The Top Ten Songs of 2014

It's the season for lists. Although Santa didn't get me the majority of the things that I asked for like, world peace, or barring that absolute power for myself to rule in dominion over the universe. Maybe next year. Fingers crossed.

In no particular order, except that I've put them in order so you should pay attention: the top ten songs of 2014....kind of.

1. Thinking out Loud by Ed Sheeran-

The first time I heard this song I was driving to work and was immediately taken with how incredibly sweet this song is. The existentialist philosophies of Hume and Sartre be damned, let's just be sweet to each other for a while. All we've got is to spend this evening, this day, this month, this decade loving each other more. Even if we're old. But then we'll probably have to remind each other to take pills and adjust the television volume to accommodate our hearing loss. But it's all going to be okay. Look at all those dead stars.



2. Tenerife Sea by Ed Sheeran
I'm certain that if I was writing for Pitchfork I would criticize the simplicity of these two songs, how they are just some guy quietly singing over a guitar about loving someone with lyrics that aren't quite the poetry of Bob Dylan or Dylan Thomas or a girl that I went to graduate school with named Dylan. However, sometimes it's nice just to think about how someone looks wonderful in a dress or a suit and appreciate the fact that you love them. Also, his voice is nice isn't it?



3. Blank Space by Taylor Swift
There are better songs on the album. However, there are not any catchier songs that came out in 2014. I've witnessed several people lovingly singing this song in the last few weeks. I might have been one of them. I already wrote an extensive review of the album, so I won't spend anytime telling you how great it is because I'm a nightmare who writes like a daydream. 




4. Riptide by Vance Joy
It's one of those songs that somehow slips through the cracks of popular music and when you hear it you're confused as to why you like it unironically. It's okay. We can like it unironically together. 



5. If I Needed you

The problem with The Broken Circle Breakdown is that it's way to melodramatic and strange. The problem with this song from the movie is nothing. It's beautiful.

 "I see your reflection, ghostlike in the window, and now I am watching you, watching me, watching the rain. I don’t remember anything well. The act of love is an invention. You put your arms around my neck and lean into me. Your skin smells of soap and lavender. Shhh. Quiet, my love. The rain is falling in the garden—it sings."



6. Five Hundred Miles Justin Timberlake and Carey Mulligan

This isn't the version by the Proclaimers. Sadly. So sadly. However, this is Justin Timberlake singing like the man we always knew that JT was underneath all that rocking of body and getting sexy on dance floors. Secretly, he just wanted to sing us a nice folk song and marry Jessica Biel and strum his banjo on the porch. I love him too. 



7. Scare Away the Dark by Passenger

I liked hearing this song roughly once a week for a while. It put me in a good mood. A friend of mine said it was kind of self-righteous. She wasn't wrong, but if you can talk about running through a forest and staring at stars while singing loudly, which I did on the four occasions that I karaoke'd this year, channeling Fern Gulley, the poetry of John Keats, Luddites and the magic and stupidity of youth then I'm probably going to be inspired by your song. If just for a couple of minutes. 





8. All I want by Kodaline
Guys. I cried a lot during Fault in Our Stars. I cried when this song played. Maybe we can cry together sometime. 

I cried fourteen times during the movie. Most of the tears were of the mist variety, though it’s hard to say because I wear contacts, which have a tendency to dry out my eyes. I never exceeded a total of two tears, one from each eye. My right eye was much sadder than the left, and often produced a tear that spilled down my cheek until I wiped it away with the pointer finger of my right hand.

                Going in, I had planned on crying. I was looking forward to crying. I won’t explain why because I’m not sure that I had any particular reason other than that I knew the movie was intended to make me cry, and that I wasn’t going to resist that. I was going to row out of the theater on a river of tears.

9. Classic by MKTO
Guys. All of you. Let's go out dancing sometime. I want you to come with me. Let me know when you're free. 



T. 10th Dance with Me Tonight by Olly Murys
No seriously, hit me up. Or we can just dance at work or in Downtown Silver Spring.



T. 10th Ignition Remix R Kelly (who is terrible)

I don't know what this song about. I recently did a karaoke version. I think it might be a car and a party or something. But it's always in the top 10 of every year, including 1786.

T. 10th Counting Crows Raining In Baltimore
Also, every year since its inception including the year it came in second to Beethoven's fifth Symphony. 

A typical sort of evening

 

He awoke to a feeling of dislocation. Some mornings he felt as if his life couldn't possibly be his life. It was scientifically and rationally questionable, but when have human beings ever been rational? He brushed his teeth, shoddily and then swished around some mouth wash while not looking at himself in the mirror. He spat into the sink, ran the water quickly and looked up at his reflection.
What the hell happened to you? he thought.

He was working downtown at a school, assisting the kids with reading. The other day a kid had said to him, "I'm not going to call you Mr. anymore. You have to earn that. I'm just going to call you Smith."

That night, he sat with his friend in the corner of a bar, drinking a dark craft beer that cost eight dollars and tasted like figs.

"The worst part about the school system is that they've taken away corporal punishment. You could just knock some sense into a child if they sassed you."

"Did you feel sassed? Is the word that you're looking for sassed? I feel like you could have done better. Disrespected maybe?"

"That might be better, yes."

"You're saying essentially that you'd like to back to a time when people were basically silverback gorillas? That that was a better time to be alive?"

"Maybe just back to a time when you could rap someone on the knuckles for being a blockhead. And you'd use the word, "blockhead." Not like these kids today who are muttering that they don't give a fuck when you're actually standing there having a conversation with them, but they kind of mumble it, and you have to decide whether you're going to call them out on it, call every kid in the classroom who is mumbling fuck this and fuck that in nearly every corner of the classroom."

