(If you haven’t read Part 1, go here.)

OK, we’ve hit the bottom of the proverbial bucket with the last song. We’re King Lear stripped of his clothes in the rain in the middle of Act III. (I have to employ my education every once in a while here, my folks paid quite a bit for it.) Now, it’s time to build our protagonist back up. Not an easy journey, however. There are fairy tale romances such as the ones in “Love Actually” which are nice and fun and warm the heart, but exist as fantasy more than something that holds up the mirror to reality. I realize this is all a bit pretentious in discussing a musical compilation, but then again, this is me we’re dealing with.

Onwards and upwards…

“Deathly”, Aimee Mann

This song, in addition to being the best Mann ever wrote, has possibly the greatest first line of any song ever: “Now that I’ve met you, would you object to never seeing each other again?” Just classic. So good that PT Anderson constructed his entire movie “Magnolia” around it.

I’m putting this song here to represent the moment of meeting someone and not feeling prepared to deal with the potential positive outcomes. Whether that be bad timing, or personal insecurities, or you’re trapped under a bookshelf. Whatever the case may be, you instinctively push this person away from you for fear you’re at best damaged goods, at worse the antithesis of what you feel they want or deserve. In addition, you’re at the point where any perceived affection towards your person feels like some sick joke: “No, don’t pick on me/When one act of kindness could be/Deathly…”

Plus, this song has one killer guitar solo, and that never ever hurts.

“Fear”, Sarah McLachlan

Some of you may not remember, but before aliens came down and kidnapped Sarah McLachlan, leaving us an inferior clone to fool the masses, she wrote and produced some of the more interesting music of the 90’s. Neither her voice nor her music sounded like much of anything that was going on, except for people like Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel.

This choice furthers the thematic content of “Deathly”, though musically veers waaaay off to the left. Ethereal keyboards envelop the high-range of her soprano voice, seemingly shielding her from the pain of the outside world. She’s at “winter’s end” where “promises of a long lost friend/Speak to me of comfort.” Still, she can’t let the cold go:

But I fear
I have nothing to give
I have so much to lose
Here in this lonely place
Tangled up in our embrace
There’s nothing I’d like
Better than to fall
But I fear I have nothing to give

So we’re left with someone who actually has established some sort of contact, is contemplating a new life beyond that she’s been living, but feels neither able nor worthy to move forward. A fairly common perception, it seems, for those in the months following an intense and/or emotionally damaging relationship. Your emotions in a way don’t feel like yours…yours to own, or yours to give. They belong elsewhere, even if you intuitively know they are rightfully yours.

“Skin”, Madonna

One of the great “songs you don’t know by an artist you know” ever. I can’t believe this was never released as a single. Off the very, very good album “Ray of Light”, it’s the perfect segue from “Fear” in that it shows someone more willing to break through the self-imposed boundaries listed in the past two songs. Just check out the lyrics to the first verse:

Kiss me, I’m dying
Put your hand on my skin
I close my eyes
I need to make a connection
I’m walking on a thin line

Later, she sings that, “I’ve got this thing/I want to make a correction/I’m not like this all the time…” Finally, an acknowledgement of the inadequacies in the protagonist’s life, and the stated attempt to correct them.

(Some might be tempted to note that the three songs of attempted redemption are all by female artists, whereas all the songs of despair were by male artists. To which I say: Yo, you’ve been at Berkeley too long.)

“Red Rain”, Peter Gabriel

To represent the initial tumbling down of the protagonist’s defenses, I chose this song. This is one of those choices that makes more sense musically than lyrically, and I’ll be the first to admit that. It’s hard to not feel emotionally cleansed after listening to this track. I myself prefer many of the live versions of this song versus the one featured as the initial track in “So”, but I abhor live tracks on a compilation mix. Always feels terrifically jarring.

(OK, so funny story as an aside…back in college, we’d do the “Dark Side of the Moon” over “Wizard of Oz” about once a month. On one occasion, instead of looping the CD over and over, it skipped to the next CD, which was Disc 1 of Peter Gabriel’s “Secret World Live” CD. I stopped the CD after a few seconds, said, “Bugger it”, and let it play through. And damn, it worked amazing. “Red Rain” came on as the red sands in the hourglass were falling. “Solsbury Hill” started the second Dorothy woke up. Unbelievable. Through sheer stupidity, we had debunked the entire “Dark Side”/”Dark Side” myth. Thank you, cases and cases of Bud Ice.)

Possibly the best part of this song lies not in the gorgeous, larger-than-life choruses, but in the quiet, shaky ending, which has Gabriel trying to maintain his voice as the instruments get stripped away, layer by layer. Which leads us right into…

“Green Eyes”, Coldplay

OK, you knew Coldplay would be on here somewhere.

So we’ve made the breakthrough. In “Red Rain”, our protagonists states that, “I come to you defenses down/With the trust of a child…” Well, in “Green Eyes”, we have a childlike worship of the newly beloved. I myself remember very clearly hearing this song for the first time and looking for someone with green eyes so I could have this be our song. The reaction for me was that visceral, and here I am, 8 months or so later, throwing it on the compilation.

I mean, how can you hate on any song that has a chorus like this:

I came here with a load
And it feels so much lighter
Now I met you

If that don’t make you well up a bit, well then, you’re taking up some of my valuable oxygen. And I need all I can get, as evidenced by my less-than-stellar performance on the treadmill yesterday.

“Sick of Myself”, Matthew Sweet

OK, I love Coldplay as much as the next mildly wimpy Caucasian, but let’s face it, you’re not gonna hum “The Scientist” in a dark alley and expect to not have your lunch money stolen. So we need to crank this up a bit, because while the initial forays into a new relationship are puppy-dog eyes and a fair bit of trepidation, at some point the honeymoon is over, and seeds of doubt start to slip in.

So let’s crank up some Matthew Sweet here to rock out our newly found frustrations. Power chords for those who can’t stay happy for very long. You’re still into the person you’ve found, but now you’re worthiness is once again called into question. Could take a few weeks, maybe a few months. Always different. But at some point, a lot of people end up like the chorus:

But I'm sick of myself when I look at you
Something is beautiful and true
In a world that's ugly and a lie
It's hard to even want to try
And I'm beginning to think Baby you don't know

The imperfection lies not in this new person, but in you, and the sheer fact of living in a world where keeping a relationship going seems a Sisyphean struggle. You’re at a point where backing out would suck, but in the end, better than stretching it out longer. But you can’t jump ship, because, “There's something in your eyes that is keeping my hope alive…”

Hoping against hope, that’s what you’re doing.

“We’re In This Together Now”, Nine Inch Nails

And in hoping, what you do is hold out so tight you sometimes threaten to suffocate the object of your affection.

NIN’s album “The Fragile” in a lot of ways is, for lack of a better phrase, frickin’ awful. However, a handful of songs, such as this one, ranks up with Reznor’s best work. It’s a song that, when taken just as lyrics, often could be mistaken for any other “typical” love song, but when actually heard, sounds like a terrifying howl, a desperate cry for salvation that could be mistaken as a guttural cry of violence.

It’s almost a modern day “Romeo and Juliet”, taking the “us against them” of that play to a frightening extreme:

Awake to the sound as they peel apart the skin
They pick and they pull
Trying to get their fingers in
Well they’ve got to kill what we found
Well they’ve got to hate what they fear
Well they’ve got to make it go away
Well they’ve got to make it disappear

An attempt here is made to eliminate all external forces and focus on that which you know: your beloved. The problem of course being that both of you live within the world, and as such cannot extract yourself from that you feel is bringing you down. IN trying to deny the enemy, you instead let him or her in through the front door..

Because we’ve all been there…those moments/day/weeks where you feel something slipping through your fingers and every time you increase your grip, the thing you’re clutching just slips that much more out of your hands. And worse, in hindsight, you yourself caused the angst in question. Things weren’t nearly as bad as you thought, but your neuroses increased the tension to the point of making it unbearable for the both of you. And then you wake up and look at yourself in the mirror and see your true enemy.

So how do we get out ourselves out of that? Well, I’ve got an idea for our compilation protagonist, and those who might be in similar situations.

But we’ll deal with that next time.

Inspiration’s been a bit tough to come by in the last few days. I’ll blame it on the triptonin or tripopherotin or Tripoli or whatever it is in the turkey that makes one so sleepy. I’ll call a mulligan on yesterday’s attempt to bring some bloggy goodness to the world. God knows I wasn’t going to try and shop. I don’t care if they were selling 500’’ plasma-screen TVs at Circuit City for $50 between 4 am and 5 am, I still wasn’t getting up and delving into that madness.

So instead I was a good little boy and went to the gym to work off the oodles of food consumed. After nearly incurring a myocardial infarction after my 4-mile treadmill run, I plopped down at my office desk across the street, where some of my lengthier tomes have been transcribed. I munched on a Lean Pocket and waiting for inspiration to beat me like a red-headed stepchild. Alas, not to be. I ended up buying a hooded sweatshirt emblazoned with The Cheat, thanks to my friend Liz’s birthday/Christmas gift. But thus ended my productivity for the afternoon.

On the way home, though, I was listening to the debut album by Garbage, which by my recollection came out somewhere in the 1992-1993 era. And I forgot how damn good some of the songs on that album were. “Vow”, in particular, was rockin’ my headphone-wearin’ world. So, as per usual, inspiration struck from the realm of music. It had been, I reckoned, quite some time since I’d dropped a mix CD on y’all, so hey, why not? You won’t have to hear faux-deep accounts of emotional strife, no stream-of-consciousness thoughts involving secret love dungeons, and I get to talk about songs I really dig. It’s win-win-win, to be sure.

Once again, I’ve limited myself only to tunes in my personal collection. This time, however, rather than simply account for the natural ebb and flow of a good mix compilation, I’ve added a bit of a theme to it all. And since I’m narcissistic, I’ve made myself the theme. Or rather, the year of me as the theme. It’s not a biography per say, and the songs themselves don’t relate to events in my life on a one-on-one basis, but the overall arc is consistent: that of someone travelling out of emotional strife towards something which, if unclear, is undoubtedly better. In doing so, I’m hoping the compilation in addition deals with many stages of the grieving process and even stages of happiness tinged with danger, ultimately ending up in the place it should: in your betrothed arms. So yea, that hasn’t happened yet. Power of positive thinking though, yes?

Here we go.

“You’re Nobody Until Someone Loves You”, Dean Martin

A good compilation starts off in a few ways. Sometimes, you can use a short novelty track. Say using the “20th Century Fox” theme. Or a snippet of Monty Python dialogue. Both of which I have employed on old-school mix tapes. You can also start off the tape with a high-energy track, such as “Pump Up the Volume” or a heavy rocker. The third way, and the way used here, is to establish the overall theme of the compilation. This type of intro gives the listener a statement of purpose. As such, the song should have thematic, if not musical, relevance to all that follows. And hey, if this song worked for “Swingers”, it works for me. A great song which, if not something you actually believe yourself, nevertheless represents the psyche of our imaginary protagonist.

“There, There”, Radiohead

Normally I don’t like such a musical jump between songs. I’ve avoided it as much as possible for the rest of the compilation, but here it works, and I’ll try to explain why. We’ve gone from a loungy, Big Band ditty to a primal, modern, guitar and drum attack for precisely the emotional response the juxtaposition creates. It’s my musical version of the opening shot to David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet”, which does a beautiful tracking shot over idyllic Suburbia down, down, down, until the camera burrows itself into the ground, revealing the decay and festering insects creeping and crawling. The effect in both cases is similar: stripping away the outward façade to reveal the turmoil under the surface. You’ve got to imagine the former song as watching the protagonist from afar, and then burrowing into his skull with this Radiohead song. Full of imagery of a destructive relationship, with the wailing of Thom Yorke punctuating the hypnotic percussion, it’s an ideal song to begin our exploration of an emotionally troubled mind.

“I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself”, The White Stripes

A much smoother musical transition here, with both musical and lyrical similarities between the two. More importantly, the dynamics of this song allows us as listeners to cool off a bit from the driving rhythm of “There, There”, which will be important for the tracks which follow. This selection also follows one of my tenets, which is “Introduce people to unfamiliar tracks by familiar artists.” For those who only know the band from “Seven Nation Army”, this is hopefully a nice surprise. God knows all of “Elephant” opened my eyes to the band, and the quieter tracks such as this one aided my quick conversion to being a White Stripes fan. The loud/soft dynamics match the emotional content of the musical perfectly, and Jack White sings the hell of this song. Damnit, just buy this record this instant if you don’t own it.

“Angie”, The Rolling Stones

My second favorite Rolling Stones song (“Loving Cup” being the first) and, to my knowledge, one that doesn’t get a lot of cred or airplay. Oh well, I love it. And it’s my compilation, and I can cry if I want to. One of the few songs where I actually buy into what Mick Jagger is singing. Mostly, he’s super cool, swaggering, “I will have sex with your mom while your sister watches”, and hey, that’s all well and good, but here I get a vulnerability I don’t get in most of the Stones’ material (not even songs such as “Ruby Tuesday”). Go ahead, listen to lines like, “Angie, you’re beautiful, but ain’t it time we said good-bye?” and be unaffected, you cold-hearted miscreant. If the White Stripes song is about that phase where you’re in your hand-wringing, don’t get out of bed stage, then “Angie” is about that part where you try to accept the end of a relationship as the best thing in the long run. It still hurts, but you intellectually can rationalize behind the tears.

“Anna Begins”, Counting Crows

And here’s the phase where irrationality takes reason out behind the shed and goes all “Deliverance” on it. “Anna” is one of those perfect meshes of lyric and music, to the point where music lends a gravitas to the admittedly too wordy at times lyrics. Consider the following lines:

It seems like I should say "as long as this is love..."
But it’s not all that easy so maybe I should just
Snap her up in a butterfly net
Pin her down on a photograph album
I am not worried
I’ve done this sort of thing before

When you listen to this part of the song, the word “before” is punctuated by a cymbal crash, which resonates through a few seconds of almost sheer silence, as if letting you the listener absorb the utter psychotic nature of this narrator. This is a man who seeks to love through control. Of course the two are antithetical, but at this point of emotional despair, you can’t often see that. So we invent schemes and plans that are utter bollocks but ones we share with our friends as if we’ve gone and invented cold fusion. And we can’t see just how far gone we are at that point. All we can see is loss, and we cope by inventing ways to counter that loss. There’s a few ways you can interpret this song, and in the context of this compilation, it’s easy to see this song as a fever dream of a relationship long gone. All the warm memories are punctuated by the cold reality he keeps pushing away. But, as the last lines tell us, “She disappears, and oh lord I’m not ready for this sort of thing…”

“Happier”, Guster

At some point, though, all that does subside. Unless you’re nucking futs, in which case, just stay away from me. Especially if you’re known by three names. Y’all be assassins.

Point is, it does get better, bit by bit. And sometimes you can truly see the better, post-breakup path and/or life. “Happier” is mostly about a semi-sarcastic send off to the person whom you are no longer seeing. Still has more than a touch of bitterness, but much less so inwards. The narrator in this particular song is not one happy with his lot, but he’s doing far better than his compadre in “Anna Begins”. As much as it would be nice to think that you need only come to terms with your own life as a newly single person, you usually have to eventually come to grips with the person who’s no longer with you. Sometimes, that’s a nasty path through awkward encounters, passive-aggressive emails, and “he said/she said” between your friends, but you do end up on the other side eventually. Hopefully without too many scrapes and bruises.

(Plus, hey, you really can’t go wrong with any “Lost and Gone Forever” track by Guster. One of the most misplaced titles in the bargain bin at Tower ever. Snapped this puppy up last summer, and worth every penny.)

“Lost Cause”, Beck

Which isn’t to say you come out of such a path a whole being. Far from it. Stronger, most likely. But still prone to some backsliding. Usually, right around now you get a semi-regular dose of “events/places that trigger some wistful memories”. They aren’t visceral at this point, but if you had a choice between having the memory versus, not, you’ll usually choose the latter option (most likely by ordering a beer, if available).

“Lost Cause” also calls into focus that part where active antagonism, if previously present, has dissipated. Beck in this track is not out for blood…actually, he seems if anything fatigued by the effort he’s previously put out towards the girl who gone and done him wrong. Being angry and/or spiteful takes WORK, and unless you've got the constitution of Khan chasing after Kirk, chances are at some point you throw up your own white flag and cease the antagonism.

At this point, then, as in the next song, what’s left in your exhausted self is the realization than not only will you not get what you’ve lost back, but maybe you don’t want it back.

