372 days ago I sat at a different computer in a different home in a different town and wrote my first blog entry. It was even on a different blogging site. I wrote about the same thing that I always write about: the power of film and music, screens and sound. It was about letting go, for an hour, two hours, and being somewhere and something else. It was about turning into rhythms and noise, becoming the static crackling through the clouds. It was about escape.

At 12:00 a.m. on the day of my first blog post I had just turned 22. It was my birthday and that afternoon a few friends and some family and I drafted our own teams of “what ifs” and “if onlys” for a fantasy baseball league online. Now I’m 23. “I keep forgetting how young you are,” a friend of mine always says. She’s older than me and has a tendency toward forgetfulness. “Wisdom comes with age,” she said, as if it’s there, smoking and dancing on top of sugar and yeast. As if it’s there, wisdom, hot and bored and melting inside of candle wax, stuck inside the sleepy monotone of “The Birthday Song.” As if it’s waiting for you. As if it’s granted.

In a year’s time things have a habit of happening. Changing. You get a new computer, a new keyboard. You get a new TV, a Blu-ray player. You get a haircut. In a year’s time, you send out resumes and work above your pay-grade. You write a book and try to read more. You give up cooking becuase you live with your parents. You swallow pills. You start wearing colored socks instead of white.

I wasn’t being sappy when I did this: pulled a heavy cardboard box from the top shelf of my closet. I wasn’t being curious or sentimental. Practicality told me to take it down, open it; it told me to feel around the ridges of stickers and taped-on song lyrics I had applied too long ago to remember why. It said to eye old birthday cards and dump the contents of a worn old Ziplock onto the comforter on my bed: some marbles from when I was this [---] tall, guitar pics from ~rd grade, two dyed rabbit’s feet.

It was practicality, me scavenging through a box buckling with the weight of past’s debris. It was to get rid of stuff, stuff that doesn’t make sense anymore: plastic crucifixes, old wallets, a pitch pipe, the broken wingtip of a cardboard rocket that I made in high school with an old girlfriend who launched herself into the sky one day and got tangled in the clouds, drizzling down for years in tears of ink and acid letters.

When I touched the wingtip, I felt like this: [ ____________ ].

In a year, you tire of symbolism. Irony gets wrinkled and lame.

“Are you having fun?” A happy girl with distracted eyes kept her balance on the outskirts of a dance floor and looked at me. She was in a blue dress. Guys with shirts unbottoned to the middle were walking by and ordering drinks. Her friends were there and she was celebrating growing up. “Birthdays are overrated these days,” she said to me once, then hugged me for a long time, so long that I noticed the feel of her hair and just exactly how she smelled. “Are you having fun?”

I nodded, as you do, felt sweat from the bottle I was holding run cold across my fingers. Fun was an experience I found harder and harder to gauge these days. I knew I had it when I was small. I knew I had it playing “rubber ball” and “tennis ball” and ambling through haunted houses and making forts. I knew I had it just before I fell, from the very top of a basketball pole I was climbing just to prove that I could. I was having it, I knew it, just before I fell from that pole, dragging my leg down the metal and across a protruding screw on the way down. It was the first and only time I’ve ever had to go to the hospital. I was 10 or 11. I could’ve been 9.

These days, fun’s face curls up in an enigmatic grin to show its teeth. It stares out at weekend skies from ambiguous eyes and wonders, Is this enough? Wasn’t the week worth more than this?

In a year you write and watch and read and drink, and you wait and look and feel in darkness for those moments, those peaceful, quiet moments–those “surreal walks through breezy backstreets in perfect weather.” To capture them inside the empty jar you’re holding, to watch them spark and paint the inside yellow. But every time the wind blows, changing the current of the air, you think you hear the flutter of delicate silken wings against it, brushing past your neck and heading away from you. They soar, pulsing toward a brighter light that’s somehow always at your back. They beat and you follow them, for a year you follow them, into the burn of a greater sense of urgency, into the crack of another morning breaking.

