Belated Thankfulness

In the wake of Teo's passing and under the smothering pressure of grad school applications, neither inspiration nor time has presented itself to a degree appropriate for creating new posts. I guess it's fitting, then, that I can't even write a Thanksgiving entry on time. But late trumps never, and late November always hands me the realization that I display too little gratefulness for a life which, despite its occasional strain and turbulence, remains essentially priveleged, fulfilling, and altogether rewarding.

And so, with that in mind, and with special attention to this (admittedly fairly difficult) year's developments, I am thankful for:

-- Reconnecting with home. When I left Providence, returning to Michigan seemed a death sentence. Now, after almost six months here, I've rediscovered the friendliness, pluck, and tenacity of Michiganders, the immense pride and affection we harbor for our dying city and the incredible hope we maintain for its resurrection, the unique slants of light and scents on the air that signify Southeast Michigan. These are the experiences that made me despair to leave five years ago, and I'm relieved to have found them again.

-- My job, and no longer feeling the pressure to justify holding such a job. Working in retail may fall outside the confines of acceptably prestigious entry-level jobs for graduates of purportedly elite colleges, but it's no cause for self-pity. I have a schedule that allows me to care for the horses in the morning and work on my applications at night and a paycheck that covers equine and personal expenses. I've met some fantastic people with some amazing stories, none of whom I would know had I not taken this job.

-- My horses, who anchor me in sanity and comfort when all else falls away and leaves a wake of bleakness and desperation. Now that Teo is gone, I am all the more thankful for the nine years I had with him; it is increasingly evident that no horse will ever match him in steadfastness and personality. And it brings me joy to think that Shwy, my first horse whom I've had for nearly 15 years, acts much younger than his 25 years and will hopefully remain with us for quite awhile yet.

-- My family. Despite our splintered state and moderately tense undercurrents, we manage to reunite each holiday for an ultimately enjoyable time. Our gatherings may resemble absurdist drama, but we somehow retain our senses of humor throughout. I owe an especially large debt of gratitude to my mother, for tirelessly supporting my education and never once questioning my choice of career, and for not turning me out on my ear, no matter how many times my holy-terror adolescence tempted her to do so.

-- My friends, both old and new. I often speak of my "friend family," and last week's trip East reaffirmed my faith in that concept. I will never, ever find another group of kindred spirits quite like my residential college compatriots, and my Providence friends will always remain my favorite artistic community. Moreover, longtime and new-found friendships here at home promise to brighten the interminable Michigan winter. I truly have no excuse for loneliness when I'm so lucky to be surrounded by so many luminous individuals.

-- Music and lyrics. Whether I'm practicing violin or guitar, belting out Mountain Goats songs on a road trip, basking in John K. Samson's lyrical genius, or absorbing the unparalleled communal experience of witnessing a favorite band or artist in concert, music occupies an appreciable portion of every day I live. It comforts sadness, focuses rage, enables memories, augments joy, and imparts wisdom. I organize my life by artists and albums: this year, I suffered through Providence's winter to Bon Iver's Blood Bank, danced through spring to Born Ruffians and Harlem Shakes, studied summer away to Sunset Rubdown's Dragonslayer, and grieved for Teo to the Mountain Goats' Life of the World to Come (particularly "Matthew 25:21," the first song ever to drive me to unfettered sobbing). As a hypersensitive, deeply emotive, vaguely neurotic individual, I am deeply grateful that music offers me such catharsis and support, and am infinitely thankful for my own ability to create it.

-- Simple pleasures. For each of the above major life elements, there exist dozens of small joys that defy classification within those parameters. I experience them frequently, yet consciously appreciate them far too little, so I list them here, now, if ever my future self should forget their soul-healing power:

long drives, strong hugs, waking without alarms, late-night conversations, pumpkin spice lattes, breathtaking sunsets, uncontrollable side-aching eye-watering laughter, autumn foliage, the smell of horse, the smell of bonfires, cranberry-walnut-goat cheese salads, truly good coffee, truly buttery croissants, Ken's fries, Rudy's frites, smiles from strangers, cuddles from my cats, trips to the driving range, red wine, college towns, excellent iPod shuffle streaks, comfortable mattresses, Altoids, my mom's cooking, Mad Men, peppermint tea, Sweet Juniper, Ontario, Canada in general, social networking and other keeping-in-touch methods, and waking every day to general good health and food and clothing and shelter.

