All my friends got flowers in their eyes
but I got none this season
all of last year’s blooms have gone and died
time doesn’t give a reason
hey baby do you ask yourself sometimes
what you need to be forgiven
everything that you ever done wrong
is the reason that I’m driven
straight to you

Waiting here for you
wanting to tell you
how I get my ends and my beginnings mixed up too
just the way you do
I thought if I told you
you might want to stay for just another day
or two

(It’s just like answers
that come in small packages that go in the mail)

Waiting for the trains that just never come
beginning to believe in
the disappearing nature of
the people we have been
we have begun to change
into the worst kind of people
so unkind
oh apologies
no apologies
this apology
doesn’t describe
the way
it feels
to feel
for you

Waiting here for you
wanting to tell you
how I find myself
slowly disappearing too
just the way you do
I thought if I told you
you might want to help me to remain
with you

I just wanna stay for a little while
I wanna stay a little while
oh come on come on come on come on

There’s a night life falling down on me
I just feel like a change
beneath the sun in the summer a sea of flowers
won’t bloom
without the rain
but oh this desert life
this high life
here at the dying end of the day

I wasn’t made for the scene, baby
but I was made in this scene
baby, it’s just my way
I don’t wanna go home alone
I wanna come on home to you

Waiting here for you
wanting to tell you
how I line my sky with all the silver I can use
just the way you do
I thought if I told you
you might want to stay for just another day
or two

(Isn’t that just like
disappearing into the sum of yourself
and the person you are disappearing into
it’s like one plus one equals nothing at all
one plus two equals nothing at all
one plus me equals nothing at all
one plus you equals one plus you equals you equals
you and you and you and
nothing at all)

-Counting Crows

All of a sudden she disappears
just yesterday she was here
somebody tell me if I am sleeping
someone should be with me here
cause I don’t wanna be alone

As already indicated, it’s been a crazy last few days. The way things are going, almost everything is becoming believable at this point. But before I knew the extent of the damage to the apartment here or the extent of damage my body had suddenly started taking, I decided to go to a Counting Crows show in Montclair, New Jersey, since they had extra tickets for the 18 August show. And since I’d missed the show I was scheduled to attend on July 31st. And since I needed an emotional bloodletting, of which Counting Crows shows are the best kind I know. And since I don’t care what happens to me anymore. And since I just need to find a way to get through the next eight days, likely in many ways to be the most painful of my life thus far. Those of you who know what’s going on know exactly why that is.

I wanna be the knife
that cuts into my hand
and I wanna be scattered
from here in this catapult
what a big baby
won’t somebody save me please?
won’t find nobody home

I found Montclair, New Jersey to be something of a dying small-town community feel nestled in the midst of an industrial wasteland. This probably sounds a little worse than it is, but I haven’t exactly been in the most flattering of moods lately about anything. Everything looks dead or dying, everything seems to be atrophying, everything has the stench of broken dreams. The miniature downtown of Montclair seems to be built around the newly reopened and revitalized Wellmont Theatre, a pretty nifty little venue long fallen into disrepair and recently rescued. If the fellow line-waiting front-row patrons are to be believed, the ceiling is still in danger of collapse and they have a thin excuse for netting up there to make sure no one takes a direct plaster hit if so. Against the odds, the building remained intact not only while I bought tickets, waited an hour or so in line, and jetted up to the second row on the floor, but even through the duration of the emotional turmoil unleashed when CC and their friends took the stage.

All of these quiet battered voices
wait for the hunger to come
we’ve got little revolvers
and stupid choices
no one to say when we’re done
well I don’t wanna bring you down

This is part of their summer tour and their summer tours lately have been subheaded The Traveling Circus and Medicine Show, an innovative amalgam of whatever three bands they have grouped together, all switching out songs and sets and playing two acts with an encore like a seamless 20-piece band. It’s not exactly my favorite incarnation of the Crows, but it works pretty well most of the time, even when they have an angry joke of a white rapper as the third piece in their triage. There’s a rockabilly sensibility to this manifestation of their live act, but this particular show lacked most of the boisterous highs one would typically expect to come along with that. Adam Duritz seemed more dazed than I felt, often staring into space and almost muttering lyrics in a dejected haze. It wasn’t sloppy or misdelivered in any way, though – it was deliberate, calculated, crafted. It spoke of a person whose life has whizzed past him, leaving him to contemplate the rubble. It spoke to me.