]]> http://mellotronsounds.com/index.php/2010/04/04/chill-chaser-ii-next-year-nostalgia/feed/ 0 http://mellotronsounds.com/index.php/2010/03/30/i-wrote-a-book-get-a-copy-30-off-free-shipping/ http://mellotronsounds.com/index.php/2010/03/30/i-wrote-a-book-get-a-copy-30-off-free-shipping/#comments Tue, 30 Mar 2010 23:02:00 +0000 Mike http://mellotronsounds.com/?p=2073 Friends, Family, Turtle Fiends,

Most of you have probably heard sometime within the last couple months that I’ve been working on a book. I’ve joked about it a lot—my “opus,” my “turtle book”—but the truth is that putting this thing together has truly been one of the most demanding, stressful, insomnia-inducing, 24/7 kinds of crazy I’ve ever experienced. But also surprisingly rewarding. My life since December has been an absolute blur.

I call it a “turtle book,” and it is about sea turtles, but over the span of the project the subject transformed, and I like to think of the final product as more a creative study of passion and human habit/obsession. Most of the first 2 chapters outline the different turtle species, their threats, diets (blah, blah, blah), but the rest is about this group of volunteers—“The Turtle Patrol”—and the unbridled, completely unrequited love they have for the animals they protect. To most of these activists, it isn’t about the work or “environmentalism” in the traditional sense of the word. It’s about their “love” of the turtles, an almost spiritual bond they’ve formed with the beach. It’s about picking something, and calling it theirs.

I tried to add some humor; there’s tons of pictures, interviews; and at the end of the day, I think I was able to take a topic that didn’t at all seem to be “me” and meet it somewhere in the middle.

Releases April 10th. CLICK HERE to read the full back cover “pitch” and get in on the Friends & Fam 30% Off /FREE SHIPPING promo.

Now, as promised, the GQ-inspired “serious business-casual” back cover pic. And the About the Authors pic, too. You know, for laughs.

p.s. If you read and like the book, a rate or write-up on Amazon would be huge (if your last name isn’t Cavaliere). It will raise its search relevancy. Thanks! TRACKS ON AMAZON.

Wrinkled and worn, you know it’s mine because of the stains.

Three years I’ve kept it–four if you count 2006, the year I started halfway in and only rated in stars, the year I started Netflix. Three years I’ve kept it, decorated its pale inside covers with multicolored stubs, and after every movie I watch, I take it out and we keep each other company in letters. I talk. It listens, lying flat on its back on top of my desk as if it were waiting all night for this.

After so long, precious few of the pages inside are still clean or tight in their binding. Most are crumpled and loud in blotches of spilled drinks that somehow, after being repeatedly patted and blown on and dried, still make the paper look damp and slightly bruised. Smudges of black where things that were once important enough to write down used to be. It’s the kind of character you get when you dip manuscripts into coffee to make them look ancient. Except this is from clumsiness. And time. Words just age faster, I guess.

After four years I’ve seen 583 movies–the proof is right in front of me. And that’s not including ones I’ve rewatched or caught on TV (those don’t count). Every one gets logged, like memories, complete with accompanying ideas and emotions that light the scene of each particular collection of hours, recount the highlights, offer context in a web of barely visible veins creeping underneath the pages like laugh lines.

Soon the next turn will be to cardboard and the final sentence etched may be rushed or end without a punctuation mark; already, a new book is waiting patiently and anonymously in some shadow in the closet. A flimsy, inevitable layer of white–that’s all that’s left before all the words stuffed inside this celluloid diary grow too heavy and spread to the back, infect the spine, until the book can’t hold any more and it collapses into my bookshelf. Not living. Not listening. Just a bunch of snapshots captured in the halflight of projector burn.

This was what we set out for together in 2006, back when “the end” was no more than a metaphor and film device, before it was even set in ink, scrawled to shaky, fragile life–and then gawked at.