Flights of Angels

You were a presence full of light upon this earth,
And I am a witness to your life and to its worth.

I don't know if I believe in rainbow bridges or pastures in the sky, but I believe in eternal peace for those who have felt great pain.

Galateo, the elderly horse of the previous post, lost his battle with arthritis this weekend. His hindquarters had become too stiff and weak and uncoordinated to carry his large frame. He almost fell yesterday on his way in from the paddock. He had started to suffer.

My mother called the vet, who came to our farm this afternoon and instantly agreed that it was time. He led Teo to a grassy spot next to the pine tree in front of our paddocks. The dreaded moment had still arrived too suddenly, even after months of steeling myself.

I could not watch Teo go. My mother, ever the stronger soul, watched for both of us. She said he fell gently, slowly, first to his knees and then to his side. Life left his body like a bird departing its perch. For the first time in a long time, he felt no pain.

Though I will always worry that Teo wondered where I'd gone in those last minutes, I am glad my mom insisted that my parting image of him be a better one. I spent our final day together cuddling him in his stall, stroking his face and neck, telling him how much I loved him. And even though he still showed his heart at the end, trying to escape the vet's grasp -- he never did like doctors, and he never, ever gave up -- he was already gone, in a way.

After he had passed, a strange calm washed over me, almost as if my body had released whatever pain it had absorbed from his. Even now, mere hours later, I find myself oddly peaceful and almost relieved. Perhaps it's numbness, or maybe even acceptance. I doubt I'll really know for some time.

What I do know is that whenever I think of Teo, the strong, proud, steadfast, talented, courageous competitor will always come to mind. I will remember our first competition at Indian Hills, where he swept every class we entered. I will remember my delight when he carried me to a 63.5% in my first Prix St. Georges and then earned me my USDF Silver Medal. I will remember the freestyle symposium in Raleigh, where he danced to swing music and captured the audience's and the panel's hearts. I will remember the elation of making the Region 2 NAYRC team, the long drive to Bromont, the agony and ecstasy of being held at the jog and then finally admitted -- how he willed his right hind, its arthritis then in its infancy, to reach just that extra inch farther -- and then collapsing in the arms of my teammates, who showered him with praise. I will remember our first Grand Prix and each one thereafter, and the unbelievable pride of earning our Gold Medal together. I will remember the joy he brought to my friends who rode him after I left for college. I will remember him trotting in his paddock and scratching my other horse's back over the gate. I will remember his nickers and whinnies and head-tosses and goofy looks.

Goodnight, sweet prince. You're free now, and you will always be my Bear.

The Coping Before the Coping

When you own an elderly horse, there comes a time when you realize that soon, it will be time.

("Time," of course, needs no explanation.)

You've watched his movement grow creakier over the years, and you've diligently soaked his hay cubes for him since his teeth wore too low to master dry forage, and you've clipped his progressively shaggier coat every dog-day season. You've seen him struggle with minor bouts of soreness, but he has always recovered fairly quickly. He has conquered Potomac fever and laminitis, both potentially fatal diseases, but it's the arthritis that will get him in the end. His flareups have become more frequent and more painful. This winter, like the last, will be hard on him, if he -- say it -- if he makes it through.

The thought of losing him already hurts beyond belief. No one has seriously discussed euthanasia yet -- he's still abundantly enjoying his somewhat slower life, still getting up and down without struggle, still managing competently -- but the topic has burrowed into the back of your mind, and heaven only knows when it will spring forth to steal your peace and your happiness. You try to prepare yourself, but you know your strength will only carry you so far, because all your life you've never not treated horses like family, and you've never lost one before. And you know it's going to wreck you.

But then, just as your toe prematurely dips into the vacuous void of grief's rabbit hole, a friend says something you need to hear: "He's still here." And she's right.