I wanna be the light
that burns out your eyes
cause I know there’s little things about me
that would sing in the silence of
so much rejection in every connection I make
can’t find nobody home

I wept, literally, through six of the songs. Having been to something like ten Counting Crows shows, I have long come to expect that they will move me, that I will find them religious experiences, that the poetry and pathos of the live delivery will shake my foundations and reignite the core of my soul, for both good and for sad. What I am often not prepared for is that even my expectations of transcendence will be exceeded and surpassed. That the phrase “Awareness is Never Enough – It Must Always Be Wonder” is so frequently made corporeal in those unexpected moments of a CC show. What song will they build into what other song? What meaning will be encompassed or recalculated in such a way as to render the entire deepest voice of a song bare in a new and scintillating light? What will cut so hard and so fast to the quick that one’s heart will bleed anew, pouring forth a whole new reason for pouring? This is the emotional breakdown and rebuild, the evisceration and glinting hope, that these shows offer.

I wanna be the light
that burns out your eyes
cause I know there’s little things about me
that would sing in the silence of
so much rejection in every connection I make
I wanna be the last thing that you hear when you’re falling asleep

It was actually Augustana who offered me one of the most painful and beautiful moments when they stuck “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of” in the middle of “Boston”. I openly bled tears, taken back to both a moment on a bus in Scotland convinced I was going to die when that song came blaring over the speakers to give me hope and also to the understanding of the song’s original purpose: an open letter to a suicide, committed to voice too late to make any difference for that one but submitted all the same in hopes of saving others. Suddenly the fact that “you don’t know me and you don’t even care” was cut back by the fact that we’re all “stuck in a moment and can’t get out of it”. It was at that moment, after a long soliloquy on growing up in light of “Up All Night” and two songs before “Catapult” that the song selection stopped speaking to me and started being for me, about me, through me. By the time “Time and Time Again” was paired back-to-back with “Richard Manuel is Dead” near the open of the second act, I was slayed and begging for more.

I wanna be the knife
that cuts into my hand
and I wanna be scattered
from here in this catapult
what a big baby
won’t somebody take me please?
can’t find nobody home

It’s impossible to explain everything I’m feeling or thinking or going through now, or was then. It’s impossible to explain the importance of “Richard Manuel is Dead”, Emily’s favorite Crows song, or the precise implications of the way Adam sang “A Murder of One”, centering on a to-me-unprecedented line of “I need to change,” observing and reflecting on the painful nature of growing up through things one shouldn’t have to experience. By the time “Rain King” was offering hope “With a Little Help from My Friends”, I’d already settled in a numb fuzzy-faced coma of crying to the point of catharsis. It was no wonder that I stumbled home to find a dumpster overturned by the storm in the parking space normally reserved for the Prius and would be in the Emergency Room within a few hours, dealing with the extraction of kidney stones. Every day, hour, minute, is its own special trial. And like the singing of a song or the passing of a kidney stone, the pain embedded deep in each moment makes the overall picture impossible to even grasp. No wonder Emily seems capable of such callous calculation and diffident distance. No one could hope to understand what’s happening without living through each second. Even me.

Caravan
Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby
Omaha
[NOTAR]
Up All Night
Stars and Boulevards
Boston (with Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of)
Steal Your Heart Away
Twenty Years
Catapult
[NOTAR]
Why Should You Come When I Call?
You Ain’t Going Nowhere
—
Four White Stallions
Time and Time Again
Richard Manuel is Dead
Safe and Sound
A Murder of One (with Doris Day)
[NOTAR x2]
Just Like a Woman
Dust
Shot in the Dark
Sweet and Low
Come Around
A Long December (with A Murder of One)
Hanginaround
—
Rain King (with With a Little Help from My Friends)
This Land is Your Land

(Augustana songs in italics; NOTAR songs not named)

The Counting Crows show was a great experience overall, despite manifesting as an emotional woodchipper that forced me to hysterical tears during at least six songs. I’ll write up that whole situation at some point – I was excited to post the setlist and review after spending a first night here in Princeton.

Turns out I wasn’t so lucky. I went to sleep with a good deal of pain in my left side and it was so excruciating at 5:00 in the morning that it woke me up. I spent a panicky half-hour wanting to throw up and being unable to, then looking up appendicitis, discovering my pain was on the wrong side, and still being concerned anyway. I wound up deciding to head to the ER. After all, no one’s here living with me to talk down from the ledge or reassure me or offer me anything anymore.

