Snapshots of youth as felt by the Pixies performance at the Macdonald Theatre in Eugene, OR April 28th 2004

Snapshots appear, the cafeteria open for the last day of the term. The stoic silence in the server’s delivery of my grits, the nothing sound they made when plopped into the lunch tray. The smell on my hands after three hours in the photo lab. The footsteps of the sexy TA as she ascended the conical steps, the swirling architecture and the pit-like consistency in the air, that draped down into the stairwell. The busy signal on the twelfth attempt to call a fellow radio station member.

It’s hot in Eugene on this particular morning. So hot that it knows I have a hangover and uses this to create a larger border between myself and my mind. A reunion stuck at the back of parched throat, twitching as it plays out the neurological disconnect between nerves and emotions.

The shattered ringing that pulses through the ears. Flashbulb memories of Frank black standing triumphantly in front of a sold out show after reuniting the band after 15 years. Is this the end of my childhood? The look he gives the crowd is the general summation of how he feels to be back. We all feel it to, the punters, some of whom who drove hundreds of miles to be caught up in the retelling of fifteen years of growth setbacks, battles and redemption. They stand facing the audience, stripped of their instruments. They exit the stage and the present catches back up with me. It was a rare moment when the past and present intersected on itself, and I stood at the juncture without a beer in my hand, but friends on either side. One who remembers who I was when I was 18 and “Skyline of the Olympus Monds” was on her stereo when Id locked the keys in the cars, diving after some vodka concoction. None of this is spoken of course, my other friend is still stunned by the turn of events, he’d have been in high school at that same time and I was certain he was replaying the last fifteen years in his head as well.

We're older now, had seen adolescence through with our personalities in tact. We still had the biting knee jerk reactions of young protestors, still dipped our tongues in poison, and still knew how to say the wrong things at the wrong time. To have it all there right in front of you, to see that tiny slice of who you were pressed right up against who you are now is disengaging, we needed more beer.

No one mentioned the communal feeling; I'd made a few half assed attempts myself at trying to articulate how time had passed and we were still young even with wives, fiancées, law and graduate schools on the horizon. My attempts came across about as well as an elderly hallmark card, well meaning in its execution, but saccharine and overly-sentimental in its delivery.

I’d spent the last fifteen years running away from who I was conversing with at present, spent uncalculated dollars and hours running away from maturity, holding onto my youth with the rigorous abandon of a compulsive gambler on his last stack of white chips. The images of current achievement filled my thoughts as I tried to explain that this show actually meant something to us, all at the same time.

The rest of the night was a fruitless attempt at trying to explain my position. The night was filled with faulty navigations both social and geographical. I was with a younger crowd who were in elementary school when these songs were first released. They didn’t listen to “Where is My Mind?” and “Gigantic” at the prom, They were somewhere else.

For the next few days the feeling persisted. The culmination of struggle, pain, growth and retraction compounded into a two hour show of 17 songs, powerful enough to, if just for a moment, rekindle the burning spirit of youth in a man child approaching middle age.

Yet Another Excerpt From My Never-To-Be-Published Memoirs

Its morning. And the soft duvet cover tells me Im no longer in America. Grey skies overhead filter through my brain, and I breath, the air being a little older, Victorian. Everything is older here from the switch heater on the shower nozzle to the chain on the WC. As I struggle to remember what the last statement I made last night after a 15 hour flight. The beer was so much stronger here, and I could legally drink.

Marmalade and toast and everything covered in crisp linens. Radio, everyone listens to the radio. An ageless taste prevails. And I can walk down the street with a beer, warm against the sweat of the previous night. The Steak-like presence in my mouth from the Benson and hedges. Gastronomically speaking, I’m jumping through the hurdles. As I begin my first day at the factory, my host father’s whistling as he drives on the wrong side of the road, whirling through roundabouts and whirlygigs. The sun’s out and so is Dexy’s midnight runners. I didn’t know they had more than one hit. It’s a flagrant sort of toe tapping that he does as I stare down at his feet, one that combats a recent divorce, and the burden of having to raise two boys on his own. He’s free to go off to the pub whenever he wants now, and he’s very affectionate with his boys, loves them dearly, would openly resort to violence if it came down to it, but he’s bitter in a hidden way, in the way he taps out his ash on the M4 as we leave Leeds and turn into Middleborough.

