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

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

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

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

So there’s that.

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

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

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

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

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

“Well I never lived the dreams of the prom kings

and the drama queens

I’d like to think the best of me

is still hiding up my sleeve

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

but something’s better on the other side

I want to run through the halls of my high school

I want to scream at the top of my lungs

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

just a lie you’ve got to rise above”

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

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

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

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

“I’m never speaking up again

it only hurts me

I’d rather be a mystery than she desert me

oh, I’m never speaking up again

starting now “

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

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

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

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

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

Since the day I started writing I was a failure.  I just never knew it.  Teachers gave me good grades, people gave me favorable comments, and the few places I submitted or contributed my stuff to published it.  I was a big fish in a small pond if only by default, but I had no reason to ever doubt my ability.  Nobody else did.  As the years passed by, and I started focusing more on writing, the pretentiousness level amongst my peers increased exponentially, but the quality of their writing more or less stayed the same: It sucked.

The first semester of my Senior Year in college I enrolled in a Fiction Workshop class.  It was a Monday night class at a satellite campus fifteen minutes away.  The distance seemed to keep away the window shoppers who might have otherwise thought the class an easy grade.  There were thirteen or so students, none of whom—including me—really looked like writers.  Our professor, however, looked exactly the part: Birkenstock sandals with Argyle socks, sweater vests and khaki pants, a gold pocket watch that he set on the desk in front of him before every class, he was every bit the stereotype; the underappreciated poet who was just teaching until his brilliant prose was discovered by the masses.  The class sat in a circle, and every week three or four of us would have our previous week’s assignment read aloud by someone who didn’t write it.  After each reading was finished, the rest of the class would comment or ask questions about what was read.  Our professor made it a point in our first meeting that he was in no way an expert on fiction; his cup of tea was, of course, poetry.  But he stressed that good writing defied format; “You’ll be able to hear it,” he’d say.  After the first few weeks I wasn’t so sure; It seemed as if it was going to be like every other writing class I’d taken: one giant circle jerk.  The writers weren’t looking for validation of their prose as much as they were a pat on the back for their troubles.  Brutally honest didn’t mean, “The description of your mother when she was crying could use some fleshing out,” it was more, “That sucks what happened to your mother.”  It was discouraging; I took the class with the intention to grow as a writer, to get beyond just writing poetry, just writing simple exposition.  Early on it looked like the only thing that would grow was my already extensive vocabulary when it came to sugar-coating things.  Before the third class I told myself if it didn’t get any better that night, I was going to quit it and find something else.  And then someone read the first line of the story from the guy with the clover on his hat:

“In sixth grade, I paid Kristine Barber ten dollars to touch her boob in the cafeteria. It was taco and guacamole day, just around Christmas, it was snowing out, and lunch was nearly over.”

I felt my stomach drop.  This wasn’t just good, it was great.  (Two years later, while riding down an elevator after a two-day workshop, best-selling author Chuck Palahniuk said the same thing to me about that line.)  I felt myself slide down in my chair.  Collectively, over all of the years that I’d been writing, everything, every word that left my pen wasn’t in the same league as those two sentences.  I went from feeling like a former semi-pro baseball player playing in a recreation softball league, to a former semi-pro baseball player trying to tell war stories to Derek Jeter.  Part of me wanted to quit; I thought it would be far more graceful, or at the very least less embarrassing to quietly bow out the back door than to have my words be read after his and be exposed for what they were: CRAP.  As the person read on in the story I listened, and like everyone else, I laughed.  Everyone knew this guy was good, but he just sat there, looking disinterested, rather unassuming as he slouched in his chair until everyone was finished with their comments.

Around the same time as the Fiction Workshop class, in the rap world the heavyweight battle to end all battles was in full-effect.  Jay-Z, on his album Blueprint, had just landed a devastating uppercut to Nas with his song, “Takeover.”  In it, amongst the below-the-belt “You know who did you know what with you know who” blast and other dizzying disses, Jay-Z said:

“Went from Nasty Nas to Esco’s trash

Had a spark when you started, but now you’re just garbage

Fell from top ten to not mentioned at all

To your bodyguard’s “Oochie Wally” verse better than yours.”