Turns out, five hours of hospital later, including my first-ever CAT scan and first-ever IV, that I have kidney stones. Yeah. Also known as perhaps the only human experience more painful than childbirth. Because that’s what I needed about now. A good old-fashioned medical walloping. Hooray.

Lots more doctor’s visits to come to determine why I’m getting them and what I can do to mitigate. If you need me, I’ll be ducking and covering under the bed and trying not to blink.

Our conversation was short and sweet
It nearly swept me off-a my feet
And I’m back in the rain, oh, oh
And you are on dry land
You made it there somehow
You’re a big girl now

Bird on the horizon, sittin’ on a fence
He’s singin’ his song for me at his own expense
And I’m just like that bird, oh, oh
Singin’ just for you
I hope that you can hear
Hear me singin’ through these tears

Time is a jet plane, it moves too fast
Oh, but what a shame if all we’ve shared can’t last
I can change, I swear, oh, oh
See what you can do
I can make it through
You can make it too

Love is so simple, to quote a phrase
You’ve known it all the time, I’m learnin’ it these days
Oh, I know where I can find you, oh, oh
In somebody’s room
It’s a price I have to pay
You’re a big girl all the way

A change in the weather is known to be extreme
But what’s the sense of changing horses in midstream?
I’m going out of my mind, oh, oh
With a pain that stops and starts
Like a corkscrew to my heart
Ever since we’ve been apart

-Bob Dylan

There are two ways I can make this trip that are almost identical in mileage:

One is to take US Route 1, a literal straight line road that hearkens back to legends of the tsar drawing plans for a railroad from St. Petersburg to Moscow. While straight as an arrow, the route runs south of both my origin and my destination, adding a bit of time. More importantly, Route 1 (in Jersey, at least) is perhaps the worst four-lane road in America, a bizarre combination of highway lane structures and traffic with endless stoplights. Despite the lights, left turns are strictly forbidden, requiring “jug-handles” where one exits to the right to then turn onto a crossover lane. There are no conventional exits, just jug-handles. And the thing is filled with trucks and Jersey drivers, who remain the only people worse than drunk New Mexicans, murderous Manhattanites, and raging Massachusetts drivers, somehow blending the worst aspects of all three.

The alternative is NJ Route 27, a pastoral winding road whose frequent elevation shifts are outnumbered only by the number of times the speed limit changes between Princeton and New Brunswick. If Route 1 is the express (or tries to be), Route 27 is the local, plowing through the center of random townships and dropping the limit from 50 to 25 with almost no warning. This is a two-laner (one in each direction) and is frequented by these aging gray buses that seem to run local routes in this thickly settled part of the state. There are no trucks, however, and very little traffic at all late at night, when all the lights are green. There are lights, but probably fewer than on the “highway” counterpart.

After doing round-trips on each, I’ve settled into a vague pattern of taking Route 1 up to New Brunswick in the evening and returning on Route 27 in the middle of the night. Route 1 seems to have a stagnant amount of traffic 24/7, which is more palatable in comparison to the fairly heavy traffic on 27 at around 8:30, but less palatable compared to the emptiness of same past midnight. But more than anything, there’s just something peaceful and rewarding about taking 27 home, soaring through empty silent communities like a high-schooler the night after graduation.

Tonight, however, the road was deader than ever. It was ghostly, the kind of night that inspired Ray Bradbury’s story “Night Meeting”, where a Martian and an Earthling colonist cross paths through the midst of time on desolate night roads. The first leaves were covering the road in some places, sent sailing as I would race through in an effort to stay ever 5 miles an hour above the mercurial legal maximum. I think I passed all of two cars going my direction the whole time, both fairly close to New Brunswick, and maybe 5-7 in the other direction the whole way. In 25 minutes.

There is much time to ponder in such settings, though they have a way of dominating the mental space with their own unique offering. We spend so much time surrounded by people, their structures, the possibility of interaction. To be moving swiftly through a voided landscape is at once solipsistic and comforting, calling attention to one’s place in the universe and focus to the significance of each passing minute. The more I noticed my aloneness, the more I felt both isolated and somehow unified with a larger presence and could feel the awareness of the moment pile upon itself.

I had a CD to keep me company, but its significance was only to underscore the larger reality around, not to take center stage. Like Kitaro on a road to Jewell that suddenly became endless and transcendent, with my Dad so many years ago. The songs were like leaves, like the occasional droplet collected on the windshield, to be considered and passed like most days on the wind.

