I know I’ve addressed this before, but today’s date reminded me that there are a few people whose birthdays I can remember even though I haven’t seen them in years, dates sunk into my brain far deeper than the birthdays of more recent, closer friends—my brain was younger and therefore more plastic when I learned them, I suppose. At some point in 1987, not long after becoming friends with him, I committed to memory the fact that April 11 is Michael Mutti’s birthday.

Starting in fifth grade and continuing more or less all the way until high school, Michael and I informed each other’s troubled, surreal preadolescent sensibilities. We were similarly introverted and socially awkward and had a love-hate (mostly hate) relationship with the institutional and social vagaries of Grinnell Middle School. We drew bizarre cartoons and science-fiction tableaux in our notebooks that might get today’s eleven-year-olds sent to a child psychologist. We made up cruel nicknames for the popular kids in our class, and crueler nicknames for our teachers. We staged epic schoolyard battles where the playground equipment became spacecraft and the grass and gravel became—of course—either hot lava, flesh-dissolving acid, or deep space.

I now realize that in these idiosyncrasies, we were profoundly normal boys.

And like most young American people our age, we negotiated the pop-culture landscape far more adroitly than we did the social rituals of our peer group. Frequently assisted by Chuck Munyon (9/6/77), we became highly discriminating connoisseurs of Duck Tales, Ghostbusters (the film), The Real Ghostbusters (the animated series), Weird Al, Airwolf, the 1988 Olympic Games, Police Academy, Future Problem Solving, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, Laser Tag, Dragonlance, Legos, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Odyssey of the Mind, Foxtrot, the NES, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Headbanger’s Ball, Michael Jackson’s Bad, Weird Al’s Even Worse, and—last but certainly the hell not least—Def Leppard.

Michael actually ended up going to undergrad at Lawrence, just like me; by then, however, we had fallen out of touch, which is weird, and which I’ve always regretted. I haven’t seen him in a long time and probably won’t hear from him until he finds out about this post and emails me to request I remove it because he doesn’t want prospective employers to Google his name and see this.

Until then, happy birthday, Michael.

Posted: April 11th, 2008 under Grinnell.
Comments: none

1973: My father obtains a position in the fledgling Russian department at Grinnell College and moves, with my mother, from Baltimore to a tiny town in south-central Iowa. Their families think them crazy; they might as well be joining the Peace Corps and shipping off to Zaire.

1975: Grinnell College scores a major coup by bringing to campus a relatively unknown young singer-songwriter named Bruce Springsteen. It turns out when he’s on the cusp of a national breakthrough; he plays Grinnell a month after releasing Born to Run and a month before landing on the covers of both Time and Newsweek.

My mother and father attend the concert to see what all the fuss is about. It’s held in Darby Gym, an ancient barnlike basketball structure a block and a half from their house. Darby has a high, curved roof and an ornate brick facade; it’s a gymnasium, of course, so the acoustics aren’t the greatest. My parents are there for only a few songs when my father decides to leave. My mother stays a little longer, but my father, about to turn forty, deems it simply too loud.

1983: “Dancing in the Dark” is taking the pop charts by storm, its video in heavy rotation on MTV, to which I am glued whenever possible. We’re renting a row house in Greenbelt, the my mother’s hometown near DC. I spend the evenings bouncing off the walls in my pajamas, listening to Top 40 radio in the bedroom my brother and I share, trying to stave off bedtime. I thrash around on the bed, imitating Courtney Cox’s dance moves from the video.

1985: Singles from Born In The USA are still ruling the charts; now it’s “Glory Days”, Springsteen’s hokey bar-band anthem about summer, baseball, and drinking. I only really like one of those things I and I still love the song.

I’m watching the video on MTV one afternoon in Greenbelt, the volume cranked way up, when my father comes thundering into the living room, raging at me about God forbid his sons should go outside, God forbid they should read a book once all summer, about Goddamn it watching this crap all day.

