august, again

strange times.

mostly I'm too busy to remember to miss a lot of things, and a lot of people, but sometimes when I get home earlier than usual I feel intensely, terribly lonely. I'm sure I'd turn to drink if I were of a certain disposition, but mainly I turn to writing and watching baseball. so it could be a lot worse.

I'm always compulsive about the things I care about, and that's bad enough in and of itself, but it's worse when it's the only thing I care about. there aren't a whole lot of people in this state I'm interested in hanging out with, and I can only force myself on the ones I do like so many times a week. for their sakes. so the other things I care about, the books and games and shows, get a lot of attention, and I know so clearly that it's a problem, that it's separating me from the world, but I can't do anything about it. my internal clock wants me home at 7 PM to watch baseball. I'm honestly afraid this will be at least a big a factor in me never having any guy care about me as my general physical plainness and lack of confidence.

the people I share the most of my life with are concealing things from me, and that's normal and natural and all, because nobody knows everything about anybody, but it makes my stomach hurt. it makes me anxious. I feel like there are things I've been marked unfit to know because I can't understand, and I feel like people are tired of me and the way I am, and I don't know how to fix it. I don't care about a whole lot of people I've actually met, so always-just-missing the ones I do care about hurts a lot.

in less than a month I'm leaving the country for four months. any billion things could happen in those four months. I'm looking forward to them.

my work this summer has been awesome, as jobs go. but I don't want my work to take over my life. I'm on a career track that very well could do that, and I don't really need any help in not having time to spend with people. I wish my career track was "travel around South America for a while, write about mountains and baseball, then come back and be able to make enough money to live by writing books forever." someone find me an internship with that company. my Spanish is falling behind where it was in May, though. someone find me a Venezuelan to practice with.

I don't know, it mainly boils down to me not caring enough to keep hanging out with people I don't really like, thereby being stuck in my own house too much, knowing a whole lot about things that interest me and not feeling like I have anyone to talk to about them. add in some Mountain Goats, you've got my summer in a nutshell.

I will try to shake away this disease.

I am still dreaming of your face, hungry and hollow for all the things you took away
I don't wanna be your good time; I don't wanna be your fall-back crutch anymore.

I think I'm done now. I think I'm good. I think we're friends and I am okay and I will miss talking about life and road trips and the best goalies in the world with you, this summer when we don't see each other, but I will be fine. I think I've made my peace with you; you are absolved.

finals are hard to focus on when you know you have a real-world job starting in 13 days and you're going to Tennessee in a couple months and you might have an awesome camera waiting for you at home, and you're gonna see your family and your best friend soon and you're gonna see Pittsburgh soon. it's really hard to give a fuck about a political science class you never gave a fuck about anyway. at this point there's a good chance I'm going to write Wilco lyrics as the answer to every question and just peace out after half an hour.

You wake up suddenly and look up at me. When you say my name your voice is low and sleep-roughened, uneven. "How are you feeling?" you ask.

I am feeling like you are going to be the end of me. I wish I could get you out of my system the way I got the alcohol out a few hours before, however painfully. I am feeling shaky and small in the clothes you lent me, and I'm feeling both too young and too old to deal with this, sick at my stomach and sick over you.

"I'm feeling better," I say. "Although I've felt better."

What a twist. Since September I've dreamed of leaving your place in the morning, walking home light and high on your kiss and your smile. I did not anticipate that when the sunlight hit my reluctant eyes on Beacon Street, I would be cripplingly hung over, unsteady and leaving you sleeping untouched on the floor.

for a second they're as young as they ever were

what's weird is when you write a sentence that you think is absolutely gorgeous, something you've articulated that taps into something profound up in the clouds, and then you read back over an old story and you realize - you've pulled it from something else, without even thinking.

it doesn't make it any less cool, though, in a way. you've still gotten it from somewhere in the course of human events, something that resonated with you.