"Didn't Giuliani solve the crime problem in New York this way? Don't leave a window cracked or someone will steal the car?"

"Something like that. Leave a broken and the next thing you know the kids will be stealing the Statue of Liberty or something. Damn kids. So what you're saying is that I should confront them for saying fuck."

"No. I said Giuliani used it to stop crime. This isn't crime it's a classroom."

"He did it personally, Giuliani. You know. people always complained about his handling of Katrina, but he really could put in a nice piece of glass."

"I don't know that it was actually him."

"Aw. This is me making my disappointed face."

"What are you going to do about those children?" 

"Should I wow them with my knowledge. Fuck is actually a word of German derivation that means to strike with some amount of force. There is nothing these kids love more than a word etymology session."

"Who can blame them?"

"Not me. I was the same way at 14."

They drink their beers and scan the room. He wipes the condensation ring off the table with the edge of his sweatshirt, an old habit from growing up in a house where everything was made from authentic hardwood.

"How is your job?" his friend asked.

"It feels beneath me."

"It feels beneath you? You realize you have a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, right?  You should be paying these people for the privilege or writing something on your resume. Do you think the bards of old?"

"Bards of old?"

"Yes, the singers in olden times who used to spread the news and Homeric tales of wonder to the gathered peoples."

"Did they use a harp or  a mandolin?"

"Don't try to get me caught up in semantics. Do you think these guys went to a school and got a degree in songsmithing?"

"Songsmithing."

"Yes. The writing and crafting of songs. It's in the OED page 946."

"That's not even remotely accurate."

"These guys went around from kingdom to kingdom and sang for their bread. They didn't apprentice with other bards and critique one another's songs. Oh, I think your pitch was a bit off there, maybe try strumming the harp for half a beat longer. No."

He walked home on streets covered in light--lights from store windows, from taxis, from the street lights overhead. His whole world was swathed in light. At times, when his creative energy would sap, he would start grasping at straws looking for a reason that he felt his life slipping through his fingers like water from a creek. Perhaps it was because their was too much artificial light. He'd read studies about people going crazy when they were exposed to too much light over a long period of time. What he needed to do was see if the could apply for a fellowship on a submarine. Maybe taking a trip underneath the seas to somewhere dark would rekindle his imagination and allow him to write a novel that would change the face of American literature. He doubted it though. Mostly, if he was on a submarine he figured he would eat bag after bag of tortilla chips and stare out the window at the darkness, hoping for something to appear to distract him from the boredom of being on a submarine.

He lived in a small apartment with two cats, who's names were Humprhy and Bogart though sometimes he wished he'd named something better like Jingles and Mr. Kitty. The cats were his deepest and most intimate friends with whom he shared all of his secrets. In this way his life resembled a Murukami novel, though he hoped it wasn't as poorly written.

Sometimes he'd go next door if he heard the television on and knock on his neighbor's door. They'd slept together for a few months before she lost interest in him, citing his lack of motivation, chivalry, and the fact that he was a teeth grinder--a sound which annoyed her immensely. He thought that fault should have been forgivable. This particular evening, a cold and clear evening, grey outlines of clouds visible above fire escapes, one or two very bright stars, a stray cat mewling in the alley at a trash can--he knocked expectantly.

Life is a series of Distractions

 

He feared that life was merely a series of distractions and not the contiguous thing that he and the rest of the people he knew were trying to make it. This seemed particularly acute today, with the variety of ways that a person could go about without ever paying any attention to his own life, to his thoughts and feelings. Perhaps all these distractions were mere trifles—idle splashing at the top of the river, or perhaps they were indicative of humanities thoughts and feelings. It seemed, if the data was to be believed, both recently and throughout time, that mankind really was a bit of a petty creature grasping about for straws or gold or land or language or women. 

The idea that people should be engaged in some sort of authentic internal discourse was a bias in and of itself. Who is to say that the Roman soldier at the outpost of Gaul did not spend the day musing about his wife, or a woman’s white leg he’d seen passing in the street market, or his riches. Who’s to say that he was any more present to his life than we are now? Eastern cultures have been engaged in the practice of living intentionally for nearly two thousand years. Perhaps the natural expression of man was distraction. And, the deification of focus was the real problem. It was the focused men and women who moved the chain forward, built towns and skyscrapers, made banks and space crafts, rockets and the IMF. Perhaps the problem wasn’t a problem at all but a sort of coping mechanism. A default setting that allowed people to go about in the world without doing too much harm.

 It was an American President, no doubt a focused and driven man, who perpetuated a massacre from above in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on all those unsuspecting people below, going on about their idle and trifling days, buying food in the market, peddling across town, hanging clothes on wash lines, flirting with a girl, and then, ashes to ashes and dust to dust. Of course, the alternative could reasonably be true as well. The Buddhists were well known for their love of peace and solitude. Perhaps all this distraction was not just one of the baser developments or manifestations of the human spirit. It might be reasonable to conclude that peace and solitude, presence to life, to each moment, to the leaves crunching under your feet, the soft trill of a bird, the motor on a passing car, your breath expanding and contracting, would be enough to bring you into some sort of community with yourself that would allow you to expand outward in peace. 

The thing to conclude, he thought, as he walked down a winding street filled with blinding sun light, was that distraction had always been a part of human nature, and the real question was what a person would do with it.

