Wherein I meditate to music alone

Just back from the rockin' Calexico / Shins show at First Ave. Couldn't find anyone to go with, all my friends being a) broke b) philistines c) in a different city so I went alone, which I thought might feel weird, but as long as the bands were playing I could bob my head in my meditative way, and it was no different than if I had someone at my side. If it's a good show, I fall into a certain reverie in which the music is often subordinate to racing thoughts and memory. A certain line or chord hits me and suddenly I'm mulling over a poem I was working on earlier in the day. Or Calexico conjures visions of my personal Myth of the West and suddenly I'm remembering the horrible cross-country drive I took with my dad when I was sixteen and my grandma was too old to live alone in her house in Sacramento so as she moved north to Seattle we loaded up her old car and attached a U-Haul of antiques and spent a week driving east under endless hours of sun, fighting. He didn't want to stop to see anything and made me drive the entire time, ten hours or more a day, I would cry myself to sleep at night in Elko, Evanston, Laramie, the moments of familial clarity when he napped in the car and I wandered by myself among collapsed forts and sage, and sat once for a very long time among silence and the grooves of Oregon Trail wagons in soft limestone. Also, a surreal drive through Bear Country, U.S.A. in Rapid City, where all the poor bears, dozens of them, were fucking each other senseless around our car. I'd also imagine what it would feel like, what it would take, to quit my job, buy a beat-up car, and drive into the setting sun with tortilla chips and a coupla notebooks. If Whiskeytown makes me want to drive to Winnipeg in January, then Calexico makes me want to visit Kris in Tempe. Instead, the show ends and I slip away among the impossibly young hipsters who have come in from the outer rings, waiting forever among wafting black-and-milds for the #4 back to Uptown.