The farms remind me of History books alive with a saddening dullness. On my first break there’s breakfast served out of a cafeteria with partitions rolled up and the tangy odor of baked beans, toast and black pudding assail on my nasal passages. It’s alarming how much preparation is involved in this. I buy a paper and sit outside on the picnic tables. Unable to read the Sun (purchased because of the page three girls) I stare out at the fields, spying a partially hidden pathway, which passes by several ancient homes. For a moment, I am in an Edwardian Novel, Thomas Hardy, “Tess of the D’Urbervilles”, an apple falls and while picking it up, I imagine torrid love affairs with farmer’s daughters who live in bungalows. I’m wearing the black hat, the one worn by “The Mayor of Casterbridge.”

But the whistle blows (there’s actually a whistle here?) and I walk back to the smell of sawdust and burning plastic. At lunch I buy a sandwich and read the tabloid I bought earlier that day. I don’t speak to many people, to them I am exactly like them until I speak, which is identical to every other social interaction I’ve had.

They all ask the same questions “American or Canadian?” the way we’d say paper or plastic. And by the end of the day I’m looking forward to the pub opening, which it does twice weekly, another partition removed, run by an affable Irishman who doesn’t dwell too much on my American accent. To Brits, we all talk like Chicagoans; we all accentuate the short e, regardless of region.

I go home on the bus, since my host father is a workaholic, and Redundancies are facing the factory, so there’s job security in it for him. As for me, I’m paid in food and lodging, so I’m, not too motivated. Sometimes I find evangelical ways of slacking off, in order to make the busy feet of my anti-American boss jump with anger. I took a three hour lunch one time, just to see his heart rate increase. I wanted to distract him with misery. He was such an asshole.

On those afternoons on the bus, I experienced what can only be described as an epiphany. As the beginning rays of summer trickled down up on me on the upper deck of the bus, whirring by unknown places and sceneries, I felt more like a figure in constant motion than a static being, haling from one place and headed for someplace else, my path was wide, took up hundreds of miles. It was this interloping feeling that would propel me through next few years. In between where I was and where I came from was thousands of pages of international politics, borders, treaties, land distributed, uncharted depths of hidden undersea volcanoes, speech differentials, knowledge and ignorance exchanging various levels of inventory as the bus came to a halt and I walked through the park on my way home. Even though I was working at a factory, I always felt regal, even if I was more regal reject than subject.

We always ended up in the Deer Park pub eventually. With my fogged head, I would slip the heavy gold coins into the jukebox. They felt so heavy and secure, worth so much in such a miniscule package. A more stable system of currency, this stuff sank when you threw it down the illuminated slots, the ring echoing in my three pint brain as I scanned the lines for songs by The Cure, Happy Mondays, Charlatans UK.

It was the summer of love, in Manchester anyway. The dance club the Hacienda had regular visits by the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays, it was the summer it all went criminal as gunfire outnumbered public groping, turning a bona-fide scene into a bloody turf war for the drug dealers. In Leeds however, it was business as usual. No one wanted to go to Manchester, I didn’t know about the violence back in the states. They didn’t mention that in Rolling Stone. In the states I imagined all of Northern England to be one Ecstasy filled rave, but really I wasn’t ready for that anyway. I was only 18. I wanted the sort of instant spiritual awakening these drugs provided as advertised, but in reality, I wasn’t mentally prepared for it. And I hated dancing. What was I thinking?