On Christmas Eve

 

On Christmas Eve we walked out into the night. First, we girded ourselves with heavy jackets, knit scarves, gloves and hats knitted over the past years by our aunts and grandmothers. The whole neighborhood was lit up, and the lights skittered across the snow. Our neighbor's house had a tableaux of the manger, replete with a donkey, a cow, a camel, and two sheep all gazing towards replicas of Joseph and Mary, though they both looked a bit too Caucasian, who were in turn looking into a crib at a small little bundle of Jesus.

We wandered further down the street, our bodies made shadows in the streetlights, and my son pointed to them and smiled, he and I, walking hand in hand in repeat on the bank of snow. At the end of the street we saw a group of carolers singing Joy to the World to an older woman, glasses perched on her head, who was looking at them with a face I can only describe as filled with wonder. The voices reached out to us across the snow, thick and full, like the snow that had fallen over night.

It was Christmas Eve and the lights were resplendent. Across the street from the carolers was a house that had a large snow globe in front. Inside the globe Santa stood at the front of a sleigh, pulled by eight tiny reindeer, and, smaller still, was a workshop complete with elves, work tables, benches, small screw divers, a saw, and small screws. And inside the workshop was a tree and gathered underneath it were presents that were both indescribably small but also of all shapes and sizes. None of us understood who could have made such a thing. We stood in awe and wonder as the angels must have stood on the seventh day of Creation.

We were carrying cider in our thermos's. We took a drink and were warmed. The night was cold, icicles hung on the eaves and bird houses had the water frozen over in their tiny feeders. A sheet of quiet lay over the whole street.

As we walked back towards home we passed a house that was completely unlit. It was so quiet and small that you almost didn't notice it, and we too almost passed it without a second glance. A porch light was on, creating a miniscule shell of light, but everything else lay in darkness. My children poked and prodded at me, asking why the house was not lit like the others, and I wondered what I should tell them.

The world is as mysterious as the ice. Ten years ago I had Christmas dinner with another woman in a far away city, and slept with her on the couch while the television played White Christmas. My children and everything before me were phantasms, nothing more than dreams. After dinner, she and I talked to her sister, who eventually went to bed, and then she and I sat on the couch and talked for hours about family, God, and silence. We got nowhere because no one ever does in these conversations, but we felt closer. I went to bed that night on the soft green couch thinking of the days ahead.

And now here I was bent down in the street, considering what to say to my children in this city thousands of miles away from where I'd been. "Someone died," I told them, and they seemed to understand, turning away and trudging with their little boots picking up bits of snow and sending it on either side, mini-snow plows.

Back in our own house, we kicked off our shoes, and I stoked the fire. After a while, I kissed the children on their sweet little heads and ushered them into sleep. Downstairs, I read an article about the situation in Iraq, the bombed out cities and broken families, I read about the ill treatment of chickens and animals the world over. My wife was wrapping presents and listening to a Christmas mix that I'd strung together by spending hours on the internet pulling things together.

Before bed, I was given a plate of cookies to put at the base of the stairs. I was instructed by my wife to take a bite from one or two and to leave it next to a glass of milk to convince them of the validity of a very strange being. And yet, as I reached the door, something possessed me this particular Christmas Eve to pass by the foyer and to open the door. It was cold outside. The moon was a sliver of silver in the black mountain of sky. I walked down the street, my feet slipping down into the soft snow, wetting my socks, I walked up to the house that was nearly dark, hoping that someone was still awake.

I knocked on the door, and it took a few moments for someone to answer. "I brought these to you," I said, to the woman, Helen, who answered the door. She smiled at me strangely, taking the plate of proffered cookies and turning as one of the children came downstairs, rubbing her eyes, wearing a blue nightgown, covered in snow flakes. "Who is it?" she asked her mother.
"The neighbor," she said.
"Oh," the little girl said, "I heard the door, and I thought you were Santa Claus."
I hesitated and received an encouraging smile from Helen. "I'm not, but he'll be here soon. You'd best get back to bed, so he can come soon."
The girl, a little angel with golden hair and rosy cheeks, the very picture of a bloom of youth, smiled at me brightly and marched back up the stairs.

On the way back home, a light snow started to fall, a flurry of snowflakes dusting the ground, brushing my cheeks like the fingers and lips of a lover. I walked back inside the house and up the stairs to where everyone was sleeping. I sat down in the middle of the hallway where I could hear them all breathing, and I thanked the Lord, in all his infinite wisdom or folly, strangeness, or irony for the sound of their breathing, even and steady, like the snow falling on the slender branches of trees. 

Taylor Swift 1989: The Album review that the whole world has been waiting for....mine

A friend of mine recently burned me a CD when I opined that I had run out of CD's in my car, leaving me only with the same old tried and trued songs that I liked a few years ago, a mix of Joe Purdy, Ray Lamontagne, and Ryan Adams. And while I'm still rather a fan of this music--sadness is universal--I was looking for something new. To make a short story rather longer than it needs to be, I heard Out of the Woods and was shocked to learn that it was Taylor Swift's song.

M: That song was by Taylor Swift? I liked it.

F: Yeah. She's good.

M: But I didn't like the song ironically. I just kind of liked it.

F: Yeah. She's great.

M: Huh.

A few days later I had a long conversation with one my part-time staff members about the six page review she was writing about Taylor Swift's new album, "1989.". Unfortunately, her editor told her that they didn't write about "pop" music. Thus, the task has fallen to me.

Song 1: This song says "Welcome to New York" a lot, which is great for my little daughter to sing along to because the words are easy to remember. After a while though you kind of wish she'd thought of some more lyrics besides just welcoming everyone to New York. Maybe something about Occupy Wall Street or how financially centric our economy has gotten. However, Taylor leaves these difficult topics on the side to welcome everyone to New York a lot of times.