I sadly hit the volume button on the TV’s remote, and the E Street Band’s rollicking good times fade into the background.

Posted: March 19th, 2008 under Grinnell, Music.
Comments: 6

1979. My parents took me to Paris to visit my mother’s sister Mary and her husband Greg. Because I was three years old I was obsessed with all things Sesame Street and was horrified to discover that, on the French version of the program, Oscar the Grouch was blue and played the trumpet. The number-one song in the United States on Christmas Day was “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” by Rupert Holmes. Greg had a massive record collection and I implored him to operate the record player so I could listen to Beatles albums and the brand-new Muppet Movie soundtrack, which caused me to become frantic with glee.

On Christmas morning my father and I were the first ones to awake. We sat in the kitchen for about two hours while he read the paper and wondered to himself when I was going to remember that it was Christmas morning. When I finally did, I opened my presents, which included a wind-up plastic bird and a miniature car ferry with removable cars. Mary made me a pretend radio out of a cardboard box and wrote “Jake’s Radio” on it. On New Year’s Eve I spent the last ten minutes of 1979 dreaming about Big Bird and willing myself not to wet the bed.

1986. My family moved to Ann Arbor, and the snowfall seemed more intense and abundant than what I was used to back in Iowa. Our new home had a fenced-in yard, which made the snow drifts seem even larger. The number-one song in the country on Christmas Day was “Walk Like an Egyptian” by The Bangles. In my fourth-grade classroom I was the New Kid, and during our current events unit I struggled for the first time to understand AIDS.

Our house also had something called a “family room” where we spent most of our time and which was separate and distinct from our “living room” where we hardly spent any time. This also took me a while to parse. We had cable television, which was also novel, and I quickly became obsessed with MTV and David Lee Roth and Madonna’s video for “Open Your Heart”, which caused me to become scandalized in all sorts of ways I had yet to comprehend. Nickelodeon showed reruns of The Monkees, which caused me to become obsessed with the Monkees.

For Christmas we traveled to see my grandmother in DC. All I wanted for Christmas was Laser Tag. I would absolutely die if I did not get Laser Tag for Christmas. Then, for Christmas, I received Laser Tag, and so I lived.

I also got my first Walkman, and roamed my grandmother’s house with my headphones clamped to my head and my Laser Tag gun in a holster on my waist, blaring my Monkees tapes. On New Year’s Eve I spent the last ten minutes of 1986 falling asleep listening to Mickey Dolenz sing “Last Train To Clarkesville” and willing myself not to wet the bed.

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Posted: December 4th, 2007 under Grinnell, Iowa City, General.
Comments: 8

Last night I had the pleasure of hosting my old friends who are now in a band called Bowerbirds. They played at the 400 Bar and then crashed on my floor. It’s always bittersweet to be reunited with people who used to be such an integral a part of my life and at such a formative time—Mark and Phil and I (and Wes, too) were pretty much inseparable throughout most of junior high and high school (which is when it’s arguably most crucial to have friends from whom you’re pretty much inseparable)—I say bittersweet because I only see them a couple times a year, at best, since we went our separate ways a few years ago. Fortunately, they are the sort of friends with whom I can fall right back into the sort of jocular camaraderie that we perfected in eighth grade and which has served us so well ever since that it hasn’t changed a great deal, much to the delight and then immediately subsequent annoyance of any friends, acquaintances, girlfriends, etc. who’ve come along in the intervening two decades.

The other huge, obvious dimension to this is that Mark and Phil and I (and Wes, too) formed a band together in high school and another one later on, and any of the music we’ve made since then with other people in other permutations is inevitably entrenched in and informed by the embarrassingly naive but, again, incalculably crucial and formative initial musical excursions the four of us made in our parents’ attics, basements, and living rooms, excursions which were—fortunately for posterity and probably unfortunately for our credibilty—exhaustively documented and subsequently digitized and now housed in my iTunes library so that, when I wanted to wake the band up this morning, I simply had to turn up my stereo and begin playing a recording of a show we played in Gardner Lounge at Grinnell College in May 1994, when we opened with a cover of “New Day Rising” by Husker Dü. Their heads came off the pillows with a quickness.