I’d been listening to Nas for years, since his debut album Illmatic came out when I was in high school.  Early on, Nas was the writer’s rapper; critics called him the best lyricist in rap, and that distinction seemed due.  Along with thanking the likes of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. in his liner notes, Nas was just as likely to thank Billy Joel and Bob Dylan.  He had his pulse on more than just the streets from which he was raised, he was educated in history, and he told compelling stories.  When I was in high school, I really started listening to rap because I couldn’t find any truth or personal identity in most grunge music.  Not that I could relate directly to what it was like to gang bang or sell crack, but there was a struggle in the Biggies, 2Pacs, and Wu-Tangs of the world, and the way they were conveying their message, in dizzying rhymes over catchy beats, it was exciting, fun even because you could listen in a communal setting and everyone might catch something different.  But as the years passed by, Biggie and 2Pac were murdered, Ol’ Dirty Bastard went loco, and on more than one album after It Was Written, the quality and focus of Nas’ work seemed to slip.  Along came a hungry Jay-Z; already respected for his flow, and a crossover success to boot he still needed his Michael Corleone popping Virgil Sollozzo moment and he took his best shot.

After “Takeover” came out, a short time later Nas responded on his album Stillmatic with the all-time counter punch in “Ether.”  In four-and-a-half minutes Nas annihilates everything from Jay-Z’s motivations:

“Y’all niggas deal with emotions like bitches

What’s sad is I love you ’cause you’re my brother

You traded your soul for riches”

to his manhood:

“You a fan, a phony, a fake, a pu$$y, a Stan

I still whip your ass, you thirty-six in a karate class?

You Tae-bo hoe, tryin’ work it out, you tryin to get brolic?

Ask me if I’m tryin’ to kick knowledge

Nah, I’m tryin’ to kick the shit you need to learn though

That ether, that shit that make your soul burn slow”

By the end of the barrage he tells Jay-Z he should apologize and it almost feels just; he should.

The fact of the matter is that both Jay-Z and Nas came out winners in their battle.  Jay-Z went after a made-man, a legend, and he slapped him upside his head pretty good.  Nas responded with his best album in years, and whether or not he regained his proverbial throne, he re-gained the respect of those who started to doubt him.  One of them lost the battle, but both of them won the war.  The only way to get better at anything is competition.  If you ever want to advance your skill, your trade, your art, you have to put yourself in a position where you’re surrounded, or at least aware of your talented peers.  Bob Dylan had The Beatles, Joe DiMaggio had Ted Williams, Ernest Hemingway had his “Lost Generation” cohorts.  Competition doesn’t always have to be as cut throat as it was between Jay-Z and Nas.  In Fiction Workshop, I wasn’t looking for a prose throw-down.  After I got beyond my initial insecurities I was excited by the possibility of being in the same class as someone so talented.  If I wanted to get the sort of reaction out of people that he got with his boob-touching beginning, I had to step my game up.  If I didn’t know how to do that, I had to learn.  I couldn’t just rest on my supposed—and as I could now see, completely exaggerated—laurels anymore.  If I ever wanted to be considered a good writer I had to learn how to write.

The prospect was a daunting task.  Some assignments I had better luck on than others.  When I’d get blocked I’d listen to Stillmatic the same way I used to listen to Dylan’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan when I started writing.  “Got UR Self A Gun” was a favorite listen; with its Sopranos theme sample, it’s both catchy and confident; the sign of a man who is through taking sh!t:

“To take it back to Africa, I did it with Biggie

Me and Tupac were soldiers of the same struggle

You lames should huddle, your team’s shook

Y’all feel the wrath of a killer, ’cause this is my football field

Throwin’ passes from a barrel, shoulder pads apparel

But the Q.B. don’t stand for no quarterback

Every word is like a sawed-off blast, ’cause y’all all soft

And I’m the black hearse that came to haul y’all ass in

It’s for the hood by the corner store

Many try, many die, come at Nas if you want a war, get it bloody, uh”

One of the redeeming qualities of Nas’ music is his vulnerability.  He wears his emotions on his designer sleeves better than anyone else in rap.  “One Mic” is a lyrical Memento; built off a Phil Collins “In The Air Tonight” sample, the song slowly gains momentum that amplifies his rage and outright dystopian outlook on the state of things before it quells to an almost hypnotic, hopeful whisper:

“This is crazy, I’m on the right track I’m finally found

You need some soul searchin, the time is now”

For the second of two short stories I had to write for Fiction Workshop I chose to write about Woodstock ’99.  Though rooted in some truth—some things I saw when I was there, a little bit on the sequence of events to actually get some of my friends there, a band or two that I saw perform—the heart of the story was more or less made up.  But writing the story allowed me to think deeper about some things I couldn’t quite get my head wrapped around at the time: the randomness of the people who ended up there, the complete disregard by so many for even the slightest bit of decency towards so few, the fact that the whole event felt secondary to the actual experience of that many people in one place at the same time.  Writing that story felt like my first attempt at a short story all over again.  It was exciting, scary, and disjointed; far from polished, but because of how hard I was pushing myself, the story was far from horrible either.  It had its redeeming moments, and moments were something to build off of.

