second person narrative mode - christmas edition

Imagine you are a girl. (If you are actually a girl, this exercise will be much easier for you.) Now imagine you are not just any girl; you are an overweight, clumsy, awkward girl with a heart of gold. Imagine you have broken almost every rule enforced upon you by your parents in some misguided attempt to protect the honor of your friends and to uphold your own personal beliefs in being a friend to the friendless and living a strictly Carpe Diem life. you make poor choices, like staying out late because if you don't your friend might drive drunk or get involved with the wrong people; so you come home late and you get grounded. Imagine you find yourself entangled in these stupid scenarios over and over because you were raised to believe that your specific deity which you have chosen to worship rewards those who selflessly take care of those who can't or won't take care of themselves. Then imagine after several years, say 23 or so, of being constantly taken for granted, ignored or abused you start to question your motives. are you doing these things because you want to or because you're supposed to? Are you doing these things selflessly after all or are you assuming there is a reward? Are you supposed to expect the reward? Then maybe you have a crisis of faith here and there because ... you want that reward! you feel so guilty for wanting it and this causes so much anxiety and depression in you.

Now imagine you are seeking answers. Imagine the only way you know how to do this is a constant internal dialogue. You see everyone around you making life make sense with college degrees, husbands and wives, hobbies or sports, and with unquestionable religion. You see most everyone around you contented, calm and accepting. The only way you have found, however, to make anything make sense is to keep quiet and be alone and to escape into some music. Your headphones are your church. Your mix tapes are your religion. When the music stops, the confusion creeps in. You drown yourself in it, it is the only time your imagination runs free, there are no expectations and you dream wildly. it keeps you calm, it keeps you awake, it keeps you safe. you have no husband, you only have Bono. You have no degree, you have Peter Gabriel. You are not working a job you care about, but on the way to and from this job you get blast Jesus Christ Superstar at full volume and sing along. This somehow makes it all okay.

Sometimes when you are alone with your music, you are someone else. You are on stage. You are flawless and loved. You are thin and beautiful. Pretending you are someone you aren't becomes something you do so much it almost becomes who you are. you become an amalgamation of the pretend you and the real you. Then suddenly someone comes along, the right girl at the right time who encourages you to try and be both. why not? Dream out loud, be wild, be free, kick and sing! You may be in a stranger's bedroom at a house party and meet this girl and never think twice about it and then sometime down the road that moment becomes legend in the story of who you are together. Then one day you're sitting out on a patio of a coffee shop and this same girl decides to sit with you and you find yourself telling this practical stranger things about yourself you never said out loud before. Through a series of twists and turns, broken hearts, dead ends and towers falling, this girl becomes so much a part of yourself that you forget where she ends and you begin. You start to depend on her, to love her like family, to trust her input and opinions more than you trust your own. Her approval feels better than your parents'. You need too much sometimes and she kicks your ass in gear. you get stuck in a loop and she pulls you out. she watches you fly into the same closed window over and over again and she never judges you, she just waits until you learn your lesson. You love this girl. she is your best friend.

As you get older, it gets harder and harder to stand back up when you fall off the hypothetical horse. You feel so sure about something and it falls to pieces and you, therefore, fall to pieces. Your best friend will listen and nod and offer kind words and keep you moving. Sometimes the weight of the poor decisions and the heartbreak and the pain keep you in bed for days. Your body aches, your brain can't sit still, you walk aimlessly around the house for hours, heaving with sobs. Your best friend knows this about you, she is never cruel, she is never demanding, she is never condescending; she listens.

Somehow through the grace of your chosen deity, you suddenly find yourself becoming the person you always wanted to be. your body is cooperating and looking better, your self esteem is in tip-top shape, your mental imperfections are under control and your bills are being paid on time. and for this you suddenly start seeing those rewards you hoped would come. so then one day, you meet a man. This man takes you back to the girl you used to be before your best friend. this man reminds you of all the times when you were a kid and you just knew your chosen Deity would repay you for your kindnesses with just this type of person. The strength, beauty and goodness radiates from this man with such high intensity you want to just linger in it all day like a cat with a premium ray of sunshine. This one man represents everything you admire and respect in humanity, he represents everything you ever admired about yourself and your best friend in a beautifully bearded package. you can even see your mother and father in him, you can see such gentle kindness, such wild passion, big dreams that he will determinedly make come true, and most importantly you can see every reason in the world why you should be a better person because of him. You find yourself taking those final steps your best friend laid out for you and now through the strength and conviction of your love for this man, you are strong enough to take them. You feel justified and finally like a complete person, not just a collage of ideas. you feel whole. you finally feel better than the rest of the people who thought they had it figured out because you know the real secret; you solved the riddle of true love.

