This is going to be yet another one of those embarrassingly earnest, emotionally vulnerable, hastily assembled blog entries I regret posting the next day but will nonetheless leave published in fealty to some lofty sense of vulnerable frankness or truth-telling rectitude or whatever.

I’ve been on edge all week, as I imagine many people in the Twin Cities, regardless of their political stripe, have been. Emily and I were discussing it today and agreed it’s a combination of the prematurely autumnal weather and back-to-school week and of course the Elephant in the Arena-Shaped Room. Anxieties and fear and rancor had been slowly building for a week / year / decade—until this week they cracked and burst and were then hastily sealed back up again during and after skirmishes and ill-considered displays of indiscriminate force by the authorities and indiscriminate hooliganism by a small faction of so-called anarchists, on either side of what has lately felt like a rapidly widening cultural and ideological chasm.

What I’m about to say might sound shrill and obvious, but violence on anyone’s part—whether that of the government, the police, or the young brash and bored—makes me sick to my stomach, and a week’s worth of that violence only compounds the sickening trumpeting noise already generated by the aforementioned elephant, resulting in a cacophony that has drowned out the majority voice: a voice of thousands of reasonable and peaceful and constructive people who put a lot of hard work into waging intelligent, inspiring opposition. But intelligent opposition (some of it extremely compelling, well-organized, elegant opposition, with a clearly articulated message that’s above reproach and a delivery mechanism that left me in tears on Monday) isn’t nearly as mediagenic as the hype and the chaos, so it’s lost in the din.

But it’s more than that; it’s something more insidious and constant: it’s the sensory overload. Tonight I attended this event so I could write a review of it. It was entertaining and a good time was had by all. (My full review will be a bit longer than that.) Afterward, the Parkway Theatre stayed open so that the three hundred drunk liberals assembled could watch a live feed of McCain’s speech. For a while it was fun listening to the crowd hoot and boo the screen, and the Xcel Center’s oppositional infiltration was exciting, but the cumulative effect was just more nauseous noise, so that I found myself taking fewer notes and just sitting there, occasionally with my head in my hands, occasionally massaging my temples, unable to stomach any more of it from any person, institution, screen, page, blog, or ideological node on the multipartisan spectrum.

In short, I felt edgy, sick, disconnected, lonely, sad, and scared. There have been cultural, political, psychosensory intruders in our midst all week and around the point when the green screen on the cross-shaped stage showed its last hackneyed image, I reached my breaking point.

Also it probably didn’t help that I hadn’t eaten any dinner except for some trail mix and a bag of Whoppers.

So I left. I went outside into the chilly air and called my mom, which made me feel a bit better even as I realized I was regressing to a panicky childlike neediness, reaching for comfort and familiarity. Ideally I would have been lying on my grandmother’s couch in footy pajamas, simultaneously eating cinnamon toast, playing with Transformers, watching the Cosby Show, listening to Tears For Fears, and reading I, Robot, but that wasn’t going to happen. So instead I talked to my mom and felt a little better. Then I went back into the theater, where lo and behold Dan Wilson was playing “Closing Time” by himself on his acoustic guitar to a small crowd of smiling people sitting on the couches in the front rows, and I felt even better.

And better still, somehow, upon driving back into the heart of the beast of the lion’s den of the hellmouth that was downtown Saint Paul this week, parking and walking upstream against sidewalkfuls of drunk Republicans—loud beefy guys and tall severe Aryan women, flooding the bars and swarming the cabs and snogging against store windows—so I could hang out at a bar across the street from the Xcel Center with the editors of Wonkette until way too late on a school night. And when I drove home I again took refuge: listening to Crowded House and Jawbox and, yes, Tears For Fears, remembering why I love these cities, and why I want them back so desperately.

Posted: September 5th, 2008 under General.
Comments: 1

I realize all I blog about anymore is Infinite Jest and running. I realize this makes me quite possibly the world’s most boring blogger. None of that is about to change anytime soon, however. Sorry.

I came home from work and even though it was late, like approaching eleven, I decided to go for a run, which is terrible for my sleep but pretty much excellent for everything else. With the kind of week I’ve had, I needed it more than I needed sleep. And earlier in the day I’d taken a sad nap (a phenomenon I promise I’ll explain and expound upon at some point in the future) and I’d spent much of my shift drinking caffeinated beverages, so I had some energy to burn.