“When The Stars Go Blue”, Ryan Adams

We still romanticize, though. Only human nature, unless say you caught him in bed with half of your sorority, in which case remembering all those times he bought your flowers may do little to ease your mind.

This song also belongs in this slot on the compilation because it is the sparsest. I like the idea of having a song here which, like “Lost Cause”, is structured around a simple acoustic guitar riff, but without all the sonic bells and whistles of the Beck track. It’s important because this is the last song in this particular compilation where the protagonist is alone, and I want something that represents, in a way, the utter emptiness which is the calm before the “storm” of meeting that next special someone. You go to work, you go home, you watch some TV while cooking dinner, you go to bed. Life’s pretty uneventful. Quiet. And “When the Stars Go Blue” captures both the simplicity and melancholy of that situation.

OK, thus ends Cycle 1 of this compilation. Cycle 2 is here.

So I’ve barricaded myself within my apartment. Can you hear my DVD sing? Singing the songs of movie extras. It is the singing of a people who want to tell you how painstakingly they researched the weaponry, hand-crafted over six months, then shot from 50 feet away in a shot that ended up on the cutting room floor. When the beating of Sydney Bristow matches the beating of Keith Moon’s drum solo…there’s a life about to start when Gandalf comes.

OK, translation for all you non-“Les Mis” fans…I’ve got myself more movie goodness than any single male should be allowed to have. “The Two Towers Extended Version”, “Alias Season 1” (thanks to the Commander) and the 2nd half of “Angel Season 2” all at my disposal, with the roommate having left for the weekend. Finally, my lack of life is an advantage! I’ve already waded through “Towers”, and let me just say before delving into the meat of the essay that the new 43 minutes are pretty hit or miss. I mean, Faramir and Eowyn certainly benefit from more screen time, but honestly, inserting the “Saruman Go-Go Dancers” into the Last March of the Ents was ponderous at best. (OK, it must be late if I’m making that joke and not erasing it. Yeesh.)

What I wanted to mostly talk about, the above digression aside, is the notion of Thanksgiving. The annual giving of thanks. We as a society need to set aside one day of the year to stop being total bastard people to each other. Just ask Corky. He’d tell you.

The notion of Thanksgiving, along with the notion that accompanies most holidays, inherently bugs me to a certain extent. It bugs me in that we need a yearly reminder to, say, be thankful. Be kind. Plant a tree. Hug a midget. That sort of stuff. We get all worked up over the coming day. Hallmark makes a mint off cards. Old Navy runs their annual “Arbor Day” sale. And then we forget about it all the day after and return to our rude, selfish, eco-unfriendly, midget-kicking selves.

Thanksgiving this year at Chez McGee will most likely be a small affair, with the core family, my grandmother, and potentially a few others. In olden days, we’d have two tables---the “grown-up” table and the “kids”. Pretty standard arrangement. This year, only one table will be necessary. No anarchy as 10-year olds scamper about the house. The basement in which we used to build forts now hosts an assortment of cardboard boxes, filled with knickknacks of yesteryear: dust-covered photo albums, the odd board game, sweaters which haven’t fit anyone for years.

There are two schools of thought on days such as Thanksgiving. One is the “this is one of the few days a year family should be together”. I take a slightly opposite tact, which is the “family should be together all the time or just not pretend on days when society says we’re supposed to.” I’m fine with a small group at Thanksgiving, because having the four of us around a table is fine for me. I don’t mean this as an indictment of my extended family. We just haven’t seen a lot of each other in the past year. I don’t want to spend a day catching up when all I want to do on this indeed unique day is relax with those who have shared the past year of my life with me.

There’s time to reconnect, but I’m not sure Thanksgiving’s the best time to do that. I think maybe somewhere around New Year’s Day you make your resolution to keep in better contact, if that’s what you want to do. I’m as guilty as anyone in my family for losing touch with cousins and other extended relatives. It’s been hard enough keeping my parents and brother in the loop. I love all of my family, don’t get me wrong; I just choose to focus what energy I have on the three that matter most.

So, if Thursday isn’t a time to reconnect, perhaps it’s time to recollect. Take stock, as it were. Think about what it is over the past 12 months for which you should thank your lucky stars. Think about what’s been important. Even those things which at the time seemed painful but have since borne happier fruits. The turkey, the football, the parades…hey, all well and good, but cosmetic at best to the nature of the day.

The past year has seen its shares of ups and downs, and it’s been mostly here on this site for the world to see. Certainly not what I set out to do, but looking back, it seems that some part of me needed to chronicle what was to come. Seeing seeds of happiness, discontent, inspiration, desperation…it’s all there for both you and me to see. Course, I can fill in a few narrative gaps myself, but the point is this: I can scan over what I’ve written and be vividly reminded of a self I barely recognize anymore. It’s not just that the writing’s fairly crap (though that’s a valid point as well, and yes, I’m using the preterite tense semi-ironically), but more that I can see the person typing away at these entries and looking at a person who is not the one typing now.

Sure, the infamous “hunt and peck” typing technique is still there. Ditto on the hairline and the one Spock-like ear. Same goes for the glasses that are in need of a prescription renewal. Ditto for the old show posters which adorn the wall above my desk. On the surface, a lot of it looks the same. Same apartment, same job, same commute every day, same basic daily schedule (work, workout, write…the three W’s). Dig a bit under the surface, though, and you’ll see that someone or something’s gone in and rewired the whole thing starting from scratch.

God knows I’m too close to it all to see the overall scope of change, but I can see and feel it well enough to notice in any case. And God knows it’s an ongoing process. In the end, it’s been about stripping away layer after layer of comfort zones established both consciously or subconsciously over the past few years. Taking a hard look at each “firmly established” set of tenets that structured my life and really wondering if they should be the benchmarks. Taking a step back and seeing exactly what I’ve been taking for granted as “normal” and trying to see if indeed it is. Challenging each assumption I could.

Now, some parts of my life stayed exactly the same. I didn’t wake up one day and just do everything the opposite, because hey, some stuff was already working. (Like my pimping. God, the under-the-table money on that rules.) And I didn’t do a one-man “Queer Eye”-esque change, abruptly going from geek to chic. (I mean, look at the beginning paragraph for proof. Yikes.) Most of the changes have been small but cumulative, which is why when I look back a year ago, it resembles nothing so much as a funhouse mirror. The one where you’re all short and fat. Stupid mirrors. Damn my ex for teaching me about “fat days”. One of her lasting contributions to my psyche. Amen. Who needs a Cosmo?

So all of this I get to bring to the dinner table on Thursday. Yes, I bring the bottle of wine, and good conversation, and table manners, and a host of prepared answers for when my grandmother tries to figure out what a “blog” is for the 87th time. But again, on the inside, I bring a sense of self rewired almost from scratch in the 12 months since I last saw raisin sauce. (Does anyone eat this besides us? Please tell me yes.) And it’s not something I can adequately share with the others, any more than they can adequately describe the changes you’ve gone through. It’s not to say you can’t talk about certain aspects of it; it’s just that certain things defy easy explanation, especially over buttered squash.

This is why God invented things like recliners and wine and warm hugs. You can sit next to someone you’ve known your whole life, drink a bit, talk a bit, and in that last hug goodbye, feel a complete and utter empathy with your situation. Even if it’s not overtly discusses. Especially if it’s not discussed. In those actions, you’re thanking each other for being around another year, because really, it’s no guarantee that they’ll be there next year. It’s not a promise you can make. It’s merely a moment you can share. And therein lies the true power and beauty of days such as this.

Hey, more power to you if you can find these moments ensconced in gaggles of family members and friends. Again, I’m not denying the value of such gatherings, especially if they encompass who and what has been important in your life over the last year. As for me, it won’t be fully complete this Thursday, but it will be close enough. And it will be good.

And there’s always next year, right? Things can certainly change in a year. Or a few weeks. Even in an instant. Just got to be ready for them, that’s all. I’ve come this far.

I’m ready for the next step.

Well, I shoulda known karma would bite a gigantic sized chunk out of my posterior on the way back from New York City. After all, the trip down there was smooth. I’ve talkin’ seven inches form the midday sun smooth. And since McGee’s Law of Travel clearly stipulates, “At least one leg of the trip must be fraught with peril, annoyance, exorbitant unexpected fees, and/or any combination thereof,” I shoulda known. And Richard Marx shoulda known better than to fall in love with a girl like you. Now love is just a fading memory. Nice work on your part. Truly.

It’s not like my battle plan was as complex as raiding Helm’s Deep. (OK, I finally watched the extended version of “The Two Towers” today, sue me.) Very simple: wake up around 6:45 am, hop on the 8 am bus to Boston, back in time for lunch and “The Young and the Restless”. Honestly, I didn’t want to build a “Home Alone” type security system. Get up, get to a bus, get on my way. Get out of my dreams, get into my car. (OK, the 80’s club from Saturday is still in my system. It might get worse before it gets better. I’ve given you ample warning.)

So first thing’s first and I wake up at 8:45 am. Let’s all get a collective Homer-esque “DOH!” here. I failed to set Tim’s alarm clock correctly. First the bastard hogs all the sheets, then he buys a Ryan-proof alarm clock. Don’t even ask what he did with my stuffed badger, Hector. I shudder to think. To top it off, last night I had the strangest dream. I sailed away to China…in a little rowboat to find ya. But that’s beside the point. I wanted to leave 45 minutes before I even woke up. I pack my stuff quickly, grab a bagel, donate 10% of my income to charity, invent peanut butter, and then haul ass down to Port Authority. All in 15 minutes. Amazing how motivated you can get when running late.

9:15 am. At the station, in line. 5 people ahead of me. Rockin’. There’s two things about travel I despise. The first is “lack of floor” on any method of transportation I choose. When given the option, I always go for the “floor” option. Secondly, I hate it when someone sits next to me in what is inevitably a row built for supermodels. On planes, there’s no real getting away around it, but on the Boston-NYC shuttle, it’s about a 50/50 shot. So I figure hey, how many more people can come in the next 45 minutes? They’d have to rock down to Electric Avenue pretty quickly, and Port Authority is on 8th and 40th anyways, so they’d be nowhere near me.

For the next 45 minutes, we had to deal with a few Greyhound employees who shall we say regret their vocational outcomes and took it out on the rest of us. Look, I’m all for security. They all but extracted teeth with a rusty pair of pliers though. I guess everybody wants to rule the world sometimes. Meanwhile, with each tick of the minute hand, another person joins the line. So we have the double-angst of me having to wait and watching my chances to have room for my 6’5’’ frame to not be compressed for 4 and a half hours happening. I almost beat someone with the metal “let’s see if you’re packin’” wand. For no good reason other than I’m not a morning person.

I had luckily built up enough “sit near me and I may bend you in unpleasant ways” pheremones to give those off to any and all who walked past me on the bus itself. So hey, score, two seats to yours truly. I’m just about walkin’ on sunshine. It’s time to feel good. I’m sportin’ my new Discman bought before my Nashville trip, reading some Stephen King, rockin’ out to Coldplay and “Tim Foley Sings Bluegrass”. It’s a good thing I had all of these things to distract me, in that it took us nearly an hour to leave Manhattan. OK, know how China has a baby embargo? Neither do I, really, since I can’t be bothered with anything that doesn’t come with special features on the DVD. But I still feel strongly in that totally uninformed and ignorant way that there are too many cars in New York City and really, we have to kill some of them in secret death camps. All so the next time I want to go home to Boston, I’ll get there 10 minutes or so earlier. Seems like a fair and noble reason to me. It’s my life. Don’t you forget.

After leaving the island, the bus yielded nothing but the most boring ride the Northeast has to offer. Ever seen those “Come to New England” commercials? I don’t know where they are filmed, but I’m pretty sure “southern Connecticut near I84” was nowhere on their itinerary. I had arrived Thursday evening, and I missed this lack of splendor due to wearing sunglasses at night.

Get to Boston around 2:30 pm, and hop on my beloved Red Line on the T. Hop off at Harvard to grab a cab to my place, rather than walk the 10+ minutes uphill with my luggage. Yes, I’m a strapping young lad, and yes, I’m fairly brawny, and yes, I’m all hot and stuff, but look, you’re forgetting an important fact, and that’s that normally I don’t have a $20 in my pocket, and today I did. It’s in the way that you use it, don’t you know? So don’t you ever abuse it. (OK, I pulled that quote so far out of my butt than I no longer need to blow my nose.) So I hop in the cab, and we’re off.

Here’s a bit of advice for you. Now, normally I give a lot of intentionally bad advice on this site, because some people are dumb and it’s fun to mess with their minds. But this I say in all earnestness, so please take heed. Don’t do what I did.

If your cab driver starts getting really agitated about the guilty verdicts in the DC sniper cases, get the hell out of the cab as fast as humanly possible.

Tell them to stop there and pay. Tell them you found religion...a religion which forbids riding in fare-based transportation. Do that cool “jump out of the car while moving” that Shatner always did on “TJ Hooker”. Anything. But please, take my advice. Let me be your reminder.

This dude was AGITATED. If I had some detergent on me, I could have put him in a box with my laundry and skipped the $1.75 machines all together. AGITATED, I say. And here’s the worse part: I didn’t even know what he was upset about. Mad because they want the death penalty? Mad because of COURSE they want the death penalty? His Haitian accent was simply too thick. Plus, he quickly moved into tumble dry cycle and it was all over for any hope of me understanding. So I threw in a lot of vague confirmation statements, such as “Oh yea…” or “You would think, eh?” or “Please don’t kill me, I have to know where Sydney Bristow's been the last two years on 'Alias'.” You know, stuff like that. I don’t even know what I’m agreeing with. The DC Sniper case? That “The Da Vinci Code” is the best book of the year? The fact that Robbie Williams is one hit single away from breaking into the US pop market? Who knows? I missed Hector terribly. I wanted to ask this man, “Do you really want to hurt me?” He’d already made me cry after all. Just….ack.

So, whew. Home sweet home. Never has a 5-minute cab ride felt that long. I get in, drop my stuff on the floor, check the website, and decide to go grocery shopping. See, I was smart. Today on my street is street cleaning, which means your car gets towed if you’re there after 8 am. Smartie McGee moves his car last Wednesday off the street where the “4th Monday of the Month” parking law is in effect.

Turns out I moved it right into a “3rd Friday of the Month” area. I’m a freakin’ moron. So I ran. I ran so far away. And by “far away” I mean “back to the Red Line”.

One hour, four phone calls, another cab ride, and $90 later, I pick up my car from the towing place’s lot. There in my car, I felt safest of all. OK, that’s a lie. I had intentionally spent less than usual on this particular trip to NYC, since I’m always in the hole when I get back. The $20 in my pocket was part of the original amount of money I had budgeted for my trip. I was feeling so proud of myself. And that hubris…how low it did bring me. Yea, verily. There’s always something there to remind me not to get too cocky. If I start doing a stray cat strut, well, I’ll suffer a total eclipse of the heart, and well, I’ll turn into a maniac.

I know, I know, I know this much is true.

So it’s late Sunday, and it’s been quite the full weekend. Third wind of the day is long gone and hard to find, right up there with Gerardo’s career, but far be it for me to leave your Monday morning reading empty. I’m lookin’ out for you. Aren’t you lucky?

So, I’ll give you a quick quote and a few snapshots from the weekend. Can’t share it all now, for a variety of reasons. Soon enough. For now, I’ll give you what I can.

“He’s a master onanist. He’s constantly screwing himself.”
---My friend Matt, re: our friend Jerry, aka “The Fox” (more on “The Fox” soon)

Snapshot #1:

Tim and I are waiting for the crosstown bus to meet friends to head down to Culture Club on Saturday night. Tim’s relaying his day, which featured a cabaret show downtown. One woman, a 40-something mother of two, sings the showtune, “Tits and Ass”. For some reason, I know I’ve heard this song. But can’t remember where. “Hmm,” I muse out loud. “I think it’s from ‘A Chorus Line’, but I don’t know why. I’ve never seen it. Hmmm.” Tim shrugs in reply.

Silence. Waiting for bus. The derivation of the song quickly fading from conscious thought.

Then, ten seconds later, a woman waiting for the bus turns around and, with all the unnecessary venom she could muster, says, “It _was_ from ‘A Chorus Line’.”

Tim, not to miss a beat of biting sarcasm, says, “Hey, straight guy here, sorry!” Hardly vicious, but slightly tangy.

He then realizes what I realized when she turned around: namely, if I were to date her, she’d be the butch by far. Hoo ah. Awkward. Awkward. Ms. Lesbian is sooo not happy with our existence right now. Not good times. Hate crime times. New York: come for the culture, stay for the perceived intolerance!

