To the days when my car was reliable, first term freshman year of college before weird shit went down...

I had the sweetest memory when I woke up this morning of driving around North Bennington with Chris, the kid who lived next door to me. We'd go to Powers Market blasting Music to Make Love to Your Old Lady By by Lovage. Shit! Those were the days, in the daze of discovery. Two kids in the throes of their tumultuous late teens who had no idea what was up and what was down other than that Faith No More's Angel Dust remained awesome 14 years later and drinking excessively was fun. We bonded fast those first days of school over a shared obsession over all things Mike Patton (except, perhaps, Mike Patton himself). Then Milford worked with Mike Patton and said he's a huge tool. Noel said the first time he met me and Chris, we were arguing about Marxism (we were in the same introductory political economy class) and then started making out. Neither of us remember that. Hahahaha. I think that was how we all eventually related to each other -- making out. If we didn't make out with each other at some point chances are one of our friends had made out with us. College was kind of like high school with way less social restrictiveness, more illicit substances and ashtrays.

I think the nightmare starts around 3:30. Prepare for it by chugging some Robitussin.

"Just think, after the decline and fall of Western civilization, and it's inevitable, what we're gonna leave behind is masses of concrete and steel and millions of miles of paved highways and overpasses going nowhere."





These photograhs are from David Maisel's series "Oblivion". You can check out the whole series on Polar Inertia.

Man, so continuing on my 2010 tour of bitterness and dismissal of everything and everyone, about 2,280 miles off from devolving into a total bore I reckon...nah, just checked, I'm already there.

I woke up too early for important business matters. After I went cruisin' around old haunts for no real reason. No special memories really attached to this places as I've always put a roadblock between my heart and emotional connection to this region, all I was sure I was suited for as a kid was "getting the hell out of here". I still think that, but haven't the gall at the moment, nor the direction. All that time spent pouring over atlases, guidebooks, and my now outdated globe, lazily dreaming of road trips through Western Australia and explorations of lesser traveled coasts in countries with strange names, and what for!

Of course, there's always exploring places I've been a hundred times before.



I drove through Lynn, hell city, to Nahant Beach. I used to go to that beach often as a kid and also when I skipped class when I was putting in my dues at community college. I remember getting out my writing pad and going down to the beach and looking out and being well, totally uninspired to write anything other than a somewhat critical review of my present experience sprinkled with some big words I've forgotten the meanings of. It was a lonely time, not unlike now. Going to beaches, especially in September, instead of frolicking through meadows in the nude and bursting jewel weeds and trying to convince everyone of the greatness of Dutch hip hop or knocking knees with Adam. Today I was alone, no music. I tried to listen to the waves but it was the same old, crowded out by thoughts. Well I thought it was just me and a pair of broken sunglasses but then a spied a gaggle of teenaged hooligans hanging out on the breakers smoking and probably about 30 feet away from making rude remarks so I retreated back to my car. I wasn't feeling particularly witty.

<---- look at dem shells!

I couldn't do the drive back through Lynn again. In fact, I decided that the drive today was the absolute last time. It's conceivable that I can avoid that as I have no business there, seeing as I don't have any special interest in drugs, nor do I have an interest in prostitution or joining a gang or being a teen mom or any of those fates I may have narrowly avoided. On the way to the beach, I saw this funeral procession headed the opposite way and the cars were all out of order because people don't yield for such things there and they had these little white plastic signs on top that said "FUNERAL". With a steady shot and a winter backdrop it coulda been straight out of a Kaurismaki film. That seems like it could be spun into a good detail for a story someday but not now, now I am just focused on getting the hell out of this place.

I took a circuitous road home, looping 'round cul-de-sacs in Swampscott and Marblehead, the ye olde historic and weird as fuck (in a good way) Salem. I turned the cd player off, windows down. Uncomfortable silence and unable to turn off the constant interior monologue, I put on college radio 'cause I decided I'd rather be aurally violated by limpdick indie rock than blaring commercials for like, used cars and football, and whatever is top 40 right now or a half hour of silence. Lots of forgettable stuff these days (as ever, I suppose), why even bother, but then I came across some station coming in clear playing "Psycho Killer" by the Talking Heads. There was a time when I reflexively thought I didn't like the Talking Heads but I didn't have any respect for my elders then. And then when the song was over it was college kids messing around talking about music they were thinking about playing but just decided to talk instead. I wanted to change it. But they were just so... jocular. Gosh I just love college djs. "Oh who cares what we do, no one's listening anyway." I wanted to call them and tell them I was but they were just so into the idea of it being only them talking to dead air, broadcasting all this newfangled stuff, I couldn't bear to disillusion 'em! Then one of them got the other all excited teasing him about a motivational song for the one who had to cut out for class, getting all hyped up in that great pure way all "what is it what is it" and then the other one played this song and well, I didn't hear his reaction but I bet it got him through class. It was a song that used to do it for me in a way I guess I was pretending to like, "This Year" by the Mountain Goats and well, it's just too overblown, overwrought, overemoted, I don't know, I always found that guy's voice to be entirely too much. I wouldn't go so far as to call him limpdicked though.