On this run I decided to follow my new longest and therefore best route, approximately 4 miles, even though it takes me down some poorly-lit paths, and to try out Path Tracker on my iPhone, because I am a jerk like that.

The moon was hidden; the sky was whitish pink, like it was going to rain. There was even a little chill in the air, the first sign of autumn. It reminded me of the September eight years ago when I was first getting serious about running and went for a run around Ahrens Park every night after a long exhausting day of student teaching, but that’s neither here nor six dozen of the other.

I ran across the Stone Arch Bridge and back north along the west bank of the river, listening to the usual: Subtle, and Battles, and LCD Soundsystem, and also this hot-off-the-press track by the band I just recently joined—this particular song being the band’s entry in this songwriting competition, at whose website one can apparently vote for us (and I say “us” not so much because I had anything to do with the song’s creation, which I didn’t, but rather because the other night we practiced acoustically and the evening sort of [d]evolved into us sitting around singing as many songs from The Wall as we could remember off the tops of our collective heads, which spontaneous unforced kind of experience makes me feel included in this new group in a valuable way for which I’m unquestionably grateful, in addition to which we have a show here tomorrow at 7, if you want to stop by).

I saw a lot of other people out, some other joggers but mostly couples, literally walking hand in hand, and I ran past them as unobtrusively as possible. (Maybe there’s a metaphor there but I refuse to see it.) I ran back across the river on the Plymouth Street bridge and the breeze was really picking up, coming in off the water.

One of my favorite things about this route is that I can see the Mpls skyline at almost any given point. I came home via Nicollet Island, behind the Grain Belt sign which some enterprising anarchists have decorated thusly, in anticipation of the RNC’s arrival next week. I ran over the railroad tracks and back into my neighborhood through the sprinklers in front of the condos. Path Tracker helped me make this.

And now I’m lying on my couch about to read the Eschaton chapter and drinking a ginger beer. I think I’ve written most if not all of this under the influence of endorphins, and look forward to being disconcerted at my own candor when I read it tomorrow, like a person who wakes up from a bender to recollect the previous night’s embarrassments.

Posted: August 22nd, 2008 under General.
Comments: 2

Apparently the Olympics begin today.

For the first twenty or so years of my life, the Olympics—both Summer and Winter—were blissfully innocent, televisually thrilling events for me. They’re perhaps best enjoyed by children, who can bring their raw appreciation for totally awesome feats of strength and kinesthetics to bear on the proceedings while remaining ignorant of the controversies surrounding them. I was born too late for Munich and so enjoyed a stretch during the 1980s-90s of Relatively Uncontentious Quadrennial Showcases of Amateur Athletic Prowess and Global Goodwill.

I have fond memories of watching the LA Games in my grandmother’s living room in 1984, even though I was scared breathless by the high-altitude acrobatics of the divers and haunted by the agonized face of Mary Decker after she collided with another runner. My favorite events were the aforementioned diving, cycling, and gymnastics—my interest in the latter mostly piqued by the awesomely hilarious name Mitch Gaylord.

In 1988 the Winter Games coincided with an overdue case of chicken pox, so I was able to stay home from school to watch coverage, which I still found riveting even through the feverish haze of especially severe CP whose blisters and sores ravaged not just my skin by but the insides of my throat (grosser than gross) which rest assured was thoroughly unpleasant. I preferred the Winter Games to the Summer ones, and my favorite events were bobsledding and the luge, which combined my two favorite things at age eleven: sleds and slides.

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Posted: August 8th, 2008 under General.
Comments: 5

I’m taking a break this week from the IJOSASa/oBC to talk about something that’s been on everyone’s minds and very much a part of the national conversation lately. I’m talking about the New Yorker, of course, and its cover art, which incorporates the “dark imaginings” of America’s current cultural landscape into a tableau that is both satirical and controversial.

That’s right, I’m talking about the artwork on the front of the June 9 & 16 Summer Fiction Issue, with artwork by Adrian Tomine—by far the magazine’s edgiest, cleverest cover in recent history. It depicts a UPS courier delivering a package from Amazon, presumably full of books, to a woman who is looking sheepishly over at the proprietor of the independent bookshop located next door. Excellent satire, and incisive cultural commentary. It doesn’t get much sharper than this! Well done, Tomine. Another one out of the ballpark.