You watch him slowly but ably amble around his paddock, and you realize that appreciating the present trumps dreading the future. You focus on his already long, successful life, and your time together, nine years full of competitive triumphs and indelible memories and irrepressible goofiness -- and most of all great love and respect. You think of all he's taught you and all you still have to learn from him. You put on your happy music, your Grizzly Bear and your Dirty Projectors, and you keep up with your chores, and you do everything in your power to keep him happy and comfortable for as long as you can. And every so often, you glance out the window to watch him grazing contentedly. The time will come someday, but for now, he's still here.

You mean I can't move to Seattle? Damn.

Two weeks later, I am still in love with this city.

Lift

The sky would only hurt you if you never left the ground before. -- Tim Easton

I was nine and airborne when I learned the definition of phobia. Buckled into my window seat, watching the Orlando lights recede below, I asked my mother: "What if the plane goes down?"

"We'll cross that bridge if we come to it," she calmly replied.

Twenty minutes later, the DC-9 pitched and shuddered violently in the rough blackness. A flight attendant, red-eyed and rough-voiced, announced our passage through "extended turbulence;" she lost her footing mid-sentence. I looked out upon the narrow sea of tears and clasped hands and cursed myself for cursing us. Some passengers breathed into paper bags; others sat statue-like, pale and breathless, eyes slammed shut; all of us hoped this was the worst of it.

And then the bottom dropped out. The plane plummeted for a neverending split-second, bellyflopping into the void and eliciting screams from both children and adults. The actual fall was no doubt much smaller than it felt -- likely only a few hundred feet and not the thousands I would later claim -- but to a nine-year-old, it seemed catastrophic. The plane soon recovered and climbed above the turbulence to cruise smoothly for the remainder of the flight, but I was too far gone. By the time we landed in Detroit, I was officially afraid of flying.

Since that traumatic experience, I have flown sporadically to destinations as far as London and Rome, but despite the uneventfulness of nearly all of these flights, I have yet to completely conquer my fear. Tomorrow, I will fly to Seattle to see my friends married; like it has before every flight I've taken in the last fourteen years, "the drop" keeps replaying in my mind. I think of the reassuring facts I gathered from websites aimed at assuaging phobic flyers' fears, and though my mind understands the overwhelming statistical evidence of air travel's safety, my palms still sweat when I picture myself packed into an aluminum tube hurtling through the sky.

The irrationality of phobias is widely known, especially to those plagued by them, but the sheer embarrassment they cause sometimes escapes perception. I cringe explaining my fear to friends who regularly fly between coasts; some of them have spent more time on planes than they have behind steering wheels. Even I know that no convincing justifcation exists, yet remain trapped by a deeply ingrained physical response. I'm arguing for a cause I never chose to support.

No one decides to contract a phobia, but one must decide to overcome it. Two Decembers ago, after eight earthbound years, I agreed to fly to Florida for an equestrian awards banquet. Takeoff and turbulence still terrified me through the hangover haze of the Dramamine, but I somehow kept my composure and deplaned in one piece. At the time, the utter foreignness of the experience, the disconnection from reality implicit in traveling miles above Earth, eclipsed its significance. Only later did I realize that my initial reacquaintance with the sky had torn open a new world of travel. Without Florida, I would not have known Italy, and would have balked at the now-looming Seattle trip. Flying still frays my nerves beyond description -- combating the phobia will remain a lifelong struggle -- but thanks to once choice (and to the soporific marvel known as Tylenol PM), it is no longer an impossibility.

So when I prematurely shake myself from sleep tomorrow morning and set out for the airport, I will remember to remember the comforting facts I've learned: that the plane is just a fish swimming in air and physically cannot fall from the sky; that the human body feels turbulence more than turbulence affects the plane; that all aircraft have stabilizing systems. My heart will still pound and my palms will still sweat upon takeoff, but with the help of a few pills, I will hopefully remain asleep as we traverse the limbo between towns and time zones. And what better reward than a weekend of warmth, laughter, and celebration with my dearest friends? I can't think of a better incentive for facing my fear once again.

