Someone Great by LCD Soundsystem

My high school sweetheart and I broke up when we were in college. Then, sometimes, we would be unbroken up. This was not easy for me, I had a soft face and confused head. I was taking writing classes and very exact. I remember, vividly, seeing her for the first time in months after she went away for the summer, came back calmer with longer hair and looser clothing. It was nice to see her, easy. Then (and less now, but still; now) I was too eager to be taken with grandeur, prone to unnecessary loftiness, the kind of person for whom everything is experiential. This is all embarrassing (what I am telling you, the fact that it’s possibly still true). Then, though, unaware and self-important, I went and wrote about her and I, called us “synchronized swimmers” and lamented not only the loss of that synchronicity, but the lackadaisicalness towards her it was replaced with. This poem wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good. Regardless I brought it to my poetry class, had it lauded; my twenty-year-old success, accolades from worse-than-me student writers and a teacher who published in Ploughshares! This was it, this was the end: I described a thing as another thing and people understood the thing as it was. Synchronized swimmers, huh? It’s like automatic closeness, elaborate showiness of natural movement that masks the mechanical practice and struggle needed to create such glorious dual fluidity! That was us! Who needed descriptions, bright and accurate, of my skin tone in the morning, of the grim carpeting of her dorm, of the way she sushed me when speaking to her mother? None of these things brought the experience as close as synchronized swimmers. So, then, I stopped writing about how things were and started writing about how other things things were like were. When I wrote a magazine review like this about this song (in its instrumental form as part of LCD Soundsystem’s mix for iTunes) the editor told me to talk about how it sounded. I changed it, a little. When the magazine ran, the review wasn’t there. I’ve not written for him since, unable to become specific and grounded. Here I write of willows and wingdings for free and on end. There I am losing ten cents a word and my name in print. I am unsure who is missing out.

Tourist Trap by White Rabbits

I thought I had pesto but I was out, but I’d already cooked the pasta so I ate it with olive oil, sea salt and pepper, talked to my sister on the phone about her new dog (“The vet says I can’t name him Noah because it sounds like ‘No.’”) and, in all ways already sated, then I went to see White Rabbits. They started at ten; I got there at ten. Apparently things start on time now, before time, even, and a billion prompt sweating losers stood in front of me blocking the band, so Liana and I got beers and listened from the sidewalk. When the café owner asked us politely to not drink beers on his sidewalk because he feared arrest we chugged and threw them away. He didn’t mind. When he came back later and saw us beerless, he smiled and waved. I waved back. I hopped a little mini-fence and watched White Rabbit through the fogged window amidst brambles and potential mosquito nests. They looked overdressed and kindly Midwestern; they are Midwestern. They gave people maracas, people sang along. I waved to the guy in the band close to the window; he cocked his head back at me, I climbed back over the fence to the sidewalk and my friends and was like, hey, this is fun.