Friendship is the long slow wait before cruelty.

There’s a bar down in the fenway called “An Tua Nua.” Its Gaelic for “a new beginning” and as fate would have it, its where I fell into an old trap. I don’t know what inspires me to put such amazing faith in the long shot romance of large distances and imagined personalities. But that’s what I do, and that’s what I have done for the last couple of days, snapping out of it while the credits of Heros played.

I was out of it too. I thought I was anyway. I was fast on the rebound this time, I was slow to get excited about the prospect of some new heartbreak and I was comfortable with where I stood. And then I got drunk on a freezing cold kickball field and was sucked back into foolish fantasies that life was going to be all peaches and roses and no work.

I’m crazy. I know it. No one else jumps headlong into this great unknown. I live in the fallout from the divorce generation. We’re to fear long term commitment because 40’s the new 15 and we’re going to miss out on the good times like getting drunk in your friends dad’s garage. Imagine a world without that. Its horrifying. I’m sick at the thought of “what if” whenever I see a short-skirted nubile piece of ass stroll by me with more swing than Jack Nicholas. Even if I’m single with no shot, imagine having to deprive yourself.

I should get whatever I want, whenever I want. The epoch of life is over saturation. I’m not a child dressed as a clown any longer, I’m an adult and I’ll eat all my Halloween candy in twenty-minutes if I want. The spoils of love and war are mine and I am not satiated by moderation.

I am most free and creative when there are no boundaries. When I can do whatever I want, I come up with the best ideas in the world, like dressing like my friends and trolling the clubs for woman half my age. Every night. For the next 50 years. And I can’t wait to high five my buddies on the car ride out there, about yesterday’s fresh kill. I don’t care about the clap or twins because I never knew her name, and she gave me a fake phone number anyway. All the responsibilities are erased when we fly back to America next Sunday morning.

What the fuck is wrong with you Molina? She’ll be used up by tomorrow, are you that blind? Besides, she can’t cook and she has a fat ass. Are you gay or something? Why lay next to someone until you’re dead. Freeze to death in a studio apartment that your social security can pay for and keep your fucking dignity. Its like you were born yesterday.

Cold

I think your cheeks are the best indication of how cold it is out. Their thin but your tongue has too many heat receptors in it to get cold, so it can tell how cold your cheeks are. And the rest of you is assumed to be dressed well enough that it will retard the cold. You’d have to be there several hours without moving to truly feel how cold it is in, say your stomach. Thankfully we have cheeks. And I think maybe because of this, we can actually taste cold. Maybe not cold directly, but what we assume cold to be. The saliva that keeps the temperature and the malleable flesh of the wall – that’s cold.

And I’d bet you can feel it to, but only on the tip of your nose, out on the peak where the bone won’t grow and the wind scorches as it scrambles into your sinuses. Its always numb on a cold day and you have the anesthetic sensation of a dumbed down sense of feeling when you scrunch your nose, keeping in the drip of whatever the hell it is that drips from your nose; half water, half…not.

Everyone bitches about the cold, and I’m not really sure why. To me it makes everything a journey. You have to battle against the cold. You get suited up and you prepare yourself mentally and people tend to give you a little more compassion if you’re out in the elements walking around. The cold makes a walk to the corner store epic or at least important. I remember I got called into work in a blizzard once and walking down there through the plow-made drifts on Hancock Street, it was just something fun to me. People were driving amazingly slowly, and kids were dodging snow balls and the snow made everything more aesthetically pleasing. Its cold out folks, it happens. Start your car early, wear layers, and complain to yourself how you can’t wait for the flesh-exposing, sweatfest that is summer, I for one don’t want to hear about it.

"If you're going to San Francisco
Lay some flowers on the grave stone
There's music on the station but I'm just listening to cold wind whistling
And if they ever find me tell the papers cold wind, cold wind
cold, cold wind blowing" - Arcade Fire

Reminder

Sometimes it takes a reminder to remember. As obvious as that was, im still writing it, and i'm still posting this; this is all that remains of The Station in Rhode Island

bored and rambling

The days blur, and the cities safe and I havn’t seen a sunset since September. The manhole covers smoke and the street lights are dim. The overpass is cool from the trucks that pass.

Growing up the breeze near the fence on the edge of the woods felt remote, a secret location that saved us from the wide open boredom of nowhere. Theres a love and safety in depressing sameness. I can drink tea up town every night, and I can rehash the same conversations with the same people constantly, and I don’t worry about whether I’m waisting my life. I don’t care. The effort of the great horizon is painful. The brave new world is wet and cold, and its breezes are neither familiar or comforting. My hearts still coiled deep in its sleeping bag and its refusing to get up fro breakfast.

Nothing is fun anywhere, and I know the price of soup in boston so fuck it. To me the grass is depressed, it blows in the win near patches of dirt and it will forever, seeing the same dumb kids with brand new fashions come year in and out. The future is overcast, not bad, or negative but set, and toned down. I sail. The crabgrass can’t get me at sea and the inside of the boat is the best place to watch the rain engage the small cap sea shanties.