And, while none of us knew back in 1991 what trajectory our musical lives would take, I don’t think we could have possibly imagined just how wildly unpredictable they’d be. We drafted Phil into the band in eighth grade and ordered him to be our lead singer. “Just make up some lyrics,” we told him. “It doesn’t matter.” At the time he couldn’t play guitar, and pretty much taught himself over the next few years. That he is now a formidable songwriter whose songs are almost frighteningly, autistically brilliant, and to have those talents duly recognized and ratified, is a surprise of the best kind, though of course it now seems inevitable. But that Mark and Phil—who probably, more than any other factor, informed my (incredibly forceful, incredibly loud) drumming style by forcing me to compete with the volume wars they’d wage with their guitar amps in my parents’ basement—would eventually land in and make their name with a rustic, romantic folk trio born in North Carolina (touring with the much-beloved Mountain Goats, whose principal player’s wife [in a quintessential small-world coincidence] attended Grinnell and was in the audience of the aforementioned 5/94 show) is, of course, an outcome none of us could have foreseen.

So naturally it was also bittersweet to see them playing at the 400 last night, in front of a large, appreciative crowd, most of whose constituents ventured over to the merch table afterward to pay their respects and buy CDs and ask for autographs—and to miss the days when Wes and I were right there with them, playing louder music to smaller crowds in smaller rooms. Bittersweet, but inspiring—it makes me want to play my drums more often and in a greater variety of contexts; to compose music; to join new bands and continue playing with the ones I’m in; to try my best not to succumb to a 9-to-5 after I get my degree in May and instead fight tooth and nail to make a living with my writing and music, as improbable and elusive as such a lifestyle always seems, has always seemed. It is not easy, and rarely glamorous, but all the more rewarding for being so hard-won.

Posted: November 1st, 2007 under Grinnell, Music.
Comments: 2

Win and Chris K formulated a theory, which they recently expressed to me, that my blog is the textual equivalent of a Postal Service song. They tried to emphasize that they consider this a good thing. I think I see what they mean, though my blog regrettably involves less Jenny Lewis.

I should warn you this entry might be a bit Postal Service.

Over the weekend I went home to Grinnell and had the bittersweet experience of swapping my old, fifteen-year-old Nissan Sentra for my mother’s almost - as - old - but - in - much - better - condition Mazda Protégé, a car she’s been offering me for years, but which I’d been holding out on until this summer’s coup de grâce (that’s French for “oh, come on!”) which came when I had the Sentra’s non-functioning AC unit looked at by good old Blake down at the Precision Tune on Lake Street, and Blake (who occasionally thinks my name is Jay, but I’m willing to let that slide because he’s so friendly and does an excellent job of explaining what’s wrong with my car in terms that are not condescending to a moron like me, who doesn’t know dick about shit when it comes to automobiles) assessed the situation and told me that good old Poi Dog would probably need a new compressor to get the AC up and running again, which compressor runs at least five hundred dollars, and that’s before labor, and good old Poi Dog itself is probably barely worth that much.

And as much as I loathe the ethos of disposability that defines consumer culture, and as much as I hate my degree of dependence on an inefficient, fossil fuel-guzzling automobile, and as reluctant as I was to junk a car mostly because it wasn’t air-conditioned (though also, admittedly, because it was old and had a host of other problems, but mainly it was the AC), I really wanted a car with AC. I wanted a car that was clean and whose windows I could comfortably roll all the way up so I could better hear my God Delusion audio book, and whose windows also didn’t sometimes roll down on their own, necessitating duct tape jury-rigging. And having a car that was red (did I mention it’s red?) wouldn’t be bad either. And it’s not like I’m junking a perfectly good car and laying out serious cash on a brand-new sports utility vehicle. I’m junking an old, embattled, un-airconditioned car that’s given me nine mostly faithful years and one hundred thousand miles of service for a used compact sedan from the year 1995, which year is the provenance of lot of good things—not least of all my high school diploma and Jagged Little Pill Alien Lanes.