I have this thing about timelines. This theory about them. Relationships, philosophies, “worldviews” – it’s funny, they’re all so important until they’re not anymore. But when they are, they’re you. Then you get older. Life happens, and you usually end up looking back and laughing. Like you know better. It’s all a scope thing.

So, You Are Here. Where? After what was and before what hasn’t happened yet, I assume. Before what maybe feels like it won’t ever happen. Before whatever. The sad truth is that “Here” is actually nowhere. Nowhere the same as in how the internet is nowhere, how words are nowhere. The same as in how sadness is nowhere, as in the word “indie” and how it actually means nothing but people always use it to describe music or themselves nowhere. The same as in time and the broken trails of exploding fireworks.

I haven’t written anything substantial in a while. I try and I look at what’s down and none of it makes any sense. It’s all some kind of forced metaphor, some persona, some other person’s voice. For a stretch there I was posting everyday just to prove that I could. It was my newest goal. My newest “what this site should be,” like I had something to prove. And in a way I guess I did. It’s Dustin Hoffman swinging a cross at all the pissed off wedding guests in The Graduate, sliding it through the door handles, locking them in. It’s him making a get-away, taking a stand, getting onto a bus exhilarated, then catching his and breath and coming back down and thinking, “…oh, shit. Now what?” The point is, you soon come to notice something undeniably sad about yourself, about the nature of routines. You notice it after you watch or read something amazing, or terrible, and how your first reaction is to plug it into your blog online, your twitter account. Your timeline. It’s all the same thing. This is me swinging a cross at all the naysayers, all the everyone who holds back a smirk when I tell them I majored in English, then asks if I want to be a teacher.

This is what happened to me on August whatever of 2009. Dear Diary. This is how I felt. This is how I lived. This is me real. Really.

It’s funny, really, this absurd desire we have to be heard, this ridiculous compulsion to have ideas, and record them. I have this constant back-and-forth with writing, this always overarching resentment for it. Ask most people and they’ll say that writing’s cathartic. But I never got that. I got it more as some goal that I was aspiring to. Something I could be good at. Someone I could be, exaggerated and dizzy and everything that is and isn’t actually me.

After my month of posting every day I wanted a return to something more real, something more primal. I wanted to retire from Facebook, never touch my keyboard again and find something to do outside. I wanted to go swimming. I wanted to work out, play softball, sweat. I wanted to look people in the eye. I wanted to drum on buckets in the park.

So You Are Here. In your twenties. In the middle of a TV series. In progressive rock and mellotrons and movie trailers and books. You Are Here. In the Golden Age of television, watching shows like Breaking Bad, Six Feet Under, The Sopranos, Mad Men, This American Life, The Office, Hung, Dexter, Tell Me You Love Me, In Treatment, like you’re in on some ground floor, in the presence of real brilliance, real reality.

This piece doesn’t mean anything again. It’s just another one of my odes to not knowing, one of my homages to time and place and confusion and noise. People are in love and breaking up and far away and longing and opening up and shutting down and making dinner and blacking out. There’s no way to make sense of it. And maybe that’s why “insights” are so interesting: because they’re all so piecemeal, never really getting it all but never really giving up on trying. All there is is TV and soundscapes. If you accept that, then you can really start to enjoy something so simple as swimming. You start to get why so many people love the beach.

I don’t think I’ll be happy until this blog is the most jumbled thing I could possibly make it. Oh, and The Ladykillers sucked, by the way. I’m not gonna write a review on it. And I’m not gonna edit this before I post it, either. I think it’s better that way.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
My day starts with stoplights. Blue turned red. The road. My hands on the wheel. And songs about suffering.

This is what the morning sounds like.