I haven't written here in a while and I don't expect I will again, although who knows, I've thought that before. I'm working a pretty legit job this summer and going to Ireland in the fall. I'm trying to make sense of a lot of things and I keep buying dresses, for some reason. I think maybe I want to go to Peru and Ecuador and teach little kids how to write and hike through the Andes.

two weeks from tonight I'll be with my family in a hotel in the suburbs. night after that I'll be home. in between now and then I have to take three finals, write one long-form news feature, get drunk at least twice, go out to lunch with a lot of people, and go to Fenway one last time for the year 2011. I'll also be turning 20. bring it.

things you might not know

- Hunter S. Thompson and Jack Kerouac were both sportswriters at one point. Kerouac played college football and Hunter once had an in-depth discussion with Richard Nixon, whom he despised, about the NFL and obscure Super Bowl plays. He still hated the guy, but came to respect his knowledge in that area.

- Apparently, there are "summer" and "winter" suits, or at least there are in Kentucky.

- All you need to successfully drink whiskey are determination and the right role models.

- A lot of times, the Boston Globe's lead national or international story is from the New York Times. Doesn't that suck?

- Movies almost always disappoint me because all I ever want from a narrative is good character development, and it's pretty hard to really develop more than one character well (or at least to my standards) in an hour and a half or even two hours.

- The White Stripes just broke up, denying me the certain life-altering experience that would have been seeing them live. Via Rolling Stone, here's the end of their statement to their fans:

"The White Stripes do not belong to Meg and Jack anymore. The White Stripes belong to you now and you can do with it whatever you want. The beauty of art and music is that it can last forever if people want it to. Thank you for sharing this experience. Your involvement will never be lost on us and we are truly grateful."

Fortunately, I work in an office full of people who love good music. It's gonna be all Jack'n'Meg until 2 AM tonight.

stop me if you think you've heard this one before

you know what's bullshit? "the longer you have to wait, the more prepared you'll be when you finally find the person who's right for you."

bull. shit. the longer you have to wait, the more nervous you are that you don't know what the fuck you're doing and everyone else does. the more convinced you become that you are completely undesirable, because people who are less interesting or less attractive than you get all kinds of guys, so there must be something deeply, unchangeably wrong with you that you can't even figure out. the more everyone else develops a backstory and a set of ex-whatevers they can refer to, and the more you have to lie and make things up. the longer you have to wait, the farther behind you are, and the less likely you are to ever catch up or find anyone who likes you the fucked-up way you are. that's all.

attack of manbearpig

just walked a mile in what weather.com says feels like 10-degree weather. some of the snowbanks up the street are taller than me. I could literally disappear into them. Boston is a polar ice cap right now, snow-cover-wise.

you know what else Boston is? it's built on a landfill, same as San Francisco, or most of it is anyway. where I'm sitting right now, this whole part of town, used to just be the Massachusetts Bay. and if there's ever an earthquake of significant magnitude in New England, close enough to the city, the loosely-packed ground under this dorm will liquefy and the whole Back Bay neighborhood will sink into it, anywhere from a few inches to several feet. that includes Fenway Park, and that includes everywhere I've ever lived away from home. there have been earthquakes out here, too. nothing in the last hundred years to compete with the West Coast, but out on the Cape there was one in the 1800s that they felt in New Hampshire and western Mass and all over.

get to the edges of the country while you can, yo. New Orleans is sinking as the water's rising, the next great coastal earthquakes could cripple San Fran and Boston. there's great stuff out here, come see it before we all have to move to Kansas.

earth science is the only science that's ever been remotely interesting to me, you see (besides space'n'planets, that is...and dinosaurs...okay, applied science can be awesome, it's just bio/physics/chem that I hate). how the Midwest is flat like it is because it got rolled over by glaciers during the last Ice Age, how New York and New England are actually rising upward, 18,000 years later, as a result of those glaciers retreating off of them. how it was probably a volcano in Mexico that got the dinosaurs, and you can still go see the crater.

100 percent unrelated to all this, MLB Network named Andrew McCutchen the best center fielder in baseball today. my boy. I couldn't be prouder of him and I think they're right. kid's going places.

my dad and I were discussing the Pirates a couple months ago and he was being pessimistic as ever, and I said, "well, my great hope for Walker and McCutchen is that they end up Red Sox, so I can still watch and love them." he said, very earnestly and seriously all of a sudden, "no, you know what? my great hope is that they win the World Series as Pirates in 2014, and Neil Walker wins the Series MVP." and he walked away.

the moral of this post: Boston may be hit by an earthquake and fall into the bay before the Pirates win the World Series, but that doesn't mean I'll stop believing.

and i think to myself, what a wonderful world

here's how my first 48 hours back in Boston went:

- touched down in Logan, took a shuttle that I never knew existed back to campus. went to the newspaper office, where I was until roughly 2:15 AM.