And then, as Princeton approached faster than normal, and cars six and seven northbound, Dave Matthews Band’s “Christmas Song” came on the disc. And the world of silence, of sleepy village churches and big box brand name signs illuminated for overnight advertising of empty stores, shifted. It transformed to a seventeen-year-old kid who made the decision to buy his first-ever CD (after years of accumulating cassette tapes) because it was the only way he could acquire this song he’d heard just once on the radio that had captivated his feelings about Christmas in a way he could handle as a no-longer-Christian. Who had looked everywhere for a tape, knowing that he already had one DMB tape, finally settling ironically for the older album on CD only and wondering how to deal with the technological shift. Who came home and skipped right to the last track, wondered at the trail of lightning sounds that followed the track, played it on repeat most of the night. It was a cold night, beckoning to Christmas still a couple months out, a night not unlike this one. Then there was a play to direct, a year to get through, somehow, colleges and a future to seek (up). Tonight, not so different perhaps, a novel in place of a play, colleges behind but not forgotten, a year to be savored instead of endured. Perhaps life really does get easier over time, after all.

I listened to the last three recitations of the closing chorus in the stopped car in front of my current residence, smiling at the yellow porch light and the barely visible Christmas lights within, decking the top corner of the living room walls. “And the blood of our children all around.” The last fade of notes, the car switched off, and a gathering of paper for the trek inside. Crossing the threshold, I felt the wind swirl behind me and wondered what message it carried from what past or future self. I am never (and always) alone. But tonight, oh tonight, it all seems to make sense.

I went inside to find Pandora staring at me as though she’d been waiting this whole time.

Em and I have been watching the Up Series, a continuum of documentaries about 14 British children who turned 7 in 1964. In the first film, they are shown expressing their hopes and dreams for the future, answering a variety of standard questions about the human condition and giving a full range of kids-say-the-darndest-things responses. In subsequent films, their lives are shown to follow or deviate from the prescribed path. While the series was ostensibly made about Britain’s class structure and how opportunities are truly unequal, the films end up being much more about the similarity of people’s lives and, frankly, their simplicity.

Given that Netflix, to which we have recently subscribed, offers most of this series for free and immediate streaming download, Em and I have torn through 7, 14, 21, 28, and 35 in less than a week. Crossing the threshold from 28 to 35 gave pause, as we went from watching people younger than we to older in the span of a scant two hours. And while in many ways this transition was the least overtly noticeable, the aging and especially the confrontation of parental mortality were sobering.

More than anything, the impact of this series has been to further invigorate my excitement about where I am at this particular juncture of my life, knowing it may be the first threshold of those offered in the films that my 7-year-old self would have been proud to see me on. I cannot say enough times how much the pain of crossing 30 is dulled by finally embarking on the steps that I have longed to take since I was very young. Watching these 7-year increments in quick succession is a ruthless reduction of the lives of others and reminds any conscious viewer how much waste and irrelevance compiles into a standard human (especially first-world) life. My nightly writing efforts are my only real antidote, though I am drawing much satisfaction from the debate coaching as well.

Much of the weekend was spent conducting the first-ever Novice Retreat for the Rutgers team. For many hours on Friday and Saturday, we (the Rutgers elders and I) drilled and trained the novii in each speech position and general debate strategy. Friday especially gave me a good taste for what high-school teaching might have been like, as I gave three consecutive 45-minute sessions on how to deliver the first speech for the Opposition. Of course the classes were smaller, everyone wanted to be there, it was three sessions instead of seven, and it was one of my favorite subjects of all-time. But, y’know, close enough.

On Saturday, we were able to conduct practice rounds as well as finish up the training, and I think the novii will be about as prepared for this coming weekend’s novice tournament as any I’ve seen on APDA. With any luck, I’m hoping Rutgers’ drought of reaching the elimination (”break”) rounds will be over by this time next week.

Though the Retreat ran very long on Saturday, costing me the chance to help celebrate Greg’s birthday, it failed to spill into Sunday. Thus we were able to attend the Weakerthans show in Philadelphia as scheduled, after a brief tour of Fish’s house (Em hadn’t seen it) and a lengthy Mexican meal in an authentic dive. The show was great, perhaps the best aggregate setlist for the interests of myself, Emily, and Fish. (Madeleine was there as well, but is less familiar with these Canadians.) But the crowning moment was that John K. Samson finally delivered on my perennial shouted request for “Sounds Familiar”, the greatest Weakerthans song of all-time. Our acquisition of his handwritten setlist (actually the drummer’s, but I presume it’s John K.’s handwriting) revealed that the request had nothing to do with it and it was planned all along, but I’ll take “Sounds Familiar” any way I can get it.