I remember she tipped the bottle awkwardly when she motioned to me, pouring the rest of what was inside steady from her back-turned hand. The way she motioned, nudging her head quietly toward my glass like a question, it was like for a second we were alone in that kitchen rather than crowded in it, rather than loud with drink and expectation. For a lot of us, it was the end of our last college semester. Tomorrow our futures would start and we were celebrating, taking the night to enjoy standing still before we had to move again. And the way she moved the bottle toward my glass, in that one private moment between just the two of us, we acknowledged each other in a way the classroom could never have the size to hold. We transcended, two prospective lovers grazing fingers under a table. We exhaled, two children whispering in each others’ ears.

I moved my glass without thinking and watched the stream stain it red then slide down its curves, leaving them hazy and tinted. I had had this wine before. If I concentrated hard enough, I could almost taste the years gone by. The bottle was a 2006.

“I like to share good wine,” she told me. And I told myself I’d use that quote in a piece sometime. It was romantic and innocent, though we were neither. We were writers, at a dinner party, drinking Cabernet and reading our work behind a lonely stand-up lamp and the soft sound of a waterfall somewhere over our professor’s pool.

If you blinked too long you’d think it was rain. It’d be dark then, black, and the water, both forceful and submissive, would sound like some kind of answer, a metaphor for letting go or an analogy for all the different tomorrows we might have. We weren’t all young but we all had futures ahead of us. We were holding them, those delicate papers with letter-shaped ink stains lined from top to bottom, those palimpsestic ledgers that held all of our veiled confessions and all the articulate ways we tried to come to terms with them. We held them gently under that lamp, that beam with its neck craned over our hands like so many eyes and ears. And we became the rain.

The first day back I felt like I was visiting. My old job, it had me pulling staples, stacking paper, moving folders, writing file numbers. It had me pressing Enter on a keyboard and clicking a mouse. One person said, “You know you’ll have to put that English degree in the closet for a while.” She was making a joke. I laughed.

I was moved when Rodney read his piece in front of the waterfall. He wrote about music, old gospel records he’d gotten from his grandfather, scratchy, rickety old things he knew he should be too cool to like but did anyway. He was young. He’d played the albums to a new friend. They bonded.

“When we talked about music, we were actually talking about self,” he wrote, reading in his usual modest and affected lean. I watched him. I looked around the group, the half-glasses of wine and empty beer bottles. The plates with Greek olives and hummus and shards of shrimp curry. And I knew that I’d miss this. I wondered what had happened to the stiff and impersonal academia that I grew up on and learned to hate so many years ago. I thought about its fluorescent eyes and misshaped footprints, watching around the group as faces opened up at whoever was standing with their papers behind the lamp but before the water. And I felt that I’d finally fallen onto something real, something mutual and worth saving.

The wine was dark and warm in my chest now. It had almost gotten down to my fingers. The moon and the world were each outside of the patio screen. They were far away and covered in mesh.

When I got home I brushed my teeth and washed my face and stood in front of my open closet, staring. I scanned over everything, all the shirts I was sick of and the shorts I wondered why I even bought. I stood there for a while, imagining myself in tomorrow’s clothes. And I wondered what each article would whisper to the wind as they touched outside of my front door in the morning. I wondered how their colors would project off the sun and if they could hide the fact that, underneath the bright, they were just as desperate and over-thought as everything else.

I thought, These are my clothes. And I sifted through my sock drawer, pulling out the older looser ones and feeling their age on my fingers. I hated loose socks, the way they slid on my heels and lost their shape. Tomorrow I’d throw them all away, start again, maybe buy all new pairs in all new colors. I thought, Tonight I’ll sleep, and I pulled a shirt from the rack and held it against the light, at angles, examining it.

I thought, What goes with red?

I wondered, Is this what a grown-up would wear?

I stared. The closet’s yellow glow casted in bursts on the carpet and surrounded me in an electric cloud of half-night, where I could stay forever, be safe and never go to sleep and never wake up. I’d just wait there inside of it a while, quiet and weightless. The light was soft, it wouldn’t mind me staying. And the air was light, faintly sparking around my hands and head with some kind of energy, tiny, almost invisible flashes of heat. I’d just stand there as though I were floating in it, my own personal cloud of nowhere and nothing. And I’d wait. I’d wait for it to open up and turn me into rain again.

