Will you carry me across the sea...

I honestly don't remember the first time I heard Sunny Day Real Estate's "Diary." It must have been ten or more years ago, in High School. I assume I was in my 4Runner, or in Juice Box's Jeep. I don't remember. So, I can't say how long it has been since I have wanted to see them live, but it has been a while.

I got to see them Sunday night. They were amazing, in the most un-bastardized, literal sense of that word.

Elle and I went and ran into Terrence of the Lafayette Luftwaffe. Terrence got to see them in their heyday, on their tour supporting "How it Feels to be Something On." We both pine for that period of music. We both still listen to Superdrag, SDRE, Samiam, and other bands from the early-nineties, before the word "Emo" was ruined, coopted and stripped of any meaning. It is a word that does not mean anything anymore, and certainly one that a band like SDRE does not recognize.

I'm sure one day I will get around to writing a long-form essay about my love affair with this time period of music, about the aesthetics of vulnerability, etc. But right now I want to tell you that SDRE played an incredible show. The crowd (which consisted of a disproportionate number of tall, chubby, black-shirted sad men, so many that is was very difficult for Elle to see no matter where we were in the crowd) erupted at the first notes of each song, a choir singing in unison to each chorus.

It was a good show and one I will not forget soon.

Here's some clips.

It's starting to feel like fall here in New York. The leaves have already begun to look singed at the edges and the air feels lighter today. These are the days for bike rides, for sunset sessions and offshore winds. For coffee on the boardwalk. The beginnings and ends of the day auburn and rusted, crisp and clear.

This is my last semester as an undergraduate student. I have been in New York for almost two years. I feel like I have been here forever, yet at the same time like I have just arrived.

I spend a lot of time browsing graduate schools in the afternoons, waiting for 4:45 to roll around so i can pedal downtown to pick up Elle from work. It makes me hopeful, yet empties me. Where to go now, what to study, what to do. MFA in creative writing, try to get a book deal? PhD in American Studies, teach college, write essays on the bowels of American popular culture? Who knows which way the wind blows.

I do know that in <9 months I am getting married to a girl who everyday surprises me with he fits of beauty, her moments of grace and humor, her empathy. Other than that, well, I'll figure it out. I'm not worried about it. Not worried at all.

I realized that I never put a decent shot of MY bike up, and, since I will inevitably be putting a picture of Jack's bike I just finished with Devotion, I figure I might as well. My baby:

I built Elle a bike. I'm very proud of how it came out.

We went skateboarding yesterday. Elle and Noelle hung out and chewed gum while Vava and I shredded. I haven't skated in a while--not counting trips to the grocery school on my zip zinger. It was a good feeling, still being able to pull a few tricks out of my bag for Vava.

Here are some pictures Elle took:

News. A little late.

I asked Elle to marry me.

She said yes.

I have been thinking about asking her for a long time. That sentence makes it seem casual kind of, which I promise you it was not.

I decided I was going to do it before we went to Nova Scotia, one night lying next to her as she slept with her eyes half-open. I started looking for rings. Over the next couple weeks I spent hours walking around the city looking at rings that felt empty, cold, diamonds that sparkled wildly yet felt distant, fake, soulless. I talked to my Mom, something I have started to do a little more often lately, about rings. She mentioned the ring her and my dad got married with, that she had saved it and would love for me to have it.

My Dad got a pretty bum deal in my opinion. There are obviously two sides to their story, but the one I have witnessed wasn't very fair to him. He worshiped my Mom. When they got divorced I got an email from one of her friends wondering how I was dealing with everything. She was a good friend of my Mom's from childhood, and knew my Dad and her from the beginning. Your Dad always adored your Mom, she said. Put her on a pedestal, but she never took it well, being worshiped.

He gave her that ring and they were married in the backyard of the house where, one year later, I was born. The story since then isn't all bad news. Not even close. I mean there are three of us now, and the earlier part of our childhoods were spent in the company of two parents who loved each other and us very much.

