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.

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.