It was a little over half a year ago when I threw it all away, trading what little was left for a train ticket to take me as far from the site of my collapse as I could go. Inbetween the moment I feebly surrendered and the moment I stepped onto that train and placed a most literary phone-call, I bought a little black book with nothing in it. When I returned to From Where I Came, I settled back into my room with a thin sigh and cracked the journal’s spine with weary purpose. Beaten but not defeated, I focused the best handwriting I could muster for a title page of what was next to come. I forget how I put it, exactly, but “Recovery” might have been one of the words in that title. “Redemption” certainly was.

But, man. If you read that book you’d probably think I hardly experienced either — though not because I didn’t. At first I maintained a steady stream of thoughts, observations and musings, but this daily document soon degenerated into a place to vent exclusively when things were going wrong. I only ever bled ink to those pages when I felt like I myself was bleeding; and as the wounds became less frequent, so did the ink. Up until just a few minutes ago, I’d just about forgotten the book existed. I’m not even sure where it is.

I’m not detailing those messy pages now, that’s not why I bring it up. It’s just that that was so me, back then, to only ever say something to complain. I didn’t like that about myself, and the propensity to continue that habit is something I keep not liking. And that’s why I’m taking the time to write this blog entry right now, even if that’s time I have to make: things are just going so right, and I’d be remiss to not say something about it. Recovery and Redemption, baby.

This feels like a good time for a list. I’m not going to mention everything that’s been going right recently, because if I did you’d think I’m some kind of viciously lucky asshole. But the most of it goes a little something like…

• 1) My band — the one I’ve been detailing in the ongoing Story in this very logbook¹ — is playing its second real (technically third, or first, depending on how you look at it) show this month, on Thursday, July the Thirtieth. If you’d like to watch one of the future chapters of this Story unfold right before your very eyes (and hear some fucking good music), I recommend you ford planes/trains/taxi cabs and make sure you get your ass in attendance. I’ll give you a place to sleep if you really want one, even though I don’t think that’s something we’ll be doing that night. Whatever. Click the damn picture as follows and find out all that you need to know.
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• I can assure you that my band will be at least twice as large, twice as sexy, and a great many exponents musically better than what you see in the picture above.² Which is setting the bar pretty high, you know.
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• 2) I started a music website with my good friend Daniel just a few months ago, and in the past weeks it’s gone well into overdrive. We asked awesome musician/constant inspiration Girl Talk to let us record his set at our fine college a little bit ago, and he said yes, and so we made it and posted it and watched it instantly rise to the top of the HypeMachine charts (that’s the Billboard for the blogosphere, don’t you know). It was beautiful, and it looked something like this. Go listen to it now.
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• “I’m Ill” is my favorite track of the set. But that’s just a quarter of the picture. We were recently at a big convention selling our *FreeCulture tees and ever since then several people who could conceivably be called “famous” have been spotted wearing them all over the world — emblazoned with a rather sharp design that took me no less than two minutes to concoct on my computational image-design contraption. We will be putting them for sale online very soon, and I promise to take the time to let you know about all that good stuff when it hits. It’s going to be the kind of t-shirt you’re going to want to buy and wear often, even if you’re not the type to usually buy or wear t-shirts.
• 3) I just got my first assignment writing for what one could ostensibly call a very large publication. Back in the beginning of my college career, I began writing about music’n’such for the daily news rag there to a circulation of about 10,000 readers. This was mostly unsatisfying, and so the following summer I began to write for a publication with eight times as many readers. This was a great experience for which I am very grateful, but now it seems I am this summer multiplying the circulation of my script-scrawl by a similar integer as I did last summer. For those of you even remotely math-literate (don’t worry, I’m not), it should be clear that this is a pretty dizzying figure now. I welcome this figure with open arms and by all means plan to do it justice. Stay posted here and you will find out (very shortly) when I do.
• Hell, just follow this here Twitter thing for all the official scoops. There’s also a personal, less-roll-but-more-rock Twitter that I’ve been using for a couple years, which you can find if you’re cleverly bored enough. And while you’re at it, just follow the *FreeCulture one, already, and call it a night. That thing’s going to be popping off sincerely in about a week, and it really can’t hurt to queue up now. I promise.
• 4) Within the past week I spent a little cut of an evening stargazing on someone’s rooftop whilst discussing apple trees and parking lots, next to a plaster bust of Billy Shakespeare, no less. After a while she said she could feel my heartbeat, and I smiled and responded in a way that would both distract her from that heartbeat and slow it down a bit. It might not have been a literary moment by any stretch of the imagination (not even with William in attendance), but it was quite a nice one nevertheless.
• 5) I’m really starting to feel like an asshole myself, so I’m going to forget the rest and wrap this up with something almost mundane: a couple of my photographs on Flickr were recently selected, considered and accepted for publication in digital travel guide company Schmap’s sprawling Philadelphia doodad. When viewed on a computer it looks like this, and when viewed on an iPhone it looks like this. Either way, there I am in all my anti-capitalized glory, which makes for a grand total of…four photos, in my published photography portoflio. This as being someone who seldom takes photos and is not, by any means, a photographer. But I will say this gives me just the added dose of inspiration to go out and take a photography course up here come the fall. I certainly wouldn’t mind if my life took a turn for the photographic.