Samson was sick and has put on a bit of weight, but his shiny resilience and abundant joy at performing was still present. We were about three rows back on the floor of the remarkably small World Cafe Live club and were old enough to have parented some of our surrounding attendees. John K. talked a lot and joked with the crowd about requests and seemed genuinely pleased with how nice most of the crowd was. And played a pretty long set considering his condition. Even more than the average show, this Weakerthans set came across as wearied and humble, but resilient, which seems quite reflective of the overall mood in general. The whole world is sick and tired, but we’re not dead yet. And, with luck, we still have something to say.

Night Windows
Tournament of Hearts
Our Retired Explorer
Benediction
Reconstruction Site
Aside
Relative Surplus Value
One Great City! (John K. Samson solo)
Sounds Familiar (John K. Samson solo)
Bigfoot!
Plea from a Cat Named Virtute
The Reasons
Sun in an Empty Room
Left and Leaving
Confessions of a Futon Revolutionist
Manifest
—
Utilities
Civil Twilight
Everything Must Go!
Virtute the Cat Explains Her Departure

As promised, we procured an original setlist. Please note that the encore was changed from “Pamphleteer” to the two closing songs listed above. No other changes seem to have been made on the fly…

• Took delivery on a flat-screen television, which will hopefully never have network or cable TV thereon.
• Spoke to my parents on the phone.
• Listened to Barack Obama’s speech and…
• …Decided that I am against the current incarnation of “healthcare reform”.  (More on this later!)
• Spoke to Em’s mom in person.
• Welcomed Pandora back into our home.
• Ate a bunch of fried food.
• Had a soda for the first time in weeks.
• Wrote Chapter 21 of American Dream On, weighing in around that magic 2,000 words.
• Played “Hero” by Regina Spektor on repeat for some time.

The only difference between these days and the old days is that these days matter. I am writing and that changes everything. My whole outlook on life can be determined through the filter of how much control I have over what I do on a given day and how much of that links to what I feel I was put here to do.

Daily fulfillment is not about the space in between, the margins, even most of the time spent. It’s about intentionality, living deliberately, and whether what is done is part of what should be done. Not on the path there, or some esoteric larger vision of being there, but actually a PART of what is intended overall.

This makes all the difference. And I am grateful, eternally grateful, for every day on this side of things.

To this day, I would probably rather spend time watching them in concert than see almost anyone else I haven’t seen – actively choosing what would now be the tenth time I watched them perform over people whose performance before me would be unprecedented. Aside from another Simon & Garfunkel reunion show or Cat Stevens getting back out on tour with his full canon, it’s hard to imagine a musical act I’d be more excited about seeing. Even summer tour shows, even sets played almost entirely with other bands, are so emotionally charged as to put a spigot straight from an emotional well into the observer’s soul.

Fish and I had an eventful weekend, including my first visit to his Mole Street place, a trip to a classic Jersey diner, visiting Monopoly’s fabled Boardwalk (with hotels!), hours of overnight poker in Atlantic City, and my second viewing (his first) of the truly excellent “500 Days of Summer”. But the highlight, of course, was the Crows show.

It was a weird show in some ways – the show itself dubbed itself the “Saturday Night Rebel Rockers Traveling Circus and Medicine Show”, an effort combine CC with Michael Franti & Spearhead and Augustana into one epic 18-piece band. It was preluded by one of the most bizarre concert check-in experiences I’ve ever witnessed, where the Borgata Casino staff checked our tickets, issued numbered wristbands (a la Southwest), then checked our tickets again as they move the line up a few stairs, then checked wristbands, tickets, and stamped us with an invisible stamp (no joke – when we alerted them that the stamp hadn’t made a mark, they said it wasn’t supposed to), and constantly checked our numbers against each other. I felt old, as I often do in the early part of lines for rock shows, and wondered what proximity my #217 wristband would procure me.

Turned out, about third row. Which, somewhat remarkably in the face of all the other shows I’ve stood in line for and been able to touch the stage, was the closest I’ve ever been to Counting Crows. They just haven’t played all that many shows in places with a standing-room floor in the West lately.