Snapshot #2

Let’s go back to Friday night and the onanist, “The Fox”. “The Fox” was born through an Emode test in which your type of animal lover type would be magically revealed through 15 or so questions. Excited by getting a fox as his type, he proudly announces to Tim that “The Fox” would be a great nickname. Tim doesn’t’ believe Jerry’s really a fox. So Jerry does the test in front of him to prove his fox-ness.

And his answers this time yield “otter”. Whoops. Jerry’s vehement that he’s a fox, to the point where he changes each answer, one by one, to get the spontaneous result of “fox”. So he’s now officially “The Fox” in our everyday discourse.

So we’re ordering drinks, and The Fox orders a Stella Artois beer. The Fox has an inherent fear of being accuses of being anything less than the Uber-Man, so of course I accuse him of drinking a chick beer. A panicked look crosses The Fox’s face.

“No, no…not a chick beer!” he cries, a sweat quickly crossing his face.

“Um, it’s got the name ‘Stella’ in the name, dude,” I say, turning the screw.

“No, no…it’s a Belgian beer. ‘Stella’ in Belgium is a male name.”

“And ‘Artois’?” I ask. “What’s _that_ mean?”

“It means ‘not a female’,” he replies, without missing a beat.

The Fox is crafty.

Snapshot #3

So we’ve successfully navigated the crosstown bus Saturday night, and Tim and I have been waiting for 30+ minutes for two loverly ladies to accompany us down to Culture Club. We’ve been waiting due to several factors:

• One of them calling to tell us she flat out forgot about us and had just gotten back from dinner as we were on the bus itself. Um…ok…


• This same one declaring herself unfit to go, since she was “unable to accessorize properly”. Tim and I offer to buy a black can of paint to help her recreate her missing black shiny handbag. Now wait a sec…


• This same one saying she’d be right down, she just has to pee, and then twelve minutes later, comes down finally. What in the...

The stereotypical New Yawk ladies who walked by the store by us shouting, “O my GAWD, look, AWCHIDS!” to each other didn’t help my mood. Tim’s amused by my annoyance. But when Laura Branigan’s blaring somewhere and I can’t enjoy it, hey, I get testy.

So we all get in a cab, and these gals are as wired as the stage of a Pink Floyd concert. Tim and I are slightly terrified for our lives. Our cab driver wants to drop us off in the Hudson. A few choice exchanges:

“I love Christmas!”
“Um. You’re Jewish.”

“Damn. I shouldn’t have brought a coat.” *To cab driver* “Can you take me back to my apartment?”
“No, we’re not turning around.”
“Yea, just leave the coat in here. And when we leave the club, just ask for this cab. Tell them it’s the yellow one with wheels.”
“Oooooh, Christmas lights!”
“While you’re at it, leave your welding equipment in the cab as well.”
“And your cocaine.”

That cab driver earned his $12, lemmee tell you.

Snapshot #4

Today the Commander and I moved one of the UNICEF girls from one floor of her apartment complex to another. Sounds simple enough. She promised us it would take an hour, and yea, it did take only slightly more than that.

I had not, however, counted on the monolith known as IKEA to present such a bizarre challenge. So near as we could figure out, IKEA constructs all furniture out of non-stick polymers. These pieces were as slippery as OJ Simpson on trial.

So, what started out as helping a friend move turned into an all-out verbal battle against Sweden. I exceeded my monthly quote of fjord jokes by roughly 673% in 30 minutes alone. Megan, the friend in question, kept justifying the difficult by saying, “But it’s cheap!” Like she had to remind us of this fact. I didn’t think I was lugging a bureau from the Ottoman Empire. All I knew was that somewhere in Northern Europe there are a few blonde blokes I want to pummel.

Snapshot #5

Finally, we’re in Culture Club, joined by another couple. It’s a bit past 10 pm, and the place is fairly empty. There’s a Q-Bert board-shaped stage in the center of this first floor, but no one wants to be the first people on the floor. The music at this point wasn’t helping my mood to break the ice, cuz really, I like mid-tempo “synth+drum machine” stuff as much as any rhythmically ignorant Caucasian, but it’s not gonna make me wanna spontaneously make as ass out of myself.

Luckily, we had Tony TNT to call us to action.

We know his name was Tony TNT for two reasons: firstly, the DJ name-dropped him about six times in 30 minutes. Secondly, he had his own line of clothing: blazoned across his grey t-shirt in navy blue lettering was “TONY TNT”. We all hypothesized later that he probably let his friends refer to him as simply “T” once they were in his inner circle.

But we could just hypothesize anything at that initial moment, since below his t-shirt lay a pair of pants that can only be likened to “hardened Nestle’s Strawberry Quick”. I mean, damn. To riff off Michael Sambello, this dude was wearing pants like he’d never worn before. OK, I take that back, he probably has Vanilla Quick pants as well. To say these were painted on may not be an exaggeration. To say I could see my reflection in them from 12 feet away is only a slight exaggeration. To say I know exactly what religion Tony TNT is is a sad truth.

It’s hard to party after the early apex of Tony TNT and his Pants of Pinkness, but you know, we tried. Highlights included “Shadows of the Night”, “Private Eyes”, and “Heaven is Place on Earth”. Lowlights include any song between 10:18 pm and 10:47 pm and that Botox-laced woman who for roughly half of “Say Say Say” mistook Tim and myself for a support beam. (I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt; after all, while the upstairs does not have any support beams, the downstairs does. That all being said, he face was pulled so taught I could have lit a match off her left cheek.) That 31 or so minutes left most of us scratching our heads, wondering if indeed we had been alive during the 80’s. Not good times. More “Rick Aistley but it’s not ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’” times.

So there you have it, 1300+ inconsequential words regarding inside stories that may have bored you to tears. If so, I heartily apologize. Have a Stella Artois on me. Send me the bill. It’s all gravy. You want consequence? You'll just have to wait. All in good time.

Oooh, baby, do you know what that's worth? Oh, my blog is just a place on earth.

So I’m here at the Commander’s, enjoying a lazy Friday morning. I threw on MTV when I woke up, and hey, this must be when they show the videos---when everyone’s in school or work. Brilliant. That’s up there with showing movie previews after everyone’s left the theatre. This makes no sense at all. I’ve only recognized two videos out of six. I know I’m getting old when “Hoobastank” sounds like a stupid, stupid name for a band.

So then I flip on the news, and apparently there’s footage of a “secret room” adjacent to Michael Jackson’s bedroom that contains videotapes, homages to Macauley Culkin, and a stairwell leading down to a private, windowless bedroom which is adorned with children’s books, toys, and paraphernalia.

OK, two thoughts. One, he absolutely, positively MUST get over never being allowed to join the Babysitters’ Club. Honestly. Secondly, I wondered if Tim has a similar secret passage in his bedroom. So I went looking. And lo, if you tip his copy of “The Klingon Hamlet”, a door appeared just to the left of the bed. So I went through the door. And boy, what I found.

So I found a stairwell, lined with framed copies of comic books, show posters, and weirdly enough, the bones of Patrick Stewart. Odd, since he’s still alive. You then get down to the bottom of the stairs, and a butler greets you. The butler wears a Nomar Garciaparra t-shirt open-chested, with a “Girls Gone Wild” bra underneath. The less said about him, the better.

So, I grabbed a glass of Cristal from him and moved down the hall. There was Paris Hilton in one room, droppin’ mad flava with Ludacris in a song titled, “Night Vision’s Yo’ Friend”. Move down the hall, and another room had Justin Timberlake doing karaoke with Gene Simmons on backup. They were singing “To All The Girls I’ve Loved Before”. Creepy.

Moving on from these musical oddities, I came across a home theatre, replete with comfy chairs, a 345’’ plasma screen TV, and most of the castaways from “The Bachelor” trying to get the recliner next to Tim himself. “Dude”, I said, “I thought you were at work.”

“So does my work!” he exclaimed, covered in hickies. “Thank God my science department perfected the cloning process before the surround sound got installed.”

“Science department?” I exclaimed, getting a bit wigged by Pimp Daddy Foley.

“Yes, meet the head of my department…” he said, and clapped his hands twice. Strains of Wagner could be clearly heard as a spotlight hit a door on the far side of the room. And lo, in a lab coat and very little else, was Reuben from “American Idol”.

I ran screaming. I can only take so much in one day.

Tonite, toniiiite, I'm on my waaaaaaaaaaaaaay, just set me freeeee....*makes metal sign with right hand, raises Zippo Lighter with his left*

Whoa. Sorry. Got carried away there.

Well, it’s been a nice visit here in Boston, but really, these boots were made for walkin’, and that’s just what they’ll do.

Continuing the Mid-South and Northeast legs of my “Punchy and the Lovekins” world tour, I’ll be taking the bus down to NYC tonite for a four-day visit. I saw Tim shirtless a lot during my last visit, and boy, if only I can be so lucky again.

Just wanted to take a brief moment to thank all those readers and bloggers who took time to send me birthday gifts over the past few days. I’m not good at writing cards, so I’m going to take care of my thank you’s right now:

• Tim, for the massage oils


• AJ, for the “linkage”, nudge nudge, wink wink


• Susan, for the manservant


• Shannon, for the knitted version of Meg White


• Kristin, for all those Polaroids…


• Diana, for sending Outkast over to my place to serenade me


• Kristen, for the defamation lawsuit she issued following my post about her


• Rob, for making my dreams come true and giving me a wrestling title, even for only 15 seconds

To my Canadian ladies….well, I’m still waiting on those t-shirt designs. Maybe for Christmas? Does Canada even celebrate Christmas? Don’t you call it “Boxing Reindeer Day” or something? (That’s the next reality show: “Interspecies Real World: Find out what happens when Ted Nugent lives with 4 deer, a bear, and Michael Moore”…)

While we’re in a rambling mood…I don’t think “Punchy and the Lovekins” would be the best name for my rock and roll band. So I need your help coming up with a good name to replace it before our EP, “Dude Looks Like a Blogger”, hits stores next week. It features tracks such as “Not Only My Type is Moveable”, “Bandwidth Blues”, and “Hit Me with Your Best Google Search”.

As for my all-time wish list touring band---I’d have Duane Allman on lead guitar, Pete Townshend on rhythm guitar, Lars Ulrich on drums (I don’t like him, but “Wherever I May Roam” has my favorite drums ever), Page McConnell on keys, and John Paul Jones on bass/random instrument fill. Or I’d just tour fronting The Donnas and own up to my incessant crush on their lead singer. That would be....pretendous. So you can sleep easy knowing that.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go marry my life partner Sven. Thank you, Supreme Court Justices of Massachusetts.

So like I’ve said, I didn’t skydive on my birthday. But I have been known to free fall.

I know what it’s like to jump. What it’s like to feel your stomach go into your throat. What it feels like when it settles inside your chest. When the ground seems to be coming faster than possible and yet you hold your arms out to embrace it as it comes ever closer.

I know what it feels like to have the rush fill you so completely that you feel like your heart could burst. Because that’s where it ends up, the heart. Always there. All the sensations, from your toes to calves to thighs to tummy straight on up…they all collect in the heart, like water rushing towards the same drain. Only this drain collects and stores all of the energy. All that emotion. It’s a strong muscle, after all. It’s built to filter and distribute blood, this much is true. But it serves a secondary purpose as well.

It’s the place all of our emotions go when the rest of our body rejects them. Sometimes these emotions get stuck in the pit of your stomach, but more often than not, the body sends these enormous impulses straight to the heart. After all, it’s not like the heart ever stops working. Send all the anger, love, fear, hope, and despair right over. Come on down, anxiety and anticipation. Take a load off, jealousy and compassion.

When we talk about heartache, we really and truly mean it. It hurts. It hurts because even something that strong can be overburdened. Oddly enough, heartache can occur in times of extreme happiness or sadness, in the true sense of “heartache”. To be filled with an overabundance of joy can, physiologically speaking, feel the same as having your heart stepped on. We just don’t always look at it that way due to the emotional circumstances in each event coloring our perception.

But really, we’ve all heard about people “so happy [I] can’t stand it”. We’ve also undoubtedly heard some variation of the polar emotional opposite: people so upset that they “feel [my] heart breaking”. In each case, what you’re seeing/hearing is in essence the same: an emotional overload that neurologically locates itself smack dab in the middle of our chests. It might be easier if, say, all of these feelings just went into say our big toe. At least we could ice it or something. But no, right in the middle, behind the ribs, incredibly difficult to get at. And so these emotions gestate, churn, simmer, and sometimes boil within us.

People who suffer heartache from an overabundance of positive energy don’t get the sympathy than their sad counterparts do, and for the most part there’s very good reason for that. After all, you don’t seem many obscenely happy people in need of a “comfort cookie” at Starbuck’s. They tend not to walk around the apartment in their Hello Dolly pajamas all weekend long. You won’t find them in the middle of the day, skipping work and shouting at soap operas. “Damnit, look in the well! She’s in the frickin’ well!”

It takes a certain amount of strength to deal with this positive form of heartache, however. It comes with it’s own host of problems, conundrums, and potential potholes. Melancholy Mel at least knows her affections aren’t returned; Happy Hal might consistently wonder if his beloved feels the same. Sad Sue can be comforted in knowing the pain will most likely be finite; Elated Elaine worries about the mortality of her emotional state. Deflated Dan knows he’s hit rock bottom; Ecstatic Ed is free falling through the fog, unclear where the ground is…50 feet? 50 yards? 50 miles?

Again, I’m not trying to fully equate the two situations. I’m just saying they are more related than perhaps we think. In both cases, the physical and emotional conspire to combine their lump sums into the repository of the heart to the point of outright discomfort. And here’s the kicker: we can’t even be sure at times why the feelings are so intense. You sorta wish you had a running ticker, like at the Stock Exchange…you could attach it like an electrode to your chest and it would spit out answers.

I mean, yes, you have a basic sense of the derivation of energy. But to really express it, to put your finger on it…well, that’s harder that putting your finger directly on your heart. Much tougher stuff to pierce than mere bone in this case. So you get thousands of years of love poems, songs, sonnets, novels, a 10-year siege of Troy, all things which say a lot but in the end are a lot of sound and fury signifying something…it’s just we’re not that much closer to what that something truly is. It’s a copy of a copy of a copy off a song from the radio, and it crackles and pops and hisses and yea, you get the gist, but not the true meaning.

Look at all the restoration work going on in music and cinema. All the “new” prints of all old movies. Better picture. Re-mixed sound. Brighter colors. All in the name of “getting closer”. To what? Well, to the “heart” of the movie-going experience, right? Getting through the clutter that’s surrounded the piece of art. All part and parcel of our instinctual desire to wipe away any and all barriers between ourselves and the experience, whether that experience be Indiana Jones defeating Nazis or Neruda defeating your heart. All part of the same impulse.

When we get lucky enough to get the positive heartache that I’ve been talking about, it’s about finding as close to a pristine feeling as we can possibly perceive. It’s not a copy of a copy, it’s the real deal. And sometimes, well, we can’t always handle it. Aren’t ready. Can’t accept the responsibility. Are afraid of the implications. Only natural, really. After all, their counterparts want to shake the extremity of emotion as well. It’s almost as if people prefer equilibrium. It’s boring, but it don’t none hurt much neither.

Another reason why people reject happy heartache is that we’ve been trained by media of all types (romantic comedies, television, novels) that love (for lack of a better word here) doesn’t hurt. Love is in fact the opposite of hurt. Well, as I’m trying to argue here, that binary is simply false. The two are not opposites; they bleed into one another on a continuing scale. Both coexist simultaneously at all time; it’s only the proportion that changes.

We say people “fall” head over heels. They “pick themselves up” when they’ve been hurt. The words aren’t picked at random. To fall is to willingly accept that gravity in the end might prevail. Most people can’t accept a happy heartache for that reason. Too much danger. Can’t get hurt. Stay in the air. Stay above ground. Can’t get hurt. Can’t jump.

Those that do, however, know full well that the ground is below them. They just trust that someone will be there to catch them when they land. And that’s that difference.

Well, it’s always good to see a lot of comments on the site after a long day of traveling. Does the body good. It’s like milk that way. And none of them involved a keg. I’m mighty proud-like of y’all.

Oops, there’s that Southern twang that I would have picked up in Nashville had I actually heard it more than twice. Seriously, I felt at times like I was still in the Northeast and Southern tourists were in MY hometown. The only true exposure to this accent was given to me by Glenn, better known as “The Gayest Steak n’ Shake Waiter Ever”. Hey, be a gay waiter, go on with your badself. Just don’t expect me to be not confused by the juxtaposition of your Tennessee Titans t-shirt and 3’’ heels. Jeanna, who works with Nashville PRIDE, couldn’t even look this guy in the face lest she giggle. But Glenn brought me cheddar cheese fries, so he’s OK in my book.