As for the other guy in the class, well, he’s still the best writer I’ve ever read.  I’d even take being Bushwick Bill to his Jay-Z.

I’ll never be confused for a prophet; if I could tell the future there wouldn’t have been any heartache, any bad decisions, I wouldn’t have invested in Beanie Babies.  But on more than one occasion in my life I’ve had these overwhelming feelings—a sixth sense, intuition, or whatever you call it—where I knew what was going to happen.  At 18, while sitting at work, I had an urge to play the numbers 349 in the Daily Numbers lottery.  I’d never played Pick 3 before, or gambled in any form really, but the urge was so strong I went with it, I spent fifty cents and I ended up winning $120.  A month later I had the same sort of feeling, only it was to play New York Yankees uniform numbers as NY Lotto numbers.  This time I didn’t give in to the urge.  Two weeks later, on the front page of the local paper, there was an article about a man who won the lottery playing New York Yankees jersey numbers the same night I had my urge.  When I was 20 I spent a week in Bangor, Maine trying to find myself.  I never did, find myself that is, but for that week, every turn I made I knew what was going to be around the corner, what the buildings were going to look like; I really felt like I’d been there before.  Maybe part of it, maybe all of it was coincidence: I’d seen the numbers 349 earlier that day on a price tag or something, or I had just watched a Yankees game, or I’d read so much Stephen King that the streets I was traveling were the same ones he often wrote about.  I don’t know.

A few weeks into the fall semester I was lost.  The girl I’d spent the summer counting away the calendar to see, after that first party her and I stopped talking.  I had five literature classes with a total of 84 novels to read, and one Fiction Workshop which I had no idea how to approach because creatively I hadn’t written anything longer than four or five stanzas since I was 15.  I had two jobs; I worked around 40 hours a week.  When I was home, I’d lie in my bed and stare at the ceiling, too worn down to focus on reading, too uninspired to write.  Sleep was scarce, and I started having nightmares.  One night I woke up drenched in sweat.  I was having this dream where I was tightrope walking between two skyscrapers; the cable was covered in grease and the sneakers I was wearing had no tread left on them.  Hundreds of feet beneath me were all of my friends from college and some other people from my past.  I could see all of their faces, their expressions.  They were whispering things to each other that I couldn’t hear.  After a while of watching me inch my way forward, they all started to scatter.  I yelled down to try to get them to stop but they either didn’t hear me or they didn’t care.  I considered jumping; I wasn’t doing that good walking anyway, but before I could talk myself into it I slipped and fell off the rope.  As I shot towards the ground I reached my hand back up in a desperate attempt to save myself.  I didn’t want to die; I wanted to see what was on the other side of the rope.  Unlike every other dream throughout my life where falling was involved this time I didn’t wake up before I hit the ground.  I felt the impact of the cement; it felt like twenty people simultaneously whacking me with baseball bats.  But I didn’t die; when I got my bearings I rolled over and looked up.  My past, the people from it, were staring through me.  Some were rolling their eyes, others were laughing.  From above them I saw something descending down like a rocket.  Right before impact I woke up.

That morning, on my way to work, I couldn’t shake the dream.  On top of that I had to have Emma, The Great Gatsby, The Cleveland Connection, and Tess Of The D’Urbervilles read by the end of the week; two of them I also had journals due on, the other two I had to write papers about.  For my Fiction Workshop, I had to write the first draft of a story.  My grandmother was sick; her mind was abandoning her.  I wanted to try and work things out with the girl, but I was didn’t feel confident in what I had to say so I didn’t say anything.  My job was mindless to begin with—mopping the lobby, vacuuming the hallways, changing light bulbs—and having too much time to think only made matters worse.  The only thing I was looking forward to was the release of Bob Dylan’s Love & Theft.  It was Monday; I had one more day to wait.  I’d been counting off the days like a kid does towards Christmas; even if everything else was doing me wrong at least there would be Dylan.  After my four-hour shift, as I was packing up my stuff to leave a current day’s newspaper was sitting beside my bag.  For some reason—beyond the Sports section I’d never really read USA Today—I grabbed the paper and stuffed it in my bag.