A Home Regained

Some aspects of my Michigan life I will never not love.

Backlit trees:


Cozy study sessions:


Gentle fauna:



Raging sunsets:

Hollow nights:

"Like being everything you are all at once."

The weather turns earlier in Michigan than it does in New England. I had forgotten.

The last few mornings, I have donned a fleece before sleepily stumbling to the barn to feed breakfast. That first shock of warm softness against sun-weathered skin still manages to surprise.

Two days ago, my mother and I dismembered a young tree growing behind the barn. Late August's suddenly forceful winds had begun assaulting its branches and bending its narrow trunk over the fence separating it from the riding arena, and its clatter and snap and spastic gestures had scared my horse. We amputated limb after limb until only a triangular tuft of green remained at the top; the trunk remained standing, having greatly overmatched our flimsy saw. In the aftermath, the breeze swiftly bypassed the newly gaunt figure whose ashen skin warned of the gray-brown days to come. It was only after the taking-down that I realized just how much the tree had grown.

Down came the branches, down go the temperatures, down goes the sun in the deepening sky. Evenings arrive earlier now; darkness surprises rather than procrastinates. And while I miss the post-1opm sunsets -- one of the few benefits of living on the Western edge of Eastern time -- I much prefer sixty degrees to ninety and gusty briskness to stagnant humidity. The anticipation of autumn is a prickly and welcome sensation.

Fall has always held some promise of (ironically) renewal and structure. Renewal because fall births school years and theatre seasons, structure because such institutions drop me into a template of regimentation. I like a measured existence, and love autumn for offering one up every year.

(Even the clouds roll in with new-found organization, uniformly sized and shaped and spaced, proud battallions methodically advancing across a wild blue battlefield.)

When I wake up to September tomorrow, I will still be in Michigan. New England will wait for me; it will still be autumn when next I visit. This fall lacks the gleam of its predecessors, but it will suffice. I begin a new job in two weeks, and though it requires a mere teaspoonful of intellect compared to my last position, it still brings a framework and financial gain in with the season. The farm will still consume my mornings, and until Octuber 10, all spare time will belong to GRE subject test preparation. My location will not change, but my life's boundaries will harden in the cool crispness. I will look East for nostalgia, I will look West for inspiration, but mostly I will look forward. It's time to bury the wayward summer.

A Bigger Kind of Kill

For years, I have soundtracked my life according to the season. Bands and albums become inextricably linked to particular phases and places; their sounds rocket me back to their corresponding moments whenever they enter my ears. Bon Iver's Blood Bank EP immediately conjures the vicious gray-and-black cycle of a colorless Providence winter, while The Decemberists' The Crane Wife recalls the autumn of my junior year of college, all yellowing skies, brisk throat-tingling breezes, and crisp autumn leaves descending in kamikaze spirals to find themselves beneath the shoes of frazzled students. So too this summer has found itself underscored by a recently-released album: Sunset Rubdown's magnificent Dragonslayer.

The brainchild of Wolf Parade's keyboardist and co-principal songwriter Spencer Krug, Sunset Rubdown began as a bedrom recording project and has matured into a full band with considerable live performance prowess. Characterized by what Filter magazine so accurately deemed "epic eccentricity," the band layers precise melodies and stately vocals over chugging rhythms and lush guitar- and piano-based orchestration. Their sound conveys a unique urgency especially appropriate for this summer, the first in my life clouded by a terrifying futurelessness, racing toward the first fall in five years to refuse promise of a return East. Listening to the layers of sound swirling beneath Krug's literate, grandiose lyrics produces the feeling I imagine I would experience upon standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon, and, in doing so, engenders a painful awareness of the need for proactivity in charting a path through a vast and overwhelming future.