This song by Rosie Thomas about New York is better:



Song 2 Blank Space

The thing that's annoying sometimes about pop music is how catchy it is. It just gets in your head like a really strong drink of alcohol and pings around in there like a pinball until you want to split your skull open and let the words fall out. Okay, it's not always that bad. The best thing about pop music is that it's catchy. This song is great. Taylor Swift is great, and I bet if we went to Starbucks together we could laugh about how they spelled our names wrong and wonder what kind of future two lover's with the names written on the cups would have that would be somehow different than ours because you just know Taylor Swift is up on the possibility of a multi-verse.



Song 3 Style

This song has the best chorus on the whole album. Mainly because it reminds me of that James Dean phase that my sister went through that didn't really make sense to me. So it's this guy who's been dead for a few decades who wore white shirts and drove around in old cars? Yeah. I'm in! Or maybe I wasn't. There's those classic lines of song writing like "good girl in a tight little skirt." I remember that girl, Taylor, and this part where you can sing along and have your voice go up a couple of octaves or crack or whatever floats your boat. But yeah. This is a winner. Also, I used to wear white t-shirts and have long hair. We could have beautiful music together. Or rather, you could have made beautiful music while I sat around drinking and complaining about the life of a writer. Next time around.

(Picture of me with long hair and white t-shirt no longer included)




Song 4-Out of the Woods (a conversation with my daughter)

s: Why does she want to get out of the woods?

M: The woods are metaphorical. It means she can't see anything.

s: Does she want to get into the clear?

M: Yes. She wants to get out of the woods, so she can see what's happening. its' a metaphor.

s: Oh. 

This is probably the "best" song on the album, in that you wouldn't have to like it ironically. You can just kind of like it. I prefer self-loathing.



Song 5 All you Had to do was Stay

I always wind up skipping this song or sending my voice up about 9,000 octaves to the range only hit by 15th century Italian eunuchs. In general though, I'm too worn out from loving the first four songs so much to really enjoy Stay other than singing, "Stay."

Here is a better song with Stay in the title.

Song 6: Shake it Off

This is the original anthem from the album because it got everyone excited to shake things off. In this track it's clear that Swift is channeling such legends as Galileo when he shook off the church's dismissal of his heliocentric world view. Swift, a student of many types of history is also channeling Gandhi's shaking off of oppressive British rule and subtly giving a shout out to the members of Occupy Wall Street, who tried and failed to shake off the shackles of 21st century capitalism.

Of course there's also the chance that this bouncy tune is all about the fact that haters are gonna hate, hate, hate, and so you just have to shake, shake, shake, but I believe it's a more complex song than that. I do. Let's dance.



Track, I've been using song before, I'm sorry 7 I wish You Would

This is one of those secretly good songs. Okay not secretly this girl has sold like 9 billion albums, which might be a low end estimate. Anyhow, coming off the high of shaking it off I feel like people could miss how great this song of stalker regret is. Sure she's still driving by the dude's house, but that's because she loves him bro. Haven't you ever loved someone and then lost them and then kind of treated them like crap to convince yourself that you were better off without them only to realize that you missed the very thing that you'd been repudiating? That is some rough shi- regardless of your age and station in life. Thankfully, we have this chorus to make us feel okay.

Track 8 Bad Blood

This kind of sounds like a Lorde song. But Lorde sings her version of this song better, so I usually wait until Taylor has told me about Bad Blood and problems a couple of times before I skip to the next song. I hear you girl. We all got problems. My problem is that I need to get to the next song.

Track 9 Wildest Dreams

On my first run through the album this song stood out as the best. Taylor is talking about hindsight and the ephemeral nature of reality and occasionally relationships. She is committing herself to the beauty of the moment in a way that would make Buddhist monks proud. And really, in channeling the best of Borges, she talks about the phantasmic dreams of the future in which these two lovers will remember each other, invoking a reality that does not yet exist nor that is guaranteed to justify her current state of affairs. But he's tall and handsome. We've all been there.

Track 10 How You Get the Girl

Thank goodness for track 10. After track 9 and pretty much every other track I'm starting to wonder if it's ever possible to get the girl, or hold onto her. But we have this song that tells us how precisely we are supposed to get the girl and then lifts us up to head shaking realms of happiness in it's catch little chorus. I've been known to wave my hand a bit in the car to this one because I feel exactly what Taylor is laying down. It's going to be okay. We're going to get that girl.
 (I could give you a bunch of randos covering this song, but I don't want to do that to both of us).

Track 11 This Love

Wait? Did she just reference Wildest Dreams in this song? It's like a meta-commentary that Swift is getting into here. No matter how far you run you can never actually run away from yourself and perhaps that's all we're trying to escape whether it be drugs, travel, pop music, or new loves. Of course, maybe she just wanted to write a pretty song.

But really this song makes me think that we're going to sail away on a ship over some emerald water and have everything work out fine.Also, it has a little musical riff that reminds me of that crazy ass movie Drive.

Track 12 I Know Places

I think this song is mainly about fox hunting. If my life had worked out differently, I'd be spending my days smoking pipes and hunting foxes. I like foxes and am partial to the Fox and the Hound. But honestly, let's go hunt some foxes or be the foxes or whatever. I'm in. I like what's happening here. We're hiding away, probably to smoke pipes. Do foxes smoke pipes?