“hangers” from yyellowbird on flickr

So I’m sitting here listening to Regina Spektor for the first time to expand my horizons, a cup of now-cold coffee at my side and a window with the blinds open, right there. I’m at my parents house and I remember when it used to be my house too. But now it’s theirs. I just live here.

It’s funny when I look around at this makeshift desk I have set up. It’s a foldout. There’s a mousepad, mouse, a stereo in the corner with an iPod docked. I have an external harddrive attached and this journal where I keep a log of all the movies I watch, complete with notes and ratings, lying beside it. There are wires hanging and dangling and flowing from the backs of all of these machines, machines that count the minutes of my day for me so I don’t have to. They count the minutes, collect them and keep them for me. So I don’t have to. This is the chronicle of my early twenties, they tell me. This is my timeline. This is what happens after college is over.

It’s funny. I got my first ticket the other day. It came in the mail with photos and website links attached where I can go and see myself speeding, turning right on a red light at 10:30 on a Friday night without stopping first. The ticket tells me that when I rolled through, I offended the state $125 worth. And they need that money back. It’s the legal, camera-on-top-of-stoplight equivalent of saying a couple Hail Marys and an Our Father. All I have to do is pay and my record will be clean again. Amen.

Regina’s done and now I’m listening to Bon Iver for the first time. I guess this is my indie phase. Outside the sky is getting darker. The numbers on my alarm clock are blue and big and shaped into 1s and 2s. It’s the afternoon. And at night my fantasy team will play. A-Rod seems to be getting hot, too. I have four pitchers starting.

In the car that night, the night I ran the red light, I saw the camera flash loud behind me. It painted my interior in light for just a second, mirrored and richocheted off of glass and metal like when my brother and I used to flip on and off the bedroom lamp as fast as we could when we were small, pretending it was lightning. It was as if the bulbburst caught me, the headlights that freeze the deer mid-street. It reminded me of when I drove to the city for work once during my last semester of school. It was raining then. The streets were slick and grey. I turned a bend too hard and lost control of my car. It fishtailed, slipped, my braked-tires glided, and I remember not being scared. My hands on the wheel, trying to straighten out and get control again, I remember thinking: “Hm, this is bad,” the same way you would on the go-kart track when an uncle bumps you to get ahead and your wheel steers itself into the tires stacked on the shoulder. Except this time I knew I could die. The car could turn over or flip, I could hit the side-rails, rear-end the stopped traffic ahead of me and bash my forehead into the dashboard. There would be blood in my hair. I’d miss work.

But my heart didn’t sink or speed up. I didn’t sweat or get tense. Wasn’t it normal to?

On the other side of my window there’s a lake. During the day, when the sun’s at the right angle, the water looks black. At sunset, the light bends over its ripples like the inside of a glass pyramid. It’s a funhouse mirror, a sanded-down reflection of the world, one without hard angles, without edges or endings. If you dive in and hold your breath, I sometimes wonder, where would it take you? What does the world look like on the other side of softer reflections?

My mother’s making lamb tonight. She’ll marinate and season it and I’ll grill it. My dad will probably eat a frozen dinner, one of those red boxes with a Styrofoam tray inside that you microwave. And tomorrow I’ll wake up and I’ll wonder when my life will start, when I’ll stop being jaded, stop thinking, find a job, stop remembering. I’ll pick up my mail-in ticket and follow it to a website with an open hand held out, the other one available to slap me on the wrist. Then I’ll pay. This is me learning my lesson.