you start a project. you are on step-whatever of your never ending-step-plan to become the best you that you can possibly be by actually doing something you set out to do; you start writing. it may not be the best written thing out there, but it is yours. and with every new thing that is written, you feel more and more confident. you feel that empty vessel that was meant to hold your pride all along start to fill. you are writing for three people. yourself, your best friend and your true love; the only three people in the world you trust with your life and most importantly, your heart. you make a decision to dedicate songs to the people you love the most as a Christmas present as a part of this writing project. From day one you start to realize the two hardest entries will be for these two people. It takes you months to make a decision and as soon as you make it, you realize it was the wrong one. Imagine this: you have to stand at the graves of your grandparents. You have to look into the faces of the people who share your blood. You have to spend Christmas Eve alone and lost. You have to hear the right song at the right moment, you have to read just the right poem at the right time and you have to have just the right dream during the right nap to know the answer...

There is no one song for your best friend. There is no one song for the love of your life. They are your songs; they are every song. These two, these two random people your chosen Deity has chosen to set before you that he or she gave you to love more than life itself, they are your soundtrack. They ARE the music.



no two silly people have ever been so loved xxx

Wreckless Eric - Whole Wide World

There is only one thing in the world I think about more than music, which should be baffling to some people, but when I confess what that thing is it should come as no surprise: Love. I think about love a lot. A LOT, a lot. What it is, what it means, what it could be, what it should be… What I want, what I have, what I need, what I feel. What I deserve, why do I deserve it? Is “deserve” even the right thing to say? Does anyone DESERVE love? Is it a human right or is it a privilege? What is the ratio to human suffering and the retribution in the form of someone worshiping the crap out of you? Have I suffered enough? Is there such thing as karma? Am I repaying some karmic debt from some terrible thing I did in the past in the form of being forever alone? Why? Isn’t my faith enough to combat this self-imposed solitary confinement? Am I doing it to myself? Am I just too stupid to know how to love correctly? Why am I my favorite person on earth and yet I am no one else’s favorite person on earth?

There are a thousand other questions… I won’t burden them with you for now.

I will admit I never heard this song until Will Farrell’s movie “Stranger Than Fiction”; a movie I loved so much I bought instantly on DVD. I find myself watching it over and over again, as I do with certain low budget-ish indie-esque quirky love stories (i.e. Dream for an Insomniac, The Pillow Book, Garden State, etc… these are my very favorite kinds of movies) If you knew this song before this movie, you win this cool-points battle, cool kid. I didn’t. I will not be ashamed to admit that. But that scene, when Harold just randomly starts playing it and Ana comes out and just falls all over herself for him; yeah that. I want that. I remember watching that scene for the first time and literally saying out loud; “Oh god! I want that!!!” (I want that, by the way.) This song personifies everything I want a man to feel about me.

So I was walking in to work this morning and this song randomly popped into my head, so I was walking along, whistling the tune, when I realize. Damn, I’ve really never had that. How have I never had the kind of love I deserve, to this point? How do I keep missing the mark? I have such a good, clear vision of what it is, what it feels like, I know exactly how to love someone else, but why has no one ever figured out how to love me? Why hasn’t anyone bothered? I’m so …. Loveable? How is it even possible that no man has written a love song about me? How have I never gotten a love letter, like a hand written “you are perfect” love letter? How has no one ever written me a poem? How have I never gotten a mix cd from a man? How is this even possible? ME? Of all people? Me, the girl who has made more mix cds than friends, the girl who makes such perfect mix cds I should practically put this skill on my resume. Never has it happened; it blows my mind.