I drove back to campus; bs’d my way through my full day of classes, and went back to my apartment.  My roommates weren’t home, and I didn’t feel like being alone so I walked over to my friend’s place, which was more or less a gathering place for everybody around.  We had a few drinks, talked about the new Madden football, about the upcoming baseball playoffs.  Right before I’d gone over to their place I checked my email.  I got a five-word one from the girl: “We’re dropping out of school.”  Sitting on my friend’s couch, drink in my hand, staring into the TV I felt like a volcano about to erupt.  All of the pressure in my body was focusing on my head.  I tried to take a deep breath but I couldn’t get any air.  Panicked, I ran out the open door, down two flights of steps, and in between their building and the one next to it.  I knew I was going to cry and I didn’t want anyone to see me doing it.  A friend of mine, my roommate that previous summer, he caught up to me just as the tears revealed themselves.  I was hysteric; one of those people you see in movies getting dragged out of the courtroom.  He braced me against the brick wall; to keep me from running, or falling, or doing whatever I had a mind to do, I don’t know.  He kept asking me what was wrong and after a while I shouted a bunch of gibberish about my grandmother being on the verge of dying, about how I couldn’t take six classes and forty hours of work each work, about how Thomas Hardy sucked, about how I couldn’t even afford the new Dylan CD, about how the girls were dropping out of college.  “They’re dropping out?” I heard him say over my own pathetic voice.  For some reason that calmed me enough to explain what I knew of the matter.  He had a vested interest; his ex-girlfriend, the same girl who’d sent me Jimmy Eat World lyrics and we became kindred spirits, she was one of the We’re, along with another mutual friend of ours.  In an instant, like some grand illusion, all of my emotion had transferred over to him.  Before I knew what we were doing we were on our way over to the dorm we used to live in, where the girls still did.  The three of them were sitting on the front stoop as if they knew we were coming.  Collectively they’d decided school wasn’t for them; they sold back all of their books, dropped all of their classes, and were on the way to purchase one-way bus tickets to Florida.  “Why?” we asked.  “Because,” was more or less their answer.  In the chaos of the conversation it ended up where the only two people left were the girl who, not even two weeks prior I thought was the one, and I.  We were sitting on the same bench we had six months earlier only the feeling in the air was an entire climate different.  The only thing I could really muster up to say was, “I’m sorry.”  And I was.

The next morning I was drained; tired from my lack of sleep, upset that I’d let my emotions show the way they had, betrayed by the fact that I seemingly had no control over the people I cared about.  As I walked out to my car the air gave me a boost.  The sky was clear blue as far as you could see; it was warm.  Despite my disposition it felt good to be alive.  I rolled down all my windows, opened up my sunroof, and tried to focus on how beautiful it was outside and the fact that in a couple of hours, one way or another, I’d be listening to Dylan’s new CD.  When I got to work, compartmentalized inside the cold walls of the hotel, the pep I had started to fade; reality was settling back in.

I was on the second floor vacuuming the hall when I heard a voice from behind me yelling something.  I turned the power on the vacuum off and turned around.  “You always talk about wanting to live in New York City but I don’t know why you’d want to live in a place where planes smash into buildings,” one of the maids said.  It took a minute to register what she was saying and even after it did I didn’t know how to respond.  “What are you talking about?” I asked.  “Some plane hit a building,” she said, “it’s on the news.”  The girl had always creeped me out, so instead of joining her in the room she was cleaning to see what she was referring to I took the elevator down to the lobby.  By the time I got there a few of the morning crowd were gathered around the television, their morning bagel or muffin in their hands.  Just as I got into position to see the television a plane crashed into a building.  I had no idea if this was a replay; if somehow what the maid was referring to had been caught on video.  For a second my eyes moved away from the fireball on TV to the right hand of the guy standing next to me, and the plastic cup of orange juice he just dropped.  Its descent towards the carpet I’d vacuumed just a half-hour earlier was like watching a DVD frame-by-frame.  By the time it finally hit the floor and erupted orange juice over everyone’s legs someone had screamed out, “Oh my God!”  It wasn’t a replay, or some Hollywood stunt.  This was real.