I moved the last of my stuff out of my apartment a few days ago, packed it to bring it back to my parents’ house where I lived when I was young, back to the same room whose walls are now drenched in so many years of forgotten words and smiles and silence, hardened drips of them still visible under all this blue paint. I imagine most of what’s gone was probably so important then. Cleaning out drawers and closets, I came across papers from the past few years of school, notes and essays and jotted-down ideas. Some had dates, others didn’t. Leafing through them was like watching homemovies on an old and tired TV, sifting through the static to see yourself, squinting through the snow and grain to hear the way you used to talk.

There was this writing exercise, I did it in one of my first workshops. The idea was to think of a body of water, a color, a fruit, a month, a job and something you’re afraid of. Then you had to incorporate those things into a short story passage.

We were given 10 minutes to turn word salad into poetry, to comb through our memories and draw something new, color outside the lines of structure and sense. Capture that one particular moment in time, that specific “one of those days,” and hope that it says something real. Maybe years from then we’d find the exercise, dig it out of a notebook or backpack and read it. Maybe it would contain some kind of subconscious truth or wisdom, a time-capsule with a toy you’ve forgotten about locked inside, a frayed old photo or a yellowed love letter.

Or maybe it would still just be word salad.

It isn’t March. I think it’s May. The summer. The summer night is black and dark blue with mounds of dirt stacked to make clouds in the sky. God, the undertaker, must have gotten sloppy when he was digging a grave to bury day. I’m nervous, too nervous. It’s a little ridiculous. It’s like the Nile turned white-water and is surging through my stomach. I want to kiss her but my body’s stiff. I want to feel those soft lips moist like the inside of peaches pressed on mine, dry and chapped and decaying like zombies. Zombies aren’t good kissers. They lunge and plant awkwardly. Then they die. I don’t die, and I’m not a zombie, but I kiss like one. We both laugh when it’s over, and I smile now. I wonder if zombies have good memories...

Picture “Haarlem, Netherlands ” courtesy of hans solcer on Flickr

Fine. I admit it. I like 7th Heaven and I refuse to let you make me feel bad about it.

It all started a few weeks ago when, like every Monday and Friday, I woke up early for my internship and was drowsily flipping through the channels and eating my breakfast. I think first I stopped on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, but it just wasn’t doing it for me like it used to; I remembered it being so much funnier. This episode, though, I was timing the punch-lines, deafened by the laugh-track, bored by almost everything else.

Maybe it was too early in the morning.

A few channels up and I came to 7th Heaven, sitting pretty but so alone on channel 20, where you’d never find it unless you strayed from your usuals and pushed the up and down buttons instead of the numbers. It glowed on my screen like the wallflower at the dance—not the ugly one, not the sad one you always felt bad for but the cute and quiet one, the one just on the brink of being beautiful, although she never quite got there. This was the girl you always secretly had a crush on but never did pursue . Maybe you thought your friends would laugh, or maybe you were just as shy and mediocre as she was. Maybe you were just afraid to slow dance.

But it felt like I had bumped into an old friend, a confidant who’s heard all my secrets but I hadn’t seen in years. We both stared at each other for a long time, my eyes on the TV, the TV’s on mine, and we watched each other all the way till commercial break.

It was so surreal. I felt old all of a sudden. All the characters who were so young before, who were in daycare or diapers or little girl haircuts back when I’d watch them in the ‘90s with my parents, had grown up. They were in Seminary school and they had husbands and some of them had grey hair. They’d all survived my childhood and stood before me different than they were before, as if to prove that time had passed, that a certain part of me had ended and been replaced with something new, something fluid and indefinite, something I was supposed to mold with my fingers and eventually become. I didn’t even know the show was still on the air. These were probably reruns. It didn’t matter. I wasn’t tired anymore.

In this episode, the writers were tackling the race issue with deftness and tact. The story took place around Martin—a new character, the obligatory male heartthrob—who had his car vandalized with racially insensitive insults just because he was friends with a black guy. We never did see exactly what was written on the car—the writers wanted to avoid any exploitation (there’s the tact I was talking about)—but he brought it over to the Camden’s house to show the Reverend and they spoke about it at length, staring at the back window where the words had been painted and shaking their heads.