I should clarify. Yes, men have loved me. Men have loved me well; socially acceptably, restrainedly, technically correctly, cautiously… but I don’t want that. I want the right man to love me the right way. I want someone to go the whole wide world just to find me… so then I say this, (I type this,) and I hear the voice of my conscience and my father and certain friends saying things like “you should be reasonable and you should accept that men are the way they are.” I hear every ex of mine say, "You live in a fantasy land." Or something like that. I would rather live in a 'fantasy land' than on a planet where that kind of love doesn't happen. I don’t want a sane, rational, calm love. I know it exists! I know it as well as I know that *I* exist, or god exists; I can feel it. Look at this song, for Christ’s sake. There are men that feel like this. Look at every incredible love song written by a man. Look at Ian Curtis or Shane MacGowan. Look at Lord Byron or Nicholas Sparks, even. Listen to Explosions in the Sky, dammit. There are men that are capable of great loves and very capable of expressing that love without hesitation or fear. I want this man. I have a habit of saying that I need a man to have bigger balls than I have. And for someone to have literally no physical testes, I have certainly dated my fair share of weak men.

About a year ago, actually a year ago this month, my ex, Gigi, and I split. We had a good run, but there was about a million things wrong with our relationship, which I really don’t feel like going into right now… after a month or two of going wild and being free I started having that “oh god, why did I dump my boyfriend, I might have screwed up” feeling. I ran into a good friend who had me make a list. I made this list. This is part of the “story” as I related it on my private journal at the time, 3 days before my last birthday:


I’ve been in love before. Lots. I have loved more in my little lifetime than most people do in five lifetimes. There is nothing on earth I have pursued or fought harder for than true love. I have loved men who pulled my pigtails, men who didn’t know I existed, men who knew I existed and exploited me, men who abused me, men who tried to hold me while I wriggled free, men who loved me some but not enough… I almost got married once, but we were kids. I can look back on that and see how we both dodged a hellacious bullet, but I mostly think I missed my only chance there. I was with Gigi for almost 3 years. We ended things at mostly my insistence because I thought we were going nowhere and at the secondary insistence of my friends who KNEW we were going nowhere and that someone who would love me how I needed was out there. I knew it too. I got single, I got laid. I met some guys, I dated one young guy and had a really good time and dumped all my emotional garbage on him that I never dealt with after Gigi. I got really close to losing my mind for a minute there. I kept talking to a good friend of mine who kept insisting I meet this one guy because he was my ‘soul mate.’ I knew who he was talking about but I let old ugly me take over and insist that I had no chance with this guy. Through some impossibly coincidental circumstances that I, at the time, took as fate (which was the prognostication of my entire spiritual downfall let me tell you,) we wound up dating. I literally did everything by the unspoken girl rule book, aka ‘He’s Just Not That into You,’ every Cosmo mag EVER, everything your mama ever told you about how to get a man and every bit of bad bar bathroom advice from your girlfriends all in one. I played it cool, I acted indifferent, I stayed calm, I didn’t run my mouth, I didn’t get carried away, I let things happen, I was a cool customer. But somewhere lurking in the shadows, as always, was the ‘OMG MAGIC! TRUE LOVE! TAKE A CHANCE, THIS COLD BE IT!”

We had a few really amazing nights together, then one REALLY amazing night together and I realized that I was falling stupid head over heels for this guy. So what did I do? Got drunk and told him, of course. And what did he do? Run for the hills, of course. There are some really stupid circumstances surrounding this situation. One of which is this: either right after or soon before Gigi and I split I was hanging out with one of my hippie mama outcast weirdo’s at the coffee shop and she told me to make a list of everything I could ever possibly want in a man, as if I created him in a lab, make it as outlandishly impossible as I wanted, just dream out loud…. I made the list. This man was the list. NO ONE SHOULD BE THAT LIST. IT DOES NOT EXIST. IT IS ME WITH A DICK… …I am so pissed that I am getting pissed about it. He was so different; I don’t want to get over him. I want the phone to ring. I want magic. I had the opportunity to see him again last weekend and I was a fucking coward and I drank myself into blackout status. Don’t remember the majority of the night, just that I finally told him that I loved him and he pretty much patted me on the head and said “Aww, you’re just drunk!” and then proceeded to let me drive home…? In what universe is the logic that I am too drunk to understand what love is, mean that I am in any way capable of driving? This thought fucks me up too much to continue right now.



