What I was trying to say

William Least Heat-Moon's River-Horse: Across America by Boat is a much longer and much sloggier read than his Blue Highways, which I inhaled over the course of a few days when I first read it. River-Horse has taken me, oh, three months of before-bed reading.

Though I find it too long, way, way, way too detailed, and lacking in the tight and fascinating storytelling that makes Blue Highways so brilliant, it does have some seriously impressive moments.

The gist of the book is that Heat-Moon undertakes a cross-country voyage by boat, often following in Lewis and Clark's footsteps (or, well, boat wakes, I suppose) but also making some out-of-the-way turns that will allow him and his small crew to stay on the water for as much of the journey as possible, save for a few unavoidable portages.

On a stretch of the Missouri River in South Dakota, Heat-Moon lies on the ground in the sunshine:

"I thought how far I was from where and when this journey began, how I was so distant from that fellow passing for me twenty months ago, the one so eager to learn the secrets of river passage. Could he--the me of that moment--and I sit down together, he would want to know what I knew and absorb what I had experienced, and he would regard me enviously, just as I do those men who have returned from the moon."

He goes on:

"But there would be forever a difference between him and me: I went and he did not. He set the voyage in motion, but he could not take it. Just as I, who lay on the Dakota hill, could not know whether Nikawa would ever reach the Pacific, he could never see the outcome of his preparations, unless somewhere, on some far other side, time permits us to meet our past selves, all those we have been. Our physical components change every seven years, so our brains are continuously passing along memories to a stranger; who we have been is only a ghostly fellow traveler."

And finally:

"As for me, what might I learn from him who laid out the voyage or from all those others I once was? ... What a report I might deliver to them about where they have sent me! ...They could redraw the faded lines on the long map of my journey here, point out clearly where it was I took a road other than the one they intended, and they could tell me whether they found it a good one or rankly stupid. Were human memory total and perfect, perhaps I'd be only one person from start to finish, but forgetfulness cuts me off from who I've been so that hourly I am reborn."

All of which is essentially a much more lyrical and thought-provoking (and, in some ways, heart-rending) way of saying what I was trying to get at in my post on my eighth San Francisco anniversary. Heat-Moon has put the words down better than I ever could; to one such as me, for whom finding written proof that someone understood what's in my head before it actually got there is like striking gold, that alone is worth the effort of soldiering through 502 dense pages.

To Dana on Her 30th Birthday

As your elder, I'd like to share with you a few things 30 has taught me:

1. Sometimes life throws up on your shoes, sort of like George Bush Sr. once did to the Prime Minister of Japan.
2. Ruined shoes (figuratively speaking), emotional potholes, and other curveballs are much easier to deal with when you have good friends and good (or, hell, any) booze at your side.
3. Now and well into your 30s, you're still allowed to do things that are silly, immature, and sometimes outright dumb.
4. The Burton snowboards ad from 1989 was right: the more you live, the less you die.

Taking a ride with Garfield on Mission Street 

Improving Web forms

In his Techno Files column in last Sunday's Times Business Section ("Finally, Sisyphus, There's Help for Those Internet Forms"), James Fallows notes that technological advances as evidenced in Google Maps, for one, are helping to lessen the pain of dealing with interactive Web forms. Rich Internet Applications/Rich Web Applications/Ajax/call the developments what you may have made Web sites much smarter and much better able to anticipate (and act on) what the user will do next.

Improving the bone structure and the central nervous system of Web technologies is indeed an awesome development, and can go a long way toward mitigating the frustration that's still such a large part of so many online interactions. But what Fallows doesn't touch on, and what seems to me equally crucial, is the need to keep improving the "skin" of Web sites: the layouts, the look-and-feel, and, of course, the text. Because even the most brilliant backend can be nullified if the user can't understand what's happening up front, or runs into an error that's too frustrating or too complex to overcome.

I admittedly know little to nothing about the whole "rich" phenomenon, so it's entirely possible that attention to front end details is part and parcel of it. In any case, it's worth remembering--as countless tests on sites from the simplest to the most complex have shown--that brilliance behind the scenes can't, on its own, make up for weak text and bad design. The three need to work together if Web forms (including error messages and shopping carts) are ever to be as good as they can be.

Can't we all just get along?

As one who, for years, did not use any Apple products (indoctrinated in the ways of Windows as I was, and too addicted to right-clicking to do without it on a Mac), I was spared the full ridiculousness of the Apple/Microsoft bickering for a long while.