Stroking his chin, the good Reverend asked Martin why he thinks this could have happened. And then Martin’s father walked in through the side gate. The Reverend turned to him, motioned toward the car and said something like, “You just don’t think that an incident like this could happen in Glenoak…”

Martin’s father fired back, “Incident? This is a crime, a hate crime, and whoever’s behind it should be locked up!”

From that line alone I was hooked. You can’t write stuff like that! Well, I guess you just can’t help but be enamored with it.

Since then I’ve gotten well reacquainted with the characters and their stories through our mornings together. That theme song with the synthesized choir “aahhhh” at the end; the way every episode starts with a solid minute or two of dialogue-less action while the credits finish rolling; the montage of actors turning and smiling at the camera (my personal favorite: Catherine Hicks, the mom, resting her chin on her fist like they tell you to do in elementary school photos and putting on a warm, close-mouthed grin that says, My children are growing up so fast. I still remember when you were small…)….there’s just something about it, all of it, even down to the way she smiles–as if everything is going to be okay and she really does believe it.

I walked passed a girl on the sidewalk today who was smiling a similar kind of smile. She wasn’t walking with anybody or staring at anything in particular—she was just looking in front of her, smiling at the sky and the ground as if remembering something funny or perfect. I walked by her and imagined home movies playing in her eyes. Maybe she was remembering back to when she was little and her sister or brother would jump off the see-saw while she was stuck on the other end, in the air, and her side would crash to the ground rather than just bounce on it. Maybe she was thinking back to just last night, remembering the look on her boyfriend’s face when he told her that he loved her for the first time, and then the way her words were weightless as she said it back to him, and then their first real kiss.

We passed each other and the rest of the sidewalk was empty ahead of me. My headphones were in. I didn’t used to listen to music on campus—I felt it shut me out too much from the rest of the world–but after a year and a half of never having a real conversation with anyone on the bus or on sidewalks, I stuffed my ears with white and started turning up the volume. The girl was gone now. And I hoped she was still smiling.

The Deacons are all over the Revered. They want change in the church, their crony told him, avoiding eye contact, grimacing. “Some of the Deacons feel that your sermons have, um, jumped the shark,” he said. “…Their words, not mine.”

Ever since Eric found out he was sick, that his heart was starting to tire of pumping, they feel that his sermons have gotten too morose, too many life and death issues, too much soul searching. They’re trying to replace him with a “younger, hipper” preacher. They want to advertise at the local used car dealership. He doesn’t know what to do.

T-Bone just went with Kurt for a driving lesson and Kurt was blowing air horns at him to simulate a high pressure situation. “This isn’t helping!” T-Bone cried. “This is hazing.” T-Bone was homeless and crashing at the church until the Camdens took him in. His parents abandoned him, but he’s still so innocent and charming. They’re all so innocent and charming, even when they’re not. This is how life turns out, I think, with yet another stray kid living in the Camden house every time I turn on their electric lives on Mondays and Fridays. No one is broken or lost here—even when they are.

I take a gulp of my coffee and have to leave for my internship before the episode is over, never any later than 9:45. I dump the too sweet bottom of the cup into the sink and make a brown splash. I never get to see how it ends.

On a bench on campus, sitting just passed a shadow casted on the ground behind her, a girl leaned in and talked into her cell phone. “Seriously,” she exasperated, “graduation is less than a month away.” She sighed and I sighed with her. I don’t have a job lined up yet and I don’t know where to look. The economy’s terrible. On the shuttle home, it was only me and five other people and one of them was lying on the seats, laid out on his back with his hands still on his stomach. He was staring up at the cieling and watching the hand straps dangle from the roof and wave at him. Glenoaks’s economy is probably recession-proof. I bet none of the Camden’s ever woke up one morning to realize that during some time in their sleep years of their life had slipped out the open window, that they were floating somewhere now, out in the trees, in passing scents and thoughts in twilight.