Then I came home and thought some more and made some decisions about more roads to never go down again, literally and figuratively. Now just where was I headed?

"But...I've only slept with one girl this term." (week and a half into term)
"I thought you would be interested in helping me mess up the hotel bed a bit." (drunk British guy)
"Where is the third girl?" (Montreal classic, not even addressing the girl directly)
"Dolby sound will be then top crowned / When I put the needle into your groove" (De La Soul, 1989)

1: "That right there, you did that with steez."
2: "Yes, but what exactly is 'steez'?"
1: "Well you see, 'steez' is a neologism originating from the melding of the words 'style' and 'ease'. Originally all was chill but then some time in the mid 1990s it was raped and repurposed by skaters to serve their own twisted ends. Motherfuckers."
3: "Uh woah...did you go to college without telling me or something?"

Haha, oh I was just reminded of this, looking over what I'd written about roommates. I posted this as a comment elsewhere but it bears repeating because, haha, fuck, I just find it too much not to share without revealing identities of offenders.

My next-door neighbor freshman year of college used to blast 70s FM classics when she was getting it on with her boyfriend. One night another one of my neighbors and I got super stoned in the kitchen and just sat there laughing and critiquing their music whilst eating birthday cake. Whenever the song would change we'd pause from licking our fingers and turn to each other, doofy grins and bloodshot eyes for sure, and last about one second before totally losing it.
"Like, who seriously gets in the mood when they hear 'Hello it's me' in 2006?"
"Oh my god, America -- 'Horse with no name'?? No wayyyy..."
"How the hell do you 'make love' to that shit, come on!"
"I feel so mean but I can't imagine it any other way than being stiff and awful and beyond hip...ahahahah"

At one point they started blasting "Mr. Blue Sky" on a loop and we totally lost it. "For fuck's sake, ELO?! No! No! Oh god, oh god I'm dying, I can't deal with this!"
I guess they liked that one a lot because they played it ALL THE FUCKING TIME after that for the next few months. That one seems like it'd be akin to sticking your erect member in a snowbank but apparently it hit some sort of aural sweetspot because for the next two months that song would result in rhythmic creaking of dormitory beds. E L fuckin' O, that's right.

Goddamn. But here I am blasting Bryan Ferry and judging like this when I really just wish music video performances were still made just like this, lipsynching and weird props and weirder backup dancers and long shots and all. Pop music videos these days, when they happen at all, seem to be created for an audience with the approximate attention span of goldfish, with most shots exceeding not much longer than one second before cutting to the next disparate, flashy image.



But do I 'make love' to it? Hell naw.

I was originally going to post at length here about it but I changed my mind and it was relegated to a Microsoft Word document like so many other things. I write compulsively. Actually, more accurately, I type compulsively because my handwriting is illegible to even myself unless I write really slowly but that is tedious, cramps my delicate piano fingers and I can't write as fast as I think. However I am fortunate to be able to type nearly as fast as I think. I mean I think faster sometimes but mostly typing class was actually pretty useful, torturous as it was at the time, especially when the only sentences we could type in correct form were constructed from the letters asdfghjkl and punctuation mark ;. Alas; all sad lads as fags. That sort of thing. Eventually I learned to type beyond the bounds of one line of letters and one punctuation mark on the American English keyboard and I've been filling up disk space since then with observations on anything and everything at a rate of over 100 words per minute sometimes, when I'm into the groove. I bet a lot of people do that, write in word documents or wordpad or some snazzy Mac software or Linux or Unix if they're better at computing than I am. All those thoughts poured into electronic form that go unpublished, I wonder where they go. Landfills eventually, I would presume, or the electronic equivalent of such (r.i.p. Geocities). There's so much good stuff out there (o.k. not on Geocities) so I can't get too down on everything in the world. A good deal of it is bad but what about all the secret geniuses out there whose words will make everything in you fit to burst? Goddamn, I want to know who they are! And where to find it!

But mostly I am thinking of this, a known variable in the space/time continuum who is capable of exactly that, Momus, who has the benefit of a linguistic background, a few decades, and musical talent and also used to keep a really awesome blog but writes books and makes music more frequently instead now:

I was thinking just now, ruminating bitter like good ol' two buck Chuck Bukowski, all the things that used to matter so much more. Though I was aware I was growing and changing throughout the college years, some ideas remained steadfast in my mind and were thought "important" for the long run for whatever stupid reasons. Like, That’s it, I’m done growing, and this is how I’ll always be. Shit. I don't know about this.