Part of the first, which is not explained in the journal entry above, no one ever saw that list except me and my best friend until him, now you. As me and this guy were dating, I started feeling brand new about it all, about life in general, it was off the charts exceptional. Not just him, but the way I *felt* about him, the way my body and my heart my very being reacted to his existence and presence. The calm and confidence I felt when I was near him or thought about him. I asked my best friend about it, and she simply said “well yeah, because he’s ‘the list’.” I thought about it for a minute and pulled the list out of my wallet, where I had toted it around like a good luck charm for almost a year and read through the list. By the time I got to the bottom I was crying because I knew I had found him. It is an amazing yet almost horrifying feeling when you realize you’ve met the love of your life. Maybe it’s what parachuting feels like? … The best and worst feeling ever. It was all within the same week that I realized I had found him and I loved him that he broke up with me. I was a wreck for a long, long time. (I had a really shitty summer this year. Lost my faith, my coping abilities, too much weight, etc...) Sometimes I still backtrack; mostly now-a-days I propel myself recklessly forward, taking whatever chance life throws at me to prove me wrong about him. So far, no luck, but it doesn’t mean I won’t give up giving up on him. I’m trying, still. One day it’ll stop being him I compare every man to forever. I’m really ready for that to happen. But the point of this is… the list.

When he ended things, we sat on my couch and cried like idiots and I decided to show him the list. I can’t say what he felt when he read it; I just know we were both emotional wrecks that day. I did my best to stay strong and make the hurting me hurt him less. I loved him that much. So I kept my head up and waited until he left to lose it. but after he read the list, he either that day or in a later email said something to the effect that I needed to add one more to that list… a final bullet point that says more or less that the man of my dreams has to be “ready and willing to accept the kind of love that I have to offer.” So yes, that. I have thought about that a lot. It’s something my best friend and I have discussed many times. So the thought that this guy was "everything but" has helped talk me down off that “but he was THE ONE” ledge many times… but the right word or song or thought or memory triggers him like a leg cramp; I am paralyzed with the loss. I’ve stopped talking about him and reconnecting him to everything and everywhere I go (much to the relief of my friends, I’m sure) I’ve stopped crying myself to sleep and finding myself driving in circles on the beltline listening to horribly heartbreaking love songs. I stopped hurting and started dating. I’m moving ahead slowly, doubting every step in the opposite direction from him, but I have no choice, so I keep walking. Some days are terrible, some days are awesome. Most days are just another day without him, but what are you going to do, right?


So what I NEED is the right person feeling that much for me. And I could have any guy being in love with me, but I want THE guy to be in love with me. The one I love back… The perfect one, the man from before plus one - how can something so seemingly simple be so hard? I still fervently believe the man of my dreams will be that list; he will be gratefully excited and ready to accept my intense level of love, he will write me unprompted love letters and show up with red tulips because it’s a Tuesday and he loves to make me smile, he will push through a crowd of strangers to get to me across the room because he is so excited to see me, he will sing acoustic version of glam rock pop songs to me on a barely tuned guitar in a dimly lit living room; he will love me so much it leaves me shell shocked and drunk without the drink.


on second thought, I think I might actually hate this song.

Kate Bush - King Of The Mountain

I have cultivated many seemingly useless talents. I have taught myself how to gloss over pain and to pick myself up from heartbreak. I have an extraordinarily keen sense of impermanence. I understand my mortality. I know all too well how to appreciate the people in my life and the things that I see, love and do beyond the capabilities that most people can possibly logically comprehend. I understand beauty, love, blood, pain, death, life, faith, fear, exhilaration, and passion on a manic poet’s level. This is my blessing / This is my curse. It propels me recklessly forward; all day, every day. It causes me to crack under the pressure sometimes. It finds me only being able to relate to dead poets and rock stars; hiding in my bed for days when it all gets too overwhelming. It also brings me to tears when I am too full of love for things most people ignore; a beautiful bird on an otherwise ordinary tree, witnessing kindnesses between strangers, the right note in the right song, being at the right place at the right time, the sunrise/the sunset, itching the right spot, meeting the right person, childrens' faces, ice cream cones and ladybugs. There is so much that the majority of most humans take for granted, that i have somehow convinced myself Someone has to Appreciate it or it will all be for nothing. I believe I have taught myself how to be overwhelmed with beauty. I have taught myself how to not filter out the majesty and velocity of my little lifetime. How lucky I am! Lucky me, lucky mud!