The flight home in and of itself went a lot better than I’d hoped for. For starters, I didn’t get stripped down to my skivvies and asked to squeal like a pig by Nashville airport security. So bonus there. Secondly, even though my first flight was 20 minutes late in departing, I made it to my connecting flight in plenty of time to watch old people decay right before my eyes. Thirdly, considering the 2-year old in the row in front of me, the 3-year old in my row, and the infant behind me, I was able to rock out uninterrupted on my new discman to my newly purchased CDs (Ryan Adams’ “Rock n’ Roll”, Coldplay “Live 2003”).

So I made it to Boston on time. Would that my luggage had.

You know, it’s easier to take tragedy when it’s shared with others. It’s much harder when you’re the only one experiencing it. So like, if 12 of you go to a Edgar Allen Poe concert (I’ll never, ever remember that guy’s name, I’ve simply given up) and none of you can get in, you have each other’s shoulder to cry on, and liver to borrow. But when you’re the only schmuck it seems whose luggage didn’t come in, well, then, you rail at the heavens. Or at least at the airport personnel.

Now, I won’t say which airline I rode on, lest I get sued for defamation, but let’s just say it rhymes with “Borthwest Mairlines.” Let’s just say that. Next to the Spinning Luggage Carousel of Doom (seriously, is there anything funnier than watching someone nearly lose a limb trying to not get dragged down the carousel while picking up their luggage? That entire contraption is a rotator cuff tear waiting to happen. Wow, this is a long aside, back to the story…) was the “Lost Baggage” claim office. I missed the “Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter” sign above the door, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t make the flight from Nashville either.

So I walk in to both the office and a lost episode of “The Mullets”. Hoo boy. That was not pretty. OK, it wasn’t “The Mullets”. It was a female version of “The Mullets”. No kidding. Remember how they did the female version of “The Odd Couple”? No? OK, work with me people. This was it. And it was clear that new “improved” computer software has recently been installed, because productivity had screeched to a grinding halt by the time I got it.

Now, I had a fair bit of knowledge as to why my luggage hadn’t arrived. I had only 40 minutes of ground time in Memphis before heading out towards Boston. I don’t know much about airport luggage policy, but 40 minutes seems like enough time to move a bag. Not a lot of extra time to spare, but they could do it. I guess not. So I kindly ask Ms. Mullet #2 where my bag is, seeking confirmation for my theory.

“No idea,” she says. “Marge, is it Control+Alt to get rid of the thingy that’s blinking?”

Oh Lord.

This did not bode well. Nor did the affirmation on the “Lost Baggage” confirmation ticket that, “A worldwide search has been initiated for your luggage”. Whoa whoa whoa, Sparky. Let’s not get carried away. I was in two places. Both in Tennessee. Let’s not go looking in Belgium or something. I appreciation the vigor and all, but let’s take a moment to calmly analyze the situation and GET MY FREAKIN’ BAG BACK.

In a happy end to the story, I got my bag delivered at 11:30 pm last night to my door, which spared me having to take the bulky piece of luggage on the T at rush hour. So I can thank “The Mullettes” for that, I suppose. So now I’m back for 72 hours, at which point I’ll be on a bus heading for New York City. Some might call me a wandering spirit.

Me? I’d call me a guy who can’t carry over vacation time. You can choose your own name, so long as it doesn’t involve “Mimi”.

OK, so I said before, I didn’t skydive on Saturday. Someday I’ll have $225 to casually spend and someday I’ll not be a big fat piece of lard. OK, I’m only 5 pounds over the 230 lb weight limit, but be that as it may, that coupled with another step towards impending death had me a bit low as I struggled to get back to sleep at 8:07 am on the 28th anniversary of entering into the world screaming like...well, a baby.

So yea, I didn’t skydive, is what I’m saying, in case that wasn’t clear by now.

I did get some e-cards though, which was nice. And I think I gave my mom the best present of the day when I told her that I hadn’t jumped. “Oh thank God!” she said, and I could hear her put down the sedatives. Talked to her for a bit, and basically tried not to wake up the hosts. It’s amazing how slowly time can transpire when you sit in a quiet room and allow yourself to fixate on just about everything that bothers you. Achingly slow, really. You think about choices and chances and possibilities and missed opportunities and where you fit in and where you don’t and why you don’t and could you change that and yea, so I was perfectly happy to see my hosts and grab some lunch.

I never quite know how I’m going to be on my birthday. I’m hardly at a point where this day causes thoughts of mortality to creep in, but it does, on occasion, call some serious reflection forth. Given how prone I’ve been recently to introspection, it should come as no surprise that this year provided many an internal moment for yours truly. Some have been explicated here, some might be in weeks to come, some I’ll just keep to myself. I don’t want to give the impression that my birthday this year contained 24 hours of continual melancholy, since that ain’t true. Did offer a good bout of self-reflection, though, and I think that’s by and large a good thing.

I go into all of that since it’s sort of important to know in what state I went to see “Love, Actually”.

Tim, one of my hosts, had a church gig he had to play, so Jeanna and I went back to the mall to see a movie and so I could buy myself some presents. (For those of you keeping track at home, I bought a Coldplay DVD and a rerelease of “The Kids are Alright”. Both give me the happies.) “Love Actually” is a movie I’d been raring to see. Well, not “raring” per say. But looking forward to nonetheless. It’s the type of movie you will either hate or love despite all its flaws. Me, I fall into the latter category, but I saw it in a time when I felt unabashedly open to emotional manipulation. I don’t need if I needed a pick me up per say but a reminder that the possibility of the fantastically romantic still existed.

And really, the possibility exists in as much as you allow itself to exist. I’d like to think that’s the point of the movie. There’s more to it than that, of course. The roughly ten storylines do not all end happily. The movies offers a variety of scenarios, from the sublime to the ridiculous, all coated in the magical sheen of snow that seemingly falls throughout the movie. I imagine everyone who sees this movie will latch onto particular stories more than others. For me, the movie was dominated by the Hugh Grant, Liam Neeson, and especially Colin Firth storylines. Maybe because these three ended the “best”. Who knows. I don’t particularly care to analyze why these ones made me as warm on the inside as the did. At some point, as I’ve said before, you have to know when words will fail you, and this is one of those times, I imagine.

Point being: it’s there, I believe in it, and I believe it in because really, life doesn’t make much sense to me otherwise.

Perhaps I was still a bit lost in the movie for the rest of the day, because I did feel a keen sense of separation from the now 22-guy bachelor party. (Maybe they are like Gremlins: if you feed them after midnight, they multiply.) Of course, the sense of separation could have had something to do with the fact that they had been drinking Red Bull and vodka since 8 am that day.

We take a shuttle over to this amazing steak house called The Stock Yard. Smartly, they stick us in one of the private rooms in the back, ie, “as far away from everyone else as possible”. I’m just not in a drinking mood. I think watching half of the guys stare at the menus cross-eyed is helping the cause for sobriety. I’m not one to know the decorum for 4-star restaurants, but I’m pretty sure starting a chant every half hour for “TITTIE BAR!” doesn’t fall under it. As one guy there described the scene, “It’s a bit like when the substitute teacher has lost complete control of the class, and doesn’t have anything for the students to do anyways.”

So I nursed my Diet Pepsi and thought about my inability to connect with those around me. Yes, I talked to them. Yes, I laughed. Yes, it was good to see the old roommates again. And yes, I’m glad I came down. But in hearing the dozens of old stories from college in which I wasn’t involved in, it became clear exactly how different my life was even then from theirs. Neither better nor worse, but through a variety of circumstances, personality tics, and plain old situational specifics, I led a different life than they did then, and I haven’t made up any ground their way in the meantime.

On top of that, I felt oppressed to a point by the level of “maleness” in the room. No one’s accused me of being anything than masculine, but there was enough testosterone in this dining room to bottle and use for hormone replacement therapy in Tennessee for the next decade. All good guys, all with their hearts in the right places, but took the “boys will be boys” to an extent that I myself simply couldn’t. Again, not a condemnation of them: it’s a bachelor party, come on! I’m more concerned with my inability to give myself over to that, even for a specific time. Some would say it’s a good thing I didn’t; me, I dunno. I guess it would have been nice in small way to have felt more connected to it. More connected to the guys. Last night, the years between college, college itself...I’ve made many connections over that time, I’m just not sure I have with these guys the way they clearly have with each other. A bit envious at times, I guess.

One thing I was not envious of, however, was their bill at dinner. The average per head charge? $95. Moi? $32. Granted, $32 for a plate of chicken fettucini alfredo and a Diet Pepsi is slightly ludicrous in and of itself. I thought about the guys there who spent $225 on skydiving, $100 or so on dinner, and had money lined up for the strip club later, and I thought, “Man, maybe I’ve been too hard on this whole ‘selling crack’ option back home...” God bless them for having that type of cash flow. Me myself and I have to think about things just a bit differently.

As for the club, well, I was only there an hour, didn’t get a dance, and yet spent $50. This is why I hardly ever go. $14 to get in, $15 for my share of the couches the guys bought near the stage for the evening, and $10 to get Trent a group dance on the stage, which I never even saw because I needed to get driven home by Jeanna, who was nice enough to pick me up at 12:30. Be that as it may, it was worth it to see the one girl who climbed up the 20’+ pole and, while upside down, put her feet on the ceiling. And then slide down using her thighs as friction. Suck on THAT, Cirque de Soleil.

Like I said, an interesting birthday. Not the one I expected. Maybe not even the one I needed. Time will tell. Hopefully, my impending trip to NYC in five days will provide a different type of birthday weekend. We’ll see.

So the birthday has come and gone. Safe to say it was one of the more contemplative I’ve had in a while. This won’t be particularly deep of an entry, but the day was just different than I anticipated.

To get the curiosity out of the way, I did not, in the end, go skydiving. I’m a bit disappointed, but only a bit, and that’s semi-interesting to yours truly. A combination of factors led to this development: $175 to jump plus $50 for the video plus a 2-hour drive plus I was 7 pounds over the weight limit plus sketchy weather led me to decide that maybe this wasn’t the best way to spend my morning. So I decided to sleep in and meet up with the guys around dinner.

So of course I was awake at 8 am with nary a chance to go back to bed. But I’m telling the story out of order now, so let’s go back to Friday night.

During the day on Friday, my hosts took me to the Opryland Hotel. You may wonder, as did I, why they would take me sightseeing to a hotel, but this was pretty damn cool. The 3,000+ room hotel was designed by the firm who did Mall of America, and the insides were laid out in theme-specific lush landscapes of fauna, plant-life, rivers, and specific decor on the hotel rooms lining each area. So one part was the "Delta", another was the "Cascades", another "Mistress Sylvia's House of Pain"...you get the point. After that, we poked around the mall, killing time before I was to meet the guys at the hotel. I saw a 14-year old girl wearing a t-shirt that said "Parental Guidance Suggested". Man, that ain't right.

As luck would have it, I was in the lobby for only about 5 minutes before the bachelor and some of the guys walked in, carrying what looked like all of Aisle 6 from the local liquor store. We caught up in the hotel room, drinking a mixture of vodka, cranberry juice, Red Bull, and I think paint thinner. The six or so of us then meet two others at a bar that’s a combination of the Sunset Grille and a Catholic girl’s school. I kid you not. Roughly 400 beers on tap, and all the waitresses were in midriff bearing shirts with plaid skirts. Some people might argue this place proves the existence of heaven. I’d just say the beer was good and the girls were nice and leave it at that.

From there, we’re supposed to go to a place called The Trap to see Robert Earl Keen. None of us can remember his name (James Earl Ray? David Alan Grier? Malcom-Jamal Warner?) On top of that, we’re all making fun of the bachelor, who had insisted via email that we pre-buy tickets. We’re joking, with visions of plaid skirts dancing in our heads, about how silly it was to think we’d have to pre-buy tickets, and isn’t our boy Trent a silly white boy.

So there we are, 20 minutes later, outside a sold-out concert. Whoops.

There are now eleven of us. We’re growing like the group that runs with Forrest Gump. Only two of us have tickets. One local wants these tickets bad. Bad. Face value of the tickets? $28 including service charge. Our local is offering $70 for them. Trent is so mad I think he’s gonna tackle all of us one by one and take our lunch money. Now the local is offering $80. All for John Wayne Bobbit tickets. Trent decides to sell the two tickets plus his brother’s ticket. So he actually says this to the guy: “Look, I paid $28 for these tickets, so I need at least $55 to break even.”

AND IT WORKED. Hysterical. None of us could believe it. We’re watching with bemused awe. Trent sold two tickets for $20 more than the three had cost. Ironically, Trent’s so drunk that he honestly thought that 3 tickets times $28=$110. Good times.

So we leave the Neil Patrick Harris show and walk back into town. We meet even more guys, as the Blob of Testosterone grows ever stronger. We end up at a bar playing “Pour Some Sugar on Me” on the loudspeakers. Sadly, this was a prelude to the utter crap they played the rest of the night. This bar missed the memo that said that rap-metal as a genre was dead. Oh well. I knew I had had enough to drink when I turned around to find the bartender had given me a round on her. That’s a good sign that you should just stop drinking. Luckily by this point, my hosts had come to pick me up. So my honor was saved, in as much as it can be saved after being called a “f#ckin’ p@ssy” by every guy as I left at what they perceived to be an ungodly early hour. Oh well. I wasn’t cool in college, I’m not cool now. This I can deal with.

OK, so that takes us through Friday night and Saturday morning. Saturday’s tale will be forthcoming.

OK, I don't have a lot of time to post, so pardon the typos. Thought I'd give a quick update.

So I remember a time. A time not so long ago. A time where it took a long time to get through the Byzantine halls of the airport to get from the front door to your gate.

I remember when it didn't take less than 5 minutes. Seriously. From the front door to my gate. I even got lost going to my gate for a minute. Completely surreal. It was like an airport version of "28 Days Later" after the dude wakes up in the hospital. The lesson to be learned: if you wanna fly somewhere, find a mostly international terminal and fly out early Thursday afternoon. Stellar.

Taking off in 25-MPH winds, tho...that I don't wish on anyone. The plane's all "I tihnk I can I think I can" and the wind's all "Oh yea, I'm gonna slap you punch-drunk for your insolence". Those first three minutes? Yea, not so fun.

But I get in, one layover in Detroit later, basically on time. I proceed then to pummel my liver with my hosts in tow. I'm tellin' you, I didn't know what Southern cuisine was gonna be like, but I certainly didn't think it would be served by Chris Judd's stunt double. Seriously. A spitting image. So we ate at a restaurant along what I can only liken to Landsdowne Street in Boston, only wihtout all the annoying Eurotrash that goes along with that. So, yea, improvement. Jeanna can fill you in on the street names if she comments later on this.

From there, we go to Buffalo Billiard's. Get it? I didn't, but I was focused on the sign that said "Cheap Ass Tuesdays: $2 Drafts". For those looking for the answer to the question, "What are the sexiest words in the English language?", you've found it in "two dollar drafts". I nervously ask the bartender if, indeed, all drafts are $2, and I instantly earn his sarcasm and scorn. And a $2 Bass pint, so suck it, I say verily, to his sarcasm.

From there, we went to a slick honky-tonk (my host's description) place called The Stage. Cowboy hats, country music on the stage, women wearing American flag shirts...oh heck yea. Here's the place where I'll drink enough to lose feeling in my extremities. Meanwhile, Jeanna's made the mistake of trying to match me drink for drink, and now is slurring every other word and making ridiculous claims like, "Ooooh, ooooh...I know this song...it's about NAFTA!" And I don't know much about country, but I'm pretty sure she was incorrect.

So that's the update---we got home safe and sound (on highways with 70 MPH speed limits...this state rules) and woke up with only minimal head hurtage. Tonite: I meet the roomies for the first time in 5 years. Pray for our souls.

OK, so we’ve hit our quota of extremely long “BIG THOUGHTS” entries for the week, so we’re gonna take down here a notch. Sorta like when Phish breaks out a quiet acoustic number after a 25+ minute “Mike’s Groove”. And OK, three of you got that.

I’m mainly distracted today because I’m gearing up to leave town. That’s right, I’ll be boarding a plane tomorrow afternoon for a long-awaited trip. I’m heading down to Nashville to attend the bachelor party of one of my nine college roommates. You read that right: nine. ("Nine times". Heh.) The ten of us proved that social entropy does in fact exist. Trent, the bachelor in question, is the 3rd of us to take the plunge, which statistically speaking sounds about right. Thirty percent married by late 20s? Sound about right? Oh, who cares. Me no heart math.