Those lyrics, in fact, make this specific music-to-moment match particularly unique. Past seasonal soundtracks often achived their status through either sound or lyrical content, but never before Dragonslayer have those two characteristics converged so as to relate simultaneously and perfectly to a certain span of time. Krug is an unabashed symbolist, perhaps the purest in indie rock, and his narrators catalogue scads of fires, animals, mythic figures, virgins, and bodies of water in their complex-yet-direct, sometimes sprawling but always deft lines. Yet the apparent opacity of the lyrics does not totally obfuscate their accessibility, as Pitchfork's Jessica Suarez astutely observes in her review: "What seems like a pile of metaphors is just Krug simplifying the world. Actions are products of instinct or fate, always out of our control, easier to describe than understand. It's Krug's way of-- perhaps insufficiently-- interpreting the world without fully taming it." Indeed, Dragonslayer's comprehensibility eclipses that of the band's previous two LPs. Images and ideas recur from song to song, and while Dragonslayer is not a concept album (at least not to my knowledge), its progression of tracks forms a distinct thematic arc that charts a course from recklessness toward increased maturity.

But Dragonslayer is by no means a typical coming-of-age journey. Its lyrics distinguish it from the average maturation narrative in that the recognition of the need to grow up has already occurred before the album begins, infusing its early songs with the unique bittersweetness wrung from the tension between adulthood's required sophistication and youth's unbridled revelry. Opener "Silver Moons" begins with past tense -- "There were parties here in my honor;" "It was out of line but it was fun" -- as its narrator sets "off to the ballet, and to practice all these ancient ways," passing the torch to a new generation of night owls. His graduation to increased civility is not without sadness, however: "Hey, maybe these days are over, over now...And I loved it better than anyone else, you know." Second track "Idiot Heart" finds its narrator admonishing that "You can't settle down until the Icarus in your blood drowns;" when his audience fails to take his advice, he spits an ominous portent of forthcoming consequences: "I hope that you died in a decent pair of shoes: You've got a lot of long walking to do, where you're going to." Successive songs present images of fallen deities ("Apollo and the Buffalo and Anna Anna Anna Oh!"), ghosts and black swans and kingdoms ("Black Swan"), and transience versus permanence ("Paper Lace"), mapping a landscape of uncertainty and destruction that both frightens and beckons as Krug acknowledges the perverse allure of recklessness and devastation. Bursting with cataclysmic emotion, the heaving tide of these songs makes the listening process an overwhelming one, simultaneously fulfilling and draining (in an entirely positive sense). And the album has only reached its midpoint.

If Dragonslayer's first five songs represent recognition and reluctance to change, its final three usher in increased receptivity to the idea, and eventually reveal an eagerness to embrace it. Pivotal track "You Go On Ahead (Trumpet Trumpet II)" anchors the thematic transformation, as Krug shifts from participation to observation: "I would like to just follow you awhile. I'd like to watch the white flash of your heels as they take turns breaking the desert heat to beckon me in languages I've never learned." He also expresses the desire to abandon his performative role: "I'd like to throw this trumpet down and go on empty handed." His longing for removal from the fray becomes a wish for purification; he hopes to "appear before you virgin white if virgins are still chaste" and implies that the passage of time has distanced him from the mess he once craved. The song's final line -- "And if reflections on the water sometimes look like burning tears, we can watch them changing shape without pushing off the pier" -- confirms his urge to maintain that distance. All the while, the song's simple, soaring melodies reinforce its singer's attempt at increased wholesomeness.

Penultimate track "Nightengale/December Song" ratchets the purification factor up a level, describing rituals of spiritual cleansing that comprise bathing in mud and "swimming in a lake of holy water," while filtering these images through a lens of complementary personalities described in pyrotechnic terms: "You are a fast explosion and I am the embers." Danger still lingers beneath the narrator's increasingly mature surface, but it is conquerable and even beneficial when properly harnessed and cultivated. The album's sweeping conclusion, the epic "Dragon's Lair," continues this exploration, its lyrics signaling a heightened responsibility heretofore unseen. Direct connections to "Silver Moons" abound -- the same parties, confetti, and dead leaves feature prominently -- but the focus has shifted to the future. Having undergone a period of reflection, Krug is now prepared for bigger battles: "So you can take me to the dragon's lair, or you can take me to Rapunzel's windowsill. Either way, it is time for a bigger kind of kill." Youthful brazenness becomes heroic bravery, the destructive fire now channeled into a ferocious competitive spirit hell-bent on slaying monsters and seducing damsels. Yet the potential for decimation still remains, a fact highlighted by Krug's beguiling delivery. Aurally, "dragon's lair" and "dragonslayer" bear a strong resemblance, and Krug's hissing prolongation of the letter S makes the former sound curiously like the latter. It forms the album's most arresting moment, both lyrically and performatively -- with a slight vocal idiosyncrasy, Krug foregrounds the fine line between heroism (killing the dragon, saving the kingdom) and villainy (killing the dragonslayer, unleashing chaos), and closes the album with bone-chilling subversion.