Track 13 Clean
 I was getting ready to pan this song or say that I didn't remember it, but then I found this video of Ingrid Michaelson talking about the depth of song writing that Taylor Swift showed in this album. And I got to thinking that maybe Taylor Swift was like our version of Plutarch or Keats or something, and maybe we just needed to listen closer to the words especially when they didn't involve shaking things off.
I suppose rain is a metaphor of washing oneself anew in the way that baptism was in the early church. Thus, rain and water are serving a dual purpose of implying an external and internal cleanliness that people have been channeling for thousands of years. We hear you, Taylor. Plutarch hears you, and he gives you a nod. 


And so ends a wonderful musical journey that started a few weeks ago when I heard a song and thought, "this is kind of good." I'd suggest that you buy the album, but I can guess that you probably already have a copy and have bought two for your siblings. My daughter's review after four days was,
s: "I like this voice."
s: "Who is this voice singing?"
M: Taylor Swift
s: Taylor Swift is my favorite singer.
M: I hear you honey. I hear you.



 

Still in Rome

The light coming through the blinds made a filmy pattern reminiscent of the backs of pool chairs. The room was like an aquarium. The shaded parts were where the big fish were lying in wait. He crossed the room and lifted the blinds. The light coming through the window was filmy. he rubbed away the dirt and watched a crow idly peck at something dead in the street. It's movements were furtive and jerky.

He wanted to smoke, but he'd given up smoking except when he had been drinking, the same rule as everyone else he knew. He lay back down on the bed, contemplating his stomach and wondering whether he was starting to get fat. His phone rang, and he jumped out of bed to retrieve it from his pant's pocket. It was his mother.

"Hello," he said, holding the phone up to his ear and waiting expectantly for her to answer. "How are you?" he answered, crossing the room to pull aside the drapes. The crow had been joined by another crow, a larger one, who was missing one of his feet and hopped awkwardly as a result. His mother had been a vibrant, intelligent, and giving woman. As a child, she'd played classical music for him to lure him into sleep. They'd listen to Schubert or Beethoven for an hour, and he was often transported by the beauty and foreignness of the music into a dreamland of sleep. She'd carry him back to his bedroom, and he could still remember the scent of lavender that was bound up in her hair.

A couple of years earlier his mother had had a stroke, which left her partially incapacitated. Nevertheless, living so many years with the memory of his vibrant mother he was still surprised when she asked him four times when he was coming back from Rome. Her mind had slipped quietly off the track and was now plowing through fields of thick snow. As a result, he didn't relish her calls, but he didn't avoid them either. When he became frustrated, he tried to remind himself of those walks down the hallway, his cheek buried on her shoulder, his nose taking in the sweet smell of lavender from her hair.

"When are you coming home?" she asked.
The street below had gotten busier, and the crows had retreated to a small street tree to wait things out. They were patient and ugly. On the street below a gorgeous woman, wearing a white dress with a pink sash, walked her dog while talking on her cell phone. The dog peed unceremoniously beneath a tree, before moving on down the street. He wanted to open his window and call down to her, break her stride, if only for a moment. Too much of life was predetermined, and he occasionally had wild thoughts of wanting to break out of it.this was just such an opportunity, a time to do something out of character and strange. Of course, life was strange enough if he thought about it long enough, but like most people he knew there wasn't time to deeply consider things, only move from one thing or one person to the next in a manic drive for? For something.

But he was on the phone with his mother, and she was asking again, when he would come home. He walked away from the window and lay down on his small four poster bed, in his small room, filled with late morning light, and he told her again that he'd be home in December.

In Rome

Everyone wanted to appear in the story. Though they wanted their role to be central. It is hard to picture oneself as some ancillary character in the story of a novel, a person who carries a plate of shrimp across the stage or laughs in the background at a funny joke.

Drunkeness passed over him like a veil. And he sat beneath the veil as a child beneath a blanket, playing a game of hide and seek. The central actor in his life was himself. And yet, the self was diffuse, like sparks flying from a sparkler on the fourth of July. To call it a self was merely an extension of an irrevocable feeling, a western dogma like any other. He was confused.

In the morning they made love, By the afternoon as he walked along the Tigres, with light refracting on water, he'd forgotten her. It seemed strange to him that he could be two separate beings: one wholly invested in the process of pleasure, of the two of them making love. And one who could feel so distant from not only her but himself as he walked beside that old river that Rome had forgotten.

According to Celine travel was a way of forgetting, or for forging something new. He had found though that in travel he was just lost in new ways. He needed to go home, he thought, as he wandered by the dirty river, a small boat tugging tourists by the Castel Sain't Angelo, and there was an angel impaling the sky on his sword.

He was lonely in ways he couldn't quite define in words. Though he stayed awake late many nights scribbling in his journal, trying to give some narrative continuity to the events of a single day. Most days, when he was lonely, he would try to find a woman to pass the time. He was largely unsuccessful as he didn't speak the language and found women confusing.

And so he spent many nights wandering the city like a flaneur of old, taking in the smells and sights of a city that had already outlived its use. Nothing should be in Rome now but a group of archaeologists excitedly telling us what life might have been like 2,000 years ago And yet he found himself wandering past the remnants of the Colosseum, bending his gaze to the frayed edges of a lost civilization and to the frozen moon in a black jet of sky.

In the morning he had been making love, and now he felt so distant from that person that he might as well have lived in another country and never known her. This was viewed by some as a kind of callousness, and he saw that perhaps it was true. But it was something he couldn't shake. It was intrinsic to his very being, like a blood type or eye color. As he wandered the streets, smelling the inviting bread and cappucino drifting up from alleys a thousand years old, he really couldn't connect to the person he'd been last night in her room intent upon the task of pleasing her every desire.

