it’s rainin’ in my heart
Tuesday, February 28th, 2006The one complaint I have about work is that it sucks my energy. I’m come home sapped, and all I can manage to do is watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report and Gilmore Girls and maybe 24 or American Idol. That sounds like a lot, but I really need to curl up on the couch and do the simplest thing possible (i.e., keep my eyes open) until I’m able to sleep.
What this means is that I’m not writing. At all. I spend enough time fretting over word choice for 160,000 readers that the prospect of fretting over it for you, or even just for me, is unattractive, unstomachable. It is the last thing I want to do. And so I don’t.
But I miss it. In September and October, when I was living in St. Charles part time and being bored full time, I wrote for hours on end. My sleep schedule was off and few people were around, so I spent most of the late-night hours sitting on the couch with a laptop on my knees and a dog or two at my feet. I wrote and wrote and wrote and maybe watched Law & Order intermittently.
Most everything I typed was autobiographical, memoirish. I didn’t (and still don’t) think I’ve done anything extraordinary, but I thought that if I wrote things in context, explained with anecdotes, I could pass as interesting enough. The result was a bunch of snippets of stories that I started but couldn’t finish for whatever reason. Most of them sucked and were summarily deleted.
Maybe a week or so before I moved to Jacksonville, I started something that had promise. It was the Great American Metaphor, that anecdote that would succinctly explain me while being interesting enough and powerful enough on its own to hush children, set women a-quiver and bring grown men to tears. It was about love, heartache, depression, abuse. It was about coming and going and never being OK with either of those things. But mostly it was about Hershey, my childhood dog.
Unfortunately, I never made it past the second paragraph; my attention waned and the metaphor itself wasn’t realized:
Hershey is an old dog, to be sure. His eyes are glazed over with the stare of glaucoma, and I’m never quite sure if he recognizes me. He spends his days dozing off on the couch, the loveseat, the chair — or the floor, if he’s too exhausted to jump onto the furniture. He has trouble climbing stairs. His ears are usually infected. He pees indiscriminately. His body is covered with fatty tumors that make it difficult for me to pet him without being sad. He is far from the spunky puppy I fell in love with more than half a life ago.
His name, once clever but now obviously trite, is actually short for his official, registered moniker, Hershey Chocolat au Lait Steele. This is what happens when your mother has recently eaten a candy bar in Québec. Faced with a chocolate Labrador retriever, she narrowly chose the great American chocolate bar over its nutty rival, Snickers.
The hardest part about the coming and the going was that I knew that someday Hershey wouldn’t be waiting for me when I got back. He had been my best friend and confidant since I was 7, and I was increasingly aware that I was going to outlast him.
When my mom called me Tuesday to say he wasn’t doing well and was having tests done, I cried a little and then priced plane tickets. Just in case. But we talked again Thursday and she said the vet gave him a clean bill of health; he was just continuing to wear down. It was better than what I thought was the best-case scenario, and I wouldn’t have to fly home on such short notice.
Sunday morning I woke up and my phone was ringing. I didn’t get to the phone fast enough, and when I saw that it was the second missed call from my mom that morning, I knew what had happened. Anything else and she would’ve left a message. Not wanting to, I called back, if only so it could start to sink in. I had a miserable day.
Hershey was maybe a little stupid and definitely a spoiled brat, but he was all anyone could ask for in a dog. We grew up together, had so many adventures in the woods in West Virginia. He’s the reason my teeth are chipped and ugly. He never turned down a hug or a bacon strip. I think we could read each other’s minds half the time. And now, after 14 years, he’s gone.
And I don’t know what to do. Bye, puppy.
Live albums generally shouldn’t be considered for year-end lists (hence the lowly honorable mention), but this one is special. Let’s face it: The 97′s are one of the best live bands you’ll see (if you’re lucky enough to see them); though no live album can accurately capture a band’s energy, this one showcases a band so ridiculously awesome that it is well worth nearly two hours of your time. You get 30 rockin’ songs, all of them winners. (OK, maybe not “Coahuila.” I can’t stand that song.) Everyone plays their asses off, and 
OK, I gave into 
Jack and Meg got a little … um … eclectic on this, their fifth LP. Most of the songs are piano-based, and there’s even a marimba. A freaking marimba! The guitar we came to know and love on De Stijl and White Blood Cells is all but gone. We should’ve seen this coming, though — the Whites have simply decided to go about three steps beyond the 90-degree turn presented in Elephant. But this album still rocks. Jack White might be getting progressively creepier, but he can still pound out the tunes. And if you don’t believe me, c’mon — you’ve got it all wrong.
This was pretty much hailed as The Decemberists’ best effort to date. I honestly can’t tell a difference, but that’s far from being a bad thing. What Colin Meloy does so well is tell stories about things and people that are not often found in songs (and much less often in good songs): historical things and people. The educational rock of They Might Be Giants notwithstanding, The Decemberists are the only band that has been able to pull off all the research and big words (sixth word on the CD: palanquin — an East Asian enclosed seat attached to poles (for carrying purposes)) necessary for this songwriting niche. Long live the literary rock!
Conor Oberst made a choice by getting folky for this album. (It’s arguable that releasing a second, “not folky” record on the same day as this one negates the “folkiness transformation,” but I’ve managed to ignore Digital Ash in a Digital Urn so far.) He has at several points in his young career (he’s only 26!) garnered the “next Bob Dylan” honorific, so making this album and continuing down the folky path will prove that Oberst is not the next Dylan. (No one is. Music critics just like to compare new things to old things, or, even better, say that New Band X is like a blenderfied Classic Rock Band A/Folk Hero B supergroup with maybe a pinch of Tragically Misunderstood Singer-Songwriter C for good measure.) What Oberst is, however, is a very good songwriter with a warbly, emotional voice and a sensibility (I mean, he has Emmylou Harris singing on this album!) perfectly suited for this music. And that is why we should love him.
Sufjan Stevens used to be one of those names I saw on Pitchfork from time to time and wondered why there was such a fuss. Well, now I know. I picked up the CD on a whim when I was in Bethlehem in August. The next day, I drove four hours from Bethlum up to Syracuse. I listened to this CD the whole time. It was so amazing that I was in a trance and nearly ran out of gas near Binghamton. But I remembered to refill and here I am today to tell you about Sufjan. On the surface, this 50 states project might seem like a bit of a ploy, smoke and mirrors meant to play off of our love for the ridiculous. How could anyone make an album about every state? What’s more, how could anyone be serious about it? But Sufjan is totally earnest and ridiculously talented, and the result is 70-plus minutes of music, lush and beautifully arranged (but not over the top), with lyrics that are, yes, about Illinois. But they’re about more than Illinois, too, and that’s what makes Sufjan such a winner. It’s hard to pick one standout track — there are songs obviously meant to be the albums focal points, but it’s really a suite of music that needs to be listened to as a whole — so here are two.