Now, you might rightly assume he lives in Nashville, but no, he lives in Indiana. I’ve known about this bachelor party for 2 months and I still haven’t figured out why we’re going. That’s not the important fact here. The important fact, that I want you to take home and share with the family, is that roughly 25 guys from around the country will be descending upon Nashville to “cowboy up” in more ways than one.

I’m not Miss Cleo or nuttin’, but let’s just say I’m packing a little extra cash for my share of someone’s bail money.

If you want to find us, on Friday night we’ll be here, and on Saturday (COUGHmybirthdayCOUGH) we’ll be here. The latter is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. I of course made the mistake of telling my mother two weeks ago of my plans, and she’s been on meds ever since. At some point, I’m sure we’ll end up in establishments which have, shall we say, lax clothing policies for their employees. One in particular apparently has both a “BYOB” policy as well as a “two-drink minimum” policy. Let’s see if it takes you as long as it did for me to wrap your head around that combination. Me, I’m waiting for the one guy to walk in, double-fisting MGD, and declaring, “Brings on the babes!”

And since I’ve gotten a request for “more college stories”, I might as well share once anecdote with you before I am hurled skyward. Oh, how I hate planes. OK, “travel” I hate. But I can deal with trains and buses. Planes, though, they give me the jibblies. I hate flying for the same reason I had the plastic wrap around CDs: nothing should ever be that annoying. It’s not the “I might crash” fear. That’s why you hit the bar three hours before your flight. No, I’m talking about the anal cavity search I get if I leave a dime in my pocket before going through the metal detector. I’m talking about e-tickets that are e-normously e-nnoying to obtain. OK, going to a bad place. The story.

So my roomies were great to live with for many reasons, but one of those reasons is that, unlike me, they didn’t do any theatre. So the dorm was a nice refuge from the drama of the drama. The dorm was more a “come home and find two guys so high they actually set Sega John Madden to play itself and then BET on it” place. And that actually happened, that’s not one of those “Ryan exaggerations”. So anyways, during my first directing experience, I asked the guys (I lived with 3 of them at the time, including Trent…the other six came next year) if I could host the cast party. I explained how I’d buy the booze, fill out the party form, get the food. But like Jerry Maguire, I had them at “party”. Er, “hello”. But you get the gist.

So the show opens, and never mind that they showed up completely trashed and almost couldn’t make it through the 45-minute production because they had to pee so bad. Because really, who remembers insignificant details like 6 Bud Ices apiece? No one. Exactly. So the party starts around 10:30 that night back in Casa De Sega, and it’s got the usual array of goodies: vodka in large plastic bottles, plastic cups, ice from the dining hall, and the cheapest OJ that Store 24 had. Class act, is what I’m saying.

Now, our dorm room was a duplex: common room on the first floor, four bedrooms on the top floor along with the bathroom. So, as per any college party in the mid-90’s, the “Pulp Fiction” soundtrack is playing. I’m playing ambassador to about 5 groups of social circles, since none of them were interacting just yet. So I’m working it, putting my thing down, flipping it, and reversing it, and then I notice that none of my roomies are on the first floor. So I go to find them, since I’m all about peace love and Somerville-bottled vodka joining together.

Now, I walk up the stairs, and the first thing I see are my roommates, slack-jawed, looking in my general direction. Just frozen, like they’d seen Medusa. “Um, sup guys?” I ask. Nothing. Nary a response. Then I hear a soft sucking sound from around the corner, atop the stairs. I take two more steps up, and see what the scene is.

My two female leads had decided to play a little tongue hockey.

Now, I’m as into that whole thing as much as any typical heterosexual who, if submitted to water torture, couldn’t tell you why we find this so attractive, but at this point I felt a little bad for the two girls involved. As far as I could tell, they were having a splendid time giving my roommates a little impromptu performance art, but yea, I figured they wouldn’t want any 4-star reviews in the next morning’s paper.

Before I even have a chance to say anything, one of the guys, eyes still fixated on the spectacle, says extremely out loud, and with all the gravity of a State of the Union address, “McGee, this is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Ah, college boys. Needless to say, my roommates volunteered our room for every theatre party afterwards. Even for productions I wasn’t actually working on.

So yea, like I said, I’m packing bail money. I hope to give an update over the weekend. Maybe the skydiving plane will have wireless. Who knows?

Always hard to follow up an opus like Saturday’s double entry. Not the easiest thing to do. I like an ebb and flow to the site; even if you don’t always know what you’ll get, at least you know it will have something to do with the previous entry. Can’t write about “Star Wars” and then sex unless Princess Leia is somehow involved with the sex, and frankly, this Homey don’t play dat.

So it’s nice and reassuring to know I had a topic already lined up for me, thanks to my second blog topic request less than a week. Keep them coming, it’s less work for me, and yet I still look good in the end. It’s a win-win situation. As part of the initial comment to “Blog on the Tracks Part II”, Josh asked me, “So Ryan, what is your current strategy to meet someone?” To which a reader asked me to answer the following questions: “"Is there actually such a thing as a good strategy to meet someone?"

I’d like to answer the first question, if I may, through interpretive dance. But since it’s a blog, I’ll have to instead use words. My current strategy, Josh, involves a few Rainbow Brite dolls blessed by a local Haitian shaman, some Windsor Pilates videotapes, and a “Karate Kid II” poster hanging over my bed.

Which is all a way to segue into the latter question.

The short answer is: no. There. I’m done. Go home. Nothing more to see.

Oh, you want more? Man, you people and your demands. Just because I rattle off the occasional 3,000+ word entry, you expect me to wax nostalgic on every given topic. Do you think I have no life?

Well, if you think that, you’d be correct, so let’s expound.

First off, to have a strategy implies that you’re making a concerted effort to attract someone you’ve never met. This is what we is the biz call “a complete crapshoot”. You’re already assuming to know your would-be girl or guy’s taste in a variety of things. In addition, this violates one of the tenets set forth last Saturday, which states that the active seeking of someone almost inevitably ends in failure. You’re not given them a chance to be themselves, since every deviation from your pre-conceived notions of who they should be only shatters their “perfection” and turns you off to them. In addition, you yourself are probably feeding into what you believe they want in someone, and, as such, you might as well be two totally different people encountering each other for the first time on a small dance floor with Sean Paul scoring the awkward encounter.

In short, don’t do it.

Secondly, having a strategy implies a blanket set of rules that will apply across a broad spectrum of people. Sort of like casting a fishing net, knowing that if you cast it wide enough, eventually you’ll catch something. And if you think the fishing metaphor is too extreme, watch any Joe Smooth use the same move and opening line to every girl in the club until he gets one who falls for it. Honestly, they aren’t even subtle. Usually, if it’s really crowded, the guy will try it on the same girls more than once. He’s casting his line with each opening salvo, and hoping for a bite. Why “Blind Date” and “The Great Outdoors” have never teamed up on a show, I’ll never know.

In addition, let’s just look at the phrase “broad spectrum of people”. You’re not looking for a special someone, you’re just playing the odds game. Some people don’t get how others can go out every night, or almost every night, going from club to club, bar to bar. These people took statistics. If it’s a 1 in a 100 shot for a guy of average looks to get a phone number, he’ll make damn sure to talk to as close to 100 girls as possible. It’s not desperation; it’s mathematics. Sooner or later, he’ll get that number. Doesn’t matter, though. By girl 87, he’s gone from “admin support” to “junior VP”, from “Camry” to “Lexus”, from “Gap” to “Armani Exchange”. So how he plans to pick her up in the Camry O’ Love is anyone’s guess.

So yes, specificity is the name of the game. But you can’t simply search for specificity. Read any ad on Craiglist or Match.com, and you get a series of criteria more stringent than those required to be a Navy SEAL. Height within three inches, weight within 5 pounds, hair quaffed just so, specific number of tattoos, number of spices in their spice rack…the lists go on and on. We’re back to “Weird Science”, and everyone wants their own Kelly LeBrock. And yes, “funny”, “charming”, “likes pets”; these are all factored in her in our never-ending quest to eliminate as many possible bad matches as possible.

In theory, it’s not a bad idea, until you say go and try to apply it practically. Since all of this rules out the most important part of the whole thing: chemistry.

I am not a dog guy. Pretty plain and simple. Nothing against them, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call me a “fan”. I’ll share the planet with them, but three attacked me when I was eight, and the Reagan years were hard enough on me without that little incident.

I bring all this up because chemistry doesn’t care if the girl I’m compatible with likes dogs or not. It’s fairly indifferent to the color of her hair as well. Ditto with her taste in clothes or opinions on Johannes Bach versus Sebastian Bach. All reduced to a big pile of “eh”.

So, specificity is key, but only in terms of discovering the million and one things that makes that special one so damn special. I’m not just talking about the many quirks that adds up to their individuality, but also the thousands more that you discover on your own. Their morning ritual of hitting the alarm clock exactly three times; the way they can tell with .000005 seconds the show on a station as they flip maniacally through the cable stations on a Sunday; their impression of Eeyore that they do only for you, and only after you beg. These are the specifics that matter. And you can’t predict them, you can’t anticipate them, and you can’t list them as criteria.

So, getting the chemistry identified is thus key. And that’s where “the look” from the other day comes into play. Sometimes we feel “the look” like we possess a spider sense. Other times we need to be knocked in the head by a clue by four. (See every “Boof” article from a few months ago.) The look begins with chemical signals that you can’t even understand seeping into your eyes. You as an outsider may see “the look” in progress. Maybe you want directly into the direct fire of “the look”, and notice who they are checking out. Then starts the fun game of “Oh, I saw so and so checking you out” or “I saw you givin’ the googly eyes at Blah Blah”. But it all starts in the eyes.

And you can’t just start this. It’s all, sadly, by chance. Ask any couple how they met, and most of the time, it will seem like the most bizarre set of coincidences ever. And if they give you a mundane answer, just kill them, because they are not in love and shouldn’t be allowed to breed. OK, that’s harsh, but got your attention, right? And we’re at the halfway point, you might be losing interest, and so I had to pull you back. Welcome to my brain.

Point is, most people’s tale of how they met seems like such happenstance for a reason: often times, it is. You can call it fate, karma, etc. Feel free to, even though I won’t. I’d like to assign a bit of autonomy to my actions, and things such as “fate” rob me personally of that. Just my definition of “fate”. But my dad was dating a girl who know a guy who dated my mom, and that’s how they met. If my Dad doesn’t date that girl, he and my mom don’t meet then and then I’m not here to rock your blog world. Scary thought, eh?

Everyone’s got stories like this. I heard one a few weeks ago about two guys who met in Greece. One guy was with his wife, both of them on vacation from England. In comes in two male lovers from Italy. All four meet in Greece. And one man from each pair met, fell in love, and these two have been together for almost two decades since. Fate? Some might say. I’d just say that circumstances allowed two people with the proper chemistry to finally align. If Fate is smart enough to engineer that, then why didn’t it step in before “Yes Dear” made it to my television in the first place, eh? The Greece saga is a bit extreme in terms of coincidence, but all in all, it’s safe to say that none of the four saw that coming.

Thing is, say what you will about the two people left behind, but the other two saw the chemistry and opportunity for what it was. Most people should be so lucky. But it brings up another point that the person who made this blog request pointed out:

“Transformative love…sort of comes around on its own schedule, frequently at the worst possible time, almost never when I'm looking for it.”

Well, I’d say Greece 3: Sandy (Beach's) Revenge qualifies under all three of these criteria. It hit unexpectedly, it hit during a point where both were in other relationships, and as the story was told to me, neither had gone to Greece for the purpose of ditching their then significant others.

So, let’s look at these three components and call it a day, shall we?

Transformative love…sort of comes around on it’s own schedule.

This has basically been the point for the last few paragraphs. Having a strategy will inevitably fail because it assumes you have control over when and where the spark will hit. That’s like saying professional wrestlers have control over whether they win or lose matches. Just ridiculous, and it reeks of hubris. True, you’re helping your cause by being more than less social, but even so, in the end, it’s as effective as emptying the ocean with a teaspoon. These events have neither rhyme nor reason. We are nominally reasonable creatures don’t like that explanation, but explain how John Stamos got Rebecca Romijn using reason.

Didn’t think so. Moving on.

Transformative love…[comes] frequently at the worst possible time…

Well, there are three types of “worst possible time”. The first was outlined above: namely, when one or more or you is in another type of relationship at the time of chemical warfare. This has the possibility to be messier than the outtakes of “You Can’t Do That on Television”. You either cut ties, or you prepare for everything that comes with it. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t. Like any situation involving chemistry, there are no guarantees, another blow to us rational folk.

The second time is the “I’m not ready for this right now” spark. You’re getting over a relationship, you’re making a big transition in your life, you had planned on focusing only on work/school….whatever the case may be. Again, chemistry don’t care. It’s ready to party. At this point, it’s up to you to re-assign priorities. Sometimes they shift. Sometimes they don’t. You can’t know until you’re in the situation.

The third is the “I don’t feel adequate” time. This is the “whoa, how did I get in this so fast, and maybe I’m not ready” type of time. Sort of up there when the six shots you did at the beginning of the party suddenly hit you all at once, and you know you’re in trouble. And yes, both cases can cause stomach disruption.

In all three, “specificity” one again becomes key. It’s the key and the bane. Each of the above can probably be broken down into a dozen categories, with a dozen subcategories for each. I’m sure I’m forgetting something at the top level as well. Because, remember, you have to come up with a category for every potential partner you could ever meet. As such, it’s pointless to even predict what’s coming down the pipe. Impossible to have a strategy. In all of these cases, we wish we could have prepared in some fashion, but we can’t. A hard truth, but a truth regardless.

Transformative love…[comes] almost never when I'm looking for it.

Well, I think I covered this the other day, but I think what the reader means is that they are not “consciously” looking for it. The spark, that is. The connection. It’s true. Precisely for the reasons that don’t work when you have a strategy.

With a strategy, you are consistently working against chemistry’s way of naturally pairing people off. Using a strategy to meet someone is a bit like setting off a fire alarm to put your child to sleep. It’s counterproductive. “Swimming against the tide” doesn’t even cover it. Chemistry has a way of rewarding the faithful. Even if you don’t know you’re being faithful. Especially if you don’t.

Here’s why. Anyone who says, “That’s it, I’m done. I’m giving up. I’m not looking anymore…” is still looking. You know that guy at the party who tries just a bit too hard to convince you he’s not drunk? Yea, he’s wasted. And you’re “I’m over love” people are still punch-drunk with amorous intent. When you’re really not looking, chemistry has a way of pointing out a few days/weeks in exactly how little you expected and sought that which you’re been suddenly blessed with. In the first case, you’ve got the equivalent of “OH, I’m sooo full, I couldn’t have another bite…ok, well, maybe a bit more.” In the latter, you’ve got, “You know, I didn’t even know I was hungry in the first place.”

Big difference there. “Appetite” is a good metaphor here, since what we are talking about in the end is the appetite to love and be loved in returned. Very “Grecian Urn”, I know. But just because Keats wrote it doesn’t mean it’s not true. (OK, cheap joke, I like Keats. And some of you are scratching your head. Look, I have $100,000 of useless knowledge in my head, some of it has to seep out occasionally.) We’re taught from a young age to chase after our goals. Seize the day. Go go go. And that’s all well and good for school and job and financial security and all that stuff which, while important and necessary, does us no good in the realm of the human heart.

So abandon reason. Abandon thought. And yes, abandon strategy. They won’t do you much good in this most important of arenas. Luckily, chemistry’s there to guide us, if only we can get out of our own ways and let it point the way.

Once that happens, well, the rest is up to us. And if you’re true to yourself, and true to each other, well, no strategy’s necessary, is it?

Make sure you’ve read Part 1 before continuing.

On with the quotes:

I’ve seen love go by my door
It’s never been this close before
Never been so easy or so slow.
“You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”

So earlier, I made the claim that at the end of the day, making a connection with someone should be the easiest thing in the world. And that is something I firmly believe in.

That being said, there are other circumstances that life throws in our way to make discovery said connection as difficult as identifying any Kajagoogoo song besides “Too Shy”. In addition, once you’ve established that connection, you need a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to keep it going. But for now, I just wanna talk about the connection itself.

The connection starts with “the look”. And no, not in the Roxette sense. I’m not talking about the mutual catching of glimpses look, though that’s certain one variation. It also need not be the first time you gaze at someone; that’s a rare albeit valid variation as well. “The look” is simply the first time one person sees another person for the first time in a non-platonic way.