When one is thousands of miles away from one’s destination, the possibilities in traveling to another country unwrap within the mind. You imagine a reality that cannot possibly exist, one of prioritized fantasy and categorical definition. And when you finally arrive at your previously perceived destination, the newness of discovery mixes with the crushing disappointment creating a perpetual daze that reflects the tumult of geographical conflict.

So I settled for the atomic mushrooms. At the local high school. The kids called it something else. The four of us descended up on the school grounds well after school and after 6 pints of Tetley bitter to a tamed down version of the Manchester dance-rock phenomenon in the Atomic Mushrooms. Named more after their haircuts than any sort of condition there brain might have been in.

It was the beginning of the 12 year window in which youth has motion and wings, space to live out, where living is the main priority and career is far off. Time filled with friends and books, ideas, evenings of endless fascination, days of exploration, and playing cricket in the garden with Australian neighbors; when crushes aren’t methodical weigh heavy and buoyant on us, jubilant and drunk.

It’s having songs remind you of her lips, when it’s 12 years later and you’re in your own country. And you yearn for those pinnacle moments when you matured within a thought, forever cast onto a direct path. You wish you could revisit that mindset, but it is impossible. They stay up late the night we leave the country. Walking home slowly after the pub closed, underneath large trees in the chill of late summer. Probing the depth of our limited experiences, sharing thoughts for the last time, breaking ice introducing new lines of thought, the fleeting sincerity of a moment, that hangs above the trees, above the grey industrial skyline, through parks and pubs and the hardened arteries of Sunday morning pub dwellers, the sticky smell of morning porridge on the moors.

She would normally break down on Tuesday night, after the final feedings of the day. Afterwards we’d drink strawberry wine, but not after a few hours of distant stares and dried tears. Right after sundown, when the cows cast shadows over the craggy ground. It was a hot summer that July in 1943, right before I left to catch my fate in the swinging tornado of fate that lay just outside the boundaries of the farm.

It was on such an evening that I made my decision, packed my lone item of luggage and waited for the bank truck to pick up the last deposit for the day. We sold ice cream on the side, and on this particular July we cleared 25 dollars, in crumpled dollar bills, ripped from the dirt encrusted pockets of the workers fortunate enough to be paid. We treated them well, allowing them to stop for a spell in the middle of the blazing afternoon to take respite under the great oak at the center of the front lawn.

I spoke with Handy a few hours prior. I made sure the last of her tears were dry before I heaved the trunk at the back of Handy’s truck bed. The guilt was overwhelming and my hands shook as I handed him the last of the bills.

I stood up on the bed and looked out across the fields cooled by the oncoming night, waved imaginatively at the silhouette at Henrietta’s window and could make out the languid shadow her torso made against the stained shade. The sharp gurgle of the engine started and I maintained utmost secrecy as I leapt off of the bed and slid into the cab of the bank truck, took one last glace up at the rise and fall of Henrietta’s torso at the window and felt the shove as we drove out past the milkery down through the hills bordering the farm tossing my cap as the last fleck of dust coated the rickety gate at the entrance to the farm.

Another day befriends a year of inactivity as I at the office staring out the appealing window and the receptionist who dwells beneath it. The blue sky as canvas, so pleasantly strikes the eye that it threatens to be taken away immediately, rolled up like a retracting blind, a decoration to prevent madness. Walking through the halls on the way back from the bathroom and the glint off the white walls brings an extra spring to my step. I see darkened patters on the walls, hidden shadows, reflections of the mind.

I can stop anywhere, take out my pencil and draw a window, I can then peel back the wall from the perforated pencil lines and rip through to the outer layer. Initially it’s a grizzly image, until I replace it with anything remotely European. Greece in ’96 probably, that’s the most popular one. Being content with my decorations, I make my way through the entrance and altering the image of the secretary a bit, same body, different head.

When I finally open my eyes, I wonder if she can tell what Ive been thinking, if my violent sleep patterns made me call out someone’s name. Someone she doesn’t know. Someone she shouldn’t know.

