging Molly
18. Good Mourning – Alkaline Trio
19. Five Star Motel – Andy Stochansky
20. So Long, Astoria – The Ataris
21. Inspired – Alexis MacIssac
22. Futures – Jimmy Eat World
23. Funeral – Arcade Fire
24. ( ) – Sigur Ros
25. Hopes & Fears – Keane
26. Hot Fuss – The Killers
27. As Tall As Lions – As Tall As Lions
28. Regina Spektor – Begin To Hope
29. I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning – Bright Eyes
30. Carnavas – Silversun Pickups
31. Threes – Sparta
32. New Wave – Against Me!
33. Fall From Grace – Lindi Ortega
34. Never Just A Dream – Emma-Lee
35. Within A Mile Of Home – Flogging Molly
36. In Rainbows – Radiohead
37. The Alchemy Index – Thrice
38. Death Magnetic – Metallica
39. Once – Soundtrack From A Motion Picture
40. For Emma, Long Ago – Bon Iver

Give or take a couple, I’m sure.  I will post some of these entries here.  The first few, if you happened across this site on this past, you may remember from before I blew the site up.  I’ve edited the first few essays a bit, and this time around I’ve added names.  Fake names, for sure.  But names.  I find names are a lot easier to follow/keep track of than “the girl I was dating” references.  Especially when nine years are involved.  Way back when I started writing these things I was confusing myself.

I’m calling this collection A Decade Under The Influence which is the name of a Taking Back Sunday song from an album that isn’t on this list.  Probably good for everyone.

Again, before you bash me, these albums I’m writing about are in no way my favorite albums, or ones that I think are the best.  I realize some of them, and the artists involved, for lack of a better word, pork.  That said, at the end of the day, I do love me some pork.

Anyway, once again, hopefully this will be as fun for you, the reader, as it will be for me, the rememberer…

I started work on this website in October 2004.  At the time I was sitting in the lobby of the University Center at Edinboro University.  Watching some Michael Moore documentary.  Thinking of ways to help promote my first novel.  Payday.  The one I hadn’t finished yet.   A website seemed a good enough idea.  I was a young man of 25, still chock full of good ideas.  And a website seemed easy.  I’ve always been a fan of easy.  I had no idea how to create a website.  At the time, I was still figuring out how to write a novel, the one I was hoping to promote.  I was optimistic that I’d figure out both.  And to some degree I did.  But neither with any degree of success.

Over the years this website has evolved (or perhaps devolved is a better term) many different ways.  From the content.  To the design.  Well, usually it’s just the design.  I get bored easy and I like to blow things up.  Who doesn’t?  But since it’s not socially acceptable to lay TNT down wherever we’d like to in life, I’ve done my fair share of blowing up this website.  Erasing content.  Slopping on new shades of paint.  And I’ve done it again.

The only thing I kept from the last old version of this site was a post by Caleb Ross, writer, thinker, fellow lover of music.  That post was a guest post by Caleb on his author blog tour, promoting his collection of stories, Charactered Pieces.  I kept the post because I like Caleb.  And you should too.  He’s a helluva writer.  And he helped get me into Tom Waits.

This time around I shall make no promises.  In a couple days, or months, or years I may decide to blow this whole thing up again.  My track record is stellar, a betting man’s dream.  I’ve never been comfortable betting though.  Fantasy sports and the occasional slot machine are enough for me.  But anyway, about the site, the only real constant, other than the schmuck behind it, has been the slogan/tagline, a line from the book I wrote.  That line is: “Another example of your college degree not paying off.”  And I will keep that slogan/tagline this time around.  Why?  Because it’s still true.  On what level, well, who really knows.  This time around I’m not here to promote myself or my writing.  Though I will, of course, write things here.  And sometimes the things I write will be about the things I write.  Other times, I will just write things about things.  And stuff.  And stuff and things.  Say that last sentence five times fast and you will have a nice fifth-grade style giggle.  I’m not above cheap laughter.

In closing in this new beginning, I’m still amazed that I get any feedback/reaction/email from people who’ve come across this site.  Some of you have wanted to talk about writing.  Some have wanted to discuss music.  Some of you just want to tell me that your name is also Justin Holt.  This world is a small place, even for as big as it is.  And that’s part of what I like about it, the idea and practice of it.  So keep that feedback/reaction/email coming if you should find yourself inspired to kill a couple of minutes.  I like talking to people, as long as it isn’t on the phone, and I’m not having to place an order for takeout.  Sometimes I’m weird.  Other times I’m not.  But most of the time I’m me, and here is take Take III (thousand) of me doing this.