Thus, “the look” can happen 5 minutes, 5 weeks, or 5 years after meeting this person. The time frame is inconsequential. In addition, “the look” is not purely physiological. You don’t have to be actually viewing a person at the moment of “the look”. It can be triggered by a thought, an email, a phonecall, an overheard conversation concerning this person. You see this example in movies a lot, usually with the “Person X hears about Person Y dating Person Z, and suddenly realized they are in love with Person Y” trope thrown in.

From there, well, there’s a million and one variations, with new ones being added seemingly on a daily basis. But they always start with “the look”. In the end, though, “the look” has to be accepted, and that’s where we start to think about the overall thesis at work here: we are, in the end, always chosen. We never choose. The transformation from desire into the eventual endgoal of love consists of two people mutually accepting the other’s offer of nothing more, but nothing less, than themselves. There’s absolutely nothing unidirectional going on here.

So, hopefully, here is the seeming paradox solved: we can choose who we want to love, but in the end, only by being chosen reciprocally can we love. The object of our affection holds to key to transforming desire into love.

If you see her, say hello, she might be in Tangier
She left here last early spring, is livin’ there, I hear
Say for me that I’m all right though things get kind of slow
She might think that I’ve forgotten her, don’t tell her it isn’t so.
“If You See Her, Say Hello”

There’s a temptation, in attempting to reach a place where we can both love and be loved, to wipe out memories of past emotional disturbances. We do so for many reasons. Firstly, you never want to be the person who constantly dwells on the past. Secondly, you can often assign traits of past lovers to present ones unfairly. Thirdly, we can often see the good moments amidst the bad, and tend to romanticize the relationship in a way that does disservice to the truth of that relationship as well at to your psyche.

While I don’t advocate the consistent mental uprooting of the past, it’s equally wrong to forget it exists. In positioning oneself for future interpersonal interactions of any kind, one must be mindful of past indiscretions in order to not reenact them. (Translation: don’t keep f#cking up the same way over and over again.)

Substitute “Ann Arbor” for “Tangier” up above and Dylan’s got me cold. Jenny’s there now, and I assume doing just fine. She’s a very smart girl who attacks what she wants and does not fail in achieving them. I just happened to not be what she wanted.

To say I still think about her is not, however, to say I wish I were still with her. Moving there (a far-fetched option, but an option nonetheless) would have been a huge mistake. Not for the upheaval my life would have taken: leaving Boston, finding a job, leaving behind the world I knew, missing my family. I would have done all that had she been someone I knew would have done the same for me. In the end, she made the decision easy for me. Well, easy as possible when the decision is to end a relationship after 2 and a half years of work.

Here’s the thing. She’s gonna meet a great guy, because she’s in the end a great girl. I’m just not the guy she needed, nor was she the girl I needed. And because I know that, I know more of what I need than if I had not met her. And maybe the same goes for her, I don’t know. We haven’t said a word in 5 months to each other. We’re both at fault there. But I can see another 5 easily passing without contact. Just the way it is.

Seems weird, but I don’t think either of us ever chose the other. I think that’s why I couldn’t go. And why she couldn’t stay. I think. But hey, what do I know?

Suddenly I turned around and she was standin’ there
With silver bracelets on her wrists and flowers in her hair.
She walked up to me so gracefully and took my crown of thorns.
"Come in," she said,
"I’ll give you shelter from the storm."
“Shelter from the Storm”

Well, I know a few things, actually. Not a lot, but a few.

I know Jenny wasn’t a mistake as much as I know that leaving her wasn’t a mistake. Her mom was right: I was good for that phase of her life. And she for mine. I think my parents knew that too, but maybe wished it weren’t so. Oh well. My days of wishing that have passed.

I wore my own crown of thorns for a while, the “oh poor me” schtick which gets you as far as pressing your ideals upon unsuspecting women. Do both at once, and then wonder why they are not giving you the time of day, well, that’s just comedy. Except when it’s your own life. Then, not so funny.

The key to why I like the above quote lies in the first word: “suddenly”. Again, it fits in with the notion that the right connection, when made, is effortless. It might take a lot of time and energy and, let’s be honest, luck, to get there, but once there, you’re long gone and hard to find before you even know it.

Getting to that point means not forgetting the past, but in a way embracing it as part and parcel of who you are. It is knowing that any baggage that comes with the external façade of “perfect you” will be accepted and even embraced by the person who gives you “the look”. It is knowing that any flaws you see in yourself will disappear once you see the way he or she looks at you.

Above all, it’s about accepting the protection they will give. Sounds easy, but it’s not. One of the more terrifying things you can do. Once you step under that umbrella, autonomy’s by and large out the door.

Like your smile
And your fingertips
Like the way that you move your lips.
I like the cool way you look at me,
Everything about you is bringing me
Misery.
“Buckets of Rain”

Ah, but what beautiful misery.

The last two lines might seem contradictory to both the lines before it and the overall message of this entry, but bear with me a bit. I still remember holding the first girl I ever loved. I remember every inch of my body electrified. I remember not wanting to let her go. And I remember being terrified that she’d let me fall.

I think that’s the misery Dylan’s talking about here. Remember, this is an album borne out of a failed marriage on his part. During this last song on the record, he’s both prepared for the next step while concurrently remembering where the last occurrence of this emotion led him. This is what I mean about embracing the past. To walk blindly into another relationship will do neither him nor his potential partner any good; in fact, it will do them harm.

And at last we come to the crux of being chosen. We spend so much of our lives trying to get to that point, of being chosen, and how many of us have run, frightened, once there? Too many, I’d wager. This type of “misery” suddenly floods our minds and, rather than work together with this person to hold each other up, we flee. Once you accept the choice, you’re changed. You’re responsible for more than just yourself. And most people can’t handle that responsibility once presented with it.

I share Dylan’s fear, but what I feel is his simultaneous optimism in this track. I think you have to have both in order to make it work. Because you have to realize that after that moment, it IS work. To go into it naively is a recipe for disaster. But you must, in the end, face your fears about being chosen. It’s a huge responsibility, to be sure, but the greatest one anybody can possibly offer you. To be given such trust is difficult. To give it in return, even tougher.

But to never allow yourself the opportunity for that moment, well, that’s not a life. That’s just an empty shell posing as a life. Me, I’m gonna try and risk falling off the cliff before I lead that kind of non-life. Consider it my own personal faith: I can’t know for sure I’m ready for that moment, but I’d sure like the chance to find out.

To those who have already done so, I wish you well. To those in the process, I wish you strength. To those still waiting, I wish you patience and good fortune. And to all, I wish you happiness.

I’ve got stacks of CDs pretty much anywhere I spend a decent amount of time. I used to try to centralize them by purchasing larger and larger shelving units. Right around the time that the 500 CD-holder became insufficient, I flat out gave up.

So, now I’ve filled that unit, but stuck them in haphazard piles in the living room, the glove compartment of my car, my bedroom, and my desk at work. Each of these piles tells a small story. They are not necessarily interesting stories. At their most benign, they’ll give you the story of what I’ve been listening to recently. You can tell from the living room that I’ve been exploiting the 5.1 remix of “Dark Side of the Moon”, and that “Sand in the Vaseline”, the Talking Heads’ greatest hits collection, has been sharing time with “Speakerboxx/The Love Below” by Outkast in my bedroom.

I’ve got roughly a dozen CDs stacked neatly next to my computer at work. They really haven’t changed much in the past month or so; partly due to laziness, but mostly due to the fact that as a collective whole, they offer me any emotional outlet I need on a particular given day. It’s a bit like that scene in “A Beautiful Mind” where Nash looks at the wall of numbers, and certain ones glow and distinguish themselves from the surrounding elements: certain CDs just glow when I look at them.

We don’t really pick the music, the music picks us. We are passive participants; the best we can do is openly accept what they have to offer. Sometimes we don’t, and shun their gifts. Same works with people. You can want, desire, or love someone but, in the end, they have to choose us first.

That might sound a bit of a contradiction, so let me try to explain. When I say these people choose us, I don’t mean that they actively do so. It need not be on a conscious level, on either end. But something is clearly sent between two people. In the best possible scenario, this happens simultaneously, and, as such, what you have in the union of two people is the concurrent surrender to the signals that the other has been sending.

I think this is what people speak of when they talk about finding someone when you’re not looking. You are looking. You’re always looking. You just don’t know it. The human condition dictates, no, it demands, a social aspect to its existence. Just because you’re not hitting the bars, working the clubs, wading through Match.com, doesn’t mean you’re not looking. If anything, this lack of active seeking leaves you more open to external stimuli. You’re not working to make a connection, and you shouldn’t, because none of this connection stuff should be work in the first place. (I’ll explain that point in a bit, I promise.)

So I’m here on a Saturday, checking email after my workout, and scanning the CD pile to see if anything’s calling out today. It’s not always the case that something screams to be played---in that case, I just tune in to the radio. Those songs are confectionary---they are momentarily satisfying, but in the end, empty calories for the soul. These albums by my computer though, these are the real deal. Lucinda Williams’ “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road”. Matthew Sweet’s “In Reverse”. Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here”.

And today’s glowing selection, Bob Dylan’s “Blood on The Tracks”.

Released in 1975, “Blood” is widely hailed as the renaissance of Dylan. Written off after a string of mediocre albums, Dylan came out of seemingly nowhere with what, to my ears, is one of the great statements of picking yourself up from an emotionally shattered place to one in which you can finally move forward again. Filled with acoustic guitars, quiet vocals, veering from intimate confessions to epic storytelling, it’s got the musical bravado of his mid-60’s work coupled with an appealing fragility that endears the listener. Many people will prefer “Blonde on Blonde” or “Highway 61 Revisited”, but for my money, the introduction of vulnerability on this record makes it my favorite Dylan record.

So, I thought I’d pull a few quotes from this record to illustrate what I tried to talk about before: in the end, we never choose whom we’re with; they choose us. This is a long one, so I’ve broken it up over two entries. Buckle up.

I became withdrawn,
The only thing I knew how to do
Was to keep on keepin’ on like a bird that flew…
“Tangled Up in Blue”

So there I am this summer, mind full of upheaval, trying to simple things like paying bills, going to work, running the route I’d discovered in my neighborhood. Eat my dinner, write a little, go to bed. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Consistency was the key. A checklist for life. Check each box when the task reaches completion. Divvy up the day into blocks of time. Make it not through the morning, just make it until 10. Then 11. Pretty soon it’s lunch, and after this meeting, only two more hours to go. An hour to get home, and an hour later, in the shower after the run. Two hours of television after thirty minutes of cooking, 45 minutes of writing, set the alarm, and go forth again.

Of course, that’s all bollocks. That’s not living life, that’s holding it at a distance. And I’ve got pretty long arms. They go with the frame.

We’re now, at this point, something like 2-3 months into singledom. And I still hadn’t quite figured out how to fill in the gaps. Not simply in terms of the empty spot in my bed. That was the least of my worries. I’m talking more about the simpler, but in the end much more profound, gaps in time. Time usually spent at dinners, movies, trips to the folks’, times on the phone. Even simple things like DVDs and television at home. All time that needed to be filled, lest I remember what I used to do with the minutes and hours before.

He woke up, the room was bare
He didn’t see her anywhere.
He told himself he didn’t care, pushed the window open wide,
Felt an emptiness inside to which he just could not relate
“Simple Twist of Fate”

So I went and tried to force the issue. OK, well, historically I had only dated friends, and I wanted to date again. Two months later seemed to be about right. Take off the inky cloak and all of that. After all, I had left her. Hadn’t left her for a person, at least, anyone specifically. More for an idea or an ideal.

Here’s how you don’t find an ideal: try really, really hard, because you’ll do one of two things. In the first case, you’ll want to see it in someone so badly that you’ll set yourself up for failure when they can’t live up to your all-too-high expectations. In the second case, you’ll apply expectations to someone who can offer you many things; just not what your preconceived notions have set for you.

All the while, your dreams try to show you this ideal. They never show her face, per day. Just a form. But every time you try to reach out for her, she disappears. And you wake up, 4 in the morning, because like Orpheus, you couldn’t wait. Couldn’t let things take their natural course. You had to see her face. And that overanxious impulse ruins everything.

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.
“You’re A Big Girl Now”

Having a publicly read forum such as this while all of the above has been an interesting experience, to say the least. Tears of a clown and all of that cliché stuff.

What it has been good for, thanks to your indulgence as readers, is a forum through which I can work through these issues. Not answer. Heavens knows I don’t have the answers. If I did, well, I’d package them and sell them to the highest bidder.

What I can also do, which is kinda fun, is write to certain people. I’ve been reading “The Da Vinci Code” recently, like most of the free world, and the notions of codes buried in works of art is pretty darn sexy. (OK, this website is not a work of art, but you get the gist.) The idea that hundreds, or thousands, of people can look at the exact same thing and yet, a handful can look beyond the surface and see something else that seems to have been put there just for them.

I’ve found codes in all sorts of songs. Sometimes they are in the lyrics, sometimes they are hidden in the bass line. In any case, these codes are unlocked simply by my personal interaction with this song. The unlocking of the code doesn’t produce an answer: it produces an emotional epiphany. You can’t put those types of experience into words, and you can’t share your experience in any meaningful form with anyone. Sympathy is possible, but not empathy.

I enjoy trying to produce such effects in some of you. The “you” is consistently changing, of course. And sometimes, the “you” is “me” and I only figure that out after I read over what I’ve written. Pick up almost any novel: you’ll notice the writer only thanks one or two people usually per tome. They want people to enjoy their writing, no doubt. But only a few people in the end really matter.

End of Part 1. Please proceed to Part 2.

It’s funny how the outward appearances stay the same. You get up, brush your teeth, walk to the train or your car, you go to work. You get your coffee, you yawn as you turn on your computer, you twiddle your thumbs as it boots up. You open a document left from the day before, or you flip onto the Web for a few quick site visits. You go through your morning, same as it ever was.

In the meantime, you go through your day and no one’s the wiser. You alone endure the storm in your soul, and the struggle is the sweetest one you'll ever have.

I normally hate a “what I did last night” post, because those are inherently as dull as a Jean-Claude Van Damme Movie Marathon that features his post-“Bloodsport” oeuvre. That all being said, I’m gonna throw one your way, relying on my narrative prowess to get me through this entry (and this slight hangover). Let’s break it down, ghetto country-style…

Hey y’all, so I’m workin’ fer the man yesterday, getting’ my work on, and I get this email. Askin’ me if I wanna live like a P.I.M.P. and celebrate my co-worker’s birthday. I figure I don’t none wanna do that, cuz hey, “Angel” is startin’ sweeps, but oh well, what the hey? I strap on my gat and declare it huntin’ season on my liver.

(OK, that’s just plain annoying. Gonna go to ordinarily annoying me-prose. All the taste, none of the calories! And without any more 50 Cent references, which is always a good thing.)

So it’s Derek’s birthday, and I meet him and another co-worker Matt at Friday’s just around the corner. I don’t wanna call these guys the Norm and Cliff of this particular Friday’s, but the analogy is fairly apt in the “local superstar” aspect. These guys know everyone who works there. And “everyone” means “a series of really cute waitresses and bartenders who flirt mercilessly with them”. So these guys are, as I like to say, “good company”. And hey, lookie here, $3 draft specials on 22 oz frosty goodness! This bodes well, verily. So well that I’m slipping into faux-Elizabethan English here. Rockin’.

We’ve got 45 minutes before we go to Bar #2, nominally. Figure hey, throw back two of these, and Rusted Root will send me on my way. (On my way.) But lo, after Beer #2, three gigantic shots are put before us. On the house. This is the Greatest Bar Ever. “What are these called?” I ask the bartender. “I’ll tell you afterwards,” he says. OK, now I’m a bit nervous. The three of us attempt some form of collective cheer, but it devolves into some pagan bloodletting ritual cry of pain. Oh well. Down the hatch.

Some form of a Raspberry Rickey shot. Perfect to go with beer. OK, not. Here comes Beer #3, because now it’s clear we’re not leaving soon, and why just sit there, right? After Beer #3? Shot #2! Of course! The first round did such great box office that they commissioned a sequel. Actually, I’d liken this shot to a bag of crack, since we got the first hit free, but were charged for the second. This one was served by Jenna, who I’d met during Game 5 of the Red Sox/Yankees series, and almost makes me think revisiting 20 year olds would be a good idea. OK, nothing on earth could make me think that.

