Indulge me for a moment

Today has been a shitty day. I woke up this morning and did some fiddling around with my iPod, thought about adding some new music to it and whatnot, and realized that I had, on my computer's ITunes, a copy of 10,000 Maniacs MTV Unplugged album.

Okay, I know what you are thinking. Indulge me for a moment. In junior high 10,000 Maniacs was a very important band for me! Okay, so I was a true Jack Kerouac fan back then and I saw straight through the drivel of "Hey Jack Kerouac" but they sung about spousal abuse and thwarted love and they were anti-capital punishment. I associate it with memories of Duluth...being too young to do anything fun, driving around, at Josh's with Nick out the in the woods setting fire to shit and making movies with Leah and Eli and driving around in a camaro with our skateboards, hanging out by the lake, making out with girls and making love to boys by the lake, my outcast friends whom I loved, eating Chinese food at Greysolon Plaza and looking surreptitiously at gay mags at Carlsons bookstore and Leigh...my best friend Leigh...driving to Perkins on London Road and sitting in the booths and smoking all night and drinking from the bottomless pots of coffee and talking for hours and hours and hours.

10,000 Maniacs. Bear with me. The song "These Are Days" would be pumped loud through the speakers of the parents' minivan, windows down along the Scenic Route, lake on the left, cool breeze, and the hot cicadas barely audible outside the left windows, Leigh's hair flowing...or am I imagining it? Out for hours, high on coffee and nicotine, the words "These are days / you'll remember / never before and never since / I promise / will the whole world be warm as this / and as you feel it / you'll know its true / that you / are blessed and lucky..." I remember those words, undeniably true, in love with a boy, making love to him on the beach, shouting those words as loud as I could and promising myself (as silently as I could) that as long as those words were true for me then I was doing the right thing.

So bear with me. Struck by the memories I began to upload the album to my iPod, clunky as it may be, slowly dying apparently, when the thing broke down, fucked up, went berserk and suddenly wouldn't work. Well, it was as though my pacemaker had malfunctioned. I could barely stand the bus ride into work...I had to actually listen to the sound of reality around me...the bus engine, some dude on his cell phone...IT WAS HELL.

Fucking asshole Natalie Merchant. Fucks everything up.

The iPod will have to be reformatted now. The intervening day was quite hellish...grayish, snow flurries, work stress, fighting with my landlord, moving soon. I got drunk very quickly tonight after work, had a burger at the CC Club, sitting at the bar, came home, sipping water now and sobering up and I went back to the 10,000 Maniacs just now and I'm listening to that song and as cheesy as it sounds, I'm like, "I want this song to be true by the summer..." Indulge me for a few minutes...

These Are Days....10,000 Maniacs