School is out/ what did you expect
Nothing facilitates the springtime weather like Pavement coming through your well lubricated speakers, garnering that dumb as fuck dance step you do. You can almost see the specific notes coming through the air and making their way into your cranium, and as you do, making things cartoonishly OK. I’m old enough now to have seen some these albums reissued, and I’m sure admitting that I listened to Pavement back in the day is no better than listening to them now. But whatever. There’s a lot of messed up things in my life that I don’t want to own up to, and one of which is, well, never mind. One of those things, though, sadly—now that I can see you’re interested—is the fact that I missed the only Pavement show I had ever planned on going to, in the summer of the 11th grade, by sneaking out of the house to, among all things explicable, hang around outside a Grateful Dead concert. I can’t really relate the specific circumstances surrounding the executive decision to go to the Grateful Dead concert, but it may have had something to do with the fact that my best friend Jorge was living with my family at the time, and we had to keep our streak of 100 consecutive days of pot smoking alive. Either that or the more simple fact that it was really easy to sneak out of the house and there were two bicycles readily available and nothing better to do. We pedaled through a bad neighborhood that night, narrowly escaping the more literal stoning of rocks, and then stashed the bicycles in a hedge, to entertain the prospect of illicit drug purchases. This was my first revelatory cultural experience involving sucking the air out of a balloon, which had the ensuing result of walking out into traffic so plainly and calmly. Escaping the situation alive is in hindsight the real revelation.

Showing up at home the next day, languidly pedaling our way into the neighborhood as dawn crept into view, something definitely did not feel right. My mom, in the McGruff rime dog way of all-knowingness, had sniffed us out (asserting a certain paranoia towards the 1984-style of governing right off—my mom always had some amazing penchant for total omnipresence. There was really nothing you could get away with as a young juvenile, skipping school or anything else. If you had the car, it was pretty much assured that she would be at the stoplight next to you). Somehow, the missing bicycles, the disappearance, all added up to revoking the planned trip to New York City, and thus the prospect of seeing Pavement was dashed. It’s cool, though; Pavement will probably regroup in one of those lucrative late day career moves which has so many of your favorite groups getting back together. They’ll probably suck by then, but it’s cool because I won’t have to demonstrate my dance move, although “Summer Babe” will always make me think of far away things. Which, actually, aren’t too far away. And that's pretty good, I guess.