The first being the Liza, Lisa, Elizabeth or whatever, the girl who was supposed to be my roommate first term freshman year of college. Roommates are a big deal when you’re going off to college, living out of the house for the first time and with some strange person who will probably suck. I was nervous as hell as to who I’d end up getting stuck with. The girl next to me got a girl who was really nice other than the fact that she had really snotty friends and a habit of frequently locking her out of the room to have sex. The guy next to me ended up with an emotionally unstable guy who had a drug-induced meltdown sophomore year. The girl across the hall had drawn a snotty private arts high school grad (rejected from Cooper Union, presumably) who wore avant garde jumpsuits and considered herself too good for everything. The girl I had was from Idaho and had a stupid email address -- something like "starfaerie1987", and the campus student life kept giving me different variants of what her name was. I got there a bit earlier and unpacked my side of the room. Waited a day, then another day and she still didn't show up. I was getting kind of worried. More time to come up with ideas about just how freaky she actually was going to turn out. My house chair (a resident adviser, basically) told me he'd put her with me because I on my housing application I’d said that I'm atheist and she described herself as a militant atheist intolerant of all religious scum and mindless sheep and well, sorry. But she didn't show up. I was relieved because I had been paranoid about sharing close quarters with a total stranger, never having any alone time, and well, she sounded kind of nuts anyway and there were more than enough of those people around on campus anyway. Plus, I was worried that she would judge me. It was fun, though, from time to time trying to picture what she would have been like. Liza, I can’t remember what her last name was anymore. Wakefield? No, that's not it, that's the boring twin from Sweet Valley Twins. (Perhaps a more relevant topic of discussion.) Maybe she was the boring twin, too? Now the whole Lisa thing, the way I first thought about it, it's just a mildly funny story amongst college friends who understand what the experience of a roommate at that place in particular is like, probably not relevant to anyone else, filler for conversation gaps if anyone mentions college roommate stories, not a topic worthy of discussion to bring up amongst people who weren't there ‘cause that part of our lives is over. God that sounds depressing, putting it like that, but it's more of a relief than anything.

Mostly I wasn't thinking too much about Eliza or whatever. Nah, my thoughts quickly jumped over to another college thing. Yeah, I still have a weird crush on him, but not head over heels infatuation like before. A scene and conversation I've revisted a few times since: This musician I'd admired from afar for years and I walking through the snow in December. Discussing realistic prospects of teaching on campus, places to go, friends, fears. It was wild to talk with someone like that. "Are you sure we haven't met before?" I've heard that one a few times. I must have doppelgangers all over the country. He was surprisingly candid in revealing his bitterness towards an old friend and musical collaborator for abandoning his roots. He pointed to the house next to mine on the corner of First Street and said, "A few years back, him and his band were up playing a show, it was supposed to happen in the student center but the power went out or something, and anyway, they ended up playing an acoustic set in the living room of that house. It was like old times. It was great." I feel like, in some ways, I've abandoned him, too. I deleted all of my albums by that band a few days ago, the back-in-the-day jangly lo-fi folk ones. I still own the physical copies, but I don’t have a stereo so most likely they'll just collect dust. What of the sweet wistful pop of the first few albums, supplanted in favor of...loud dance music and a flamboyant stage persona? I asked him, "Hey, what's up with that anyway? The dance music...and exposing himself on stage. Didn’t see that coming." He was all, "Me neither. But he'd always wanted to be more successful, you know. Repressed upbringing, and now he's got a family, a house, gotta make money somehow. I guess this is what he’d always wanted to do." He didn't sound bitter about that, though, I don't mean to cast him as a spiteful sort of person, far from it. How strange, how strange, how things between friends change. You know, when a friend out of nowhere pulls a total 180 and finally has the balls to do what they really wanted to do after all these years of knowing them. I ended up going the way of electronic hi-fi music, too.

The other thing I thought of was the part in Mount Analogue where the characters have to cast aside their old world identities (artist, inventor, etc) as they are no longer relevant guises to hide their true selves behind before they begin their goal of ascending the mystical mountain. What identity do I have to cast aside? Soon, it will be some sort of temporary occupation, most recently it's student, on campus psych major with obscure musical taste and riot grrrl dresses and craft beer and gin only, see friends bands not stupid parties. Now it's nothing but that old negative underachieving self-talk "unemployed", which isn't even an identity really as it's a negative one characterized by the absence of something, something I didn't really choose to take on myself.

Liza, Elizabeth, whoever, I ended up meeting her later. She showed up two and a half years late, with jangling facial piercings and bracelets, granny glasses, expensive bohemian wardrobe and Mary-Kate Olsen-inspired hair, and a pack a day Benson and Hedges habit. I didn't actually introduce myself, just observed like a naturalist does with an unfamiliar, possibly invasive species appearing in a new habitat. I found out who she was when another friend of mine was complaining about her, "You know, that girl with like, 4 lip piercings who reeks of smoke, Benson and Hedges – disgusting, and is always fucking asleep during class -- I think her name is Lisa or Liza ____". I made the connection and I was impressed by whatever transformation had undergone. I like to think that she spent those two and a half years in preparation, reinventing herself from "starfaerie1987" for the all important identity and image parade that is college, or more likely adolescence in general, particularly amongst those of creative leanings. Anyway, she fucked one of my friends, slept through class a lot, smoked a lot, and left halfway through the term. I guess that goes back to my original point. How I used to be. What a relief it is, that I have in fact changed, though I still tend to drag the past around with me like a ball and chain.