- slept from about 3:20 AM to 5:25 AM, went to the radio station for a 6-8 AM show.

- passed the fuck out from 8:30-10:30. this was my night's sleep.

- had class, came back to the newspaper office, was here until 3:45 AM because of a goddamned Russian-novel-length basketball preview. went to sleep at like quarter to 5 AM.

the not being dependent on caffeine thing was happening. I don't foresee it happening for much longer. mmmm Dunkies coffee, in which you can't even taste the coffee because of the liquid tons of cream.

it's not all bad. it's not even mostly bad. it doesn't even really get dark at night where I live. that is, 7 PM looks about the same as 4 AM, and the sky gets more grayish than black, or at least that's how it looks in the middle of Kenmore Square. at 4 AM.

and snow in the city is weird, because there's nowhere to put it once they scrape it off the streets, so they just pile it up along the sidewalks, and the eight-year-old in me wants nothing more than to climb on it. I mean, fifteen-foot-high stalagmites of frozen-over, old gray snow, piled up against streetlights and consuming mailboxes and bike stands (I saw a bike that was 85 percent buried. unreal). what else am I supposed to do on my way to class?

the morning of the radio show I was walking to the station at about 5:50 AM, the T had just started running again and it had just started snowing a little. when my co-DJ and I left at 8 there were two inches of snow on the ground and more falling, and it was quiet. you know how it gets quiet when there's a sudden huge snowfall? those big frozen-over piles of ice had all this new snow on them, and you couldn't find the crosswalks so people were just crossing everywhere. couldn't see the train tracks, anything. we just kind of walked along in awe.

and then it rained like three hours later, and there were knee-deep puddles down the street from my dorm. weatherpocalypse 2011.

I'm in this rad history class that's history of the US, 1968-present, and today we talked about our first "public" memories, i.e. the first time we realized there was a bigger world outside our house/school/family. mine's the 2000 election, which made me think that every election had to be decided in a recount that went on for months. that or the fact that every time I wanted to watch Sesame Street during 1995, the OJ Simpson trial was on, and it pissed me off.

I could ramble forever. I have all these middles of stories written and only a few beginnings. I might go to Dublin this fall. the only reason I can keep my eyes open right now is caffeine. I want to get an apartment off campus next year. I love Boston and I never want to leave. I can't wait to permanently move to San Francisco. I wanna be a professional baseball player. I also want a new camera, and to go to a good concert. and I want to see this kid I've been missing for like a month (saw him the other night but it was brief) and to listen to Cee-Lo Green. at least I have the means for that last one. peace.

see you drivin' round town with the girl I love, and I'm like-

fuck all the rest of this, I'm being a rock star.
it doesn't matter that I can't write songs, or at least, that the songs I'm writing right now are nowhere near where I want them to be.
I used to be a goddamn good guitar player and there's no reason I can't get there again.
at home I live with a kid who's ten thousand times better than me and can push me; at school I've got a buddy to jam with who's right about at my level, and I can't have him getting better than me.
there is a place you can get playing music with the right people (or even by yourself), a place I've never been able to get to any other way.
I'm going back there.

linger on, your pale blue eyes

(things I wrote down on half an hour of sleep this morning; as ever, if it's in brackets they're not my words)

blood half-caffeine, churning and shaking, I stare at 9:00 in the morning with the same eyes that saw 9:00 the previous night - barely rested, sore, and suddenly shaken by the final chord of a four-month-long song. that which had become my nucleus is splitting and I am pinned here, looking up to the sky, heart pounding out delirium, no sleep until I know what happens next, no sleep till I can't stand it anymore.

[thought of you as my mountaintop, thought of you as my peak
thought of you as everything I had but couldn't keep]

what of it now? what to believe? bonds forged in the giddy hours of the morning, taste of diner coffee on my tongue and the good tired feeling of laughter in my throat. something has changed on a deep, irreversible level; a commitment has been made, but what of my promise to myself, what of this tentative declaration of love that hangs clearly visible in the air like our breath in the frozen morning? I'm going on - no time to settle that which matters in the course of a life until the last chord finishes ringing out.