Anyhow, anyone who knows me knows how close my Dad and I are. Pete says it is incestual. My Dad is my best friend. And I feel like I share the same idealism about my relationship with Elle that he had for my Mom. I worship her. She is the most beautiful person I have ever known, the most amazing, rational girl I have ever met. She takes care of me, knows how I am feeling--sometimes before I do--, and is always, always there for me. When I fall down--literally--she picks me up. And I think she feels the same way about me. And that blows my mind. We never get sick of each other. Ever.

SO, I had the ring my Dad gave my Mom refinished, turning it into white gold, and the diamonds made to sparkle like it did when my Dad gave it to her 26 years ago. I wanted that ring to mean what it did to my Dad, and for it to be received the way it should have been. I wanted to redeem it, and in doing that, redeem my Dad. I hope this doesn't sound cruel. It isn't. My Dad had his heart broken. He risked it all, time and time again, and got burned. Elle knows this, knows how it weighs upon me, and understand me better because of it.

I think she also realizes how much it means for me to want to get married, knowing what happened with my parents. If Elle wasn't who she is, and we weren't who we are together, I would have gladly ended up living in a rooming house with Pete, Jack, and probably Lucas and Larry, for the rest of my life. Elle has forced me to reconsider and retract many statements I have made about the nature of women, the nature of committed relationships, etc. etc. She has made a liar out of me, in many ways.

So, I asked her to marry me.

Two Saturdays ago I was supposed to go looking for apts during the day. I was going to ask her that night. Her birthday was Sunday and we were supposed to go to dinner with her parents. Saturday night was my chance. It would surprise her and be a birthday present to remember.

I made reservations at a cuban restaurant in DUMBO, and we had plans to ride over the Brooklyn Bridge on the way back, something Elle had never done. I would ask her there, the city behind us twinkling.

But, Elle decided that since it was such a nice day that we could ride bikes around Brooklyn and look at the apratments together. I thought that would be fine. We could come back in the afternoon, get cleaned up, and head out for dinner.

So we rode bikes around for 6 hours, got home, and were exhausted. She suggested we order food instead of going out. No, I said, lets go out. It will be fine. She was exhausted though, so I didn't have much of a choice.

We ordered wings.

I was freaking out. I called Kayla, told her the situation as I ran through the grocery store to get stuff to make a salad. She said it would be fine. I thought maybe I should wait. Another time, i thought. Wait for the perfect moment.

But I had been working myself up to this point for over a month now.

I lit candles, put the wings on plates instead of eating out of the styrofoam, and asked her to marry me about 15 minutes into our meal. I was sick to my stomach and Elle could tell something was up.

I got down on my knee and she offered to stand up (she was sitting criss-cross-apple sauce). I don't know what to do, she said. Do you put it on my finger? I say yes, do you put it on my finger?

Then we hugged and kissed a lot, jumped up and down and tried to figure out what to do about telling people.

Now you know. I'm engaged to the most beautiful girl. The girl of my dreams, as if I had created her myself, to my own specifications and liking. She is mine, or will be officially sometime in June (we think).

I'm a lucky, lucky young man.

Bear was a good pup. She always welcomed me loudly when I cam home late from hardcore shows, or when I snuck in from the Rompin Room for some Oreo's and milk. Usually Dad would wake up from the door opening or from bear barking and join me. We would sit, the dogs sitting under the table or in the dining room, and dunk our cookies together, talking of life, love, hate, politics, religion (or lack thereof), etc. Even as she got older, and her seizures began to strip her of her vitality, she was such a loving and faithful pup. As her mind went, her love stayed put. My Mom was crucial in taking care of her, and always knew just how to calm the poor lady down. Last year her brother, Wolf, died. I wasn't there to see him off. But it was a rough time for me, being alone in NYC, feeling alienated from everyone I loved and cared for, and hearing my Dad tell the story of Bear wandering around the backyard, digging and sniffing, trying to find her brother out there in the backyard somewhere, trying to dig him up and bring him back.
She tolerated my pup Lemon's harassment, as long as Lemon didn't take her chair from her. She will be missed.