The show itself was pretty remarkable, and not just because they were shuffling 18 people in and out at a rate that ensured that virtually no consecutive songs were played by the same collection of people. There were a ton of covers, including covers of Simon & Garfunkel, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, and Woody Guthrie. I actually actively enjoyed “Hanginaround”, a song that often annoys me (in no small part because it almost always closes sets and thus means the set wasn’t closed by “A Murder of One”), since the crowd was so insanely involved and everyone was just screaming along by the end of the tune. I’ve become familiar enough with Augustana (they keep playing with CC) that I enjoyed most of their songs as well. And Michael Franti just kept making us jump. Which was fun.

We had intended to play poker for about an hour or so after the show, but it was 6:20 in the morning by the time we actually started rolling out of AC. We’d both more or less broken even (me a little more, Fish a little less), but we’d had quite the time with AC vacationers and bachelors-not-to-be alike. I’m not sure I’ve seen a more gregarious ten at a poker table.

Despite my tiredness at driving home, I’ve now pretty well converted my schedule to something resembling a dawn-to-noon sleep schedule, most conducive to writing and the creative life. Although the noon has been more consistent than the dawn – I still have a ways to go before regaining my youthful reliance on 4 hours or less.

Seeing “500 Days of Summer” again convinced me that it may be a perfect movie. Not that it’s competing with “Shawshank” or anything, but it may be flawless in delivering an emotionally honest, real presentation of the experience of love, in its full and many ranges. About a week ago, I was having a discussion about my top ten movies and the amorphous 5-10 that sort of hang out in the teen periphery of my rankings. I think “500 Days” is at least in that company, and possibly climbing.

And (though this is chronologically before most of what I’ve discussed) I was pretty disappointed by Atlantic City. Granted, it was a stormy day and we got there in late afternoon, but the town did little to convince me it was any better than Santa Cruz or Venice Beach with a few casinos tacked on. The Boardwalk was nice, and pretty long, but it was no more amazing than many other beachside walkways. Maybe living near Seaside for much of my youth has jaded me to the wonders of beach communities, but I was expected something more epic, more grand. Maybe I would only have been satisfied by a full-scale reversion to the 1920’s, complete with sepia-toned eyesight. Yeah, AC probably didn’t have a chance against my expectations.

You know what did? Counting Crows.

Caravan
Hello Bonjour
Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby
Colorblind
Omaha
Sweet Virginia
Sweet and Low (Mr. Jones Intro)
Meet You There Someday
Boston (with Raining in Baltimore)
(You Gotta Walk and) Don’t Look Back (with Casey Jones)
[unverified Michael Franti song - possible cover]
All I Want is You (with Tainted Love)
The Gambler (partial, joking)
The Sound of Sunshine
I Got Love for You
Delta Lady
—–
When I Dream of Michaelangelo
Children in Bloom
Little Bit of Riddim
Yell Fire!
Say Hey (I Love You)
Just Like a Woman
Fire
Dust
Why Should You Come When I Call?
Hanginaround
—
Cecilia
Rain King (with Raise a Ruckus Tonight intro, With a Little Help from My Friends middle)
This Land is Your Land

Garage Sale. Saturday. I need to pay my heart’s outstanding bills. A cracked-up compass and a pocket watch, some plastic daffodils, the cutlery and coffee cups I stole from all-night restaurants, a sense of wonder (only slightly used), a year of two to haunt you in the dark for a phone call from far away with a “Hi, how are you today”, and a sign: recovery comes to the broken ones. A wage-slave forty-hour work week (weighs a thousand kilograms, so bend you knees) — comes with a free fake smile for all your dumb demands, the cordless razor that my father bought when I turned 17, a puke-green sofa and the outline to a complicated dream of dignity, for a laugh (too loud and too long). Or a place where awkward belongs, and a sign: recovery comes to the broken ones. Or best offer.
-Weakerthans, “Everything Must Go!” (complete song)

Yes, I’m up earlier than I’ve been in weeks to get ready for a block-yard-sale in Oakland. We’re piggybacking into the front yard of a coworker of Emily’s since our place hasn’t proven to be the most marketable locale (though I guess we could always get some interesting traffic off of University). Lots of furniture and some random extra items, plus the attitude that pretty much no offer is too low. This is all about not shipping things we can replace for less than the cost to ship. Or that we might not need to replace after all (see, e.g., two stereos from our respective college experiences).