The sun was shining now, and he was walking along the river. These were the only two things that were real. After a time, the wind kicked up, blowing bits of trash along the river bank and skittering along the wall. He considered these bits of trash as one might have considered a cow lowing in the countryside as a thing worthy of a moment's consideration before passing on to the next event in life.

He bought a ticket to go home that that evening while emptying a bottle of Cabernet. He was lonely in the profound sort of way that he'd been since he'd discovered that loneliness was a feeling that human beings could feel acutely, like hunger. He hungered for other human beings and often found them wanting. At home, he wanted to sit on the couch and listen to his mother tell him stories about when he was a child. In short, he wanted to find a brief cure for his profound loneliness.

Christmas is coming. It's time to make lists.

Top ten gifts I've ever received.

1) That time I got the G.I. Joe, or was it a Cobra plane. Except, guess what? Mom found out that we sneaked into her room and looked at gifts and she returned it. I don't remember whether this actually happened or not. However, having a Cobra themed airplane to destroy all of the other G.I. Joe's is probably as good as it's going to get.The only thing better thing better than a present is having a present taken away.

2) That time I got a puppy. I jest. I never got a puppy. But, imagine if I had, I would have been all like, "how can we take care of this animal with a conscience with all of those starving people in foreign countries? Now leave me alone, I'm playing PS2.

3) Sega CD. Oh, what's that you say? Nobody has a Sega CD? I did. Imagine skydiving from the moon into the earth's atmosphere without burning up, and also, you're flying a dragon. That's what it was like to have a Sega CD. Only better.

4) Hot Wheels. Any year. I spent most of my childhood racing cars down my driveway, and the year I got that little hot rod that could race all the way down to the gutter was one of the best of my life. However, by the end of the day, as the car rolled for the twentieth time down into the gutter I realized that it could never happen again; this was as good as it could get. Life has been mostly downhill since that moment though I think good things might happen in the nursing home gambling ring that I'm hoping to start in my 80's.

5) That time my wife surprised me with tickets to Europe. I mean, it hasn't happened yet, but I'm pretty sure she's planning it. She's planning it right? Yes? Yes? Oh, then I guess those pajama pants from 02.

6) That year I got a hand-me-down Transformer. I think it was Rewind. He had some tapes that he could kick out on demand and, uh, that was pretty awesome, because where did those effing tapes come from? His chest. How? Black magic.

7) T-Rex. Need I say more. Dinosaurs were invented by God to make little boys happy during childhood. Now imagine getting a giant one that eats all the other puny ones. This is all before the T-Rex revolution when it was decided that he would fall over all the time or invite other dinosaurs over for tea rather than eat them. Stupid fossil records.

8) First pre-Christmas when I got that little tiny bear named Apples. Apples was my boon companion and even made it to college with me, Woody style. However, he has since, disappeared, sadness engulfs my soul.

9) That time I got Snake Eyes. Snake Eyes is a ninja. Ninjas are probably the greatest thing invented by humanity. Or at least my Halloween costume from the ages of 3-9 would have you believe. At some point in my life I hope I learn how to fire those ninja stars around corners. It's important to have goals. 

10)You. 

When the world was flat

We spend our mornings sipping coffee and yelling at the children to mind themselves because the world is flat. "If you fall off that edge," we say, before trailing off ominously. We do not know what lies on the other side of the edge of the world. Some among us speculate that the fall isn't the same for everyone. Essentially, some people fall off the edge of the world and head straight down to the bowels of hell where they burn and roast and continue doing the work of Satan, while others fall straight into the burning heart of God.

I, being a mother, do not think it is possible for a child to fall off the edge of the earth into the burning heart of God because in order to fall off the edge of the world that child would have not been minding his mother, who, in this earthly realm, is about as close to a divine representative as he or she is going to get.

Mind you, this is long before the people arrived in ships with long white sails, disembarked, gave us some shiny jewels in return for all of our food before departing and telling us that the world was not flat. Then we stopped warning the children about where they should play and society, as you can probably guess, started to go to hell in a hand basket. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.

The last day in Seattle

 

I bought tickets for a football game for our last day in Seattle. We'd been to a baseball game the prior year, a Royals game, which I described as an event, mainly involving Scott Shields tossing rosin bags that seemed designed to bore you. I've been to college football games and the experience is roughly the opposite. Yes haters. Football does have a lot of time between plays, but the plays, somewhere between 50-60 a game are magnified, the crowd, at least when Stanford was on offense, was approaching deafening. If you've ever wondered just how Romans could have possibly staged epic spectacles with men fighting tigers then you should probably go to a football game. In particular, a college one. The regional flavors, at UW, a line of large boats lined up in the harbor where people can get off the boat and walk 200 yards to the stadiums, are reminiscent of old city states in Sparta and Athens. We like to belong to something. And for 3.5 hours my friends and I belonged to the Washington Huskies, and it felt good.

We'd talked about going to the underground Seattle tour in the morning before the game if we could get up in time. However, ideas that seem perfectly reasonable at noon on a Friday tend to seem quite crazy when you are going to bed at 2 AM that same night. Needless to say, the underground tour in Seattle awaits my next visit, which might be never, a fact which should cause no mourning in me as the cities of Naples, Brussels, Berlin and Provence have also never felt my footfall nor been beheld by my gaze. In fact, almost every city in the world will always have been absent my presence, absent my gaze, perhaps I should be sad?