To cap the night, the male bartender brings over a cake for Derek. Not an in-house cake, mind you. The guy bought the cake at a local bakery that day, and instructed the other bartenders to hold us there until he picked it up and returned. Again, the Cliff/Norm parallel holds. All the wait staff came over and sang to him. I think they put something like 500,000 points on his Friday card as well. The guy could now treat the company to lunch for a year on his points. I don’t care if you think going to a bar that often is something to praise, but be that as it may, these people treat my co-workers good, so why wouldn’t you go as often as possible?

So, let’s do the math. I wish I had some Photoshop skills here, because I’d do a tale of the tape graphic and impress you all with my visual as well as verbal wit. As such, you’re stuck with a guy who only installed Moveable Type after selling his eternal soul to Satan, so you’re stuck with merely a typed breakdown:

• Three beers, 22 ounces each: 66 ounces total


• Two shots, one of a Raspberry Rickey variety, another of the vaguely pink, “I’m still manly if I drink this, right?” variety

So, basically, 5 beers worth, and 3 drinks minimum in shots. I’ll round down and assume I had basically 8 drinks according to FDA standards. Friggin’ FDA. Illuminati, all of them.

Now we move to Clerys. Clerys is a bar I’ve talked about quite a lot on here, and if you’re one of my four non-Canadian readers, I recommend checking it out. We go to Clerys because it’s karaoke night, and Derek loves to get his sing on. He was in a cappella in college, and unlike me, can actually do a good job on the mic. He’s got about 15 people waiting for him there, none of whom I know. I get into social panic mode, which is easily solved by, you guessed it, more beer.

Now, karaoke had started 20 minutes earlier, but no one had stepped up to the plate yet. We’re trying to get Derek to sing, but he’s not feelin’ it yet. Meanwhile, I’m feeling the buzz like a madman. I was covered in bees! (OK, eight of you got that. Sorry to the other 4 of you.) I’m trying to make conversation with strangers, which is difficult, because I’m naturally shy when meeting people, and at this point English is almost a second language.

But hey, our first karaoke guy is announced! Attention can be focused. Up pops Generic White Masshole to the mic. Seriously, I think somewhere in Waltham, they have a Masshole Cookie Cutter, and they just churn them out, one after another. This was the “brown-eyed smarm” variety of the Masshole Keebler Elves Company. So what’s the dude sing? “Nothing But a G Thing”. Holy crap. Not only does he do this song, but he does the whole thing about an 8-count behind, and drops the N word every time that Dre and Snoop did. OK, can I get an “Awkward” from the congregation? I haven’t been this embarrassed since the infamous family Christmas Yankee swap which saw my aunt take a CD player from my step-uncle who was DYING OF CANCER. Oh man. I’m moving on.

Now, I blame what happens next on the following beer. So, I’m on drink 10, I’m looking around at the people scanning the karaoke books, and inspiration strikes. OK, it didn’t exactly strike, since it had to burrow through the 6’’ alcoholic haze around my head, but it glanced my noggin’ after a decent struggle through the fog. So I write down my choice on a piece of paper, and hand it to the karaoke DJs: two African-American males still pissed off about the “G Thing” incident.

About 15 minutes pass. And a girl walks by, and she looks familiar, but then again, I’m introduced myself to the girl I’m currently talking to like three times by this point, so I wasn’t too trusting of my instincts. But I’m sure I’ve seen this girl before, and tell Derek’s friend this.

“Dude, you should totally talk to her!” she cries out.

“Nah, I sssshouldn’t, um, like, talk to herrrr…I means, what if I’m…sssshurely it can’t be herrr.”

“Oh, just go, you wuss.” “Wuss” didn’t have the same charge as being called a “timid-hearted chickenshit” in New York last month, but had the same galvanizing effect. The equalizer in this situation? You guessed it, my two best friends, Barley and Hops. So I saunter, so near as I guy my size can saunter, and long story short, I went to high school with her ten years ago. I pulled her name so far out of my ass that I cleared my sinuses. But hey, we’re chattin’, catching up, she’s teaching phys ed out in Lexington, coaching a lacrosse team, and…

“Next up, we got Ryan!” says the karaoke DJ.

I excuse myself from my classmate and head to the mic. One of these guys has a “You best not drop the N word, cracker” look going my way, but the other guy knew what I had selected. Mind you, I’ve never sung karaoke before. Ever. Just hadn’t. Mostly because I respect people’s desires to enjoy themselves while out and figure my singing would negatively affect that possibility. But hey, there I am, ten drinks into the night, a small crowd surrounding the stage. The words start to flash on the laptop, and away I go….

Blame it all on my roots
I showed up in boots
And ruined your black tie affair

Yea, I really did sing this…

The last one to know
The last one to show
I was the last one
You thought you'd see there

There I was, singing country music, in an Irish bar…

And I saw the surprise
And the fear in his eyes
When I took his glass of champagne

Maybe the alcohol affected my vocal chords, cuz hey, I didn’t sound too bad…

And I toasted you
Said, honey, we may be through
But you'll never hear me complain

And the crowd’s now into it, I’ve forgotten about the monitor, walk towards the crowd, and work it like a pro:

'Cause I've got friends in low places
Where the whiskey drowns
And the beer chases my blues away
And I'll be okay

Well, no blues to be found, this much is true. I’m using every move I practiced in the shower: the mic toss from hand to hand, the “point at the person in the crowd and acknowledge that you’re united by the power of music” move, all of it…

I'm not big on social graces
Think I'll slip on down to the oasis
Oh, I've got friends in low places

So yea, 10 drinks and karaoke must mean I’m not too big on them social graces, but damnit, it was fun. And here I am, alive to tell the tale.

If you’ll excuse me, my liver wants to have a word. Happy Thursday.

It’s so rare that I can requests for content that I leap at the opportunity. Oh sure, I’ve had plenty of requests to STOP, but cease-and-desist letters now go through my attorneys and Bartles and James Associates. And this request didn’t even come from a Canadian, so I’m getting love within my own borders as well. Who knew? I’m waiting for a Mexican faction to arise, and the I’ll truly be the NAFTA of the blogging world.

(Speaking of Mexico, the “I’m almost Eva Mendes, But I Got Hit By a Truck Halfway There” trophy wife on “24” bugs me. Someone needs to put her nose in the microwave, it’s not done yet. Just like 2 minutes on “Reheat” is all I ask. Anyways, I had to get that off my chest. Yes, I'm as shallow as an above-ground pool. Sorry. Moving on…)

Today’s request comes from my friend Kristen. Kristen and I were school together, back in the dayz. Kristen managed to seduce almost all of our mutual theatre friends to the Dark Side that is “Buffy”, leaving only Tim and myself to scratch ourselves off to the side, looking confused. OK, that was only me. Regardless, Kristen’s “good people”. Go to Webster’s Dictionary, look up “good people”, and there’s a picture of Kristen, holding up a sign that says, “Ebola is hysterical!” That’s Kristen.

She was too darn important to comment on my “Buffy quotes” article on Monday, but sent me the following via email:

***
From: Kristen
To: Ryan
Subject: If you really loved me...

...You'd be able to relate one of the following quotes to your life…
***

I’ll do you one better, Kristen. I’ll use all three. And hopefully embarrass you in the process, if I’m lucky. Let’s get to work!

Xander: Just think of my lips as the fruit roll-ups of love.

OK, I can’t even remember which episode had this in it, and I’m too lazy to look it up. But I’m gonna let my confusion lead my on to remember the time I was most confused around Kristen: namely, the two months she tried to transform me into a woman.

So there I am, minding my own damn business. It’s February, 1998. I’m entering my final semester of college, I’m dealing with 4 major design projects, a muddled female situation, the whole “what are you gonna do after graduation” thing, the “what would you do for a Klondike bar” thing….I mean, a lot of important stuff, right?

And I get a call from Kristen in my room. Back then, in the dark ages, we had “landlines”. These were phones, get this, connected to walls. Crazy, huh? So she calls me, and offers me a part in her show “The Valiant Villain”. See, despite thinking kids are super icky when coming forth from her own loins, she seems to have very little problem with other children, as evidenced by the Children’s Theatre company she founded while in school.

“Wow, me? Acting? No way!” I said.

“Yea, I think you’ll be great for this part,” she replies.

“What’s the part?” I ask.

“The villain’s wife.”

OK. This is the part where, if a movie, the camera does that “zoom in while dollying backwards” trick on my head, which now bears a panicked face. I wasn’t sure what about me possibly screamed “able to play female well”. Harvard scientists had seen me in a swimming pool and ran tests to see if I was the Missing Link. I mean, “Ryan” and “feminine” had never been uttered in the same sentence without “is in no way at all even close to” bewtixt them.

But hey, it’s Kristen, it’s seven lines, how hard can it be?

Now, by this point I had done a fair amount of designing and directing. All low-brow, amateur stuff, but one can be in amateur production with professional standards. Such as showing up to rehearsals on time. As director or designer, I had sat impatiently at many rehearsals, waiting for people to show up. I couldn’t believe what morons these actors were, making me wait and losing precious time.

So yea, I completely forgot about my first “Valiant Villain” rehearsal. Flat out didn’t go. Yea, go me.

So, instead of a group rehearsal, my first experience as an actor in college took place in the basement of a dormitory, in a dance studio, learning how to walk like a woman.

Poor Kristen. Forty-five minutes trying to get me to freakin’ walk. It was like the anti-“Wade Robson Project”. Cuz what I learned, see, is that I had to lead my walk with my hips, not with my…well, I had to lead it with my hips, she said, getting increasingly frustrated. Meanwhile, I pulled flexors I didn’t even know I had. Ouch.

So, show eventually comes, and at the last performance, I see a few kids who had been there for the first show of the run. We were encouraged to talk to the audience after each show, and I walked up to the kids. “Hey, great to see you back!” I say, in my character’s high-pitched Southern drawl.

At this point, the mother of the pair speaks up. “Yea, I had to take them back. All they’ve been talking about for three days is the guy in the dress.”

So, Mrs. Lady, yea, you know now where to send the bills for their therapy.

Willow: Do you see any goats around? No, because I sacrificed them.

See, here’s the thing. I’m not truly convinced Kristen is actually female. It’s not just because she never put out to me, which is a historically true statement. I tried again this summer while at her parents’ summer rental out here in Gloucester, and all I’m saying is call me Jackson, cuz I was Stonewalled. It could have something to do with us being really good friends. I’m hoping it’s not because of all those lewd voicemails I’ve been leaving all these years.

No, I say this because I think I have more of a maternal instinct than she does, and she’s the one with the breasts in this equation. I keep thinking age will decrease this proclivity of hers, but nay, it ages like fine wine. Her basic attitude towards babies seems to be: “Fun for dropkicking!” OK, I’m exaggerating here, because that’s what I do. Kristen has a sense of humor that’s as unique as it is sexy, and just like Willow, she has a hard time just flat out accepting when people recognize her full-on stud-dom. (Well, except in my case. She accepts my monetary tributes via her Swiss account.)

So what’s the connection between Willow, Kristen, and myself? We’ve all slept with John Stamos, first and foremost. But above and beyond that, I pick up on Willow and Kristen’s fundamentally warm-hearted attitude towards people, coupled with a dose of cynicism and apprehension aside. Maybe not the type of people you’d pick out of crowd, but would definitely gravitate towards at a party once you get to know us. Then again, they are both much funnier than I am, so I’d just hope to be able to hang with them if we ended up at the same party.

In terms of bacchanalian goat-slaughtering, I can clearly see Kristen, in the fall of 1998, double-fisting on the dance floor a bottle of port and a bottle of sherry. Her eyes are closed, and she’s swaying to the music. (It was her cast part, so I’m assuming 80’s music here. Hell, this girl took “Shut Up and Dance: The Paula Abdul Remix Album” off my hands, for crying out loud.) At one point, she opens them, looks at me, and goes, “This is the best night ever!” And then she killed the goat. And by “killed the goat” I mean “drank more”.

Kristen drops some of the best deadpan email humor known to Man. I drop mad flava here on the website. (Apparently the flava is “Canadian bacon”. Who knew?) Willow drops into severe vein mode and almost ends the world. It’s like, so eerie, these similarities.

Xander: I'm seventeen. Looking at linoleum makes me wanna have sex.

OK, so here’s one of my favorite Kristen stories.

You have to understand, I’ve got just under a foot of height and more than 100 pounds on this girl. She’s hardly a wee lass, but for the story to make sense, you have to get a sense of the size differential. It’s early 1998, and it’s her 21st birthday.

I volunteer to take her out. Now, at the time, there’s barely anyone at school, since most people were due back in 3-4 days. We were there, along with the Commander and others, since we were all involved in some way or another with the Commander’s production of “Antony and Cleopatra”. But Tim doesn’t drink, and no one else was legal, so it was just the two of us going out. It’s a Friday night, and we are scheduled to be at set-building the next morning around 10 am.

She wants to go to the Hong Kong for Scorpion Bowls. For those of you who have never experienced this libation, the easiest way to describe it is a “Big Blue Bowl of Death”. So near as I can tell, this sucker was Kool-Aid mixed with Everclear and gasoline, only all you can taste is the Kool-Aid. The 47 umbrellas in this thing didn’t help matters. Kristen and I down one of these bad boys, and I think I have a few more drinks. She abstains from further drinking, because she’s a lot smarter than I am.

So, now, it’s around midnight, and I have to walk her back to the Quad. The Quad is Harvard’s answer to, “Exactly how far can we put the dorms from the main campus before we reaaaaallllyyy piss them off?” About a quarter-mile into the walk, the Scorpion Bowl initiated “Operation Double Vision” in conjunction with my traitorous liver. Kristen, meanwhile, is fully coherent, wildly eloquent, and mocking me for being a lightweight. Half a mile later, I start talking in tongues. Luckily, by this point, at least she’s not sober, but if this were a marathon, I’d be a Kenyan, and she’s be P. Diddy.

We get back to her dorm, but for some reason, we have to go to her boyfriend’s room. He’s there, and has been mainlining tequila with his friend Rachel. I’m doing JJ Walker impressions by this point, if JJ Walker were “Drunk Girl” from “Saturday Night Live”. So now we have three extremely drunk people in the room, with Kristen neither winning, nor placing, nor showing in this particular race, which is of course all for the best. At some point, the boyfriend gets Kristen out of the common room, leaving Rachel to full on attack me.

Which would of course ruled all, except I had a girlfriend at the time. And Rachel was co-producing “Antony” with her. Theatre: it’s smarmtastic!

So, I’m got my conscious, and it’s all, “Ooooh, bad Ryan. Leave now.” And I’ve got the Scorpion Bowl taking a steel chair to my morality like a WWE heel. Luckily, my morality got pulled out of the ring at the last minute by its tag team partner, Conscious, and escaped. Needless to say, as I tried to get Rachel to leave, she whispers, “Room 414. Just, like, so you know.” And leaves.

Somehow I make it back to my girlfriend’s place that night, and God love her, she took care of me. This is the night I thought, “Wow. She’s really great. Maybe this will work out.”

Three hours later, I was still vomiting. Two weeks later, we had broken up. I was a stupid, stupid boy. I’ve done a lot of growing up since, though. Now I’m a stupid, stupid man-child. All about evolution, baby.

So Rachel was linoleum that night. But look, just cuz we wanna have sex a lot at that age (OK, at this age), doesn’t mean we’re gonna. I mean, I go to bars all the time. I see people eating appetizers I would like. I don’t go over and snatch their plate up and take it. I mean, what do you do? Room 414. Prolly coulda gone, had drunk fun, and lied about it. I mean, I lied about it easily enough later on, right? Not proud of it, but I did it. Xander has a chance in Season 2 to have sex with Buffy, which up until that point in the show had been his primary hormonal objective, but wouldn’t, because she was “under the influence” of a spell. I didn’t worry so much that night about Rachel being drunk as my girlfriend home alone and sober.

Now, I can say in hindsight that worrying about the whole booze thing should have been a bigger concern. One of my basic policies in “ first kiss etiquette” is, “Make sure they’re sober.” A good rule of thumb for a first of any physical type, I suppose. We all have the physical urges, it’s about figuring out how to control them. Hardly a revolutionary statement, but one application to Xander, Kristen, and myself. Xander is ix-nay on the Uffy-bay, I resisted Rachel that night, and Kristen somehow resists the hot sexy beast that is me.

The sex thing is all weird now for me. I mean, you know it’s bad when your own mom tells you that you need to get laid. While you’re in a steakhouse, no less. I mean, that’s just odd. But hey, that happened to me recently. Another one of those things that makes me…well, me.

