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.