Sadly, we did not get to play any more Nintendo. It brings me great pleasure to play Nintendo with my friends, recreating a childhood now decades in the past. In fact, the mere thought of that fact, coupled with the wine I've had this afternoon, brings a dull ache to my chest. Once, when traveling in Rome, we stopped by a small crypt where hundreds of dead monk's bones have been artistically flung about the confines of a few dark rooms, in the last room, where stacks of bones are strung from the ceiling, seated in chairs, and hiding in the corners of old walls, lies a saying, "As we are now, you too shall be." It pleases me more to play games with my friends without the specter of death hanging over us and to reinvent the saying, "As we were then, so we are now."

On our cab ride home the night before the most intoxicated one amongst us had spotted a breakfast place called the Skillet Diner, though at the time he kept asking if we could go to the Skillet Dinner, which seemed like it would be a distinctly different place. The walk downhill was through brisk winds, past a pair of fluffy white dogs who's fur looked like nothing so much as two very comfortable coats, and a myriad of houses with long stone steps coated in various shades of green moss. Eventually, we walked miles and miles on this trip, probably because no one else was there to dissuade us, and reached the Diner. Outside, we sat around, made conversation with a woman about her dog and her broken foot and generally behaved like normal people out for breakfast on a Saturday. It's almost as though everyone's wife was secretly there, encouraging us to act a bit more like adults.

At breakfast, we drank coffee and talked with our waiter, a bright eyed guy from Seattle, about the Sounders soccer game he was convinced that we were going too. None of us had the heart to explain to him that we were going to a college football game once he'd gotten his mind set on the fact that we were going to a soccer game. The service was a bit slow at first, but I appreciated how our waiter nearly ran every time he left our table. I find people who move quickly, in general, annoying. Primarily because the implication of their locomotion is that they are somehow more important than I am, which they may be, but I'd appreciate it if they didn't feel the need to show it off so much. I didn't mind it in this case because he was getting me food: Specifically, a sandwich with american and brie cheese, bacon, jalapeno aioli, greens, and bacon jam on brioche. It's the sort of thing that I'll forgive someone for being a bit late on and part of why I don't forgive dogs. They bring me old sticks and ropes. If they brought me things with bacon jam on them perhaps things would be different.

The game was miles across town, so we took an Uber ride to a few blocks away and got out at a local gas station to acquire some beverages. Out back, the parking lot is full of people drinking and grilling because it is a football game, which brings people together. We thought about joining, or buying a hat to fit in, but they were retailing at 15 dollars per, which seemed to steep a price to pay for allegiance to an unknown team. Inside the stadium, which is nestled on a hill right above the harbor, is a tailgate where you can buy booze, beer, and walk around less than 100 yards from where you're sitting. As ideas go, it's rather brilliant. And though I don't buy any drinks because I don't like beer, especially when it retails at 7 dollars, it still was pretty obviously a great idea. My friend M decided that since we were on the practice field for the team that we should throw around a football, which again, in its own way, provides a beautiful kind of symmetry from years ago when we'd run the house in someone's back yard and play a game of mud football, or drive out to a field and smash on each other for hours, resulting, in one case, in M's nose getting broken. The patterns aren't quite as tight now, nor the throws as contested, but it still has the feel of something we've been doing nearly forever. We should throw a football around every year, even if it's in the streets of New Orleans.

The game itself was quite good if you don't mind defensive football. The punter put on the best display of punting I've ever seen. He rugby punted, turned them over, didn't turn them over, rolled them for 30 yards etc. His first four punts were all of a different variety and all pretty damn good. However, if you know anything about football it probably wasn't all that exciting though I'm sure the Washington faithful appreciated our chants for him and cries of, "You can't take the ball out of your best player's hands," when UW chose to go for it rather than punt. We screamed and shouted and barked like dogs, which is apparently a thing at Huskies games. The only drawback to the game was a loud fan behind me who had a #Hottake after every play, which was generally negative, though occasionally positive, but never original. By the ninth time he said, "We couldn't play any worse, but we're still in this game," in a voice that I assume you could hear from the heavens, I asked one of my friends if we could exchange seats by claiming that I wanted a chance to talk to Tommy. I didn't want a chance to talk to Tommy. I wanted the guy behind me to shut the hell up, which my friend M quickly figured out, smiling back at me with the long suffering look of a man who has much more patience than I.

They lost, which meant we were all sad. Okay, some of the people seemed sad. We were not sad because it was our first time seeing Washington play football, which means that our expectations were firmly rooted in the moment rather than past experience or future expectations. We were Huskies for a moment and then the moment passed. Our experience had deep and rich metaphorical veins like bits of iron running through a mountain. Or maybe it was just a game that we finished watching and then tossed around the football ourselves, emulating the game, and finding joy.

We walked a few blocks into the University neighborhood, or what we thought was the university neighborhood. The streets were labeled things like, University, but there weren't a ton of students around. We got cheap pizza at a place that allowed unlimited toppings for seven dollars, or roughly 1/3 to 1/2 of the price that you pay at similar places in DC, (I'm looking at you 2 Amy's), before scrolling through our cell phones, (not me since I still had a now dispatched flip phone, sail on into the blue yonder my friend) trying to find out what to do next. Our friend J, who had arrived a day late after trying to skip out because he had a cough or something, was kind enough to have listened to me the night before as I harangued against doing the same thing time and time again. As such. besides worrying about getting everyone a good cell phone charge, one of the themes of the trip, we picked out a few places that sounded interesting. By the time we'd finished dinner and wandered the streets, it was time for our last night in Seattle. I'd seen enough beer commercials in my life to know that it was going to be great.