Anyway, the issue contains—in addition to fiction, of course—a wonderful personal essay by Haruki Murakami about his origins as a writer, which happened to coincide with his decision to take up running as his primary means of physical exercise. Since writing and running are the two things I spend the majority of my waking life doing nowadays, I was naturally drawn to his piece.

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Posted: July 18th, 2008 under General.
Comments: 5

First of all, we didn’t get in. Andrew and I were not two of the 18,000 who made it through the doors. We weren’t sure how insanely early we would’ve had to arrive to get in. The important thing is that we tried.

We showed up at seven, far too late, and wandered several blocks looking for the end of the line that wended through the streets of downtown St Paul—otherwise a ghost town after 5 p.m.—a docile but cheerful crowd that, much as I wanted to make some weary pronouncement to Andrew about our cohort, confounded all attempts at demographic or cultural classification beyond our shared reason for being there.

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Posted: June 3rd, 2008 under General.
Comments: 3

Guess what I’m planning to do again this summer.

That’s right; I’m going to teach my cat to read.

We’re going to start an online book club. If you want in at the ground floor, let me know.

And by “ground floor” I mean, of course, November Y.O.G.

Posted: May 22nd, 2008 under General.
Comments: 4

In high school this time of year would be marked by graduation parties and drama club awards ceremonies. In college, finals and hasty last-minute dormroom moveouts. This year it’s thesis defenses, a new but not entirely dissimilar ritual. A lot of departures, whatever the reason or destination. The weather complies and becomes unpredictable or ominous. Thunderstorms every few days. Still chilly at night. Sunny and dry in the afternoon. Earthquake weather without the earthquakes.

Us third-years cluster in the halls and just outside the doors to buildings. We come out of our thesis-writing hovels, bleary-eyed and ready to be friends again like we were in the beginning. Everyone wishes everyone well; nearly every debt has been squared or forgiven. I see a little more of the people who’ve spent the past three years propping me up. During defenses, sitting in the room listening to them read from their manuscripts, glancing around at the people in the seats next to me, I find my pride in my cohort growing outsized, a little amazed at the sheer magnitude of creative firepower all concentrated in one room.

When I’m not watching my peers make their presentations, I’ve been spending my days preparing mine, trying to winnow down and optimize the material I have so that when I go before my friends and mentors on Friday it will appear I’ve been working and thinking hard. It hasn’t been easy. And when I do get outside, I get sunburned and pleasantly exhausted, pedaling till it seems absurd. Yesterday I rode my bike around Lake Calhoun while listening to Led Zeppelin and playing along on the handlebars. I came home and cleaned my apartment while listening to Yes. I took a too-long nap, the kind that makes you think it’s eight a.m. when you wake up instead of eight at night. I woke up and wondered what I’m going to do with all these books.

A tapering rather than a resolution.

Well-wishes for the well-wishers.

Posted: May 15th, 2008 under General.
Comments: 4

“Instead, I’m ready to consider the argumentative essay, the lyrical essay, the prose poem, literary journalism, and criticism. I’m ready to write in the second- and third-person voice, in the present and future tenses.”

Posted: May 8th, 2008 under General.
Comments: 2

In college, whenever I was feeling antsy and uninspired, I would rearrange the furniture in my dorm room. This usually bought me a couple days’ worth of an artificially renewed feeling of purpose and invigoration before the tedium set back in and I finally got around to writing that paper about the Dry Salvages.

Today, probably because of the shitty weather, I was feeling antsy and uninspired, so I dragged my comfy couch out of the comfort nook where it’s been for the past year and installed it by the window in my bedroom. So far, so good. Just look at all that natural light my couch is enjoying.

All that cold, rainy, natural light.

Still, though. This is going to change everything. I can already feel it. Now I can lounge in the natural light on my couch while I enjoy the dour exploits of unhappily married couples on Tell Me You Love Me read classic literature and catch up on my New Yorkers and otherwise edify myself.

Truly, a new era.

Posted: April 25th, 2008 under Images, General.
Comments: none

A partial list of the words in my thesis unrecognized by MS Word’s spellcheck dictionary:

Ágætis Byrjun
Alvie (Singer)
(Anna) Akhmatova
amp/amped
(New) Amsterdams
angsty
anthemic/anthemically
apeshit
Arby’s
Arc du Triomphe
(Stella) Artois
(Paul) Auster

backload
backroad
backstory
Badmotorfinger
Balocchi
Bananarama
bandmate
barnlike
Berklee
(Dressy) Bessy
BetaMax
birdwatching
bizzaro
(The) Buggles
(Mikhail) Bulgakov

campustown
cellphone
commodify
Cornershop
Cyndi Lauper

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Posted: April 20th, 2008 under General.
Comments: 15

Posted: April 8th, 2008 under General.
Comments: none

Hey, look what I found.