I don’t remember how long I stood in that same spot, my leg covered in orange juice, my eyes fixed on the television.  It was long enough for a third plane to crash into the Pentagon and a fourth one to crash a couple hours south of the hotel lobby where I was standing.  It was long enough to make me remember every last person I thought I forgot; the things I said to them, the things I wish I had.  It was long enough for me to reassess what the word love really meant, and how I wished more than anything that I had someone I was in love with right then so I could call them and make sure they were ok.  It was long enough for me to call my mother and tell her that I was alright, and that I loved her.  And it was long enough for me to breath and be scared just like everyone else standing around me.  After enough time passed, my boss came over and said, “We all have to go back to work,” I told her no; I couldn’t.  I walked back to the break room, started gathering up my stuff, and like the day before, the day’s paper was sitting next to my bag.  I threw the USA Today in my backpack, went out to my car, drove down the street to Best Buy and put Modern Times on my credit card.  I couldn’t really afford the CD, but felt like I couldn’t afford to not have the CD either.

There was a lot of uncertainty that day; classes were cancelled, everyone was told to spend time with their loved ones, with their friends.  Everyone gathered around televisions; we looked for answers, for a voice of reason: Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and Wolf Blitzer weren’t prophets either; they were just as lost as the rest of us were, but they would do, and they did.

That night, in the campus gym, there was a candlelight vigil for the people killed in catastrophes.  I went with the girl who, depending on who was looking at it, was my ex-girlfriend.  We held hands when they played “Taps” and “Amazing Grace” on bagpipes; we shared tears and “I’m sorry’s.”  When I finally retired to myself, I wrote a few lines in the journal I was trying to keep.  It said something about the attacks on the Twin Towers, about how my previous day’s antics were stupid and selfish, something about carpe diem, something about love.  In times of tragedy we always become soothsayers of change.  Regrets weigh on us; they feel like ships with broken rudders we’re hell-bent on fixing.  We see that life really does come with an expiration date, that we’re not going to live forever, and we panic.  I was no different; I became an arbiter of second-chances.

From the first listen, “Mississippi” blew me away.  Dylan had hundreds of songs, hundreds of songs I knew and loved by heart, but this one was like a dagger right through my heart, and given the day’s events it made that much more sense:

“Got nothing for you, I had nothing before
Don’t even have anything for myself anymore
Sky full of fire, pain pourin’ down
Nothing you can sell me, I’ll see you around”

I laid on my bed and listened, thinking of those lines, how prophetic they were.  I thought about faces of people I couldn’t see, people who woke up feeling the same hope I had when they saw how beautiful and blue the sky was, people who, like me, couldn’t wait to hear Dylan’s new CD, people who in a flash of fire never had the chance to hear “Mississippi” or say, “I’m gonna look at you ‘til my eyes go blind” one last time.  To this day this is one of Dylan’s most endearing lines to me.  It’s both beautiful and haunting, an endearment just as much it could be a threat.  That night, I picture couples sitting on swings, staring into each other’s eyes, listening to that song together.  Before it would get to the end one of them would disappear.

“Walking through the leaves, falling from the trees
Feeling like a stranger nobody sees
So many things that we never will undo
I know you’re sorry, I’m sorry too”

Regret is a motherf**ker; I never wanted to feel it again.

The next day I went to work.  I went through the motions.  When it was time to leave I packed up my backpack; I grabbed the USA Today again and put it with the previous two day’s editions.  That night, after another long day of watching CNN, I sat in my room, I listened to Love & Theft, and I looked over the three newspapers, at the sequence of headlines from one day to the next; from the self-important to the sublime to the surreal.

“Po Boy” was another song that from first-listen found my ears well.

“Knockin’ on the door, I say, “Who is it and where are you from?”
Man says, “Freddy!” I say, “Freddy who?” He says, “Freddy or not here I come.”
Poor boy ‘neath the stars that shine
Washin’ them dishes, feedin’ them swine”

As close to the apocalypse as people felt they were, sooner or later they were going to have to stop waiting for the knockout punch to come and start putting one foot in front of the other again; they had to move on.  After a week or so I turned off CNN and became a hypocrite like so many others did.  I went back to ignoring the library of books I had to read, to putting off papers I had to write, to pining over the one who got away.  In life, we all have a part to play.  Most of us aren’t as noble as we’d like to be, as sympathetic as claim to be, or as motivated as we promise to be in the future.  The future for me was already a thing of the past; I wasn’t ready for a new position just yet; it would still be months before I could truly appreciate “Summer Days” for what it could be, before I could give in to my feet and let them dance again.