I could go on, but as swell as my life has been to me lately, it now demands a sausage-egg-and-cheese sandwich — my seventh or eighth in as many days. And so:

TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER

I’m live-blogging and devouring cancerous protein bombs from the fine dump of a city that is New Haven,³ as previously insinuated. And it’s all about to come to an end; I come home Friday night. This month has been a return to form, of sorts, for me. It feels good, being back in this form. Semi-tangentially, I’m really going to miss the gym here. But I will be back in the fall, which would definitely come as a relief to those of you who know me well enough to know what that means and/or to care. (Hell, you’ve read this far, haven’t you?) It’s a thought that makes me brim with confidence and optimism, as if I wasn’t sweating/crying/puking the stuff as it is. Which is a good thing, people; never forget that that’s a good thing.

Part of what excites me about this development is the rather cool experiences I’ve been afforded being here this past month, finally able to really appreciate them for the first time in I-don’t-know-how-long. (My life?) The most recent of which being an open table discussion I had with one inspired multi-talent by the name of Luc Sante, whose bookography I will soon be purchasing as I’ve just finished my last great pursuit of literary appreciation. One thing he said to me and a spare dozen others, which spoke to me in particular, was his commentary on the function of the blog to the writer. He called his own sporadically updated⁴ little web journal something of a “public labratory,” a place to “take ridiculous chances” without so much as a paycheck or the pressure of six-digit circulation to keep you on your toes. Which is, in far less words than my garrulous ass could usually hope to muster, a pretty nice summary of how I’ve always felt about this little website of mine. So good on you, Sante — I will be buying Kill All Your Darlings and emailing you all about it right quick.

Second to final thought: I just did mention that I recently finished reading a book, and I kind of want to talk about that for a moment, up in here.⁵ The book is a rock tome of roughly Biblical size, and it’s little coincidence that its author chose the subtitle “Testament for the Electric Church.” Even more brilliantly, he chose the title Rock And The Pop Narcotic, and as someone who’s been religiously feasting upon music literature ever since my delicious encounter with Our Band Could Be Your Life well over half a decade ago, I can say that this is the title of the best book on music I have ever read. It’s roughly four-hundred pages of densely gorgeous prose on the rock format and what makes it tick, and throughout it all you’re becoming increasingly aware of what he — Joe Carducci — means when he says Pop Narcotic. But then comes the Afterword, unassuming as fuck, and it just blows everything you thought you knew about this guy, this book, and — indeed — this life into beautiful little aparts. As I began reading the first paragraph of this oh holiest of Afterwords, I realized that this would be a spiritual moment, and I complied by putting an unknown Beach Boys a capella track lost from the Smile era on a constant loop. I’ve listened to roughly 700 Beach Boys songs in the past three days, and the hymnal repetition of this “Uknown Track” constituted listens 605 through 614 (approximately). I had been highlighting the particularly meaningful, relevant sentences of Carducci’s great literature rather sparingly up to that point, but over the course of these most enchanted final pages I could not put the highlighter down. These pages — they bled highlight, soaked through-and-through in their golden brilliance. Those beautiful words of Joe’s, those otherworldly harmonies of Brian’s…It was truly a Godly moment.

Buy this book. Or least of all, find it at your local print-den and read the end of it. I’ve never had my core beliefs about so many things ever so poignantly and lucidly reflected in the words of another.

Actually probably the final thought: I sit here writing (some of) these words in this newly-discovered Trumbull library, periodically stopping to read a little bit of this newly-discovered campus Literary Magazine. The library endears in a classically enchanting way, and the litmag is looking sharp and making me want to submit something to and through its gorgeous layout and page design.⁶ As I sit here and ponder these things, I feel at home, and like I’m truly in the place I envisioned when I applied to this college a two-year lifetime ago. This is something I could get used to. Finally.

1. This Story, for those who’ve been paying only partial/recent attention, begins not-quite-chronologically here. It also happens to be my favorite installment in the Story thus far, as far as literature goes. Please do us both a favor and catch up now, though, as I promise that the literary aspects of this Story are about to approach cinema. [↩]
2. Or hell, even in comparison to what we were sounding like a month ago. [↩]
3. Sausage-egg-and-cheese sandwich plus Haribo raspberry gummis and b-relaxed Vitamin Water makes for a surprisingly regal meal. [↩]
4. Sounds familiar.. [↩]
5. Up in here. [↩]
6. Looking at the masthead, it turns out that my good friend Sophia even works for them. Who knew? [↩]

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