Im entirely faithful, on the bicycle now, the humid air moves through my chest. The thoughts are diversion enough. We’re really happy. Sometimes when I see her, I can see right through her-- a vehicle for me to live through inhabit -- see her personality swell up and revolt against my desires. We make sweet war in the lesser recesses of our brains, see our collective conscious doing battle with tears and feel ripped open and cleansed. Some nights I look long into the future in those eyes, dark with intermittent shades of blue, bright azure with bellicose black shades billowing up from behind it.

Certain nights go by on the porch, neighbors on bikes whisk by, low murmurings of orgasm from next door and I wonder If I inherited her. Feel like Ive been left with a wonderful thing, can’t remember how I acquired her. I have those dreams that night, a shift in geography, my sense of self searching all corners for a static thought, leaden thoughts by which it can attach itself to, creating any sort of permanence. Has my life always been a shadow?

A professor, in Ct. who taught me all of this, where is he now? I remember his fondest memory, at his local bar in 1974. he’d have the entire class close their eyes and walk us through this memory until we all experienced it became shared, part of our collective conscious. I wonder if he’s still walking them through that memory, a thousand students walking around with vivid recollections of events that occurred before they were born.

********************************************************************

I hope I don’t die one day here, don’t drop dead while teaching the closing couplet to Paradise Lost. I hope my teachings live on and multiply throughout the ages. I hope my book sells more than the 300 students I’ve forced over the years to buy my book. I wish I didn’t have to go to the bathroom as much as I do.

Yet Another Excerpt From My Never-To-Be-Published Memoirs

Its morning. And the soft duvet cover tells me Im no longer in America. Grey skies overhead filter through my brain, and I breath, the air being a little older, Victorian. Everything is older here from the switch heater on the shower nozzle to the chain on the WC. As I struggle to remember what the last statement I made last night after a 15 hour flight. The beer was so much stronger here, and I could legally drink.

Marmalade and toast and everything covered in crisp linens. Radio, everyone listens to the radio. An ageless taste prevails. And I can walk down the street with a beer, warm against the sweat of the previous night. The Steak-like presence in my mouth from the Benson and hedges. Gastronomically speaking, I’m jumping through the hurdles. As I begin my first day at the factory, my host father’s whistling as he drives on the wrong side of the road, whirling through roundabouts and whirlygigs. The sun’s out and so is Dexy’s midnight runners. I didn’t know they had more than one hit. It’s a flagrant sort of toe tapping that he does as I stare down at his feet, one that combats a recent divorce, and the burden of having to raise two boys on his own. He’s free to go off to the pub whenever he wants now, and he’s very affectionate with his boys, loves them dearly, would openly resort to violence if it came down to it, but he’s bitter in a hidden way, in the way he taps out his ash on the M4 as we leave Leeds and turn into Middleborough.

The farms remind me of History books alive with a saddening dullness. On my first break there’s breakfast served out of a cafeteria with partitions rolled up and the tangy odor of baked beans, toast and black pudding assail on my nasal passages. It’s alarming how much preparation is involved in this. I buy a paper and sit outside on the picnic tables. Unable to read the Sun (purchased because of the page three girls) I stare out at the fields, spying a partially hidden pathway, which passes by several ancient homes. For a moment, I am in an Edwardian Novel, Thomas Hardy, “Tess of the D’Urbervilles”, an apple falls and while picking it up, I imagine torrid love affairs with farmer’s daughters who live in bungalows. I’m wearing the black hat, the one worn by “The Mayor of Casterbridge.”

But the whistle blows (there’s actually a whistle here?) and I walk back to the smell of sawdust and burning plastic. At lunch I buy a sandwich and read the tabloid I bought earlier that day. I don’t speak to many people, to them I am exactly like them until I speak, which is identical to every other social interaction I’ve had.