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.

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 executions of things is almost a formality; you become a virtual 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 the girl who told me about the college, I didn’t know anyone there.  I’d never been so excited.  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’s existence.  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 friends.  From the group of us I was the only one without a built-in date.  I had to find one.  The girl I wanted to go with, who I had asked to go with me, last minute she told me couldn’t go.  Strapped for a second option I swallowed my pride and asked a girl I worked with.  Throughout the summer this girl 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 were 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 brick covered in melted cheese.  My friends and I, an entire table worth of guests, when the bride and groom were turned we made a jailbreak, reconvening at the Olive Garden down the street.  Over spaghetti and tossed salad we poked fun at each other.  They tried their best to embarrass me.  My date, she didn’t hold back, piling on 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.  She mocked me, throwing up the four-fingered Westside salute, but she couldn’t hold back her laughter when he said, “Skibbedy-be-bop, a-Christopher Reeves/Sonny Bono, skis horses and hittin some trees.”  It made me smile; her sense of humor, the fact that she could laugh at a lyric like that as easy as I could, it was attractive.  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 this girl as a possibility for something more than just friends.  A summer earlier, I was madly—and silently—in love with her sister.  Part of me thought I still might be, and that was yet another reason to not pursue things.  By the time we pulled into the driveway, and she decided she wasn’t ready to go home yet, that she wanted to watch a movie, even if I still felt something for her sister, if I still had reservations about my feelings for her, it wouldn’t matter, no wasn’t a word she would accept that night.

A week later, with another couple 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” she pulled me aside.  “What’s my middle name?” she asked.  Three days earlier she had told me her life story, part of which included her middle name.  I could tell that she 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 a couple of weeks before I was to move, she was moving.  And it just so happened that where she was moving was fifteen minutes away from where I was moving.  That’s the kind of coincidence that gets confused for 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.  It was officially to begin after the conclusion of classes on the day, which also happened to be my birthday.  The day before was unseasonably warm; the lot of us wore shorts when we played our weekly football game.  I went to sleep at 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 thigh-high snow to get to school.  It took three hours to dig out four of my friend’s cars, and another hour for me to make the typical ten-minute drive to her apartment.  When I got there she wasn’t home.  I spent two hours digging a path for her to get her car in her garage.  I went inside to thaw, to breathe.  The phone rang.  “I don’t think I’m going to make it home tonight,” she said.  I asked if everything was alright, 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, “sorry.”  Two hours later she was home, convinced that if she didn’t come home, I would take it personal.  I did, regardless of the fact that she made it home just fine.  The next morning we drove to Buffalo, and flew out to my sister’s 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.”  She used the standard anti-Hallmark line: “It’s not you, it’s me.”   I said, “But…but” too many times, but it worked; after five minutes or so of talking she decided she didn’t need that time.  Two weeks later, I was wrapping presents while cooking dinner at her apartment.  She was to be home any minute.  We were going to have 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, but goodbye.”  The phone went silent.  Five months before I was at the pinnacle of the mountain I’d spent a lifetime trying to climb.  As I listened to the hum of the dial tone, I was back at the bottom, just like 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, 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, 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 I could at least hear the voice when it spoke, and I hated myself for it.  It was my fault; I went against my better judgment, I threw caution to the wind, and I failed.

The next morning, after class was over, I tried my best to sneak out before my friends could see me but I ended up running into everyone.  At first I tried to conceal my intention but after I while I just told them the truth: “I don’t think I’m coming back next semester.”  They asked why and I told them.  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 but 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 just fine.  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 every inch of myself.  I was a failure; a complete and utter failure, on par with Crystal Pepsi, Pat Boone going metal, and Vince McMahon’s XFL.  I was a bad joke, and now I had a 160 mile drive to ponder over the steaming pile of “I told you so” poo 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.

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 want to hear what I had to say, that would understand the things I couldn’t.  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 sorrow 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 f**k)

Slim Shady does not give a f**k what you think

(Tell ‘em to suck it)

If you don’t like it, you can suck his f**king c*ck

(Tell ‘em they kissed my a$$)

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

(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 miss-heard, 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 f**k him, and f** 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.