And then I got my iPod, installed iTunes on my (Windows-based) laptop, and started to twig to the full scope of the incompatibility between the two camps. The iTunes installation was messy and clunky, and though it eventually succeeded, it was a marked pain in the ass, which I'm told it's markedly not on Apple machines.

This afternoon, I made the mistake of falling for the Buy 1 Song/Get 5 Free offer MSN Music is currently running. (I'll save my comments on the perplexing and convoluted design of the site for another post, but will only say for now that clearly last year's exodus has had some repercussions.) I downloaded a Neko Case song--which involved an inordinate number of steps and a needless dearth of feedback (but again, that's another post)--confirmed that it was saved to My Music folder, closed WMP (which opened automatically, to my annoyance), and then tried to import it to iTunes, as one is wont to do.

But I should've known better. I should've known that files from MSN Music come not in any format that anyone else on the face of the planet would ever use, but rather in some crazy proprietary format that is, of course, incompatible with iTunes. MSN's answer to "How do I transfer my downloads to my iPod?" is basically "You can't, at least not until Apple agrees to support our file format."

I mean, come on now. Even if every other MP3 player on the market supports your wacky WM format, how far are you going to get if iPods don't? And why be stubborn to the point of almost inviting failure just to stick it to Apple? (I suppose the reverse also holds, but history seems to suggest that MS is the bigger bully by far.)

There has got to be a point at which cross-platform compatibility becomes more important than this incessant and ridiculous proprietary sparring. In the realm of online media services and serious innovation, MS has been playing catch-up for years now, and I can't imagine that releasing a music download service that doesn't allow for any compatibility with a device that is so clearly miles ahead in the market will do anything to help the cause.

I'm not quite ready to jettison my Windows-based machine (both because I just shelled out for it last year and because I'm still hooked on right-clicking as one fluid motion), but my disillusionment with the stuff coming out of MS is growing. Who knows? By the time this laptop bites it, I may well be ready to return to my days as a Mac girl. In the meantime, I've learned that even $0.99 was too big a gamble to take on MSN Music. It's back to iTunes and Amazon (and every other online music store that offers iPod-compatible downloads--which is to say, ALL of them).

The People's Temple

One of the greatest theaters in the Bay Area, hands down, is the Berkeley Rep, where I've seen Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul, the premier of the Tectonic Theatre Company's The Laramie Project, and, most recently, the same company's brilliant, balanced, and heartbreaking The People's Temple.

Though it's nearly impossible to be an American with any knowledge of late 20th century tragedies and not know anything about Jim Jones and The Peoples Temple (or, for that matter, of what happened in Laramie), most of us probably have a fairly one-dimensional view of the subject: horror, revulsion, and disbelief at how more than 900 people could be duped into going along with such a crackpot.

Which is why The People's Temple is so amazing: told from the perspective of Jonestown survivors, Peoples Temple defectors, family members, and reporters who covered the story at the time, the play makes clear both the madness of what happened on November 18, 1978, and the utopian dream gone awry that led up to it.

In its early days, Jones' church was a model of integration (at a time when the US was anything but), providing social services, acceptance, political activism, and a seemingly infallible model of socialist idealism come to life. People joined the church for any number of reasons, but one of the foremost among them was that it offered a vision of a society they could find nowhere else. What comes through in the play, just as strongly as that tragedy that was to follow, is the joy that members of the Peoples Temple found first in Indianapolis, then in Northern California, and then, at least for a short while, in Guyana.

The People's Temple makes no apologies for Jones or anyone else; instead, it uses source material, interviews, and the memories of those who were there to create an intensely moving, understandable, and well rounded version of a story that's been told so often it long ago descended into myth. In doing so, it not only brings a troubled and ultimately tragic piece of history to life, but also goes a long way toward answering what must be the most commonly asked question: Why?

Attack of the iPod People

Since getting my sweet green iPod Mini last month, I've started taking it with me everywhere. (Sorry, Josh!) And I've also started noticing something: I'm very much not alone in this.

Now, I realize I'm miles from being an early adapter on the MP3 player front, and I'm sure there were dozens and dozens of people walking around with the tell-tale white earbuds sprouting from the sides of their heads long before I ever put mine in for the first time. But I swear, I never before noticed them. And now they're everywhere.

I take the 49 ten blocks up Van Ness, and during that trip, there are no fewer than five of us on the bus listening to iPods. I step out of my new garage yesterday with Mini in hand and have gone literally twenty steps when an iPodded boy walks out of the building I'm passing. On the streets, on BART, in the post office, in the library--everywhere. Everywhere I've been with my iPod, I've seen others like me.

