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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The host had his mouth sewn shut

All in the name of trust

When the blood goes thin, he’s given in

You can spare us the formal toast

The drunken anecdotes

From this day on…goes on and on…”

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

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

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 short story: 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 playing 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 cutters, but it felt exciting as I wrote it, 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 15 it doesn’t take much to convince you to do something; someone says, “You should eat 17 rolls of Bubble Tape at the same time” or “You should take creative writing” and sure, they sound like the best ideas 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 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 closer to, that’s a hormonal trifecta; I’m 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” or something.  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 and talk.”  I was 22 now, but sitting in that chair, the insides of my eyes were a television as I watched myself time travel back to when I was 15; “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, you start expecting.  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 seem to write.

The first time I heard Ani Difranco she was opening up 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, 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 my wishing well, the girl I was in love with.  Myself, along with two other people I was grouped with who had similar themes they were going to talk about, 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 (their money), the White House (their leadership), or the Pentagon (their 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.  On the ride we 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.  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.  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 times I ever 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’s in front of you, and for two months that’s just what I’d been doing.

“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 was in for countless brooding nights alone; I needed them.  I’d sacrificed a lot for this girl, a lot more than I had to give, and worse yet, I started sacrificing my opportunities.  Instead of spending a weekend amongst people with the same interests/ambitions as I had, I passed over a major conference that was a 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 Rocky Dennis in Mask carnival mirrors where everything looks fine.  Things weren’t just fine; 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”

Nobody was going to give me the key; if I wanted it, I had to find it.  So I had nothing.  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.

If you want to get technical, the 2000’s 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 what my choice of apparel might imply.  I was barely 21, surrounded by most of my best old friends who’d I known since middle school or earlier.  Doug Flutie, the midget quarterback of the Buffalo Bills was on stage playing drums.  All the rage was the Y2K scare, 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.  Beyond getting pelted by an endless sea of uncooked macaroni and cheese during the “We wouldn’t have to eat Kraft dinner” refrain of “If I Had a 1000000 Dollars”, nothing much that night happened.  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.  I’d recently broken up with a member of that group, a sister of one of the other people in it, and something had to give; it was either her or me.  I didn’t much care if it was me.  In fact I wanted it to be me, I was ready for it, but when it happened the way I expected it to I didn’t exactly know what to do.  My cell phone was silent; my pager didn’t vibrate with sweet cryptic nothings like it had for so long.  I was lost and I had no idea how to go about getting found.

It’s cold in Rochester, NY seven months out of the year.  Like really freaking cold.  During those months if you’re not at the movies, out to dinner, or seeing a concert, you’re a virtual turtle, at home, nestled away where it’s warm.  I spent a lot of time at home in the months following that concert.  For a social life I turned to the internet.  It was a means to no particular end.  But it was something.  The people weren’t exactly real—I mean, living and breathing in front of me so I could see they were actually really who they described they were and not some 372 lb. man sitting in front of his computer in Petoskey, Michigan with nothing but his boxer shorts on—but they would do.  And they did.

After a while, in terms of life, I got the crazy idea to just wing it.

When the weather breaks in Rochester people look like birds that have just hatched.  Covered in slop they stumble around until they’ve gained the strength and balance to just push forward and fly.  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 a girl who I’d “met” on the internet.  She 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 I’d emailed her was.  The night before I was supposed to meet her I drove out to Media Play and thumbed through the CDs for an hour looking for nothing in particular.  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 is the return of one’s ability to aimlessly drive the endless miles of backcountry roads in Western New York.  A major component of that drive is music, and it just can’t be any music, it has to be the right music.  Silver & Gold was not only the right music, it was the perfect music.  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 of it, what it feels like when it 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 people’s possessions, rusted and tattered, have blended into the landscape, the splattered remains of lives that ended too abruptly, or 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” he sounds like a man beaten down by a life that’s passed him by.  Taking in the sights on the outside of my fog-ridden windows, I knew that feeling.  I was less than twenty-four hours from meeting this girl, 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 daunting as trying to figure out a Rubix cube with your eyes closed.  I was scared.

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—it’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 that girl 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 was 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, and The Beatles.  One night, she 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 forever known.  She said I should look into it.

That night, a warm one, after I dropped her off, I rolled down the windows and took the slightly longer than forty-five minute drive back home; like Gilligan I took the three-hour tour.  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 was 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, 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 she 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.