These are just some means by which I am convincing myself that this overhaul of my automotive paradigm is not entirely frivolous.

Still, I am embarrassed to admit that I got a little verklempt as I stood in my mother’s driveway and looked at Poi Dog, having just yanked out its arguably first-rate stereo and rear speakers and a few other minor accoutrements for transfer to the Mazda. I’m basically a 6.9 on Richard Dawkins’ scale and hate it when people, myself included, develop sentimental, quasi-anthropomorphic attachments to inanimate objects. However—and maybe it’s because I’d just seen an excellent if obscure film called Transformers, wherein a young man develops a meaningful relationship with a Camaro (though in the original comics it was a VW Bug, I feel obliged to point out) which is in fact an alien robot named Bumblebee (whose mechanical alien heart is pure and whose innermost nature is mostly gentle [and whom I imagine only fires his plasma cannons when absolutely necessary {and then only at those who deserve it and with the utmost reluctance and attendant ethical quandries}])—I couldn’t help feeling like I was abandoning an old friend.

After all, that car and I went through a lot: trips to various and sundry locales, including New Orleans and the Upper Peninsula; a near-death slide into a ditch during a snowstorm in early 2000; a dead baby deer and several smaller unfortunate woodland creatures; too many speeding tickets to mention; load-ins -outs to hundreds of rock shows with various bands; long drives to and from college; break-ins that relieved me of a couple stereos and a drum kit, the aforementioned spring break road trip to New Orleans on the way back from which the clutch basically disintegrated in Cape Girardeau “Gerard Depardieu” Missouri; and a lot of make-out sessions. There were also, presumably, some good times.

This unexpected, inanimate-object-based nostalgia only heightened the conflicted sort of Postal-Service-song-resembling melancholy I feel pretty much every time I approach, remain in, or depart Grinnell for visits of any duration. I love my hometown, but I’m not sure if I like it. I realize there’s nothing unique about this, of course; I imagine this desribes most people’s relationships with smaller cities or towns in which they’ve spent any significant chunk of their lives, especially during their formative years. But the constant reminders of the Way Things Were—the locales and sidewalks and intersections loaded up with all those tired memories; the people who no longer live there or live, period; the little local businesses that have closed; the structures torn down or renovated; the ghastly new Super Wal-Mart just off the highway to the Interstate—they all conspire to make it nearly impossible for me to remain rooted in the present or feel like the best times aren’t already behind us. Cars are replaced, families relocate, children grow up, people die, houses are torn down.

Anyway.

This is really all by way of saying that my new(ish) car needs a name, and I’m open to suggestions. Some early contenders: My Red Hot Car; Little Red Delicious; Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.

Posted: July 9th, 2007 under Grinnell, General.
Comments: 2

Last month I posted a couple of songs by the Hypocrites, a band which, once upon a time, reigned supreme at Grinnell College. My high school band VIVID appeared alongside them on a compilation of Grinnell and Iowa City bands, released by Grinnell alum Tom Zlabinger on his upstart indie label HUM Productions.[1]

Anywhos, after that earlier post I got an email from Xander, the Hypocrites’ guitarist. He is the latest in a series of people around the world who’ve emerged from the Internets after stumbling upon my blog.[2] He expressed his pleasant surprise at finding mp3s of his old band online, and then asked if I had any VIVID mp3s to share.

Well, of course I did. I’m kind of surprised that, although I’ve posted songs by other old bands of mine, I don’t think I’ve ever ventured into the territory occupied by my first band, which flourished during that dark yet hopeful time to which we now refer, with not a little wistful anxiety, as the Early Nineties.