In some ways, I’m still, and always be, Linoleum Boy. (Saying “Linoleum Boy” is a bit like saying “Boy Boy”; this I realize.) But priorities are shifting, lately. Not about going to bed with someone; it’s about waking up next to that person. The latter just seems more important to me. I mean, my body pillow is great and all, but something a little more substantial, sooner rather than later…well, that’d be pretty nice. I mean, that's the goal, right? Someone with whom we "fit"? In any and all situations. I think spooning is a great place to start figuring out that interpersonal jigsaw puzzle. That's just me, though. As usual, I could be very wrong here. Don't think so, though. Not on this point.

(As a post-script, Kristen made it fine and dandy to set-building the next day, and her, Tim, and others took turns listening to my moth-mouthed explanation on one person’s voicemail about how I was too hung over to even contemplate getting out of bed, never mind construct Cleopatra’s mansion.)

****

Well, Kristen, I hope I proved my love. As for the rest of you, if you have questions or topics for me, fire away. I’m populist that way. (I’ll look at any and all t-shirt designs as well.)

(Man, that's the catchiest title I've ever written. Go me.)

I’m subject to a particular form of synergy, I feel. A conservation of collective social energy. I can never have less nor more than that established some years ago. I’m not sure when it was established, or who say, “Yea, verily, give him that, and um, stuff…” but someone did, either On High or while high, and well, here I is.

My homegirl Kristin got me thinking about times past with her Halloween outfit, “The Walk of Shame”. I’d heard about these in college, where basically, at 9 am on a given Sunday, you’d see a parade of freshman girls slinking back to Harvard Yard from the upper-class dorms, wearing the same tight number from the night before, clearly having not changed nor showering, and trying desperately not to make eye contact with the other 483 girls doing the same thing. (OK, this was Harvard, no way were we having this much sex. You’ve got a point. Unless you were in the band. And I don’t even remotely wanna go there.)

I have an anthropological interest in this Walk of Shame, since I never had a girl leave my room in shame. Usually, they’d break out the Ryan-supplied megaphone and shout, “Oh, yea, I got me some hot McGee action last night and you didn’t SUCKA!” the entire way home. In the meantime, I’d position my speakers into the courtyard outside my dorm, play “We Are The Champions”, and do the Running Man clad only in my boxers and a Calvin and Hobbes t-shirt.

(This last paragraph has been brought to you by the “Ryan McGee Revisionist Historical Society”.)

So, yea, times past. I’ve talked about the sort of ever self-replacing group of friends I have. Well, acquaintances, more than friends. I try to delineate the two because I really value the notion of “friend” enough to not throw it around like an egg from a frat house when I’m just trying to get home from a Radiohead concert. (F#ckers. Sorry, bit of a regression there.) Acquaintances are fairly enough to come by, provided you speak a common language (“beer” counts as a language here), you don’t smell too bad, and you can stop from saying things like, “Normally I don’t talk to people as ugly as you, but my options seem pretty limited right now.”

An acquaintance is the type of person that is fun to hang out with or talk to, but really, you don’t notice that you haven’t seen them in two months unless reminded. And then you go, “Huh. How about that?” And then you keep eating your bagel, rather nonplussed about the whole thing. It’s like “Not Another Teen Movie”: you’re perfectly happy when it’s on, but you never think to yourself, “Man, I really need to see ‘Not Another Teen Movie’ right now.” Cable television is a great acquaintance metaphor. My roommate and I pay something like $70 a month for television. We don’t even know all the stations we have. And yet, over the weekend, we added like 20 more. He wanted Fox Sports World, and the Comcast guy rambled off the stations we’d get with the upgrade, and I had to stop him sometime after “The Sushi Network”, cuz really, at that point, I didn’t care. I can barely find Bravo as it is; I don’t need the cable company to go all Avril and make things so complicated.

So yea, back to the acquaintance/friend thing. (And I’ve misspelled “acquaintance” every time I’ve typed it, so I’m going to change this up to the “A/F Distinction”, or “AFD”, or, since it’s even easier, I’m just gonna call it “Steve”.) The “Steve” thing is mellifluous; it’s consistently changing, and can morph from one state to the other. Sometimes you remain stubbornly in the former state, trying to get to the latter. That was the situation I found myself in with Obi Wan, who I can’t call Obi Wan anymore, cuz we’re actually friends now, so yea, me and Sarah took five months or so, but finally reached a level of Zen. Well, as Zen as two neurotic people can get, but hey, it’s something. (That being said, since “Steve” is so moist, she could be “Obi Wan” again by the holidays. I promise to keep you informed.)

(I apologize to anyone named “Steve” who is now going to be described as “watery”. Moving on…)

So, the spirit of Sarah and I movin’ on up (to the eastside), I had a position open up for the acquaintance position, and lo, it filled itself with the return of “O Girl”, who started all the hubbub a few months ago with the “How long would you stay with someone who’s not getting’ you to the sexual promised land?” Well, after much debate, both here and on Capitol Hill, she dumped his booty this week and called out of the blue to tell me so. And for the record, in the months since that initial debate, nary an O was achieved. O, my.

I’m thinking also that there has to be a third category in this day and age of technological wonderment: the blog buddy. (OK, crap, I’ve got the “My Buddy” theme in my head now. Damnit.) I mean, when society leads us to this point, you know it’s here to stay. (Semi-not safe link for work.) They’re not friends, because you’ve never met them. They are less than acquaintances, even though you interact with them (through reading, instant messaging, emailing) more than your acquaintances, because call me old-fashioned, but the human touch is still of the utmost importance to me. (Especially if you touch there…no, lower…little to the left…ahhh, that’s it, that middle-back itch was driving me nuts.)

I have quite a few BBs out there, and they are a good lot, by and by. For some reason, I’m developing a lot in Canada. This I don’t get. Know how Germans dig David Hasselhoff? Canadians dig Ryan McGee. But hey, there you have it. They like their prescription meds cheap and their blogs as cool as a mountain stream. Know how the Black Eyed Peas are at a loss as to the location of “the love”? It’s up north, baby. Between the comments on the site and emails asking my hand in marriage, Canada has proven most excellent in their taste.

BBs are like acquaintances, I word I will never type again because I’m physiologically incapable of typing correctly. Amen to spell check. They are alike in that they are very fluid. (“Fluid” and “moist” are both words that I consider “icky”, but they are sadly appropriate, so let’s just trudge on through, shall we?) They come and go, and every once in a while you go, “Huh. How about that?” Only in this case you return the email or dig up the website or so forth and so on. And yesterday marked the return of one into my general e-vicinity. I’m gonna ignore the fact that it was basically a form letter with my name typed into the top and post the picture she sent me. It’s appropriate, since she sent the picture that started my last rumination like this, and me, I’m all about coherent narrative threads. (This entire entry withstanding.) That and posting hot pictures that girls send me. I'm all about that as well.

Happy Election Day In Some Parts of the Country to you all.

The Meesh and a milkmaid at Halloween...

The whole “inspiration” is a fickle thing. I mean, sometimes, reeling off 3,000 words is the easiest thing in the world. Something hits, I got to a computer, and boom, the thoughts flow. I like those days. After all, besides being a platform for eventual world domination, this whole blog thing should be FUN, right?

I don’t mean that the writing should be always funny, of course. God knows I’ve been short with the funny lately. The phrase “the funny” is a particular one to me that I associate with all things Joss Whedon related; specifically, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Angel”. I like copping to this source, if only that these are the two shows I appreciate above all for their writing. I appreciate shows such as “24” and “Alias” for their plots, but not always for the actual dialogue. Where Team Whedon succeeds above and beyond the call of anything we as a television audience can possibly hope for is the blending of “the funny” and “the serious”, usually within the same scene. It’s the only television universe that revels in communication so much; they are drunk on language and words and turns of phrase. It’s kinda hot.

I mention all of this as a way of me rationalizing “out loud” as to what makes all of this blog stuff work. I’ve taken a habit of looking back at the month that was for the site, just because even I forget what it is I’ve said over the past month. I’m too busy living my life to remember what it is I actually do for those 24-hour periods, after all. What struck me was how, on the last days of both September and October, I shaved my head. I don’t know if there’s symbolism in that. Maybe I like to start fresh after every 30-odd day cycle. Maybe I just wanna make my bottle of shampoo last longer. Who knows. October wasn’t the emotional clusterfuck that September was, thank God, but provided a host of new and bizarre and (not always) unpleasant sensations, encounters, and drunken revelry.

So, as a way to wrap up the month that was, I’d gonna turn it over to the writers of Team Whedon for a little illumination of the month that was for yours truly. (All quotes derived from this site.)

Xander: Okay, let's not say something we'll regret later, okay?
Cordelia: You crazy freak!
Buffy: Vapid whore!
Xander: Like that!
“Homecoming”

There’s a particularly fine line one has to walk when writing a publicly read series of articles with a mix of people you both know personally and have never met. I guess lines, really, more than a singular line. It’s almost like writing a continuous sequel to a movie or a book, where some people know a foundation of material, but some people are coming to it fresh. You have to try and not exclude the newcomers without boring the old fogies. OK, that came out wrong, that whole fogie bit.

Especially when the subject is you. I avoided the topic of me for so long, that once I realized it was acceptable reading material, the proverbial floodgates opened. Hard to stop talking about yourself once you think someone actually gives a rat’s ass, especially for yours truly. (I should put that as point 6 of “Annoying Ryan Traits” a few days ago, I guess.) If I’m happy, I let you know. If I’m not, I let you know that as well. Usually, I avoid specifics, because the specifics are incredibly uninteresting except to me, and I lived through them, and as such, don’t need to recap which bar, with which person, with which beer. I guess in some ways it’s better to locate the story in a bar rather than an igloo, because the story didn’t take place in an igloo after all, but really, who cares? And I’ve just spent 200 words on something you shouldn’t care about. Moving on, quickly…

Airing unhappiness on the blog has always bit a bit of rough sailing, but usually I’ve been lucky enough to traverse the waters without a hitch. Pretty remarkable, in hindsight, since nearly everyone I have the power to affect knows about the site and reads it on a general basis. Well, all good things must come to an end, and October was the time for that streak to halt. Words hurled, feelings hurt. Not good times. Terrible times.

But hey, a new month. Patchwork on that little glitch already in progress. An important safety tip though, Egon. The blog is such a safe place for self-expression, thanks to all of you, that maybe I got a bit too comfy. Which gets us into the next quote:

Buffy: Xander!
Willow: Oh, wonderful Xander!
Buffy (while giving a group hug): You know we love you, right?
Willow: We totally do.
Xander: Oh God, we're gonna die, aren't we?
“Primeval”

(This is the part of the essay where I break kayfabe and pray to the Casting Gods to give Nicholas Brendon some post “Buffy”-work. OK, moving on…)

The trick in creating such a safe psychic space is that it can create a false social atmosphere. Ironic, since one of the inherent lures of a blog is to have a type of interactivity lacking in most other forms of expression. More immediate that journalism, farther-reaching that a chat room, longer-lasting than the leading deodorant, blogs implicitly need a community to remain self-sustaining. In a sense, they prop each other up. Look on the side of the main page, and you’ll see a dozen or so daily reads of mine. They in turn have a dozen or more, and it stretches out, tendril-like.

I don’t mean to beat the dead horse of “you read my blog, but gosh darn it, you can’t know me”, because if my stance on that isn’t clear by now, well, I’m gonna give up, quit my job, and just start watching “Passions”.

That being said, the type of community that has built up, through a combination of comments and seeing who’s linking me throughout the Internet, has had a bit of a scary effect. It’s along the lines of, “Christ, people actually read this, don’t they? I best not suck.” Need to be prolific. Need to be witty. Need to be earth-shatteringly amazing. (Luckily, I get great deals on cocaine, so the prolific part is taken care of.)

I guess above all, though, is the fear that, one day, that the comfort inspired by such a community will let my guard down enough to write the things which still lay dormant in my mind. Paragraphs and paragraphs of honest emotion dying to get into a CSS code. It’s all a bit Jack Bauer at the end of this season’s premiere of “24”; all sweaty, panting, wrapping the rubber band, tapping the vein, getting the syringe ready. (No, Dad, I don’t have a drug problem. Put down the phone.)

So I guess I’m a little like Xander in the quote above: surrounded by friends, enveloped in warm fuzzies, yet terrified. This is the one thing I do really, really well (well, this and cake decoration…and fan dancing…and Kofi Annan impersonations) and I’d rather keep doing it well.

(Did I really just type “warm fuzzies”? Yeesh. No more “Queer Eye” for me. Although Thom says can never have too many votive candles, and I just used my “out-loud” voice again, didn’t I? Damnit.)

Willow: I knew it! I knew it! Well, not 'knew it' in the sense of having the slightest idea, but I knew there was something I didn't know.
“Innocence”

I just love this quote. And Alyson Hannigan. And if I keep saying that enough, she’ll date me. Power of positive thinking, y’all.

Willow: 'Cause The Bronze is nice and familiar. It's like a big comfy blanky.
Oz: I was under the impression that I was your big comfy blanky.
Willow: Ahhh, you're my person blanky; this is my place blanky.
“Wild at Heart”

Again, I heart Alyson Hannigan. As the Spanish say, “Yo heart Alyson Hannigan.”

I love the idea of a “person blanky”. This gets back to terrifying “warm fuzzies” talk again, but bear with me. Maybe it’s cuz I can keep loose change in my forearm hair, but I like anything to do with the equation “Fuzzy=Good”. By the transitive property, I inevitably end up “Good” if we agree to this theorem and as such, let’s just agree to this and move on, shall we?

A “person blanky” is great because it need not imply anything sexual, although it certainly can. A “place blanky” is of course any ol’ place where you feel at home. It can be your physical home/apartment, or be a hangout. For me, lately, Manhattan has been said “place blanky”. For some of you, it seems, this ol’ site is your “place blanky”, and I highly encourage said attachment, since I need all the visits I can to prove to “Those Who Might Pay Me To Write” that I gots mad audience, G.

As far as the “person blanky” goes, well, the jury’s still out on that one. I don’t think I have one now, per say. I mean, I dig the Commander and all, but if I called him my person blanky he might not let me ever crash on his couch again. In essence, we’re talking about that person (and I think the meaning here is singular, you can’t have multiple blankies, and let’s forget I’m making such a serious point using the word “blanky” and run with it, OK) who makes you feel as safe and secure as possible. It could be through friendship alone, it could be through naked morning spooning, whatever. That person is your emotional armor against the world. “Person blanky”: a silly name for an incredible important function.

It’s all, in the end, about making that connection to reach this status. Because, really, unless one of you is psycho, y’all arrive at this blanket arrangement more or less concurrently. That should be the way it works. Sometimes it takes a few months, sometimes a few years…and every once in a while, it takes a mere number of days. And it’s always scary, because to admit to having this person is to admit you’re vulnerable. The fact that they can protect you means they are that much more able to hurt you. And that’s a risk some people simply aren’t willing to take. I’ve been on both sides of this particular conundrum, and Lord, it ain’t pretty.

It takes almost as much nerve to admit it to yourself as to confess it to your partner. You make a conscious decision to fight your unconscious impulse to give yourself over to another person. It’s instinctive, it’s instinctual, and sometimes, unfortunately, it’s downright impossible. You want to give, but you can’t. Or you give, and they can’t or won’t receive. Hardest thing in the world. But just because it often fails is no reason to never try.

You know, I’m leaving my mid-20s officially soon. Less than two weeks from now and I’ll be 28. Hardly old, but no longer young, really. And I’ve been on the go so long: almost 20 years of bouncing from one activity to another, days filled morning until night with things and events and games and homework and theatre and parties and love and heartbreak and, at the end of it all, here I am, on a quiet Sunday in downtown Boston. I’m in my office, the lights are buzzing, and the world is still. And after all the commotion of my day, my weekend, my week, my month, my year, hell, my life, I sit here knowing there’s only two things in this world I was put here to do:

To love and to write.

That’s all I think I’m good at, and that’s all I wanna do. You’ve given me the chance to do the latter, so I’m halfway there already. As for the other part, well, sooner or later, I think. I’m in the end a romantic with the exterior of a cynic, and every once in a while I molt and expose myself for who I really am. So there, you caught me in a monthly molt. (This metaphor sounded much nicer in my head that it does on the screen. Hmmm.)

We’re all really good at making our lives more complicated than they should be, but really, I’ve got two things I want to do, and I structure my life around those two principles. They’re pretty much worth giving up a lot of my current life to achieve. On the other hand, if I achieve these goals, I’m only gaining, not losing. Every once in a while I lose sight of these goals, but usually, someone’s there to remind me, whether they meant to or not. Some people make it so damn clear that the light is blinding.

So, for me, I’m gonna walk towards the light, and see where it takes me. I’ll let you know what happens on the way.

I promise.