You Are Not A Stranger Here

So my friend Cornelius Blackpool suggested a collection of short stories to me. "It's called 'You Are Not A Stranger Here' by Adam Haslett," he said. "It's fucking awesome."

Blackpool has always seemed a damn smart guy, having majored in Literature and went on to work in the Hedge Fund world.

Anyhow, Elle bought me the book from the Strand last week. I finished the book i three days of subway rides. Besides the ones where Elle and I meet on the back of the train on our ways home from work, they were the best subway rides of my life.

Haslett graduated from the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and from Yale Law School. It's the only thing he has ever published, and it was a finalist for the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. And for good reason, too. His stories are definitely MFA fiction, but the best kind. Critics have called the stories Checkhovian. I guess that's fair.

Here is the first story from the collection:

"Notes For My Biographer"

Two things to get straight from the beginning: I hate doctors and have never joined a support group in my life. At seventy-three, I'm not about to change. The mental-health establishment can go screw itself on a barren hilltop in the rain before I touch their snake oil or listen to the visionless chatter of men half my age. I have shot Germans in the fields of Normandy, filed twenty-six patents, married three women, survived them all, and am currently the subject of an investigation by the IRS, which has about as much chance of collecting from me as Shylock did of getting his pound of flesh. Bureaucracies have trouble thinking clearly. I, on the other hand, am perfectly lucid.

You can read the rest here:

www.all-story.com/issues.cgi?action=show_story&story_id=46

I never posted a picture of my head:

5 staples and 4 interior stitches. I've been getting headaches lately, but was told it's fine on Thursday at the ER. I have Post-Concussion Disorder. They said the headaches would go away eventually.

So, we've been surfing a lot lately. Jon, Dale, Lucas, Pete and I have been on a bender. Elle has been coming and bodysurfing with us, too. Summer is amazing when you are young, in love, and have good friends around you.

These are Lucas' pictures of the Schwinn Paramount I purchased off him. I will take pictures of the frame built with my stuff soon:






I bought it of Lucas for a great deal and then built it up with Ezra. He helped me lace up some Phil Wood HF track hubs to Open Pro's and got me some Sugino 75's and a Nitto 65 post. I have nt gotten a chance to load the pictures I took of it yet. It hauls ass, and will probably be a contributor to my ultimate demise.

I got a new bike, a new log, a new spot for the summer, and nothing to show for it on this blog. I'm working on it. Stay chuuunneed.

Mark Greif is one of the smartest men I have ever met. He has been my teacher and life-coach at the New School for the last year. In that short time he has introduced new ideas, confirmed old ones, and dismantled and obliterated others. He is the editor or a personal favorite magazine of mine, n+1, and a writer who consistently weaves philosophy, literary criticism, pop-references, and sociology throughout his work, and in his daily lectures/discussions. He recently published an essay titled "What You"ve Done To My World" in an anthology titled Heavy Rotation. the Anthology consists of writers articulating something about a particular album that changed their life. Mark chose Fugazi.

Last fall we came to class to find that Mark had cued up the projector and had several YouTube videos of Fugazi, Bikini Kill, etc. ready for us to watch. We sat and intellectualized Punk for the rest of class, mark becoming flush when he found himself "falling into the 'nostalgia trap'" when discussing his younger years.

"What You've Done To My World"
By Mark Greif
Minor Threat didn't last long as a band. It was, though, as the music writers say, "influential." Meanwhile, its young singer, Ian MacKaye, moved through several short-lived bands until he formed another stable group, which added a second, lesser known but highly emotional young singer, Guy Picciotto, from the even shorter-lived (but "influential") band Rites of Spring. This was, as it turned out, a piling together of two geniuses on the Lennon/McCartney model—with a new rhythm section of comparable genius. They called their band Fugazi.