--

saying goodbye for now to one of my friends this morning, she said, "I'll miss you most of all, Scarecrow!" to me. just about broke my heart, for some reason. I'm always afraid people aren't going to miss me.

sometimes when monumental things happen in my life I imagine hearing a massive guitar/piano chord in the background, like the end of "A Day in the Life" or "Love Reign O'er Me" something. I can't be the only one.

I think I've said the word "bizarre" a thousand times since yesterday afternoon. it's fitting though. things have been bizarre. wonderful, mostly, but bizarre. like spending the night in the sketchiest office ever, sleeping on a couch, and walking half a mile to a diner for breakfast on the coldest morning you can remember yet this year. at this place on Beacon Street they serve what I think are fried bagels and give you paper placemats with maps of Greece on them; they don't seem to be affiliated with the Greeks in any other way.

I have no idea what's going to happen next.

thumbin' my way down to north caroline

I wrote a blues song about shit I did this summer. it's called "corners of the midwest" and it's kind of not terrible, maybe. in other news, my voice is terrible, and weak, and too quiet. I always think it's okay until I record it and play it back. eurgh I sound like I'm twelve and have strep. which happened a lot, I had strep every other week as a kid. hey, maybe that's why I can't sing?

I also wrote two songs (and various fragments) about this kid I like a lot. and another song about cutting out and driving to California when you feel like it. these are the things that are on my mind. and shit. at least I'm playing guitar again? and the last couple I wrote have actual chord progressions that aren't just 1-4-5, so.

I averaged four hours of sleep a night this week. I was doing really, really well at not being dependent on caffeine, and then "having to learn how to be a section editor of a daily college newspaper" happened and now Dunkies coffee (and its ACTUALLY NAUSEATING amounts of cream and sugar) is my bff again. but I spent Wednesday night drinking cheap wine and yelling about basketball with other people who are insane enough to work for a newspaper. good shit.

did I ever write about the time I accidentally found Lake Erie over the summer? I was thinking of that when I was writing today and it ended up in one of the songs. that was a cool moment. I miss summer. I think somewhere deep in my brain I believe that as long as I'm still listening to predominantly Springsteen (which I am) it's still summer.

to you and me that's jingletown, that's home

When I went to Ireland with my family, just about the first thing my brother and I did was try to convince innocent Irish people that we were Canadian. I have no idea why this happened (although the overnight flight from New York, which left at 10 PM EST and landed at 4 AM EST...which is 9 AM Ireland time...and the absolute lack of sleep on that flight may have had something to do with it), but we walked all around Shannon Airport yelling "EH" and talking about the Edmonton Oilers, in the hopes that someone would mistake us for Canadians. I think we also talked in southern accents (terrible, terrible southern accents) and did Fargo impressions for a little while, and then I passed the fuck out on a bench for an hour and a half. I don't think we convinced anybody of anything, besides that we were complete jackasses even for Americans.

Right now I'm wearing an Oakland Athletics hat. I have four baseball caps in regular rotation, for teams based in Pittsburgh, Boston, San Francisco, and now Oakland, plus a Minnesota Twins one that has been sporadically important in my life (plus my Pens hat, but that's separate). When I wore my Sox hat the other day, this kid on my floor told me I was being a disgrace to San Francisco, and I had to stop and explain to him that I'm not actually from California, even though I ran down the hall whooping it up with my friend who is when the Giants won the World Series. Before that, I wore my Giants hat to the newspaper office, with a Pirates shirt, and got the Spanish Inquisition into why the hell I would ever wear a Giants hat (also got the question "is it Barry Bonds Day?" No, sir, it is never, ever, ever Barry Bonds Day in my life, and you're lucky I didn't slap you for saying so).

I guess there's a definite thread of me wanting people to think I'm from places I'm not from, even though I love where I actually am from (more so now that I don't have to be there year-round). It's just more interesting that way. I mean, I have a reasonable claim to Boston now (I can navigate the city much, much better than I can Pittsburgh, which is a source of guilt) but I just like walking down the street, seeing people notice my hats and think of me as a Californian, or a Minnesotan, or a Chicagoan the times I wear my Blackhawks shirt, and so forth. I want to know what it's like to be from everywhere, how you think of yourself if you're from Wisconsin or Florida or New York or New Mexico, what people want to convey when they identify themselves with one place or another. I personally feel connected to a whole lot of places; hence, the hats.