Were I not so attached to this thing (and how did that happen, technologically retarded as I am?), I might decry the iPodization of the city, might be inclined to think it a shame that we're all so involved in shuffling songs and blocking the rest of the world out of our ears.

As it is, though, I feel like I finally get the appeal of the whole thing. And so I, too, propel myself through the streets of San Francisco with my ears full of music and a tiny slip of metal in my hand.

I'm one of them now.

How Keen Was My Valley

Due to the seemingly interminable Octavia Boulevard project, Hayes Valley has been what can only be described as a gigantic, confusing, ever-changing mess for months now.

It was amazing and wonderful to see the Central Freeway off-ramp come down, and though the same can't be said for watching work crews tear up Octavia Street and denude it of all greenery whatsoever, the excitement of what was to come made the mess somewhat more bearable.

But that was many moons (and bulldozers, jackhammers, dump trucks, traffic cones, mud pits, chain-link fences, and ripped-out curbs) ago. The war zone that is the center of our neighborhood has grown seriously tiring, especially after copious winter rains that turned the street into five blocks of brown puddles, litter, and dirt.

It's just possible, however, that things are finally starting to move. Workers have casted (or whatever one does in concrete) the fixtures that will be the center of what (hypothetically) will be Hayes Green. It seems like everything that needs to go either under or in the street--pipes, drains, cables, and so forth--has been put in place, which means (hypothetically) that final grading and paving can't be too far off. And it's been claimed that at least part of the project is scheduled to be completed by the time the UN conference comes to town in June, so there's at least a touch of flame under at least an ass or two.

So though I've more or less grown used to living among some degree of constant chaos, neighborhood-wise, I'm seriously thrilled that there's an end in sight. Soon enough, we'll have some actual green space, the traffic on Hayes Street will abate somewhat (I hope), the Linden terminus will cease to be an open garbage pit, and I'll have somewhere to sit while I sip the artful and extraordinarily good lattes I plan to get from the new Blue Bottle Coffee Company kiosk on a far-too-regular basis.

Things are looking up.

Becca and Em hiking Mount Tam, May 1997 

Eight

On April 5, 1997--eight years ago today--I finished the last jag of my drive up Highway 1, which itself was the final leg of my cross-country journey, and drove into San Francisco.

My first day here seems both sharply clear and lost to the blur of memories: I came to the house on Cesar Chavez, where I'd live for a few months (thanks to Kristin) before fleeing for the Castro (thanks to the unbearable polyamorous, high colonic-giving, New Age drivel-spouting, selfish and mean-tempered housemate who drove me out). K helped me unpack my car and set up my tiny little room as best as possible, given its lack of furniture. That evening, we went out to Barney's with the Vassar crowd, and I left soon after dinner, tired and achy from the drive, to make my way through the quiet Noe Valley night and back to my new home. Beyond that, details are gone.

I've heard it said that your body essentially regenerates itself every 7 or 8 years, given the way cells grow and die. If that's true, the me that arrived in San Francisco in 1997 is literally a different person from the me sitting here and typing this post.

I'm not sure how much stock I put in that, but I do know that the figurative differences between Then Me and Now Me certainly hold. Amazing, isn't it, what 2,922 days' worth of watching friends come and go; feeling like you couldn't possibly be happier, then sadder, then happier again (before deciding that something more in the middle is a bit more sustainable); falling into and pulling yourself out of pits of heartbreak; finding and leaving jobs (then finding and leaving them again); seeing your city change around you; developing a set of street smarts with a distinctly California tinge to them; and all the while exploring, tasting, questioning, wanting to know and feel and think and do and see as much as possible--amazing how all of this can change you.

And though I sometimes long for life as I lived it in my early days here--back when work often seemed like silly fun, when the Odwalla was free, when it didn't occur to me that I'd eventually watch so many of my friends leave, when the heaviest parts of the adult world hadn't yet hit me--I know that, given the choice, I'd opt to stay here, with eight years of San Francisco behind me and thousands and thousands of days unfolding somewhere just ahead.

Upshot

For some reason or other, dinner and iPod sharing and plenty of wine with Eric this evening leaves me thinking a number of things, foremost among them this: I miss the Boy more than I can say.