Speed Of Sauce - “Reminder (Gabe’s Extended Live Remix, December 2000)”

Photo by Neil

(Or, how to embarrass your former bandmates, eight years on.)

Posted: April 2nd, 2008 under General.
Comments: 3

Imagine my shock and disappointment upon discovering that Janet Jackson’s new album Discipline is not, in fact, a song-by-song reworking of the seminal 1981 prog-pop classic.

King Crimson - “Discipline” (mp3)

(I derive perverse pleasure from the fact that maybe two people, tops, will get this joke. NERDS!)

Posted: March 16th, 2008 under General.
Comments: 2

In ninth grade my CCD teacher, as a prelude to some liturgical point he must have been trying to make, asked my class what we wanted to be when we grew up. A narcissist even back then, I said I wanted to be “known.” I chose my words carefully, and considered this a more nuanced response than “I want to be famous.”

But yeah, basically I meant famous.

What a little shit.

Posted: March 13th, 2008 under General.
Comments: 5

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s 2008 now.

For the past decade I’ve been toying with the notion—and sometimes telling anyone who’s unfortunate enough to indulge me—that 1998 was my best year, the year I peaked, my time in the sun. The year when everything came together just as it should have. This is at once frivolous and depressing. But I have plenty of evidence to support it, and not all of it’s superficial.

The terms in which I usually make the argument, because they are the most persuasive, are musical. Nearly all of my favorite bands released albums in 1998. And really good albums, too: TNT. El Oso. Good Humor. Days for Days. Rufus Wainwright. Blue Wonder Power Milk. Overcome by Happiness. Try Whistling This. (Sketches For) My Sweetheart the Drunk. XO. Electro-Shock Blues. Music Has the Right to Children. Mutations. Human Being. Moon Safari. Decksanddrumsandrockandroll. Fucking Mezzanine. (As the previous list attests, I wasn’t the only one who arguably peaked that year.)

What’s more, I discovered a lot of music that had been released the previous year, or the year before. This often happens during the first few months of the year, when we finally get around to hearing December’s year-end picks and wonder, where the hell was I when this thing came out?. 1998 was no exception, as a host of terrific albums from 1997 (no slouch itself) trickled into the mix: I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One. Ladies and Gentlemen We are Floating in Space. The Fawn. New Forms. OK Computer. Autoditacker. The Unstable Molecule. Either/Or. Homework. When I Was Born for the 7th Time. I also saw some amazing concerts that year: Elliott Smith. Robert Fripp. The Orb. Hooverphonic. Saint Etienne.

And with my memories diffracted by the highly unreliable prism of nostalgia, I have spent the past decade assuming, even insisting, that 1998 was a year full of personal growth and triumph. Here, another list: I worked another summer at my all-time favorite, lowest-paying job. I read Infinite Jest for the first time. I got a haircut. I saw Armageddon AND Deep Impact. I lived in London for a few months. I bought a car. I had an awesome girlfriend—two, in fact (though not concurrently, thank you very much). I attempted some (horribly amateurish, hopelessly naïve) writing. I developed a robust appreciation for beer. I joined Speed Of Sauce. I lived in London. I had two girlfriends.

But if I dig a little deeper, I discover signs that I was also kind of a mess, as people in their early twenties tend to be. I was making progress, keeping it more or less together, about to finish college, but I was still a long way from any kind of real learning or self-discovery. I was probably a prick to a lot of people. I was self-absorbed and lazy. I had no practical skills or experience. I had a problem with oversleeping. I needed more than one haircut. My writing was horribly amateurish and hopelessly naïve. I developed a robust appreciation for beer.

Since I already live far too much in the past, and since a solid decade full of highs and lows and real (measurable, not just illusory) progress has now passed—I am ready to put 1998 and, by extension, my fetishization of it, to rest. The idea of peaking at age 22 is pretty pathetic, so I’m going to go ahead and stop entertaining that notion, long after I first should have.

Posted: February 18th, 2008 under General.
Comments: 2