Maybe I should have studied abroad. Maybe it’s right what they say, that college is the best years of your life and you never get them back and the real world sucks serious ass. I saw a car dented and splintered and lying on its side in the median last night, close to the exit of campus. The windshield was a mosaic, a beach of sand struck by lightning and turned into a million shards of glass, a kaleidascope of moonlight and flashing red and blue. I got home and my friend asked me to be in his wedding party. We used to play flashtag together in his yard almost every night in the summers.

Maybe I should have dated more girls and gone to more parties.

It’s so hard to break in and get your first writing job, my told me, organzing a stack of papers on her desk, adjusting her black-rimmed glasses. “That’s what internships are for.”

“I’ve waited too long,” I shook my head. “I just need to do something.”

“If you want to be a writer,” she told me, “sometimes you have to start with things you don’t know, take what you can get.”
Did I even want to be a writer? I nodded absently and thought about May, about the ceremony I wouldn’t be walking in becuase of how few people I actually know who are graduating on time. I thought about Lucy Camden, and whether she was over her miscarriage from last year. I thought about moving back in with my parents if I couldn’t find work.

“I’m just ready for something to happen,” my mind slouched. “I’m ready to finally start.”

You know those days when your thoughts are scattered? When your awareness becomes aware of itself? You know those days the world seems too big and too small at the same time, and all you can think about instead of school and work and life is the fact that Reverend Camden may lose his job; and that Ruthy and T-bone are moving too fast; and that Simon’s already in grad school and engaged, and when you saw him last he was just starting junior high, getting mad at his sister Mary for fighting his battles for him against the school bully–and all that he wanted was to assert himself and get into his own fights and maybe even feel what a broken nose felt like, because then at least the pain would be his—not happening to him, but his—and he’d have some kind of control? You know those days?

Me, too.

7th Heaven: WGN Weekdays at 9:00AM

For years, countless encounters with family members and every time I ever told someone that I was majoring in English and had to watch their brow furrow and lips muster up fake interest as they tried to be supportive and went, “Oh… What can you do with that?” I had the prospect looming over me. Post-college. It was a safe and down-the-road kind of make-believe.

But then one day you wake up and you’re scared as hell. You look at your calender. And the pages just seem to stop after some time in May, that some time where you buy plastic robes and sit in folding chairs and wait to shake the hand of some guy you’ve never met, some guy congratulating you and handing you a sheet of nice paper with your name and degree title pressed onto it in glossy lettering. You look down at it. It really says, “Tag! You’re it.”

And you’re supposed to start chasing something.

I’m interning at a local paper and soon I hope to start freelancing, local music mostly. But really, I wanted to review movies, TV, and music. My first idea was to review Prog rock records. How cool would that be? Get paid to listen to interesting music all day, find new bands, get the word out to thousands of people who are maybe tired or complacent with their music. Complacency and music shouldn’t mix. The thought alone makes me cringe. Ugh…

But CD reviews are getting phased out over there, and right now my best shot at getting published is with the local music scene. Ok, no problem. It could still be fun–and more importantly, it may lead to something.

This is me riding the wave of my own enthusiasm, my frantic desperation masqeurading as motivation. And I have to say it feels pretty good.

I haven’t decided on a schedule yet but I plan on reviewing at least one thing a week, a movie, a show, an album. It just depends on how much time I have and what’s good that week. And for the time being, these things might not even be new–probably won’t be, actually. I want to go into back-catalogues, I want to write about what hits me–and if that happens to be a 30-year-old GENESIS album that I’m only just now discovering, chances are there are others that haven’t gotten around to checking it out yet, either.

But I also want to do somewhat of a ProgBeat. That’s where I’ll be posting on upcoming albums to keep your eye open for, as well as reviewing them later. In fact, that’s what I planned to start with this post, I just thought it needed a bit of a preamble first.

So consider this the preamble. And I’m excited. I think this is going to be a lot of fun.