That statement goes against every bone, muscle, and cell in my body that tries to be strong, reasonable, and logical. No doubt I'll want to delete this post tomorrow when the muscat has worn off and the rational part of my brain has once again taken the reins. But for now, when my defenses are utterly down (to the point of being almost nonexistent), I can admit to being human, can say that I battle with these feelings of sighing emptiness, can admit that listening to "If Everything Fell Quiet" on the aforementioned iPod while standing in the middle of my kitchen last night made me sink into tears, so much did the song remind me of him (since it came from him in the first place), of us, of things at a better point.

But when will I learn? When will I understand the upshot of loss, what it's like to have your heart pulled out of your chest, julienned, and unceremoniously stuffed back in, so that it doesn't fit quite right, so that it strains against its boundaries, so that it aches for the parameters it once knew? When will my slow mind--and even slower heart--twig to the fact that us/we/nous is no more, however strong my flare-ups of longing and wishing might be?

For now, sadly, it's still often beyond me. I open my hands for things I can't grab, open my heart for things I can't truthfully feel, reach for a full comprehension I'm (evidently) not yet meant to have.

And all the while, I make the most heart-rending calculations: what I wouldn't give for some contact, though I don't know that it would do me any good. What I wouldn't give to cast back six months, back to when my worlds (both internal and external) seemed like different places altogether.

GWB Two Ways

Alexandra Pelosi's Journeys with George is a smart, funny, interesting look at the 2000 Bush campaign as seen from within GWB's traveling press pool, of which Pelosi was a part (as a correspondent for NBC). I know this has been said before, but one of the most brilliant and unnerving things about Pelosi's film, which she bills as a home movie of sorts, is that it makes Bush look charming, reasonable, and entirely human.

So it's jarring to consider Journeys with George side by side with Eyes Wide Open, the American Friends Service Committee's traveling exhibit of 1500 pairs of combat boots, a field of civilian shoes, and a wall of rememberance, all devoted to memorializing and raising awareness of the deaths resulting from the Iraq war.

The exhibit was in San Francisco last weekend, on the grounds between City Hall and the library (with the boots representing servicepeople from California who have been killed in Iraq lining the steps of City Hall itself), and it was both breathtaking and heartbreaking to behold. Granted, staging the exhibit in SF is pretty much preaching to the choir, but even here in Liberalville, USA, it managed to (sorry to poach the expression, but...) open some eyes.

It's one thing to read the death toll every day in the paper, or to hear NPR's endless dispatches from Iraq, but it's something else entirely to see 1500 pairs of empty boots (each with a name attached, and many stuffed with flowers, flags, photos, and letters from the deceased) and row after row of civilian shoes. The numbers become real, and the utter waste of this quagmire becomes even starker.

Asking how it is that the charming, joking, sometimes (though by no means always) even sympathetic man in front of Pelosi's lens could morph into the man who bears responsibility for the depressing parade of shoes making their way across the country isn't a rhetorical question. It's a question with a blatant and sad answer: whatever spark of humanism might have existed in the 2000 GWB was long extinguished by the time that man became 2001 GWB. Any hope the movie might've given us that the man who would become our next president was capable of compassion was long ago blown to bits.

Pelosi's film, then, becomes more than just a portrait of a man, a year, the experiences of a gaggle of reporters and photographers confined to small spaces together for months on end; it becomes a piece of history, a look at what Bush was like before power, greed, hard-heartedness, and a horrific group of advisors made him the war-mongering disaster he is today.

Vegas, baby

I went to Las Vegas last week to present my session on creating effective error messages at the WritersUA conference. Though I really did intend to check out some of the other sessions, I wound up going only to my own, the networking lunch, and the networking mixer thingy that took place the first evening.

This left me plenty of time to explore the city, which I did, both on my own and with my friend Marcus (a Vegas native) as my guide. LV can be described in any number of ways, including "totally overwhelming," "oddly compelling," and "human civilization in microcosm."

What can you say about a city where legions of Latino immigrants line the streets to hand out colored business cards offering STRIPPERS DIRECT TO YOUR HOTEL ROOM 24 HOURS A DAY, where every other person you pass on the sidewalk is openly carrying an alcoholic drink of some kind (more often than not in a gargantuan, whimsically-shaped container, such as an Eiffel Tower full of daiquiri), where both cigarette and cigar smoking are allowed pretty much everywhere?

What can you say about the fake rainforest, the fake Manhattan, the fake Paris, the fake Venice, the fake Caribbean, the fake ancient Rome, the fake New Orleans? They're utterly disturbing and utterly quaint at the same time. (I admit that strolling through "Paris" made me really want to go back to Paris--the real one, that is.)