That's why I got back into sports in the first place, you know - wanting something to connect me back to Pittsburgh. Going into junior year, I was starting to think, and be concerned by the thought, that I could go to school - let's say - in New York and have nothing to distinguish me from people from Cincinnati, or Kansas City, or what have you. And people always expected me to pay attention to hockey, since I play, and I thought sure, I'll just become loyal to the Penguins, and that will be that. The rest is history, obviously, but sometimes I realize that's about the weirdest damn reason to get into something in the world. It worked, though. When I think of home I think of Mellon Arena (rest in peace, old buddy) and PNC Park (you'll see better days, I promise) and walking across the Clemente Bridge in the summer with my family, standing in a crowd of 375,000 Penguins fans on the Boulevard of the Allies celebrating this thing we believe in on June 15, 2009. They don't have that shit in Philly or Dallas. That's just home.

"I have to go see about a girl," part 2

you know what's scary as fuck? when you realize you actually considered, for more than a split second, turning down tickets to a hockey game for which you've said you'd sell everything you own for tickets. because that same weekend, you could drive through the most heinous driving state in the union (sorry, Ohio), to Chicago to cover a college hockey tournament, with two guys you hardly even knew before this fall, one of whom you still don't know all that well. because the other one, you realize, is worth skipping just about any sporting event for, if you have to.

don't get me wrong. I'm going to the motherfucking Winter Classic, I'm not insane. it may well be the biggest hockey event I ever get to be a part of, and when I'm standing there at Heinz Field freezing my ass off for my team in the midst of 60,000 people, I'll probably cry or faint or see God or something. it's going to be amazing.

but this scene keeps running through my head (cheers to IMDB):

Will: So, when did you know, like, that she was the one for you?
Sean: October 21st, 1975.
Will: Jesus Christ. You know the fuckin' date?
Sean: Oh yeah. 'Cause it was Game 6 of the World Series. Biggest game in Red Sox history.
Will: Yeah, sure.
Sean: My friends and I had, you know, slept out on the sidewalk all night to get tickets.
Will: You got tickets?
Sean: Yep. Day of the game. I was sittin' in a bar, waitin' for the game to start, and in walks this girl. Oh, it was an amazing game, though. You know, bottom of the eighth, Carbo ties it up at 6-6. It went to twelve. Bottom of the twelfth, in stepped Carlton Fisk. Old Pudge. Steps up to the plate, you know, and he's got that weird stance.
Will: Yeah, yeah.
Sean: And BAM! He clocks it. High fly ball down the left field line! Thirty-five thousand people, on their feet, yellin' at the ball, but that's not because of Fisk. He's wavin' at the ball like a madman.
Will: Yeah, I've seen...
Sean: He's going, "Get over! Get over! Get OVER!" And then it HITS the foul pole. OH, he goes apeshit, and 35,000 fans, you know, they charge the field, you know?
Will: Yeah, and he's fuckin' bowlin' police out of the way!
Sean: Goin', "God! Get out of the way! Get 'em away!" Banging people...
Will: I can't fuckin' believe you had tickets to that fuckin' game!
Sean: Yeah!
Will: Did you rush the field?
Sean: [surprised at the question] No, I didn't rush the fuckin' field; I wasn't there.
Will: What?
Sean: No - I was in a bar havin' a drink with my future wife.
Will: You missed Pudge Fisk's home run?
Sean: Oh, yeah.
Will: To have a fuckin' drink with some lady you never met?
Sean: Yeah, but you shoulda seen her; she was a stunner.
Will: I don't care if Helen of Troy walks in the room, that's Game 6!
Sean: Oh, Helen of Troy...
Will: Oh my God; and who are these fuckin' friends of yours, they let you get away with that?
Sean: Oh... they had to.
Will: W-w-w-what'd you say to them?
Sean: I just slid my ticket across the table, and I said, "Sorry, guys; I gotta see about a girl."
Will: I gotta go see about a girl?
Sean: Yeah.
Will: That's what you said? And they let you get away with that?
Sean: Oh, yeah. They saw in my eyes that I meant it.
Will: You're kiddin' me.
Sean: No, I'm not kiddin' you, Will. That's why I'm not talkin' right now about some girl I saw at a bar twenty years ago and how I always regretted not going over and talking to her. I don't regret the 18 years I was married to Nancy. I don't regret the six years I had to give up counseling when she got sick. And I don't regret the last years when she got really sick. And I sure as hell don't regret missin' the damn game. That's regret.
[pause]
Will: Wow... Woulda been nice to catch that game, though.
Sean: [sheepishly] I didn't know Pudge was gonna hit a homer.

been waiting a long time for this moment to come.

