Driving along the interstate, I think about a lot of things. A sort of blank canvas for meditation, memories or beautiful clouds. Sometimes I’ll dip right into my mind for what seems like hours. I’ll come out, suspiciously calm, wondering who got all the driving done. On a long enough drive, I’ll cycle through until I get to where I’m going.

Like when I was eleven or so, or at least that’s how it usually starts out. I really can’t remember specific ages anymore, or even grades for that matter. It’s either 3, 7, 11, or 17. The prime number ages where everything from my childhood happened. It’s not worth the accuracy, it’s not the important part. So this little story happened when I was 11, with grass stains on my sweatpants and an Ecto-Cooler juice-box ring around my lips. During gym class every day we would run a few laps around the gym to get our blood flowing. Pretty routine. On special days, Mr. Garsh would blow the whistle and we would change direction to make a sort of game out of the jogging. Long into my physical education career I was regarded as one of the most athletic in my grade. But today, the day of this story, I missed one of the whistle blows. I just kept going clockwise around the linoleum gym floor. Taking close care to not overstep the yellow-tape track, I looked up and noticed my first encounter with the oncoming stream of classmates, Lacey Lewis’s face. Closer and bigger than I would ever see again. We were both stunned from the collision, but I kept running. In the same wrong direction. After another quarter lap I wiped my brow, starting to bead up with sweat, I looked down at my hand covered in red liquid. It didn’t feel like blood until a friend came over with a wide-eyed expression yelling for Mr. Garsh to come quick.

This marked my second major head injury that would require stitches. Only a few. But stitches meant long anesthetic needles and alcohol wipes. A scary experience for any 7 year old. Or 11 year old. Whenever it was. I’ve had other head injuries. I’m a bit of a veteran.

There was the time I was inspired to fly like Batman off our lay-z-boy recliner and head first into the hard stone edge of our basement fireplace. The other happened on my first bike ride on a 5-speed bike. I never had hand-brakes before, just stopped pedaling and the back wheel would grind to a halt. Heading down a hill on the new-fangled two-wheel contraption, I hit the right-hand break, the one that controls the front wheel pads and wham. Flipped right over the handle bars right onto my chin. This one didn’t need stitches though, just a well-place butterfly band-aid.

Today they’re kind of funny. Smiling thinking about them riding along the straight-and-narrow. Kids in the backs of trucks with two or three scar stories of their own. Flying lessons. Not like these cars in the ditch though. Driving by I wonder what sort of stories the cars have. Are they ok? Did it end quickly? Maybe my bicycle/batman/jogging exploits would be right along here had the outcome been different. Any one of those could have killed me in some freak way. Maybe that’s a morose way to look at it, but it’s hard to help. Nobody can go around contemplating the “Ifs” or “What-would-have-beens” all day long, but it hits hard when it’s close. Or real. A friend of mine mentioned how a long-lost high school friend of ours was killed in a car accident. On the interstate no less. My friends didn’t really know her that well. But I did. I wouldn’t say I knew her, but she’d been a girl I liked immensely in my romantic high school bumblings. If only for a few weeks. Funny that I didn’t know her, but somehow fell madly in love with her. More like sickly than madly.

She had two different colored eyes. Golden eyes. That’s not a literary metaphor, they were literally gold. Two different shades of blueish golden. I think everyone fell a little bit in love with them. We’d started hanging out the same way any girl hung out with me; out of proximity and convenience. Only for a summer, she came into our nerdy and estrogen-less lives, and after couple months I worked up the salt to talk to her personally. We held hands until they were sweaty while we all watched some soul-less action movie. Nobody saw, and a few days later she didn’t seem too interested anymore. I’m not sure why, it killed me at the time, but that’s the gist of my high school career. We didn’t talk again really. The last time I saw her, she was in a big bookstore during the holidays with her family, probably buying presents. I didn’t say anything. It’d been too long anyway. In January she crashed head-on into an oncoming semi-truck after losing control on the ice.

It wasn’t the first time someone I knew died tragically. But somehow this was the first time it felt real. Like the world lost something. I couldn’t get it out of my head but it seemed that just then, I saw the semi right in front of me, just like Lacey Lewis’s face. This time I noticed right away, and it’d probably take more than a few stitches to patch up. Nevertheless, I’d have my interstate memories to float me through to where I was going.