Sometimes I find myself replaying seemingly insignificant experiences that wouldn’t make it into a single paragraph of my life’s story because there literally was no meaning, it was just a beautiful moment; it happened, I appreciated being alive to experience it, the experience stayed with me. these memories come and go; the way a certain shadow fell across the sidewalk one morning as I was walking in to work one day and I never saw it again – where did it come from? A beautiful mystery. Trying on a dress in the Kmart changing room with my mother when I was 6 years old – I do not remember the dress, I remember the feeling of the terry cloth on my stomach and the perfume my mother was wearing; White Shoulders… there are certain moments I can remember very consciously saying to myself “I am alive. No one on earth has ever had this experience and I got lucky enough to be the one to feel it and best of all, acknowledge the gift of being able to recognize how lucky I am to be here.” …Standing on the lawn front of my Granny’s house the day of her funeral and seeing the first few snowflakes fall; holding my best friend’s child for the first time; lying on my back in the grass and watching the clouds roll by – anytime, ever. I relive them, I replay them, I relish them, I appreciate them.

Oscar said: “Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the arts that have influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty.”

One such memory that is slightly significant but is not, is somehow backhandedly related to this song. For my 30th birthday in 2007, I was given the gift of travel by my parents. I went to France (Paris, specifically) for an extended solo soul search. It was the greatest and most beautiful experience of my life. There are many moments that meant nothing which mean everything, that I replay over and over; Taking the wrong metro stop exit and coming out of the tube into a department store. Sitting in front of a café in the Pigalle whilst sipping a Franziskaner and listening to a man sing Cat Stevens with a thick French accent, watching graffiti roll by on the train from the 18th to the 7th arrondissements, bread, the sound of a car with its stereo blasting rolling down my little Rue Blanche in the middle of the night…

I, at the time of my travel, did not have an ipod. I knew music was going to play a very significant part of this experience, as I would be alone. I scavenged what I could and had a debacle of ipod buying drama back and forth on ebay. I tried purchasing an ipod 3 different times, all 3 were worthless and had to be returned, until 2 days before I was to leave, I convinced my friend to let me borrow his 6GB ipod to take with. I very specifically remember my dad picking my up at my apartment to take me to the airport and I was still trying to load just the right songs onto it. He was standing at the door, hollering for me to come on and I was still syncing…

Very specific albums and artists went on that trip with me to Paris; I spent a day in the Pere Lachaise with Debussy, he kept watch while I cried over Oscar’s grave. Tom Waits and I had a lovely evening on the Pont Neuf, watching lovers and rollerbladers by streetlight. Aimee Mann and I rekindled our romance in the Tuileries and traded lighters with a homeless man. Mel Tormé and I had a lovely lunch with Dave Eggers by the Louvre… Kate Bush and I went to Normandy on a pilgrimage.

I spent the entire time I was in France, basically in the city, except for one day when I fulfilled a lifelong-ish dream to visit the Mont St Michel. I left my room at 5am and got to the tour group office and climbed on the bus. It took us 4 hours or so to get from the City to Avranches. Along the way, somewhere around Caen we stopped at a truck stop type location for everyone to stretch and fuel up. I listened to Aerial over and over on the way up. The ethereal simplicity and descriptiveness of the ordinary turned extraordinary; it fit this dream day for me so well. I was listening to "King of the Mountain" the first moment I could see the abbey, it was breathtaking and filled me in a way little has before or since.

The truck stop, which could have been in Alabama or Maryland - it was that non-descript, sold amazing French coffees and tshirts and was like a travel mecca. I remember buying some kit-kat bar-esque candy bar and a coke. I went outside to wait for the rest of my group and have a smoke. I was sitting on a picnic table, my feet on the bench, shivering a little, staring at nothing; feeling lucky to be alive. Another bus pulls into the lot and a flood of children fly into the truck stop. There is a group of chaperones with the group, most likely on a field trip. A man, probably in his early 40s and probably a teacher, follows to the door and stops at the picnic table with me. He was wearing a tweed jacket with suede elbow patches. He had a red plaid thermos. He climbs onto the picnic table with me and lights a smoke. He opens the thermos and takes two small plastic cups out of his jacket pocket and fills them both, handing me one. I didn't think twice and took it from his hands. Why not? He turns to me and says (in French) “You are a student?” and I said “I am a pilgrim.” (I swear I did. Paris turned me into an idiot/poetry junky) and he said “let us drink to that!” and he handed me one of the cups. He said something like “this is the best coffee I have ever brewed in my life. How lucky I get to share it with someone on a spiritual quest.” And we sipped our coffee and watched the traffic roll by for a few minutes until my group began to load onto the bus. I handed his cup back to him and said thank you for the coffee. We shook hands I got onto the bus.