The short version of the story is that my three best friends and I formed a band and named it after Living Colour’s first album.[3] To a burgeoning catalog of originals we added a bevy of Primus and Nirvana[4] covers and in addition to shows in our friend’s basements, we began playing shows in various nooks and crannies around Grinnell College, and earned the admiration and/or curiosity of the students there. We were several years their junior, didn’t drink or do drugs, and were elated when Tom and the Hypocrites and the rest of that tiny scene validated us.

In April 1995, Tom booked us two days in Minstrel Studios, in its old location just off Dubuque Street. Our parents reluctantly, miraculously, excused us from school and let us borrow a couple of their minivans to haul our stuff to Iowa City. We were blown away by the prospect of being recorded professionally, by an actual studio engineer, doing actual overdubs, and having everything mixed to DAT (remember DAT?) and, maybe if everything worked out, appearing on an actual compact disc. There’s a hilarious amount of flanger and chorus on the guitars and mid-nineties reverb on the drums, and at several points we come perilously close to sounding like Phish, but we were pretty goddamn proud of ourselves. These are the three songs that resulted from those sessions:

VIVID - A Match Made In Space (mp3)
VIVID - Garden Fresh Kermit (mp3)
VIVID - This Is The Worst Birthday Ever (mp3)

In these days of iTunes, GarageBand, and MySpace, when pretty much anyone can record demos and post them online immediately and effortlessly, these little recordings hammer home how much the current system differs from the machinations of amateur music production as it operated twelve years ago, and they endear me to the blissfully naïve teenagers we were when we recorded them.

[1] Even typing these words and names elicits in the author a certain cognitive and temporal dissonance.

[2] Other people who’ve gotten in touch with me include an individual who found my review of a Starship album, someone whose last name is Nolan, the guitarist for the New Fast Automatic Daffodils, several high school classmates, and Ian Frazier’s publisher.

[3] The name VIVID always had to be printed in all-caps, and for the duration of the band’s existence we remained woefully ignorant of the adult video production company with whom we shared our name.

[4] And Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Led Zeppelin, the aforementioned Living Colour, U2, Fishbone, King Crimson, Stone Temple Pilots, Depeche Mode, fIREHOSE, The Police, The Breeders, The Smiths, Hüsker Dü, Van Halen, the Beatles, and probably several other bands I’ve forgotten about.

Posted: January 8th, 2007 under Grinnell, Iowa City, Music.
Comments: 11

I’m back from a quick trip to DC for Jenny and Tom’s wedding, and while I am exhausted, this was an ideal ending to the wedding season (or as I’ve taken to calling it, My Year Of 1000 Weddings).

Jenny is my oldest friend; our mothers were best friends and neighbors and I met Jenny when she was born. I’m pretty sure—though there’s no way of substantiating this—that I was there when she learned to crawl.

When we were four, Jenny and I got married in her TV room. I believe I wore a tiger costume. As a child, I just always sort of assumed we would someday get married for real; this is not because I was particularly infatuated with Jenny, but in the logic of childhood it made sense: we were the same age, our families already had Thanksgiving dinner together, and we shared an appreciation for Sesame Street and The Wizard Of Oz.

Every summer until we were in eighth grade, Jenny and I, along with several other faculty brats, attended Grinnell College’s day camp. In younger years we built forts in which we ate marshmallows, and invented antidotes for cooties; in later years we’d try and outdo each other’s precocity by writing snarky editorials and film reviews for the camp newsletter peppered with advanced vocabulary words. We were occasionally joined by another smartypants named Jessica, who moved away from Grinnell in 1988 and whom I saw for the first time in 18 years at Jenny’s wedding on Saturday. In fifth grade I had a liaison whose identity I’ve forgotten (though it was quite possibly Jenny) deliver a note to Jessica asking her if she liked me. (You know: liked me liked me.) Through the same emissary, she politely but firmly answered in the negative. It’s just as well; soon afterwards she moved to Ohio, and everyone knows that long-distance relationships are difficult.