Growing up, I never thought about college much.  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, the girl I was dating cornered me.  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 all of your broccoli” she more or less gave me an ultimatum; I either went inside and signed up for college or I was cut off.  She knew how to bargain; her scare tactic worked, I went inside, filled out the applications, took the required testing, and I 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.  Not too long into my first semester her and I were no more, and college was more like a bad case of déjà vu than a step in the right direction.  There were hordes of people I’d seen since first grade in my classes; lunch tables looked like they did in tenth grade; the same faces, the same conversations.  All of it sucked; college the way I saw it was nothing but the past as a re-run, a precursor to going where I’ve already been.  With taking a couple semesters off it took me three-and-a-half years to graduate.  After I graduated all I wanted to do was get as far away from it all as I could.  I worked full-time.  When I wasn’t working, the guys I worked with and I played Mario Kart and Goldeneye on Nintendo 64.  Before long I started to notice grey hair, both on myself and on my friends.  Some were celebrating their 30^th birthdays, some were even approaching 40.  Nobody I knew seemed happy; everyone more or less just was.  One day, sitting in a room full of those friends, I started thinking about a way to get out.  Silently, I laid out scenarios.  College seemed the easiest way to go about making a change.  Besides, I never really got to experience college in the first place; what I had was nothing more than an extension of high school.  It seemed right; I thought I was owed the chance.

The thing I wondered about the most was living in a dorm.  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; at community college, from the flunkies who drank themselves out of more prestigious universities, I heard the stories of debauchery, of newfound friendships, and it 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.  When the daydreaming became a reality, and I was sent my room assignment and the name of my roommate, 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’d 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 before my roommate got there.  When he did, he pointed that fact out.  Immediately I knew I was in for some experience.

A college dorm is a lot like the way I picture Ellis Island was at the turn of the century; a bunch of people from seemingly all over converge into one space with their bare minimum of a lifetime’s worth of possessions in tow, everyone is full of hope based on their new opportunity, but the communication barrier is 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, but since I wasn’t a drinker I had to go with the next best option; music.

In such a confined space, when one person listens to something, everyone listens to it.  You either learn to like it or you put on some headphones.  But even that only lasts for so long.  Papa Roach’s “Last Resort” and 3 Doors Down “Kryptonite” were songs you’d hear from pretty much every room on your walk to the showers.  The time of day would usually help dictate the mood; the earlier in the day it was, the more pick me up type songs you’d hear; there was a day’s worth of boring classes to suffer through, and two meals of bad food to choke down.  That later it got, the more likely you were to hear a song that might draw down the girls from the 3^rd floor in hopes that they’d shake their asses.  Somewhere during that time came an album that changed everything.  I don’t remember the first time I heard Linkin Park’s Hybrid Theory, whose room I was in, what party I was at, but before long it was everywhere you went, everywhere you turned.  From pretty much every single room you walked by.  Some called it “nu-metal,” others called it “industrial rap,” or “rap-rock” but whatever it was, like the Black Death pandemic in the Middle Ages, the place and time were perfect for Hybrid Theory to flourish.  Outside of Eminem’s Marshall Mathers LP and Dr. Dre’s Chronic 2000 a year earlier, in terms of popular rap you were pretty much left with Nelly, DMX, and ‘Lil Kim.  Metal was on life support with Pantera on hiatus, and Metallica, after years of dropping Loads, was off fighting Napster.  In walked Linkin Park with their hybrid of rap and metal; they weren’t exactly proficient in either, but they were balanced, and it worked.

In college the two common bonds are that everyone is broke and everyone wants to have fun.  When you’re broke, it’s easy to get angry about it; you’ve got champagne dreams on a Ramen noodles and Mad Dog 20/20 budget.  Bad beer and no money is a bonding agent, a cultural Duct tape.  But misery loves company, and when your radio is saying, “I find the answers aren’t so clear/Wish I could find a way to disappear/All these thoughts they make no sense/I found bliss in ignorance” it makes perfect sense.  In days like those, under those circumstances, nobody is looking for the next Henry David Thoreau or Bob Dylan; the last thing they want is to have to think more than what’s already required of them; they want easy, they want accessible, they want something they can relate to.  Even within that communal environment it’s easy to feel isolated; student loans only covered so much and you’ve still got three books at $75 a piece to buy.  You want to scream.  It just so happened that Chester Bennington came along and he’s pretty good at screaming.  It sounds right, comforting even.  And hell, the rhythm of a song like “Points Of Authority” is something that people with little to no sense of rhythm can dance to.