It chagrins me to be writing about Fugazi, since no one is less qualified than I am to do it. I wasn't there in D.C. when they started, I didn't see them on their first tour or their second, and I always had the profound and pleasurable sense that their music at least partly excluded me, because it was so tightly bound up with the post-hardcore and straight-edge world, a subculture I had nothing to do with. They were not commercial, they didn't offer themselves to the world through radio or TV, they didn't connect to anything else I knew or that felt natural to me. In fact, in addition to being a band, Fugazi was a kind of phenomenon known to many people who didn't care for them musically: an anticommercial, ultramoral, somewhat puritanical outfit that toured constantly, often playing in such unconventional places as church basements and college rec halls; that insisted on an all-ages admissions to shows so that fans under eighteen or twenty-one could attend; that held down ticket charges as low as five dollars, rather than raking in the money.

read the rest here:

http://nplusonemag.com/what-youve-done-my-world

There's more to life than surfing

I used to believe that. That statement is a large part of why I live in New York. After I gave up trying to be a pro-surfer, after I gave up trying to conceal myself within the surf industry, after I allowed myself to grow as a human being, I felt like I had to let something go, to shed a skin, molt, in order to fit new things in. Surfing was my life--exclusively--until I was 15, when I made room in my schedule for hardcore bands. Even then though, surfing drove my decisions, it controlled me. As I got older and the world didn't end up being as wonderful as I hoped it would be, I resented surfing for not preparing me for the real world. I blamed it for me not having healthy relationships, for me not having a true high school experience, for me not writing novels when I was fresh out of high school, before all the cynicism left me paralyzed and desperate.

I posted something a few weeks ago about leaving nothing behind, about burning everything in your tracks, leaving no trace. Surfing was one of the things that I burned. I have not allowed myself to honestly enjoy surfing like I did when I was 17 for a long time now, and I want to. I want to go surfing and not carry any of the egotistical, competitive baggage with me.

Pete and I surfed the other day at Rockaway. Elle st on the beach and watched, even came out and took one in on her belly fr a bit. Even playing around in the Rockaway slop, Pete surfing in cut-off jeans, our backs pasty and covered with a layer of winter-skin, it still felt like we were trying to prove something. I knew that Pete and I were by far the best surfers in the water. We usually are. That's something the 18 year-old Pete adn Ashton hoped for, something we strove to be. But, it doesn't make Pete or I happy anymore. Pete talked about how when he surfs with our friends from NY, who don't surf as well as us but who enjoy surfing so much that it is contagious and pleasant to be around--they are like grommets, but thirty-years old and have wives or kids, etc.--because he feels weird surfing aggressively when they are around, like it will kill their enthusiasm.

I ate this for lunch/breakfast. It was good.


Anyhow, what I am getting at is this:
I want to have fun when i paddle out again. And I plan on doing it more often.

Elle and I have discussed our plans for December, after I graduate. We still don't know what to do, but there is talk of going somewhere I can surf more often. There's also talk of China. And New Zealand. And Australia. There's talk.

I always dreamed of being with someone who at the very least considered my ridiculous idealism(sustainable NZ ranch with dozens of dogs, Nova Scotia cottage, Australian point surf via Vespa's, European stays, houseboats, sailboats, etc.). To be with someone who actually suggests ridiculous ideas like Elle does is quite wonderful.

And, you should see how good looking she is in a helmet on her bike. Hot damn!

I've surfed three times in the last 10 days. It feels good, being back in the water. I'm slowly getting it back. Pete and I have been getting some fun ones at Rockaway. Pete has been blasting the fins off the back on his new whip. Elle even took a few to the shore on Saturday. The water's warm, we're staying in a loft in SoHo for the next two months, my new log is perfect, my girlfriend still wants me around all the time, my bike will be built by the weekend, and life is very very good. I am a lucky young man.