All this overblown analysis, of course, is one person's completely speculative interpretation. Spencer Krug is an immensely talented songwriter whose notoriously mystifying lyrics lend themselves to a variety of explications, while only the writer himself knows the full extent of their meaning. Suffice it to say that in the face of excess time, this overactive imagination felt like putting an English major's twist on one of the summer's best albums. Who knows whether my ideas are remotely valid, but if any of the words or links above persuade you to explore Dragonslayer -- or, for that matter, its equally excellent predecessors, the blissfully quirky Random Spirit Lover and the gloriously sweeping Shut Up I Am Dreaming -- then this quagmire of an intellectual experiment will not have been in vain.

When Life Gives You Limens

"You can't look back. You must look back."

The professor's sonorous proclamation of that vital paradox emanated from the podium and washed upward, outward over the steeply-inclined rows of square red seats in the bright, cubic hall. The British Arts Center auditorium, unflinchingly modern with its cement walls and lacquered blonde hardwood floor, seemed an unconventional lecture location in its flagrant rejection of Yale's opulent Gothic embrace, but the lecture proved anything but orthodox. The incomparable Joe Roach was explaining the essential predicament of the Orpheus myth during the first meeting of his World Performance class, where I, intoxicated by this first brush with performance studies at the outset of my final year of college, would hear for the first time the term that has come to describe every phase of my life between that moment and this one: Liminal.

Quite simply, "limen" means "threshold" in Latin, and liminality - the straddling of an existential threshold - informs conventional and experimental performance in that performative acts negotiate the space between artifice and reality, between past and present, between the familiar and the foreign. As it describes a state of flux, liminality inherently implies change: as Jon McKenzie states, its "spacial, temporal, and symbolic 'in between-ness' allows for social norms to be suspended, challenged, played with, and perhaps even transformed." Furthermore, as performance studies extends beyond the expected areas of theatre and performance art into the anthropological, sociological realm, liminality manifests in rites of passage such as the isolation and reintegration of a tribe's adolescent males, or even those four freewheeling, exhausting, stressful, euphoric, intense and all-too-fleeting years of college we so fondly remember. In all cases, participants and observers find themselves changed by their relationship to each other and to the event at hand. And since all performances involve liminality, and all life involves performance, liminality becomes ubiquitous, unrelenting, inescapable.

The oxymoronic idea of constant liminality prompted McKenzie to coin the term "the liminal-norm," a concept which "operates in any situation where the valorization of a liminal transgression or resistance itself becomes normative -- at which point theorization of such a norm may become subversive." Full disclosure: I freely admit that I lack the philosophical knowledge to completely understand some of performance theory's loftier concepts, and McKenzie's idea initially struck me as somewhat tautological and head-scratching. After re-reading it, however, it seems he implies that given humans' incessant desire to assign value to liminal states, attempting to brand liminality as the new status quo threatens to obliterate our awareness of change and its impact upon us.

Hence my decision to name this blog after McKenzie's term. Liminality dictates the lives of most twentysomethings as we bob and weave our way through the blinding glare of the post-college world and the wobbly-kneed adventures of early-career uncertainty. Those of us prone to obsessive introspection constantly identify it for ourselves and for each other, mercilessly analyzing its implications and cowering beneath the monumental significance we assign it. We cannot -- and should not -- escape it, but we must not become too accustomed to it or else we risk forgetting it and, in turn, forgetting parts of ourselves.