They all ask the same questions “American or Canadian?” the way we’d say paper or plastic. And by the end of the day I’m looking forward to the pub opening, which it does twice weekly, another partition removed, run by an affable Irishman who doesn’t dwell too much on my American accent. To Brits, we all talk like Chicagoans; we all accentuate the short e, regardless of region.

I go home on the bus, since my host father is a workaholic, and Redundancies are facing the factory, so there’s job security in it for him. As for me, I’m paid in food and lodging, so I’m, not too motivated. Sometimes I find evangelical ways of slacking off, in order to make the busy feet of my anti-American boss jump with anger. I took a three hour lunch one time, just to see his heart rate increase. I wanted to distract him with misery. He was such an asshole.

On those afternoons on the bus, I experienced what can only be described as an epiphany. As the beginning rays of summer trickled down up on me on the upper deck of the bus, whirring by unknown places and sceneries, I felt more like a figure in constant motion than a static being, haling from one place and headed for someplace else, my path was wide, took up hundreds of miles. It was this interloping feeling that would propel me through next few years. In between where I was and where I came from was thousands of pages of international politics, borders, treaties, land distributed, uncharted depths of hidden undersea volcanoes, speech differentials, knowledge and ignorance exchanging various levels of inventory as the bus came to a halt and I walked through the park on my way home. Even though I was working at a factory, I always felt regal, even if I was more regal reject than subject.

We always ended up in the Deer Park pub eventually. With my fogged head, I would slip the heavy gold coins into the jukebox. They felt so heavy and secure, worth so much in such a miniscule package. A more stable system of currency, this stuff sank when you threw it down the illuminated slots, the ring echoing in my three pint brain as I scanned the lines for songs by The Cure, Happy Mondays, Charlatans UK.

It was the summer of love, in Manchester anyway. The dance club the Hacienda had regular visits by the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays, it was the summer it all went criminal as gunfire outnumbered public groping, turning a bona-fide scene into a bloody turf war for the drug dealers. In Leeds however, it was business as usual. No one wanted to go to Manchester, I didn’t know about the violence back in the states. They didn’t mention that in Rolling Stone. In the states I imagined all of Northern England to be one Ecstasy filled rave, but really I wasn’t ready for that anyway. I was only 18. I wanted the sort of instant spiritual awakening these drugs provided as advertised, but in reality, I wasn’t mentally prepared for it. And I hated dancing. What was I thinking?

When one is thousands of miles away from one’s destination, the possibilities in traveling to another country unwrap within the mind. You imagine a reality that cannot possibly exist, one of prioritized fantasy and categorical definition. And when you finally arrive at your previously perceived destination, the newness of discovery mixes with the crushing disappointment creating a perpetual daze that reflects the tumult of geographical conflict.

So I settled for the atomic mushrooms. At the local high school. The kids called it something else. The four of us descended up on the school grounds well after school and after 6 pints of Tetley bitter to a tamed down version of the Manchester dance-rock phenomenon in the Atomic Mushrooms. Named more after their haircuts than any sort of condition there brain might have been in.

It was the beginning of the 12 year window in which youth has motion and wings, space to live out, where living is the main priority and career is far off. Time filled with friends and books, ideas, evenings of endless fascination, days of exploration, and playing cricket in the garden with Australian neighbors; when crushes aren’t methodical weigh heavy and buoyant on us, jubilant and drunk.

It’s having songs remind you of her lips, when it’s 12 years later and you’re in your own country. And you yearn for those pinnacle moments when you matured within a thought, forever cast onto a direct path. You wish you could revisit that mindset, but it is impossible. They stay up late the night we leave the country. Walking home slowly after the pub closed, underneath large trees in the chill of late summer. Probing the depth of our limited experiences, sharing thoughts for the last time, breaking ice introducing new lines of thought, the fleeting sincerity of a moment, that hangs above the trees, above the grey industrial skyline, through parks and pubs and the hardened arteries of Sunday morning pub dwellers, the sticky smell of morning porridge on the moors.