I've done some scary-ass things and some ridiculously demanding things in my life. I've driven in Chicago rush hour traffic, in a blistering downpour so I couldn't see five feet in front of me. I've climbed up the sides of cliffs in Colorado. I've thrown punches at people who could beat the shit out of me, and I've thrown myself down on the ice in front of hockey pucks traveling fast enough to hurt me pretty badly. I love that shit. I'm not scared of getting hurt playing sports, or hanging off the sides of mountains or standing up to the mosh pit at a Dropkick Murphys show (okay, a little scared of that, but it's always totally worth it).

This week, all I have to do is ask a friend of mine a question. A short, simple-sentence kind of question. And I'm so fucking terrified about that, I can't even think about anything else.

FACT: I have the right to check out athletes I think are hot. Even if I'm emotionally twelve sometimes and blush when I have to say it in front of boys who judge me. Hey, fair is fair: y'all get to go on about Russian tennis player chicks and gymnasts, I get to dig on Josh Beckett. This is the 21st century.

(this message brought to you by a fantastic and far-too-late Sunday night of sportswriters being awkward and blushy and making fun of each other, and nobody - least of all me - understanding the role of Rich Harden in my life)

"I have to go see about a girl."

You know what I don't own? (besides season Pens tickets, the Jon Lester shirt I want, the entire Bad Religion discography that I suddenly need?) I don't own high heels. And I don't want to. I've walked in heels twice: once to the Rocky Horror Picture Show in Cambridge, and once on Halloween. Just about a year ago now, both last October. The first time, it rained like hell and I stepped in a massive puddle as soon as we got off the train, and I spent the next four hours with soaking wet feet, slipping and sliding on rice trying to balance on these tiny fucking points I'm supposed to jump up on and do the Time Warp at the same time. The second time, well, it was Halloween (and I was supposed to be a mod chick, I had this rad British flag dress, but everyone instantly assumed I was a Spice Girl, so I just rolled with it). And four of my friends and I walked a good mile or so down Massachusetts Avenue looking for a party to attend, only to fail miserably and have to walk the entire way back. I still count it as one of my all-time greatest athletic achievements that I didn't collapse.

Today, again, it was Cambridge. Except I wore blue low-top Converses, because I still have scars on my feet from the last time I wore my newest black flats, and because we were going to a journalism career fair, at which I would almost certainly not be judged on my footwear. I went with two guys and two girls, and both of the other girls changed from rain boots into heels halfway there, complaining and groaning and clearly in pain, tottering off the train and stumbling on the Harvard cobblestones. I walked ahead with one of the guys, because we were walking at the same pace. And I'm glad for that. My feet didn't hurt. If a bear from the wilds of eastern Massachusetts (okay, no such thing - a crazed Patriots fan, maybe) came barreling down the street to attack, I could have run or climbed up a fire escape or ninja-kicked him. I kept up with the boy I wanted to talk to. And I got to talk to the recruiters from big publications just the same as everyone else did.

One of my friends - one of the girls in heels - was complaining about them, and I said, "why do you wear them?" She said, "they make me taller." I have got to be missing something. I'm 5'2", maybe a hair more, and back when I thought I was going to be a professional basketball player, sure, I wished I were taller. But ever since I quit basketball, height hasn't really been on my mind. And I don't think it's ever been on my mind to the point that I would put myself in pure, unrelenting agony for hours on end, just to be two or three inches taller. I was born short. And I was born with an instinct for avoiding unnecessary pain for the sake of so-called "beauty" or "style."