This is an actual email I received a bit ago. For real.

leathery her swingable

bluegrass gallus calcify? insightful, id sonnet.
candle tapa induce rummage jaime caulk, leathery
sonnet millie calcify ebony insightful.

confederate revisionary.

~ Ricardo Carpenter (HectorceramiumGreene@alisonlewis.com)

Can you puny humans do any better? Doubt it!

Albums that just don’t seem like albums, are a bit confusing, a bit refreshing.

I like my albums. I’ve never been into making mixes because I’m not a DJ at a dance club. But maybe some of my favorite bands think they are.

Recently, I’ve been getting into using shuffle mode on my iPod touch, even though I don’t like having a bunch of “singles” it makes for a good mix when my music is getting stale. When I Switch back to listening to whole albums there is a bit of a disconnect, especially with certain artists. When I sit down and listen to Revolver by the Beatles, it’s unmistakably a separate album from their rest. Even between Abbey Road and The White Album there are distinctions made within the album that let each stand alone.

This isn’t the case with some of my favorite musicians. Ani DiFranco. Now I don’t have her full discography, but even having a couple albums of hers, they seem to blend between each other. While that’s not a terrible thing, it’s a bit confusing for me. Cat Stevens is another good example, but that probably has more to do with how old the music is, being comprised into a monster of greatest hits and compilations that eventually become one big Cat Steven’s pot of gruel. Sweet, brown-sugary folkey gruel, but gruel nonetheless. Another, more modern example: Atmosphere. With exception to their latest release, “golden lemonades blah blah,” which is crap by the way. While all the albums are great, I could frankenstein together a mix of Atmosphere without losing too much continuity or “higher album concept.”

I’m not saying that one way is better than another, it’s just different. But it seems like these two approaches breed much different responses to music for me. There’s a time and place for both. One, a kind of artistic endeavor to unravel the deep meanings of songs that were never meant to mean what I think they mean. And then another for little limericks of entertainment or insight, sometimes more powerful than their high-concept counterpart. I’d say overall though, the album concept has more serious artistic potential, but also has much more to risk being that they often take themselves too seriously. There’s something to be said for the Ani DiFranco’s of the music world, saying what they want to say, whenever and however they want to say it.

Some more bands that I think fit the non-album profile…

• The eels
• Boards of Canada
• Múm
• Aesop Rock [sort of what prompted this whole idea.]
• Belle & Sebastian
• B.R.M.C.
• Recent Mars Volta

ps. I’m no expert of Aesop Rock, or The Eels [favorite band at the moment] in terms of their entire anthology. Be warned. Tread softly music-nerds.

This was an excellent program, and I encourage anyone that supports equal opportunities/rights to tune in, find out what you can do, and what others are doing to help those who need it most.

I stumbled upon this show airing kind of late on friday night. The show seemed to be a notch in larger mini-series [Black in America] of shows about what it is like to be black in America right now.

The whole panel was filled with impressive scholars, actors and activists talking candidly about the issues blacks face in America. A lot of good points were made, but like any kind of problem that is so big and troublesome that it can soon degrade into talking about what we should do, rather than what we can do, and what we’re doing.

However, there was an interesting prospect brought to light by Roland G. Fryer, a Harvard economist putting a program in place to pay children for going to school. At first it seems a little jaw-dropping, but let’s pause, and recognize that someone is at least trying something rather than writing about it [like this mile222 guy]. Kids earn money for good marks in an effort to teach them the direct connection between earning money and level of education. While, sure, that’s not always a direct correlation, but it certainly isn’t inverse. And kids understand money, resources and that without them they can’t get what they want… That’s the great American lesson!*

No subhead this time, just straight into it. Some quacks over in Pennsylvania claim that cell phones may or may not cause cancer. So the question is…

Is it easier to quit cell-phoning or quit smoking? My vote is on smoking. Maybe this is how my grandparents felt when all the doctors were saying smoking is bad for you. It’s a little late now isn’t it? Well, unless we start communicating those huge viking horns and a specific pattern of smoke signals. Perhaps we’d base it on morse code and depict emotion with war-drums. Or wait, we could just use corded phones. Oh… But that’s so boring!

Good luck to all the crackerberries out there. You know who you are