Later that day I climbed the 900 steps to the top of the abbey and stood on stones 2000 years old and let myself be completely overwhelmed with beauty and luck as I stared out into the ancient sea.

The Rolling Stones - You Can't Always Get What You Want

Delicious irony: this is a sneaky U2 post.

I was 14 years old when U2’s ZooTV tour began in Lakeland, Florida. I had held my breath and scrimped allowance for months in anticipation. Dates were announced and there was no show close enough for me to figure out a 14 year old way to attend. I was miserable, overdramatic; throwing myself around on furniture, crying, like I do. This only fueled more angsty candlelit poetry. (One day I will dig out the box with all this mess in it and transcribe some for you, as much as I talk about it. writing on my hand right now, in fact.) MTV was blown up with footage and chatter and News Breaks about the tour. I was wild with desperation to see them. To just be in the same room. Anything!

The now country, then local classic rock radio station, 106.1, announced a contest. Be the 16th caller and you would win tickets to see the boys in Hampton, Virginia on March 7th. This prize also included transportation to and from the show. Was this a sign from God? My only problem, a way to get there, could be rectified. It was 5 days before the show, which was on a Saturday. Somehow I either convinced my parents that I had to be home that day to try and win or I faked sick, I don’t remember. All I know is on Monday I stayed home sick from school and sat in the bed with my phone on one side and my radio on the other. I don’t really remember walking to the bathroom, eating, anything; just waiting.

The “game” was that the station would play the first little “Yeaaaah!” from the Man at the beginning of Desire. After you heard this, you called. If you were caller 16, you win the tickets and the trip. I remember calling the station at least 3 times during the day asking if it was going to be soon. They of course offered no hints. So I waited.

Sometime around 7pm, while I was sitting on the floor in front of my bookcase, phone on the right, radio on the left. After every song finished, I laid my hand on the phone and waited. Suddenly there it was. The “Yeeeahhhh!” ...My hand went right to the phone and started hitting redial. My heart was pounding out of my chest. The song they played right after was The Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” I could hear it vaguely in the background; mostly I was only hearing my own heartbeat in my ears and the constant fast beep of the busy signal. I just remember hitting redial, hanging up, hitting redial, hanging up. It seemed like forever. There came a point where I decided there was just literally no way it could go on this long and I thought “Oh God, just one more time. PLEASE.” and I hit redial. It rang. I jumped to my feet. I started pacing. This was the conversation:

“106.1!”
“WHATCALLERAMI?”
“I’m sorry?”
“WHATCALLERAMI? WHATCALLERAMI?”
“Oh, I’m sorry babe. ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’, you know…”
“NOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!”
“Hey, Hey, ‘But if you try sometimes, you just might get what you need. YOU’RE CALLER 16!!!!!!!”
*Falls on knees to the floor, hyperventilating.* “R-r-r-really?”
“YEAH! You got it!”
*says nothing because is crying and hyperventilating.*
“You ok over there? should we send an ambulance??”
“YOU CAN SEND THE BUS TO SEE U2 RIGHT NOW OH MY GOD AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!”
“HELL YES!!!”


So, yes. I won. It was the very first time I got to see the boys. My dad drove my friend Brian (who was my main U2 influence,) to the radio station that Saturday morning to get on the bus. I was 14, Brian was 15. In retrospect, my parents are kinda super-awesome to let me go that far, unchaperoned with a boy, to a rock show. It was everything I hoped it would be and more. I bought a tour program that I’ve re-read more than any stupid piece of literature in the world. I kept the ticket stub and stickers and other paraphernalia in the tour program. That night (sometime after 3 in the morning!) after we got home I took out a sheet of notebook paper and wrote out a list. I entitled it “THINGS I WILL NEVER EVER FORGET ABOUT THIS NIGHT.” I will find this list. I will scan it. also being written on the hand right now. This list included such things as "BP Fallon sitting in the Trabant", "Black Francis Screaming", "Guy dressed like the fly wandering around the coliseum freaking me out", "Drunk guy on the bus singing the 'hoo hooooo!'s from BAD over and over again on the way home."

I’ve never in the past almost 20 years heard this song without thinking of this story and the magic it stirs in my heart. it reminds me of good luck.