A couple weeks after 9/11 I drove with a former girlfriend from school to the Adirondacks Mountains to meet up with her friends who were attending college up there.  We were to spend a night in the mountains, and then drive up to Montreal for a night of assumed insanity.  By that time, I was a drinker, and debauchery was in order. Her friends made a mix-tape of popular music for the ride, though 90% of the CD were songs from Hybrid Theory, and the only songs any of them wanted to listen to were “Crawling,” “One Step Closer,” “In The End,” and “Papercut.”  For early October the weather was beautiful, a perfect balance between comfortable and crisp.  The leaves were still clinging to the trees and they were full of awe-inspiring color, a virtual Crayola box.  We were well on our way.  Though the car was screaming, “I’m one step closer to the edge and I’m about to break” the world could do us no wrong.  Until we tried to cross the border.

The Border Officer we pulled up to decided he wanted to try and make an example of us.  We were easy enough marks; I was the oldest of the bunch at 22, I was driving a car still technically registered to my sister whose address I couldn’t remember off the top of my head, and his tone of voice made everyone in the car nervous enough for him to get suspicious.  He pulled us aside, checked out every inch of the car, and when he didn’t find what he thought he was going to he begrudgingly let us go.  Since we were already stopped we went into the Duty Free shop, loaded up on some discounted Russian fuel, and as we pulled far enough away from earshot the girls leaned out the windows and screamed, “Shut up when I’m talking to you!”  This guy whose was just doing his job, as overzealous as he might have been, gave the car a rallying cry, someone to rebel against in a time when, with tensions still high about the still-fresh tragedy, everyone was looking for one.

That night, as we hopped in and out of the countless bars, the toasts to, “The asshole at the border in the funny hat who needs to get laid” became too numerous to remember; he was our cause, our authority figure to hate, our enabler.  After a while, all toasts, no matter who they were to, became too hard to remember; McDonald’s seemed like the best idea ever, and the steps to get there became more and more of a challenge.  When we got back to the hotel I realized that my life’s greatest void was that I never got to be a bellman, despite the fact that at the time, I worked at a hotel.  I made friends with pretty much everyone in the hotel.  “You’re such a nice American,” more than one of the other guests said, which at almost any other time would ignite the assumed response of me asking, “As opposed to the rest of us?”  But words weren’t as easy to come by as smiles and hiccups were so I just pushed the buttons they asked me to, and we ascended upward.  Sometime that night the girl I came with, the girl I was still in love with who a couple weeks before decided she didn’t want to deal with labels anymore when it regarded to us, she found me in the stairwell, covered in different currencies, fast asleep to the world.   To get me to move she suggested a kiss.  To get me back to the room she suggested more.  The next morning my head felt like a cement-mixer and we were back to being unlabeled.  I took a shower, each pass of the soap across my body dislodging another Looney or Two-ney that somehow the night before was stuck on me.  By the time I was clean I was twenty-two dollars richer and furious that I let her play me again.

That night, we made it back to Adirondacks, and she and her friends continued the party.  She tried a couple different approaches to having a conversation with me and I gave her just enough to end each one as quick as I could; I wasn’t in the mood to give into her rules of our situation.  Not then.  When it came to matters of the heart, especially the ones involving her, I could be a simmering crock pot.  So I left.  I got in my car and I drove aimlessly around the unlit roads of the Adirondack Mountains; roads I never traveled down before, but seemed to know my way around.  With the sunroof open, the air was cold, sobering.  Winter wasn’t that far off, you could feel it.  The speakers were turned up high, drowning out the silence of the otherwise lifeless world.  I knew that it would only be a matter of time before I turned the car around and drove back to her, and she knew that too, and we would go back to whatever way she wanted things to be.

“Time is a valuable thing

Watch it fly by as the pendulum swings

Watch it count down to the end of the day

The clock ticks life away

(It’s so unreal)

Didn’t look out below

Watch the time go right out the window

Tried to hold on, but didn’t even know

I wasted it all just to

(Watch you go)”

Bad poetry or not, in the end “In The End” was the perfect anthem for that moment in time.  But sometimes anthems aren’t enough; they’re just songs on the radio that for one reason or another you can’t stop listening to.  Before you know it, you’re right back where you started.  Miserable.  There’s a line in High Fidelity where Rob, the protagonist of the story asks, “Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable?  Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?”  The minute I heard that line my appeal to Linkin Park made perfect sense.

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.