New England is to be roamed with a sailors cap, I walk the hills of Vermont with a hobo sack and duck into old pubs an eat clam chowder. And oldman plays the accordion in the corner, and the novels all curls up by the fireplace. I grab the wet sleeves of my t-shirt like gargoyles and just listen to them blather on.

Mixed CD

I need to know how many people would listen and review mix CD's I made available for download on the internet.

it would be one easy DL you could get from a link and just respond. I'm not sure if this would work best via e-mail or the blog. Let me know if anyone cares.

My uncle Charlie

The cigarette box was dented; it sat crouched on the table like a sack of flour leaning against the barn doors, bulging out at various points to let loose its burden, and jangling inside the box was the lone perfect stick of crushed up leaves and a filter…

Last week ended a pretty shitty run for the gene pool. The final week of October into the first weeks of November has been, save for one birth and two weddings, the week when every family member on my mother’s side had died. Last week, my uncle was elected mayor of Taunton.

It may not seem huge. He wasn’t elected governor or senator, but what’s most important is it mattered a great deal to himself and to me, that’s all the mattered really.

The best part was, it meant that when given the option, people will still vote for the man who deserves it. His opponent accused him of being uneducated saying that he had not graduated from high school. I got a report that they tried to condemn him as a homosexual for not being married or having children. They tried to make it a one-issue election on a problem his opponent had created while he was superintendent, one that as mayor, you have no authority to remedy.

His opponent didn’t win one precinct. He lost by over a 2 to 1 margin, and he put the steak in the heart of a political machine that has run the city for the past 40 years. Most saw the city in two lights:

1. You are politically connected, so everything went your way.
2. You aren’t, so go look in some other place for a fair shake.

Even he himself had not been given a fair shake. When he ran for his first election he lost by a resounding amount to incumbents that were put in place by a machine. I myself would have probably given up. Public defeat is a hard horse to climb back from. Instead he decided to go down to city hall every Tuesday for every council meeting for the next two years and sit behind the biggest loud mouth there was. He knew that guy would get camera time, and by proxy, so would he. He also decided to run a one man campaign and walk through the villages of the city introducing himself and stating his positions.

He ran again the following election and when he was waiting in city hall that night, the analysts didn’t even put him in the running. Out of nine slots, he was probably selected as 11^th. When the first precinct came in, he had finished first. I wasn’t there because I don’t think I was born yet, but Jesus Christ would I have wanted to see face on the establishment that night. There’s something so righteous about silencing the unwavering cock-suredness of self-proclaimed experts. By nights end, he’d come in third.

For the past twenty years, he’d served on the council, working more than anyone else really should have expected. He was a general outlet, taking calls and complaints on potholes and corrupt union workers that had been appointed by the machine, and stayed comfortable under the blanket of union protection.

Everyone says they are going to “work for you.” They Don’t.

Once, when he got a call from a citizen who complained that he couldn’t pay respects to his dead father because the grass in the cemetery had grown too high to read the stones, he took his own lawnmower to the graveyard and mowed it himself. The whole thing. And the next day the DPW complained because “if that job were to exist, it would be a union job, and he took work away from potential union employees.” That job didn’t exist. No one was paid as “cemetery lawn care manager.” He did something for someone who needed help. He didn’t legislate the job, or “see what he could do.” He just did it. And its those things where those of us who still believe in government and the political process; democracy and the civil service turn to. It’s inspiring for me at least to know someone out there still runs for the right reasons, and that maybe politicians aren’t all bad.

At this point he has never hired anyone because he knew them, or owed them a favor, or because they were related, the only time family came into anything is when he appointed the son of a man who’d died in office, and had only but three months left.

8 months ago, the former mayor was appointed to a position in the governor’s administration. To fill his tenure as mayor they put my uncle in his place. The machine, fearing its grip loosening, they ran the only man who was arrogant enough to believe that he could beat a sitting mayor who had written 4 books on the cities history, an elected official for the past 20 years, and who had a television show on local cable about the city and its rich past.

I’m sure I’ve bored the pants off of a lot of you, but for me little left in life is inspiring. I’ve grown unimpressed with all of my passions and feel like even the city that I had tattooed on my arm is vanishing. But I found this story so unrealistic and devoid of verite, so Disney-esque that someone who really cared would get elected over a money-fueled political dinosaur that it almost moves you to tears. I’ve never been more proud of someone in my life and frankly, never more inspired. In turn, I’ve found no one more worthy of my inspiration, and certainly, as a political junkie myself, no more worthy or noble a cause.

“Sing Muse with passion of the pistol

Sing Muse of the warning by the whistle

On a night so dark in the waning

A dawn obscured by slight sky raining, oh oh” – The Decemberists.

this ones for me.

Yesterday I saw the sun shinin',
And the leaves were fallin' down softly,
My cold hands needed a warm, warm touch,
And I was thinkin' about you.