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.

In a horror movie when the car won't start you give it one last try
The family unit seems to have sufficiently dissolved. When this happened, I do not know. One second it seems like you are ten and taking vacations to tropical southern locales, and the next thing you know it’s Easter Sunday 17 years later and you’re calculating the coordinates of disaster. The family unit is probably more closely akin to a burning building, now. I tend not to notice until it’s a holiday, and then it all becomes clear. I still hang out, make a go of the Easter brunch, but it’s hard looking at the fledgling form and the coming apart at the seams. “We are definitely a lively bunch,” I offer to the table today. Which may just elicit the kind of responses I’m more used to getting around the house these days. “Oh, it’s you,” my mom has said to me on entering recently. She doesn’t mean it, really. It pretty much all just broils down to her secret desire to run off with some sketchy hillbilly, and my further solidification of the overarching identity as Failure. It’s cool, I can take it—for about the duration of time it takes to get yelled at for eating all the pancakes. “See you around,” I say before making an exit.

Out of doors and into the sunny afternoon. Thankfully, there seems to be one location open today, as everyone I know seems to be involved in the intricate webs of social obligation and backyard barbeques that tend to characterize this holiday. That’s one thing I happen to be liberated from at the moment while simultaneously being burdened by at the same time. Border’s bookstore turns out to be my refuge. I can hang around in there, blend in with the sketchy vagrants, listen to albums I cannot yet afford at the listening station. That kind of thing. They are playing Cesaria Evora throughout the store today, and immediately I’m experiencing the placebo of context. The first girl I ever loved was into this album, and I remember listening to it on the floor of her dorm room at the elaborate liberal arts college she attended. The window was open and looked out over a courtyard, with the faint aria of college students coming and going. It did something to me, that song, which I had never heard before. It was a lightning rod of emotion that seemed to transcend genre and style and language, and hit me right between the eyes. And as we sat together on the floor that day, we cried and cried. And now, as a result, whenever I hear this song I tend to have the type of reaction that has me jogging for the exits. I know from my own experience a couple weeks ago that other human beings do not want anything to do with others who are offering up some wanton emotional display. And that’s understandable. So it’s out of the doors and into the world, crashing into people who are making an entry through those same doors, and getting in the car just in time to experience the paroxysm of emotion that seems to accompany listening to International music for me.

There seems to be no room for me outside of sadness today, on a day that is supposed to be about rebirth and rising up. I see a bumper sticker today that reads, Life is the school and love is the lesson. But mostly, the lesson seems to be alluding me. Or at the very least, showing up in song form long enough to remind me how sad things end up being. The gods, clearly, are messing with me, and they seem to be demonstrating a proclivity for Cesaria Evora. They could have better taste. But then, they could have worse, too.