I already sold my 1,000 kg forty-hour work week, but I can offer this memory of same that I ran across when sorting through papers earlier this week:

I wonder what foundational document of the next phase of my life I may be creating even now, to look back on with a quiet sigh of wondering how much predominantly futile effort was yet to be expended in whatever direction seemed to make the most sense at the time. Without these pieces of paper, these organizational memories to bring order to the chaotic-seeming decisions of our lives, we would be almost nothing but a binary code of inexplicable choices. It is the context that recalls the free will that gives these choices, however painful or complicated or ill-advised, meaning.

And not to say that I have a collection of regrets – three years at Glide taught me much. But so did more than a decade spread across thirteen schools… it doesn’t mean that any of this was the easiest, best, or most efficient way to learn these things. And if I want to learn anything, it’s probably how to make the choice of easier, better, or more efficient ways of learning or doing.

This is why I keep the paper. And sell the TV.

You want it?

To attempt to capture it all in some sort of laundry list seems to trivialize it (as, indeed, the very nature of the phrase “laundry list” captures). Besides, I sort of gave a preview in this post just 12 days ago. To think of a time when I was “searching for direction” seems almost laughable now in the face of directions very much found (chosen?) by the collective perspective.

If nothing else, the turmoil and heightened activity is certainly well captured by my recent prolificity in this very format of communication. It is surely oversimplification to say that when one is writing more, it is a reflection of more events worth living through – but no doubt the volatility in my own mind (or perhaps “mind at large” as my Dad would put it) has manifest in an outpouring of understanding. Like I said, I need to process everything and I get there too.

I imagine Adam Duritz to be somewhat like myself. This is quite an understatement – I have spent much of my life believing Adam to be somehow a kindred spirit, and no doubt a fostering of this perspective through highly empathetic lyrics is at the core of Counting Crows’ success over the years. I was not even the first person to describe a CC show as a “religious experience” to myself – I had heard many others say this was so before I even particularly new many Crows songs. And yet the discovery of the truth of the statement was in no way contrived or unduly advertised when I saw them for the first time in New York in 1999. I dubbed it “the perfect show” and am still unsure if it’s ever been eclipsed.

Trying to describe a Counting Crows show to the uninitiated (or those who, heaven forbid, don’t like or know the band) is a little like Plato struggling with the forms. Yes, we’re still talking about chairs and rooms and people, but you’ve never really seen any of these things in your life until you’ve been to a CC concert. I realize that I’m sounding hyperbolic to the point of undermining what I’m trying to express, but really. For emotional sponges like me, a CC show is like an oxygen tank for asthmatics. Suddenly, for the first time, there’s enough of everything I need.

Last night’s show was no exception to any of these rules, though there are a few cautionary notes. It was both a summer show and a double-headliner, both slight drawbacks from maximal emotional flood. They’re on tour with Maroon 5 of all people, a band that is perhaps the least like them of anyone they’ve ever toured with and seems to combine vapid, repetitive sound with lyrics that sound like a kindergartener regurgitating the most average pop songs they’ve ever heard in staccato. It occurred to me early in the show that they selected this matchup to heighten the contrast between the opener and closing act to pack an even tighter, more profound emotional punch.

But the summer shows (yes, it’s September, but it was an outdoor concert with summer-type billing) tend to be shorter, slightly less focused, and a little more crowd-pleasing. It’s important to stress that these are all questions of degree – the lamest Crows show ever is still probably the best concert experience you’ll ever have this side of Simon & Garfunkel.

But it’s worth noting because I feel that even Adam got in too deep too quickly in last night’s show and had to back off a little bit. Which both heightened and flattened the effect of the message, making me wonder if there isn’t something even larger and less grapplable going on that we’re just scratching the surface of.

The stage featured an almost pyramidal array of stair-steps toward the drums, keyboards, and then a massive fake-brick wall peppered with a large screen and several smaller ones. The most striking component of the set-up, though the clustered sodium lights were notable, was a huge clock in the center of the wall, set to 11:00. It’s the eleventh hour, and Adam’s letting you know. Already, the chills were underway.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen Adam in such a mess as a show began as last night. Emily leaned in and remarked something to this effect, implying he was somehow intoxicated, but it looked much more to me like he was grappling with some kind of emotional chasm that was entirely unchartered. He couldn’t get some words out through teary bleary overwhelm. He changed everything about every song, peppering the opening “Round Here” with plaintive cries of hope against hope. The only thing familiar were strands of “Have You Seen Me Lately?” intermingled with new riffs into the song, made all the more stunning when the second song of the act was the original “Have You Seen Me Lately?”.

