December Wolves: the Everything Else List

For my other website, every year I do an end of year recap which includes a list of the CDs I enjoyed the most. In 2006 and 2007, it was a huge, sprawling, all-consuming thing that took up a couple weeks of my free time since I had to put everything down that I thought was important in there.

It ended up being 20+ pages on Word. 2008, I stepped back from that, but it was still a pretty long document and involved a week or so of prep and writing. This year, my list was done in sporadic, quixotic bursts, avoiding a numerical list while maintaining a year-end favorite (in this case, P.O.S.' Never Better) that I think is roughly 2,000 words and not nearly as many pages in a word doc. I think it communicates everything essential.

The list itself is little more than a time-capsule and a specific imprint of what I was listening to this year, warts and "terrible choices" and all. The music list hasn't gone up yet and I'm jonesing to get a year-end something out before 2010 hits. An idea struck me walking outside and suddenly another member of the pack is ready for it's close up. Here's a different time capsule for Eleven Names: The Everything Else list.

Since pastepunk is awesome and I already covered the recorded music I listened to, I had other, non-musical experiences that were great, but didn't fit the bill of the first list, the Everything Else list is a list of everything else I enjoyed, or a list of cool experiences, media and so on. It will continue through the 31st.

1. Batman and Robin. Grant Morrison doing Batman is one way I described it to the ARGO kids, but the title of the comic tells you exactly what it's about, even if it requires a little bit of deconstruction. The comic is about legacies of Batman and Robin and the people behind the cowl. The current Batman was previously a Robin. He is training a new Robin, the test-tube baby of Batman, while fighting another former Robin who

has turned into a villain.

All of this is happening while the upcoming plotline is that the new Batman is trying to revive the old Batman. It's about growing up, coming to grips with the new responsibilities with the hope that the actual Batman comes back soon. The new Robin (the test-tube baby) is precocious enough to believe that he ought to be Batman, so the current Batman (former Robin) is trying to hold it all together.

2. Graduating college. I have a nice plaque. Okay, but no seriously, it's an accomplishment that I'm proud of. At the very least, it's provided the spark of creativity for a good third of my posts here.

3. The ARGO column. I wrote a sweet column about growing out of college gracefully. It's one of the things that I go back to and sometimes think I'm a good writer or I'm at least making something universal personal and location specific. The fact that it resonated with people who weren't in the club was something that I worked very hard on and to have the audience recognize that was and is very reassuring.

4. Meeting Jordan. After three or four years of helping Jordan out with it, I managed to hop on a drive to D.C. for the sole and express purpose of meeting up with him. I've never met Adam or Aubin or Brian from punknews, so I've always felt like there was something missing from the last three, four years of our collaborations, so finally meeting him felt awesome and a capstone on an incredible academic ride.

5. End of college radio show. It's an excuse to play all my favorite songs that don't have vulgarities and giving two endings. This two endings part is incredibly important.

The first being the appropriate "things change, it's scary but we move on" song, sung by Vienna Teng, an attractive woman, playing the piano. It's a lullaby for a child being scared by the rain. Note perfect. The actual ending, a little more...ragged.

The first track was John Coulton's Still Alive, a little ARGO hoorah, which I'm sure you know and if you don't know it, learn.

The second was Thunder In the Night Forever by Planes Mistaken For Stars. It is the sonic embodiment of this picture. It is about taking the fight of your expression to the billboards and ideologies that have gouged your eyes and ruined your friends lives with velvet-lined promises of fame, purity and higher callings. The subtitle is We Ride to Fight! and it reflects its performers, a dirty, beautiful song. I think I like women like Planes songs, breathtakingly intelligent, frighteningly powerful and with a pretty edge and this song is one of Planes' defining works.

The third was Bane's Ante Up, a song with an opening drum tattoo made for the purpose of engender stage dives. It is a song about understanding that you have made mistakes and bad things have happened, but you have to get up and put yourself forward in a way that leaves you totally vulnerable and with all your chips in the balance.

Heavy-hearted hymns are my thing, and it's Bane that finds the light at the end of the tunnel without neglecting the fact that it's dark in that tunnel. What's the point of writing about overcoming if the hurdles aren't that high and you aren't stabbed during the marathon?

