take note.

sometimes when you think, "I just need to be alone" - not all the time, but sometimes, you're wrong. what you actually need is to hang out with people around whom you can relax, in sweatpants, and laugh at stupid shit until you feel better.

tonight we're gonna give it 35%

"My heart is anywhere but here,
and how tired I was from the past couple of weeks,
From the past couple of years.
Well, it hit me all at once,
On a balcony overlooking nothing,
With snow falling all around."
- AM!

I just don't know what to do. or where to even start. I don't know how to fit. and I find it so much easier to just be alone. takes so much less effort - just a simple moment of giving in. or giving up, I guess I should say.

s'laters, Pennsylvania, you had better be beautiful and springy the next time I see you.

so, I went home, and I came back to Boston, which I keep almost accidentally referring to as home. good to be there, good to be here.

this semester on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights I am working at the newspaper office in the city section, having a group guitar class, and working at the newspaper office in the sports section, respectively. add in the fact that I have only one class on Wednesdays, giving me all kinds of time to skate at the rink on the other end of campus...fuck yeah, college.

someday soon, I will figure out what kind of writing I actually want to go into; I will either give in to the fact that sports basically own my life and the fact that the universe really wants me to be a sportswriter, or catch up musically with the rest of the world and go back to being a rock critic like I always wanted. or maybe I'll eschew them both with a firm hand and be a novelist. (as if I could ever write something with enough of a plot to fill a novel.)

you know, I'm pretty happy. there are of course things I want (Red Sox tickets! a way to instantly lose ten pounds! an actual hockey team to play on!) but I'm pretty happy with what I have.

how soon is now?

I know, I know, I KNOW.

the longer you have to wait, the better it's going to be. the more you have to be the one watching everyone else get into their messy interpersonal entanglements, the more times you learn how not to make things work, the better you'll be able to avoid the bullshit when it's finally your turn, right.

high standards are a good thing, right. things happen for people who aren't you sometimes - not all the time - because they have different standards. be patient. something will happen. be patient. don't try too hard. it'll happen when you're least trying. (I don't even know how to gauge whether or not I'm "trying" anymore.)

I won't lie, I'm a little fucking sick of it. even as I comprehend it on a logical level...I'm sick of it. and at the same time, of course, I don't know how to do anything about it. honestly don't even know where to begin. help.

I don't know how to deal with people, really. I've developed a knack for being in love with places and athletic franchises and musicians. not real people, really.

random recollections from the inner harbor barnes and noble (of no interest to anyone, really)

A year and a half ago in Baltimore – the night of the 2008 Major League Baseball All-Star Game, which I did not watch – I stood in front of the “classics” display in Barnes and Noble with a boy I was in love with, and decided I wasn’t well-read enough. He came to the same conclusion about himself around the same time. I ended up buying Slaughterhouse-Five in an attempt to remedy this, and he bought a book too, but I don’t remember what it was. I do remember singing a loud, ridiculous version of “Strawberry Fields Forever” with him later that night. But I never did read Slaughterhouse-Five.

Funny – two years before that I made a mad dash into the same Barnes and Noble to buy Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana before the bus back to Latrobe left without me. (It turned out I hadn’t really needed to rush, though, because nobody could find Lu Wu.) I did read that one. And if I’d never read that one, about 80% of everything I’ve written in the last three and a half years – outside of school assignments – may never have been written. I guess if I ever go back to Baltimore, I'm sort of obligated to go back to the music section and say thanks.

i asked you to go to the green day concert - you said you never heard of them

what I would LIKE Weezer to play when I see them for the second time on Monday:
- the lead singles from their last three albums, and no more from those albums (okay, "Perfect Situation" is allowed)
- the Blue Album, tracks 1-9
- Pinkerton in its entirety
- "Hash Pipe" because it's just fun.

what they will ACTUALLY play:
not that, of course. I know enough not to expect that. but I swear if I don't get at least "El Scorcho" I want my fucking money back.

shredding of this variety would also be acceptable.

the last one born and the first one to run

It’s pretty clear to me that Christian and Gloria live in a river town, and almost certainly one north of St. Louis. Maybe near Detroit, I don’t know. I like to think near Pittsburgh. But when I hear these songs, I hear Cheswick and Harmarville and Springdale and those worn-out little off-shoots of Pittsburgh, mill towns, steel towns, coal towns, river towns.

Maybe it’s only because that’s where I first heard it. Cheswick, Pennsylvania was the site of some gloriously epiphanatory moments for me in May and June of 2009 (not, incidentally, the one in which I invented the word “epiphanatory”), and it was indeed the first place I heard “See the Light,” an ending which brought some welcome hope to an album that had, at my first judgment, been a little short on that. (On later listens, I found a little more of it.)

But Christian and Gloria? There's no way they live in New York, or Chicago, or LA, or even the Bay. Their town was blind from something or other, busted up, rusted up, all the coal or oil or steel yanked up out of it and left it with just the bare bones. Skeletal, rickety. No place to grow up. But really, where is the right place to grow up? There isn’t one. There’s only the place you grew up.