I didn’t let Jessica’s demurral discourage me for long. I continued to harbor a horribly-concealed crush on Jenny until, one afternoon at day camp, as we were walking to the college pool for our daily swimming outing, I announced to anyone who would listen that perhaps one day, Jenny and I would get married. Jenny immediately and emphatically said, “That is not going to happen.” I was embarrassed, and of course crushed. But I got over it, and it’s a good thing too, because Jenny could do a lot better.

And then she did. Congratulations, Jenny and Tom.

(More pictures of Jenny and Tom, and Jessica, and other drunken revelers who I’ve known for considerably less than three decades and upon whom I never had childhood crushes, are in the gallery.)

Posted: October 23rd, 2006 under Grinnell, Images.
Comments: 1

When insomnia struck tonight, did I reach for a book or magazine, or perhaps write a chapter in my memoir-in-progress about how fucking brilliant I am?

Heavens, no. I might come dangerously close to accomplishing something if I did that.

No, because we live in FutureWorld, I went to Craigslist, of course. Then MySpace.

Even though these cyber-diversions are more ancient than Interpol, Lindsay Lohan, and Scientology combined, I never cease to be amazed at just what effective and horrendously entertaining time-sucks they are.

To wit.

Hey “Lost” fans: Did you know that, according to at least one of Kate’s ten (10) MySpace profiles, she went to high school with me? GHS class of ‘97, apparently. I’d like to contest this information, however, because if she’d gone to high school with me I would have definitely dated her. Or at least tried to.

“Hey Kate, care to join Drama Club? We meet every Tuesday after school. I’m the president, you know. Okay then, uh, I’ll see you at 3:30!”

I learned this fun fact while engaging in another fun MySpace activity: running a search for everyone who went to my high school. In my case, because my alma mater is so small, the results weren’t overwhelming and I recognized a lot of people (the ones over age 25, anyway), including a couple of my ex-girlfriends (besides those of the gorgeous, albeit fictional, television castaway variety). And, most importantly, I have experienced a unique mixture of remorse and nostalgia that is probably more familiar than I prefer. Good times!

And now, off to read a month’s worth of Gawker archives. [cue gun-to-own-head gesture]

Posted: April 19th, 2006 under Grinnell, Images.
Comments: 7

Another drive yesterday, this time from Chicago back to Grinnell. I always seem to take longer on drives than others. Unless I really apply myself to the goal of making good time, I tend to make frequent stops, and dawdle.

And one of the best places to do that is the (new and improved!) DeKalb Oasis. I love how, for basically anyone from the Midwest old enough to drive, and quite a few people from other regions of the country, all you have to do is say “DeKalb Oasis” and they will know exactly what you’re talking about.

And at said oasis this time, in the bathroom, I heard a strange scratching sound coming from the stall immediately to my right. It did not sound unlike male masturbation, if the member of the male in question were covered with corrugated metal or some rough fabric, and he was wearing similarly abrasive gloves. My curiosity finally got the best of me and I strained to look at the floor of the adjacent stall, where I saw a couple of discarded lottery games of the “scratch ‘n win” variety. My bathroom neighbor was evidently scratching the silvery coating off the relevant fields of his game pieces, and discarding his unwinning pieces on the floor. When he finished his business and exited the stall, he left the pieces on the floor.

The drive from Chicago to pretty much anywhere always takes longer than one expects. Or at least, I manage to make it take longer. I’m a sucker for frequent stops. To wit, the above stop at the DkO, and another in Rock Falls for a cheeseburger and milkshake from Culver’s.

During my drive, I listened to the following PodCasts: The Al Franken Show (16 December 2005); Diggnation (27 December 2005); The Ricky Gervais Show (3 January 2005, and the only Podcast I didn’t terminate before its end).