But before I even knew that was happening, the screen filled with upraised arm silhouettes clawing for some sort of solace or retribution, all aiming at 11:00 on the wall. It was the most viscerally moving and distressing thing I’ve ever seen at a concert in my life. This was on display for the whole final third of a “Round Here” rendition that must have taken ten minutes. I was openly weeping, not even knowing how to take this and being altogether sure that I was not ready for the depth and breadth of the show I was about to witness.

It was thus at once disappointing and relieving that the rest of the concert never reached the tremors of that level of expression. It’s exceedingly rare for a CC show to peak on the first song, but it felt like peering over the abyss, building up as though to jump, and then thinking better of it and dancing on the edge instead. Enough Maroon 5 fans were walking out as the show went on anyway that we have ended up with a concert for a thousand people had he pushed it. And that’s not what summer shows are about, no matter how close they fall to October.

While the show had many obvious and more surficial themes, including a concerted effort to include every song with any sort of reference to California (there are many), key threads of desperation and hope against hope in the face of overwhelming odds seemed to carry throughout. You could argue that these themes are constants for Duritz and company (company probably including me), and you might be right, but it doesn’t make it any less relevant. Those may be the themes of the last decade or so, after all, and the coming few years. If indeed we have years to come.

Early on, it formulated in my mind that the show felt a bit like Adam’s suicide note. And then again, perhaps just a love note. Isn’t every suicide note a love note? And of course, I’m sure I mostly just have suicide on the brain in the wake of David Foster Wallace’s recent action. Then again, it’s worth noting some stark similarities between DFW (born in 1962) and AD (born in 1964). After all, they look like they have something in common:

I’m not the only one that sees a resemblance, right? Then again, for that matter:

Perhaps I’m pushing things a bit far, but this is how CC gets its fans to relate to what’s going on. The intro to the show featured a tribute to the late Isaac Hayes and I was practically expecting something similar for DFW at the show’s end. But DFW didn’t make music, and for all I know Adam Duritz didn’t even read him.

Still, the thread of self-destruction was prevalent in the show and it was hard not to see it as a possible farewell. The unbelievable stripped-bare vulnerability of “Colorblind”, the dramatic trauma of “Cowboys”, the mostly seemingly ad-libbed earnest regret of “Miami”. Every song seemed to have some tie-in to the entire question of deciding whether to exist, though once one starts looking for something in a CC set, it’s hard not to find it. By the time the “feathered by the moonlight” line from “A Murder of One” was folded into “A Long December”, I was just about ready to lose it again.

And then, a sudden retraction, almost as though he was scared of what he was saying to himself, let alone the fans. “Come Around” closed the set, after a brief explanation that the song was about coming back to cities on tour, no matter what else was going on. A song, for the first time, about constancy and a lack of change. And then, after the briefest encore departure in history and only one more song, just four words, each a sentence, loudly into the microphone: “We. Will. Be. Back.”

There was the briefest of hopes that he meant tonight as he walked off stage, but the first strands of “California Dreamin’” over the stereo indicated that he was making a promise for the future. Or maybe trying to convince himself. It’s a weird thing to say to your hometown crowd when half the show chatter was about staying at home with the parents and doing laundry, seeing old familiar places, how much he loves Berkeley, which he sees as the town where he grew up. It’s the kind of thing you say to Pittsburgh or Cleveland or the Philippines when you’re not from there, when those places are remote and perhaps vaguely undesirable, but you’re convincing people to tough it out and wait for you.

And maybe he just means that about the planet. It would certainly be understandable, if so. It’s not an easy place to be, sometimes, and not looking much easier. Me, I have reason for personal hope right now. I haven’t even begun to engage the 10-year reunion homecoming implications of this weekend’s trip for which I depart tonight. I almost wrote a post called “High School Never Ends” a month ago and it still needs to be declared. I joked with Fish about offering live updates on the blog after each interaction with classmates.

But I think, for now, I’d rather feel things in the moment. Live each second as it comes, no matter how packed and overwhelming. There is anticipation, excitement, dread. Reason to believe there’s no idea what to expect. I am ready, I am ready, I am ready, I am fine.

Round Here
Have You Seen Me Lately?
Los Angeles
Richard Manuel is Dead
Colorblind
Ghost Train
Cowboys
Miami
Washington Square
A Long December
Come Around
—
Rain King (with Augustana, Mr. Jones alt)