We've Gotta Stay Positive

A friend of mine once said she didn't like Woody Allen's stuff because it felt like he was using the movie as his psychiatrist. I wonder if I'm guilty of the same thing here. As is standard operating procedure when one of my posts don't have a demos tag, it's about intensely personal stuff (read: girls), goes up and down like a roller coaster and then hopefully finds a happy ending that feels natural and not put on.


Yesterday, on the strong urging of a friend of Eleven Names, I went to my college's Counseling Center, to talk about a girl. I have spoken about her before. I spoke about how I feel it's her social group I've inherited or been promoted in and I wonder if she believes me to be enough of an emotional liability to keep tabs on me by well-meaning friends.

We used to date and, well, go to the above link and read it. I'll be here when you get back.

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I told the very nice woman that I probably wouldn't be in her physical presence until commencement, so now was probably a safe time to come up with some coping mechanisms and strategies.I left armed the office with a little pamphlet and the feeling that I've got a little bit of time.

Two hours later I see her taking out money from the campus' ATM right in front of me. She sees me, smiles and says the following:

I'm just a figment of your imagination.

She was only stopping by for a half hour at most on her way back from the north side of the state, needed to be back in her hometown in two hours.

I could only sigh.

I get out of talking to the counseling center about her and she shows up (even for a moment) not two hours later? Seriously. Does she plan it? Because one of the big ideas I tried to explain to the very nice woman listening to me was that she just can has a way of knowing what's going on and showing up with an impeccable sense of timing.

I, very carefully, try to explain that it's not like a spider at the center of a web or like a puppeteer looking down on their pieces, because that's too sinister, but, she shows up again, after I put all my anxieties on being paranoid (and even believing it!). I was getting ready to believe it. She's the Metal Gear Solid 2 of my life, because, after playing that game, for six months afterwards, I would peek around corners, expecting a armed patrol of terrorist gangs. Now, I peer down corridors of conversation and expect to hear the thump thump of her mental mercenaries approaching on the minimap of my mind.

It's an extended metaphor, but the surveillance I worry about is real in my mind. Her communicative dexterity is greater than my distaste for social games and well, I'm sick of feeling like I'm an emotional liability. She has the talent and the desire, occasionally, to do good things, which as I've learned from Eric Burns, is the way to really screw things up.

I'm just a figment of your imagination, she says.

She's right. All of my anxiety (well, most of it) about her is manufactured by me. I'm like America in the 80s, the troops and cities I'm afraid of are all Potemkin in construction. There's nothing to them. My imagination, I think, has a military-industrial complex.

It's what my imagination knows how to do, so I guess I can't technically begurdge it, but I have to move forward. The beat will go on, no matter what I do. Forward motion is hard, especially when I can see that the last four years have taken a toll on me, noticed these ways over the last six days, tops.

You look like shit.
You sound like you're going through a break-up.
You look worse than I feel.

This is what the college does to me. I'm not tired. I'm exhausted. I need to get the hell out of Meadville, on foot if I have to. But, I've done that already. Time for something new. Time for something far more awesome and positive. And that is where the title (stolen from the Hold Steady) comes from.

That title might seem now, like a cruel reminder of just how fucked I am, that the phrase no matter how earnestly meant, might feel sarcastic or disingenuous, but, its what I'm keeping inside my head. No matter how many times I think my life sucks, the only way it's going to get better is if I stay positive.

It is hard more often than not, but the road I've taken is not easy or clear. Reminders are tough. They come and they go and depression sticks around, like a black cloud, forever on the periphery of my horizon. My favorite lyricist, Aaron Bedard, tends to find the light at the end of tunnel, in his band, Bane and I try to draw strength from his words. In that vein, I think, the more I hear about Kurt Vonnegut, the more I'd like his books. He, so I hear, finds the humor and the joy in life that seems to elude a lot of other authors.

And sometimes (but only sometimes) the light is real and it is the end of the tunnel. Even less often, I find it, but for now, I think I'm going to finish the post and move toward that light.

Said Vonnegut's uncle, appropriated for A Man Without A Country: "I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

I am alive. I have ingested coffee and that will keep me going until my group's formal, in which case I ought to sail on based off little more than adrenaline and pure joy for a) having gotten this far, b) being a part of a group that is not Greek that has a large formal and c) being a part of a formal that is silly and may involve lolcats. Lots of lolcats, and if those three things, put together, aren't nice, I don't know what is.