Coming into Grinnell from the east always dictates for me a choice between taking Exit 182 directly from the Interstate onto Hwy 146, and the more scenic but slightly slower Exit 191 to Hwy 63 through Malcolm (and past the Pour House) to Hwy 6. Even though the drive had taken much longer than it needed to, and I was tired, and the fog made visibility low and nighttime driving stressful, I opted for the longer, less direct route. By now I was listening to Pixel Revolt and grateful that John Vanderslice’s voice is so easy to sing along with.

And the town’s empty post-holiday loneliness was alleviated with great effect by Neil’s presence. We went to the Pub with Ashlee, determined to convince her—and, let’s be honest, ourselves—that fun could be had on a weeknight in a small-town bar with attendance in the single digits. We were right, however. We even spoke to a couple old friends whose trajectories beyond, say, 1994 I hadn’t really ever stopped to consider. We drank fancy and expensive beer out of actual glass pint glasses and served to us in pitchers, part of the Pub’s slow climb to reassert itself, I presume, as the best bar in Grinnell for our demographic.

I should mention that being both a Writer and a Drinker and doing both in more or less equal measure means that I will think of and take notes on a great number of items and ideas throughout a night of imbibing which seem like Good Ideas At The Time. Looking over these notes the next day, it’s staggering and humorous and a little sad what precious little percentage of these GIATTs are still GIs, what even smaller percentage are actually translated into sober, coherent prose, and what even more infinitesimal perentage are presented here. It’s kind of amazing I ever get anything accomplished.

Walking home suitably drunk, I kept letting Neil and Ashlee get a few yards ahead of me so I could take pictures of them. It was a strangely quiet but satisfying evening in Grinnell, and wholly unexpected.

Posted: January 5th, 2006 under Grinnell, Images.
Comments: 6

Most of my friends know that I have a love/hate relationship with the telephone. More hate than love, really, since I’m terrible at maintaining meaningful conversations via phone, and a ringing telephone—especially a ringing cellphone—represents about a dozen different types of simultaneous intrusions into daily life. So despite the fact that I jumped on the cellphone bandwagon several years ago, right around the same time everyone else did, I still go into a state of mild panic when my phone rings. Call it a disorder if you must.

It’s especially difficult with long-distance friends. It’s not that I don’t want to talk to these important people whom I may not have seen in quite some time; it’s almost the opposite: I’m afraid there’s no way a technology like the telephone can possibly do justice to the estrangement that results when formerly intimate friendships are challenged by geographical circumstances, and the reconnection that distance mandates can’t possibly be acheived over the phone, can it? Maybe it can, for some people; I don’t know. It’s just a lot more difficult for me.

So, most people who call me aren’t surprised when it goes to voicemail. It’s not because I’m an asshole; it’s because I’m much more comfortable with email and face-to-face communication.

There are exceptions, of course. Like this evening, when Neil called and we engaged in the same juvenile humor we perfected several years ago, or earlier this afternoon, when Wes called me out of the blue. (At this point I should probably apologize to Wes and assure him that not every phone call we have will result in an extremely sentimental blog entry featuring a photo from 1995. Just this one.)

Wes and I have plans to play music together over the holidays, maybe record it, but mostly just to “jam” like we used to in high school, whether in my mother’s basement—where the cement walls of the unfinished rooms create violently epic acoustical effects, especially on the drums—or in his parents’ little piano room, or up in Mark’s attic. More than anything, my goal is to play music again with my oldest and best musician cohort. At the end of our phone conversation, Wes suggested we make custard. This isn’t some sick euphemism; it’s literal: in tenth grade, a few days before Christmas, I went over to his house and we made custard while listening to a mix tape of the Smiths he’d made for me.

Some constants remain. I’m glad I answered my phone.

Posted: December 11th, 2005 under Grinnell, Music, General.
Comments: none

Posted: November 28th, 2005 under Grinnell, Images.
Comments: 2

Last night was the first of what I’m sure will be many small-world experiences in Minneapolis.