The Stopgap Principle

I'm pretty sure it constitutes a direct violation of the rules of bloggery to write a considered if a little vainglorious introductory post and then follow it with over a week of silence -- which, let's be honest, seems like eons in our generation's welter of shortened attention spans and 140-character quips -- only to break said silence in the laziest way possible, i.e., quotation appreciation. But I will do precisely that, because it is 11pm and thus too late in the night to begin a proper post, as Farm Standard Time requires early slumber, and because, as always happens, someone else has expressed something I've been feeling in a manner so perfect it completely invalidates my desire to formulate my own words upon the subject.

In this case, that someone is Michael Chabon, the brilliant mind at the root of one of my favorite films (Wonder Boys, based on his novel of the same name), which I watched for the probably 27th time two nights before I left Providence. After a recommendation from my Chabon-enthusiast former housemate and four voraciously-devoured chapters of his copy of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, I was hooked. And while I have yet to finish that excellent novel, because apparently no bookstore in Metro Detroit seems to carry it, I have read two other Chabon books since returning to Michigan: A Model World and Other Stories and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. The quotation in question is the last paragraph of the latter, and though the act of posting a novel's last paragraph to a public forum, a novel quite possibly unread by an appreciable portion of the audience, seems rather oxymoronic and vaguely treasonous, I will nonetheless do so, as that brief, sparkling paragraph so perfectly encapsulates the memory of a year in Providence, of my senior year of college, of the end of my junior year of high school. And so I will let the novel's narrator, Art Bechstein, speak for me and for all twentysomethings seeking the appropriate words to recall a profoundly enjoyable and painful and intoxicating and poignant stretch of time:

When I remember that dizzy summer, that dull, stupid, lovely, dire summer, it seems that in those days I ate my lunches, smelled another's skin, noticed a shade of yellow, even simply sat, with greater lust and hopefulness -- and that I lusted with greater faith, hoped with greater abandon. The people I loved were celebrities, surrounded by rumor and fanfare; the places I sat with them, movie lots and monuments. No doubt all of this is not true remembrance but the ruinous work of nostalgia, which obliterates the past, and no doubt, as usual, I have exaggerated everything.

Beginning of the End of the End of the Beginning

Of all the self-professed writers you will ever encounter, very few will achieve literary success, and I will not be one of them. That distinction will belong to superiorly talented friends and friends-of-friends who will see -- or have already seen -- themselves published in newspapers, magazines, and silky-paged, prettily-covered books showcased in bright, sprawling big-box booksellers, the kind with built-in coffee shops and continuous underscores of vaguely obscure but still NPR-friendly indie rock soundtracking customers' browsing odysseys. If my words ever meet commercial shelves, they will likely do so as part of a disgustingly abstruse volume of dramatic criticism yellowing in a remote corner of a subterranean used bookstore plagued by ten-year-old dust bunnies and interminable ceiling leaks. Still, as an obsessively overanalytical, neurotically self-involved English major just over a year removed from college, hundreds of miles removed from nearly all of my closest friends (the usual unfortunate victims of these onslaughts of verbosity), and plagued by a sudden exponential increase in spare time, I feel compelled to mold my churning thoughts into sentences before they start leaking from my ears. And so I have designated as their receptacle this tiny corner of cyberspace, and you are free to read, skim, or ignore them as you see fit.

Leaving a deliriously enjoyable East Coast life behind for a forced return to the Michigan farm of my youth has certainly sparked a particularly prickly existential crisis, but if the ache of a prematurely-abandoned past and suspended future permeates every entry here, than I will have failed. While attempts to reconcile professional aspirations with personal circumstances will surely appear on occasion, they will hopefully mingle with literary analyses, cultural appraisals, sociological musings, random acts of performance theory, and perhaps even the odd outburst of creativity (do I dare re-attempt poetry or fiction after all these years?). I consider this endeavor part sorely-needed intellectual exercise and part self-indulgent psychological experiment, but mostly an attempt to communicate with friends across wires and waves and the dim blue-white glow of the screens standing between us. I would be humbled if they chose to join me on the journey.