And what can you say about the fact that, when you go out for drinks, as we did, first to a few local bars, then to the Westin, then to whatever run-down $5-ante casino on the strip we wound up at, you can stumble back to your hotel at 2 a.m. and swear for all the world that it's not a minute past midnight, as everyone still seems to be awake and everything still seems to be going full-swing? Only, I suppose, that it's like real life suspended.

But like anything suspended, it eventually comes back down. So when I left the city on Tuesday evening feeling like I'd been drinking fiberglass juice (so raw was my throat from inhaling endless smoke) and aching for a week of recovery, I was slightly bummed to be going but, truthfully, fairly happy to return to my quiet world in which other people's cigars don't figure and the only thing I generally see at 2 a.m. is the inside of my eyelids.

I'll go back, to be sure, but not until I've had the chance to detox my liver, clean out my lungs, and remind myself of what's real.

...One must be so careful
re the disappearance of hope. A new illusion must present
iteslf immediately. When I pray now
this is what I pray for.

--Jorie Graham, "Praying (Attempt of April 19, 2004)"

Trip, stumble, fall

On Thursday afternoon, while walking to the Mission to meet Dana, I took Octavia, figuring that the newly paved sidewalk on the east side of the street would offer me a quick way to scoot down to Market. What I failed to take into account were the perplexing cement lips they've added to each sidewalk as it dips down to meet the road.

For some reason, though the contractors reworking the whole Octavia thing have added non-slip wheelchair ramps to the street edge of each sidewalk--ostensibly to make it easier to cross streets and access sidewalks safely--they've also added some kind of cement apron around each of these ramps, which means that if you *are* in a wheelchair, you must first surmount these ridges of pavement if you intend to make it onto the sidewalk. It all makes no sense to me, though perhaps there's some master plan at work here that will bring all of these weirdly disparate elements together as the boulevard project progresses.

At any rate, it was while approaching one of these yellow ramps and markedly not paying attention to the ground that I found myself taking a ridiculous tumble onto said ground at Haight and Octavia. It was truly a spectacular fall, landing me face-down on the sidewalk with everything splayed that could possibly be splayed.

I pushed myself up and, after a few moments of writhing in pain and assuring the young man who rushed up and offered to call me an ambulance that I was ok, managed to get back on my feet and limp down toward Market.

The fall left my knee wildly swollen, seriously and disgustingly bruised, and nastily scraped. It also gave me a decent raspberry on the palm of my right hand, which I'd used, evidently, to try to stop myself from meeting the pavement horizontally. So when I finally made it to Dana's office, I washed my cuts and iced my knee, and figured I'd be hobbling around for a day or two.

What I didn't expect, when I woke up on Friday, was that my right shoulder would be achy and tender. I guess I must've fallen on it somehow, or pulled a muscle in my failed attempt to maintain my balance--I really can't remember. But for a while, it hurt more than my knee.

Because I'm still (in fact, am always) on the quest to soothe the emotional bruises of Novemeber (which, even now, months gone, have resisted fading from purple to blue to yellow to nothing) through metaphor, I can't help thinking this: when you get injured, you can sort of prepare for the hurt that stems from the center of the wound, whether it's a wrecked knee or a cut finger or a broken arm.

But sometimes it's the stealth pain--the pain you don't anticipate, can't quite identify the cause of, aren't really ready for--that's much worse. It seems to take advantage of the fact that your attention and healing efforts are focused elsewhere, sneaking up to knock you backwards again just when you think the end of your malady is in sight.

So I woke up with a plan for my slightly mangled knee--ice, elevation, no runs for a few days--but had really no idea of what to do with my weirdly painful shoulder, and spent the day trying to work around it.

All of which frustratingly mirrors what it's like to wake up each morning prepared to stave off the thoughts and memories and disappointments I know are waiting for me throughout the day but fully unprepared to do battle with the new ones, the buried ones, the ones that seem to have come from nowhere. And it's these that keep me achy and stiff and too often fragile, despite my best and most wishful efforts at full rehabilitation.

In praise of open doors

I love this exchange from Deborah Solomon's interview with Dan Glickman, the new president of the MPAA, in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine:

Solomon: Have you ever experienced a setback?

Glickman: I was voted out of Congress in 1994. It is not great to be fired from your job, particularly so publicly. But a month later I was picked to be secretary of agriculture. When one door closes, another opens. But you have to be standing right by the door.

Solomon: What if the door opens too quickly and breaks your nose?

Glickman: Well, it could. But you still have to be right by the door. It can just as easily open for you as it can against you.