Seattle

On the way back the sun was starting to set and the water was getting darker as the veil of night began to fold itself gently down over our day. We went below decks to grab a beer and stare out across that water that rippled glass. My friend and I sat around and talked about our lives for a while. The things we have, the things we want, that lonely space between them that too is like an island. We talked of children and love and waited for our ship to dock. The best conversations take place in these liminal zones, where all the bodies are buried.

Stepping back onto land we kissed the ground and made our way back into the heart of the city. The ground was dirty, so we didn’t kiss it. And we weren’t technically in the heart of the city. I could have said something about saving money, but instead we took a cab. It turns out that cars get you places faster, a fact for which we were all thankful.

At home, we drank beer and wine and marveled over the jingoistic nature of Mike Tyson’s Punch Out. Every character was a caricature of someone from a foreign country. We were nominally offended by the past. After some drinks we headed back out into the city. The night was brisk and cool. We fended off the cold with smoke and the warmth of wine.

We were five strong the second evening and largely repeated the events of the first. We skipped The Pony and Sam’s and headed straight for the bar with pool tables and games. We tried to play a game of skee ball but were blocked by a fairly drunk couple who insisted that they had placed their quarters on the machine before we did. I stood in the middle of the room and drank. It was like I was a character in  a Hemingway novel.

Later, we played a game of Jenga. I don’t know if you’ve ever played a game of Jenga for fun, but I would suggest that it’s not the sort of thing you should try. It’s a strange game, probably best played under the influence of much stiffer stuff than I was having. I might just be saying this because I lost. I like winning. In fact, I suspect that I like winning much more than other people who only seem to be mildly attached to the idea of winning. I like to win ­­­­­­­like the Gods like to turn mortals into cows or objects of ridicule. It’s not just a thing like, but something that is central to who I am. We play a game of shuffle board on the world’s smallest shuffle board table and lose. We do not lose, if I’m being honest, because of my poor play. My teammate cannot hold up his end of the bargain, and I wouldn’t blame him because he’s as annoyed as anyone at his piss poor ability to throw a small disk across a table full of sawdust to rest in a particular spot where someone has painted lines. Actually, when I start to describe it, maybe I shouldn’t care about winning a game of shuffleboard. Lost in the festivities of the night before is the fact that we eventually wandered down to a bowling alley and bowled for a couple of games. Again, I did fine, but my partner was held below 100 and spent the rest of the evening visibly upset and telling us that he hadn’t bowled under 100 since he was in grade school. What I’m saying of course is that even though I lost, I didn’t really lose. I was handicapped.

Somehow or other we left the table and when we returned two of my friends ended playing a match with a couple of girls to see who got to keep possession of the table. I’d like to tell you a tale that was like a Homeric epic, but if I’m honest these two girls just handed their asses to them. The score was something like 21-5, may God have mercy on their souls. Maybe we played our game after we lost the table. Maybe the Jenga happened in between those things. Maybe we all got up and danced on a table for an hour. I don’t remember. I don’t remember anything.

The evening played out much like the last. We searched out places for food, large German hot dogs, Mexican restaurants for fish tacos, small hole in the wall restaurants with Cuban sandwiches that had clear walls on the walk to the bathroom through which you could see the handsome boys with swept back hair and girls in little black dresses waiting in line to get into a club, who’s music is reverberating out on the street, and there you are, peering back at them, on your way to take a piss at a hole in the wall restaurant. I believe the term is juxtaposition.

I believe that someone once said that variety is the spice of life. I have a firm belief that our regular work a day lives are too rote and mundane. I realize that this makes me like 99.9 percent of other human beings, but I’d like to be granted the possibility that I am a beautiful and unique snowflake. Of course, in this respect I do appear to be a beautiful and unique snow flake because my friends keep saying how happy they are to just be together doing the same thing while I feel that though it is good to be together it would be even better to be together if we were in a club playing some music and listening to it bounce off the walls. I am selfish in this and many other ways, a fact of which I'm not particularly proud nor particularly repentant. I am a go with the flow kind of person some of the time. Other times I would like to direct the flow like a human Hoover Dam.

We wandered over to a club called the Starlight Room where we were told there would be dancing. Once inside this multi-level monstrosity it became clear that while many things were happening in the Star Light Room, none of them were dancing. We retreated back to another bar and wandered the streets until we came across a Mexican place where people ordered food and one of my friends who was a touch inebriated slammed his fist down on the table right when the waitress was taking our order. When asked the next day about the event in question he said, very innocently and believably, "I did that?"

After a night spent cajoling we finally made our way down the street to a club with actual dancing. Within seconds I was out on the dance floor looking for my friends and finding them off at the bar. The bar was packed, but I could feel someone dancing close enough to me that I feared we had lost room for the Holy Spirit and when I turned around to find a fine looking male specimen I realized that I was probably dancing, not for the first time, in a gay bar. This would have been fine except that the bar was packed in the kind of way that makes you feel like you're in a mosh pit, only you don't have any volition. Someone needs to get a drink. Shoulder to the face. Someone is leaving the dance floor, hello elbows. Someone is entering the dance floor, pushed in the back. After a while this feeling of being a pinball is less charming than it could be, so I wandered around with J looking for my other three friends who had taken the opportunity of me dancing to slip back out onto the streets in search of more street food.

The second night we took a cab home, up from the bright lights of the bars into the quiet and leafy streets of Capitol Hill. I was in bed by 2. A sure sign that we are all getting too old for this. Next year I think we should go to Athens, Georgia or New Orleans, but maybe in five years we'll go to Montana and look outside the window at a bear digging through a trash can and be happy we are inside. Maybe someday we'll all get old. But my God, I will chase the nights to fend it off.