There's another thing. It doesn't make me any less of a girl, or a woman, not to want to wear shoes that hurt. What an absolutely arbitrary concept. I don't want to weaken myself, or put myself in pain, or put myself in a position where I can't move at my own pace and not be distracted by my shoes. I feel like this makes me a logical human being, if anything. I have a right to wear the shoes I want, free of judgment, and not feel - is there a feminine equivalent of "emasculated"? E-feminated? Doesn't sound quite right. But either way, I am who I am, and I'll wear the shoes that best allow me to enjoy my life. And that's all I have to say about that.

As usual, I want to post about two things at the same time, but the segue is difficult and I don't feel like forcing one. I basically just want to say this: I just watched Good Will Hunting for the second time, and that is a movie that hits me in all the right places. Really blows your hair back, as they say. The funny parts are hysterical (Ben and Casey Affleck, please get drunk and tell me stories all the time), the sad parts are heartbreaking, and every detail is worth remembering. Not to mention that it's a visual love letter to Boston, and everyone has accents (which I love! 98% of America thinks they're annoying, I don't fucking care, I adore Boston accents).

The exchange Sean and Will have about soulmates blows me away. The speeches Sean makes to him about actually experiencing life, about not backing off just to keep things perfect and idealized and let yourself imagine how they're going to turn out - it gets me. Robin Williams, in his infinite wisdom, knows what's going on. Even if he did fucking skip Game 6 of the 1975 World Series. He convinces me that it was worth it to miss Carlton Fisk's walk-off homer, and that's a damned impressive thing to do.

radio clash on pirate satellite

- I'M ON THE RADIO TONIGHT. everybody should listen to it. go to www.wtburadio.org and click "listen live" up at the top, from 10-12. I'm actually playing music this week. still refining the playlist. there's no theme this week so it's just whatever I feel like playing that fits the theme of "ska, punk and other junk". WOOOO!

- the Giants alone among teams I support are still in playoff contention. got to see Mr. Lincecum throw 11 strikeouts last night after a shaky first inning for the win, and that Buster kid display some excellent plate discipline to get on base for Burrell to homer him in. it was a nice, neat, well-executed game. go team! sadface for the Sox being officially eliminated, but we knew that was coming forever. next year, boys, next year. Pirates, well. let's just try to keep it below 100 losses next year, shall we? baby steps.

- life's moving along here. I need to go buy food because I don't have any. I need to study for my Spanish test because the subjunctive is difficult. I need to know if I'm spending my afternoon at Harvard tomorrow but my texts to my buddy aren't going through. ALAS.

- I can't write songs, but here's a thing I wrote yesterday:

you’re every other thought that runs through my head

you’re the reason when I’m happy and the reason when I’m sad

build my days around seeing you

keep a running score of all the things you do

waste of time to be with anybody else

I’m tired of having all this time to myself

I’m all fucked up, I don’t eat right

I can’t go to sleep till the middle of the night

hope nobody sees

the way I look at you

every day I give myself away

but there’s nothing I can do

take me home, country roads

I just had a good walk and talk with my buddy from Kentucky. I can't explain how great it is to talk to somebody who knows about my part of the country (since it's also pretty much his part of the country) here at school. Here at school you've mostly got:

a) people from California who don't know the geography of the East Coast at all, which is kind of okay because it hasn't really been relevant to them before (even though I still know the shit out of California geography, but I'm a geek like that),

b) people from New England who only know the geography of New England and how long it takes to get to New York, and

c) people from New York who don't give a shit about the rest of the country outside of the five boroughs/Long Island, and generally operate under the assumption that people from Jersey are trash, people from Boston are assholes, everyone from California is high all the time, and everyone else is a redneck. And they say us rural folks are ignorant.

Oversimplifying, obviously, and generalizing, but that's probably 70% of the situation. So it's always great to talk to this kid, who knows I live closer to Cleveland (and Cincinnati, for that matter) than to Philly, and who will bitch about the National League Central with me and marvel at how miserable Cleveland and Columbus are as cities.