Upon getting home from orientation, I made myself a sandwich for dinner, ate it while reading Jonathan Kozol’s depressing new essay in the latest Harper’s, and then hopped on my new bike and rode to Mill City to use their wireless and drink some Earl Grey. (My fruitiness quotient is skyrocketing with each new sentence, I realize.)

After that, I rode around my neighborhood as dusk was falling. I passed 331, the bar just three blocks from my house. On a whim, I decided to stop in and have a beer. A small band was warming up on stage: a guitairst/banjo player and a young man who appeared to be playing the saw. You know, a carpenter’s saw, played with a violin bow to produce an imprecise, eerie sound not unlike a theremin. At some point I noticed that the saw player was wearing a t-shirt that said IOWA in big letters across the top. Not soon afterwards I noticed that the bottom of the t-shirt bore the word RABBITT’S along the bottom. And then I saw, in tiny capital letters below that, the golden word Grinnell.

I approahced him immediately and introduced myself. He recognized me vaguely and it turns out he went to Grinnell, class of ‘98. That’s when it dawned on me that another Grinnell friend had already told me about his Monday night gigs at the 331, but because I have a memory like a sieve, I’d completely forgotten. So we caught up with our respective trajectories—he remembered me from when I was the drummer for Speed Of Sauce in 2001, and I remembered him extremely vaguely from when he was a sophomore at Grinnell in 1996. What’s more, his current girlfriend dated a very good friend of mine several years ago.

I guess none of this came as a huge surprise, since everyone from Grinnell moves to either Chicago or Minneapolis, and I’ve already covered the Chicago half of the diaspora.

Anyway, I watched his set and enjoyed it immensely. I am hereby encouraging everyone to see the Roe Family Singers at the 331 every Monday night for some old-timey country standards and originals as well.

Posted: August 30th, 2005 under Grinnell, Minneapolis, Music.
Comments: 4

So the pictures from my ten-year high school reunion are up. In general, I had a good time, and you may recognize a certain personality from a certain WB reality-television show. Woot, woot.

Posted: July 4th, 2005 under Grinnell, Images.
Comments: none

Fun weekend. It can pretty much be summed up in the following exchange between my mom and my brother:

MOM: Joe, why are you getting a beer out of the fridge?
JOE: I’m just feeling it.
MOM: Feeling what?
JOE: Feeling like drinking a beer.
MOM: Oh. Here’s a bottle opener.
JOE: It’s a twist-off.
MOM: Oh. You’re going to drink a beer at three in the afternoon?
JOE: It’s three already?

Posted: July 4th, 2005 under Grinnell.
Comments: 2

Best song of all time, right now: “Exodus Damage” by John Vanderslice. Also, best song yet about 9/11. Also, best song to reference “Dance Dance Revolution” in the chorus.

So, it turns out my childhood friend Chuck is doing quite well on “Beauty & The Geek”. In fact, last night he gave one of the women a bedtime massage and spoke with her in Spanish. Since I sat next to him throughout our high school Spanish classes, I’d like to take partial credit for his seduction technique.

I know that I’ve previously said I hate it when people talk about their dreams, but this one is too good to go unmentioned. I’ll make it brief: I was at Grinnell College’s alumni reunion, and on the last night all the attendees were instructed to put their luggage on the sidewalks in front of the dorms so it would be ready to go when they left in the morning. During the course of the night, a bunch of the luggage was stolen. Everyone began to panic, and a bunch of townies started driving by and taunting the people missing their luggage. “What’s the matter, you elitist college fuckers? Lost your luggage?” And then the students began yelling back at them. Emily Cripe yelled, “Why don’t you go back to your shitty factory job that you hate so much!” I watched all this in horror, having been both a student and a townie, and thought, “This is not going to improve town-gown relations.”

Posted: June 16th, 2005 under Grinnell, Music.
Comments: 12