Coffee shops are the office buildings of college towns. They are centers of industry, where students and teachers go to be productive. Other people too, thinkers — in college towns people work in silence and stillness or in small groups on abstract projects. You can prove yourself from a coffee shop in college.
I am at a coffee shop in Fort Collins. It is full of nooks and crannies. There is a gas fireplace and they still have Christmas lights up. They have plastic icicles in the window, and white LEDs light up a descent. It’s supposed to look like dripping water.
Things I have seen in the last two hours:
Two students in glasses and sweaters were looking at sheet music. One turned a page to show the other and said, “I don’t know if you can hear this, but it’s really pretty.”
Two dudes with open laptops facing each other. One said to the other, “Are things depressing over there?”
A girl sitting right in front of me, looking at facebook on her laptop and talking on her cellphone. She said to whoever was on the other end, “I’m at the coffee shop trying to get some work done, but you know how that goes.”
TV Show: Archer, because the first two episodes are maybe 95% hilarious.
Podcast: Risk!, because it’s less obnoxious than This American Life. The overshare moments are worth the payoff in honesty.
Song: Forever, by Drake and Kanye West and Lil’ Wayne and Eminem, because it’s awesome. It’s the little things — the piano leading into Wayne’s verse and Eminem just tearing the thing to shreds.
Beer: Orale from Del Norte Brewing, because it’s sweet and delicious.
I put on Boxer for someone who’d never heard it before. I love doing this because it is the sort of album that strikes you immediately. It is remarkable music for quiet moments.
My most vivid memory of this album is listening to it on the way to sneaking into a late night bike ride through downtown Colorado Springs with my best friend the year it came out. We listened to it driving to the parking lot, and I remember the mindset: serenity. Life gets more complicated as you get older, but, again, you get to choose how dire it gets, and watching someone hear The National for the first time is the sort of thing that makes me believe in writing about music. Keep reading →
Not in a cosmic, literal sense. I believe reality is objective in that sense. That’s what god is all about, but that’s a different post. No, I’m talking about perspective, and how limits are freedom. Because you can only ever see the world through your eyes. You can only filter experience through your brain. So you get to decide what it means. And that’s about as real as it gets.
It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.
There are raised voices in some other apartment. I thought it was the one behind the back wall, and later two away behind the bathroom, and even at one point I was sure it was on the next floor. Sound travels strangely in apartment buildings, taking the path of least resistance through ducts and pipes and under doors and down hallways — not just through walls. So it can be hard to tell.
You are at some point supposed to move into a house. There, you get some degree of control in a world that is too large and complicated to conceive. In your house you are sovereign and you have the option to trace every errant sound to its source and understand it. Keep reading →
I am on the fence about LED Christmas lights. They will last forever and be much less of a hassle and are easier on the ol’ conscious. But they do not look familiar yet, and familiarity is key here. The best things about Christmas make you feel like you’re eight years old again. That said, I am adjusting already. I give it five years before I prefer them. As an aside, maybe LED Christmas lights were around last year, but I don’t remember them.
It is bitterly cold, so much that you sort of have to greet any trip outside like a boxer: ready to fight. But the fire is so delightful.
I didn’t actually listen to this album today or ever. I never bothered to look up the youtube clips before earlier in the week because it takes more than a standing ovation from a studio audience of a reality TV talent show to get me interested.
Then she went and sold about a kajillion copies of her debut album and that does interest me because no one not named Lil’ Wayne has recently figured out how to actually make an album release count for something in the bank.
Now, look at that cover. How many albums can you find buried in the easy listening section of Best Buy or wherever with some anonymous woman in that exact pose, with some version of that title block? That is a Thomas Kinkade cover, warm and easy.
Only the other women with this exact CD are more attractive than Susan Boyle, which I realize is the whole point. But don’t let anyone tell you that she is proof that talent can prevail in a materialistic world. As it turns out, Susan Boyle is not a particularly good singer. Seriously! She’d be buried somewhere in the middle of an average college choir. She can’t really hit or sustain high notes and her voice is not compelling by any measure, unless you count placid and completely oblivious earnestness. Susan Boyle is the product of diminished expectations, and that is most assuredly not something worth supporting to the tune of $10 worth of corn-pone plastic. Keep reading →
After lifting slightly more than you thought possible for slightly longer than you thought possible, you feel temporarily weak but are filled with a sense of lasting strength.
At least I have found this. The ad team for the US Military has also found this. Somehow, I don’t mean the same thing they do.