We were talking about one of the cheers some members of the BU fan section do at hockey games when we play Maine and other rural state schools: "the wheels on your house go 'round and 'round," which is so fucking ignorant. He was a columnist for the paper last year and actually wrote an article calling them out on being snobs and elitists and generally assholes, and people got all up in arms at him, telling him to go back to Kentucky, calling him a fucking hick, all this shit. Of course, this was all in anonymous comments, on the newspaper's website. He still gets pissed off talking about it, and I get pissed off too - I've been in the student section when that cheer started up, and I wouldn't say it. That's worse than BC calling "safety school" at us, and that makes me livid (I could have gotten into your sheltered, suburban Catholic school if I'd had any desire to, savvy? I got into NYU, which is just as selective, and had a fighting chance at Northwestern, which is more selective, so y'all can kiss my Irish ass, unless you're too scared to come down here into the big bad city to do it).

Anyway. None of my friends here are snobby assholes, obviously, but it's always good to hang with a Midwestern kid who also identified me as Midwestern, haha. The picture above - they were actually going to make a 14th colony/state back in the day, with the highlighted bits of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky, because it was wild-ass frontier country back then and they didn't think they really had any connection to the governments back east in Philly and New York. I wish I could cite that to everybody who ever asks me if I'm a Phillies fan or how far I live from Philadelphia.

we drove 800 miles without seeing a cop, we got rock and roll music blasting off the t-top

Happy birthday, buddy. 61 and still running around onstage like a madman for upwards of 3 hours every night on every tour. Bruce Springsteen is not subject to normal human aging, true story.

The Boss has sort of taken over my life again lately - partly because it was just summer, and nothing is quite so synonymous with summer evenings as Bruce, and partly because I've got a good buddy who loves him maybe even more than I do (he made this his profile picture at one point - epic mancrush city), who recently dedicated a playing of "Darlington County" to me. For being young and in love and wanting to drive everywhere and see everything, it's hard to get a much better soundtrack than the early recordings of Mr. Springsteen.

don't blame us if we ever doubt ya, you know we couldn't live without ya

When I say "church of baseball," this is what I mean: the renewal of spirit and soul that takes place for me on the walk up to Fenway Park. I mean crossing the bridge over the Mass Pike, welcoming the cool evening air, and descending past the Cask'n'Flagon onto Lansdowne Street, smells of smoke and hot dogs and alcohol and giant soft pretzels all around. I mean stopping, unashamed, to take pictures of the FENWAY PARK - LANSDOWNE GATE C sign with the Prudential Building as a backdrop, leaning through the doors of the Bleacher Bar to get a look out onto the field, little kids in Beckett and Lester jerseys leaning over the dividers in line to show each other how they're gonna catch foul balls from their seats tonight.

I mean stopping to lean against a railing on the non-park side of Lansdowne, just where you can see the video screen inside, to hear the announcement of the starting lineup, the rumbling applause that escapes up into the sky when David Ortiz (the designated hitter, nummmber 34) is announced, the wild cheers and whistles for Josh Beckett at the end of a difficult, exhausting season. I mean walking down the street completely at peace, every gap and imperfection in the world filled in by the sounds of guys calling "eyyy, tickets? tickets?" and "programs two dollahs, free Green Monstah stickah with ya program."

It took me a few months after I moved here to realize where exactly I'd been on my college visits to Boston the previous summer. Eventually I connected the dots between the three schools I'd seen - Northeastern, Emerson, and BU - and realized that the part of the city I'd fallen in love with was, in fact, just off my campus: Kenmore Square, viewed from a certain angle in the center of the street. I'd remembered walking from a garage downtown to Fenway through a stretch of gorgeous, old-Boston brownstones into a place where the streets split off and a five-story Barnes and Noble claimed nearly an entire block under a 40-foot-high Citgo sign. I lived in Boston for months before I realized that was lower Commonwealth Avenue and the heart of Kenmore Square - the ballpark neighborhood.

It's a similar feeling walking across the Clemente Bridge at home, don't get me wrong. I could happily spend hours walking the river path below PNC Park, or hanging out on the bridge, or standing on the balcony up above the Allegheny on the third base side. But for enthusiasm of the crowd - not to mention magnitude of the crowd - PNC and Fenway are, no pun intended, in different leagues. I would love Boston without the ballpark, but I've never known it that way, and neither has anyone else of my generation, or my parents', or my grandparents'. The ballpark is the city, same as the rumble of the train at street level or the neon beacon of the Citgo sign reflected on the river at midnight. And even when Beckett can't keep his fastball down and playoff hopes have essentially become delusions, the ballpark and the game are there to strengthen the soul.