Perhaps the best description of Bush II yet

From Steven Hart's review in Salon of Christine Todd Whitman's It's My Party, Too: The Battle for the Heart of the GOP and the Future of America:

"Bush's narrow victory in November completed the Republican Party's transformation from a vehicle for principled conservatives into a debt-fueled pimpmobile for crony capitalists and religious hucksters."

Back, back, back

Josh sends me a message today with simply, blissfully a photo--labeled "We used to get free lunches every Friday"--of me, Lily, Monica, Geoff, Shayne, and Josh in the courtyard of the original WebTV building.

It sends me reeling.

There's no real reason to be nostalgic for the summer of 1997 (when the photo was taken, and when the Friday lunches were indeed free): we were making $10 an hour dealing with endless reams of ridiculous customer e-mail, commuting down to Palo Alto at all hours, kept afloat by Odwalla and cheap microwaveable burritos. But there's such a sweet patina to those days nonetheless; they were free of worries of long-term career success, of complex relationships--of anything, really, but who would win the Borders gift certificate for answering the most e-mails per week, or what outlandish surprise the next company party would hold.

It's funny what my mind is able to elide when it wants to: the frustrations of past jobs, the shortcomings and imperfections of past relationships, moments (and hours and days) I'd never want to relive. All of those get pushed down, and what comes rushing to the fore, bidden or not, are the glossy, happy, sun-dappled moments like those in the photo.

Incomplete and sharply edited though they may be, they keep me afloat when I need them most, when I need to remember that sometimes existence is nothing more than a catered meal in a Palo Alto afternoon, a third round of drinks with the friends I was convinced would never leave me, a nap on a beach in PEI with the man who filled my heart to bursting.

That old scattered feeling

Evidence of my million-thoughts-at-once existence over the past week is easy to find in a quick look at the piles of books and DVDs throughout my house.

There's the emigration theme: "So You Want to Be a Canadian," "Living and Working in Canada," "How to Be a Canadian," Lonely Planet's "Vancouver."

There's the brush-up-on-French-for-TEF theme: "French Plus--Just Listen and Learn," "Le Petit Prince," "Les Jeux Sont Fait," Larousse de Poche 2005.

There's the must-continue-crawling-out-of-emotional-hole theme, evidenced both by the return of "The Wisdom of No Escape" (for those "wish I had the fortitude of a Buddhist" moments) and, on the opposite end of the spectrum, by the wisdom of pure escape ("Queer as Folk" season 2 volume 4 and "Da Ali G Movie: Ali G Indahouse"--which, by the way, is utterly f'ing hilarious in ways both similar to and totally different from the show).

And, of course, as a constant undercurrent there's the develop-business-or-perish theme, with alternating piles of organizing theory books, business plan workbooks, and guides to things like marketing and branding.

All of which, not surprisingly, leaves me flitting about from one thing to another, unable to focus exclusively on one topic for more than, say, an hour at a stretch. Am I keeping things interesting or am I driving myself crazy? How long can my brain handle this constant and radical shifting of gears before it gives up and latches permanently on to the closest topic?

Songs that were written all about you

What were the chances that the bartender at the Dutch Cabin--the tiny beer-only, ages-old, Eugene O'Neill-haunted place in downtown New London, Connecticut--would play Broken Social Scene's "Anthem for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl" when Phil and Monique and I were there on that random late December night? We had chatted with the bartender about the 17 Relics, about Lotus, about his current band, and he had none of those on cd, but for some reason he had "Anthem...," which made me stop and think, "Why do I know this song?" before realizing: ah. Because it was on a cd G made for me.

And what were the chances that Frijtz would set aside its normal fare of 80s vinyl while I was there tonight to play "There Goes the Fear" instead? I tried to focus on chatting with Jeff about client consultation questionnaires rather than listening to the song, but it crept in anyway. I once (clearly erroneously) read into those lyrics--the soaring "there goes the fear/let it go," especially--a kind of loving encouragement to once and finally set aside my fretting. Now they just seem taunting and sad.

Though I've taken all of G's mixes and dubs from my cd changer and have seriously limited my doses of emo and Canadian pop, even just going out in the world (which is supposed to be a balm) risks hearing something that will send me reeling, if only temporarily and only internally.

So maybe I just say fuck it, just put the summer '03 disc in my Discman tomorrow and turn it up loud and take it running like I used to, when "American English" and "Sharp Hint of New Tears" and "Throw Your Arms Around Me" meant something else entirely. Maybe I run with it fast enough and long enough and hard enough that, for a while at least, only my legs ache, and everything else goes numb.