Earlier today - or more accurately, yesterday, since, at this point, I am watching the sky gradually brighten as the clock flicks red dots in the shape of 6:20 AM - I was cleaning out the closet in my spare bedroom in preparation for Jeff's arrival on Tuesday. As I sorted through two over-sized, Tupperware bins, discarding items no longer of consequence, I came across a three-subject spiral notebook. It was slightly beaten up, with white creases - like varicose veins- spider-webbing across the blood-red cover. Before I opened it up, I flipped it over and glanced on the back cover. I like doing that, for some reason. Sometimes I can tell just by the doodles on the covers what I used a particular notebook for. On the back of this book were three separate sets of writing. At the top was scribbled a single, enigmatic phrase: "Empty evil inside, like a jack-o-lantern smile. On the lower half, written hastily in black sharpie, were a set of directions:
1) Bear right on Cedar Swamp Rd
2) Left on Hendrix - big church, right side
3) Left after stop sign - onto Porter
4) 3rd right - Eldridge
5) 1st house on left
It took me a while to figure out what these were directions to. I knew Cedar Swamp Rd. meant Glen Cove, and since I ended up living right off that road, I immediately knew what church whoever gave me those directions was talking about. I finally realized that these were directions to Jen's housewarming party. This was right after graduation, in 2003. This was one of my older notebooks. Underneath the directions, barely legible in pen, was another list:
1) Joe/Clubs
2) Football/Linemen
3) Healthy Eating
4) Man on Street
5) P. Safety
A fucking segment list. For what, I have no idea. It must've been for a class or a PTV Club show. This meant that at least some of the writing in this notebook would be from when I was still in college. I was kind of excited about it. Hesitating then no further, I began to leaf through, page by page.
This relic was basically composed of three things. Of the least consequence, there were several pages dedicated to fake football drafts. Over the years, when I've played Madden, I always create players. I create myself, of course, as well as a few friends and some of the guys who played ball at Post while I was there. I also liked to create characters from sports movies, like Darnell Jefferson from The Program, or Mox from Varsity Blues. I would then assign them to teams randomly, and that would be my draft. I kept track of who went where on sheets of paper. What are you laughing at? What, like you never did weird shit?
Anyway, the 2nd thing I found in the book was playlists; lots and lots of playlists. See, this was pre-itunes and pre-ipod (at least for me it was), and I loved to make mix cd's. I made them for other people, and I made them for myself. Fuck, I made them for no other reason than my love for music and my desire to never hear a song I couldn't sing along to. I planned these things out more carefully than Lee Marvin planned the assault in The Dirty Dozen. It was nothing less than a labor of love. I enjoy looking through them now, because some of the songs are still right up there among my favorites, while I don't even remember what others sounded like. You know how quickly bands come and go, and at this point in my life - I'd say 2003 - 2005 - I was at my most ravenous as far as consuming new music. Ninety percent of the bands whose records I bought never mattered much, and some never even released a second album. Most were good for a song or two before they faded into obscurity, but that song or two obviously had an effect on me. Here is one of the playlists exactly how it was written (which is mostly abbreviation). See if you recognize some of the bands, or if you've ever even heard of others.
1) TBS - Cut From the Team
2) Finch - Letters to You
3) Thursday - Cross Out the Eyes
4) Thrice - See You in the Shallows
5) BSF - Rookie
6) Brand New - Failure by Design
7) Piebald - Grace Kelly w/ Wings
8) C&C - Everything Evil
9) PMFS - December Killed...
10) GC - WaldorfWW
11) Early Nov. - All We Ever Needed
12) Mest - Drawing Board
13) TSL - Best of Me
14) FSF - Wearing Thin
15) Downtime - I Guess
16) River City High - Just Wonderin'
17) The Descent - ?
18) Yellowcard - Big Apple Heartbreak
19) DLD - Do You Hear Me?
20) Days Away - Knows My Name
21) CV77 - Another Night
22) Anatomy of a Ghost - Onto Morning Stars
23) Story of the Year - In the Shadows
24) Anadivine - Alcohol & Oxygen
25) Recover - Rodeo
Out of these twenty-five tracks, eleven songs are still on my ipod. I remember who all the bands were, except for The Descent. No clue about them. CV77 is Clearview 77, some shitty band that Red11 played with at Club Crannell Street. Downtime was my friend Dan's acoustic project, and DLD is a band called Don't Look Down. None of those three are currently in my rotation, though I believe I still have all the discs those songs came off of. It may seem superfluous to take the time to transcribe a meaningless playlist from half a decade ago, but I feel like the playlists correlate directly to the most valuable contents of this notebook: lyrics.
I scribble lyrics everywhere. There's not a notebook in my possession that doesn't have at least a handful of couplets or quatrains every few pages. I guess technically they aren't really lyrics, because none of them ever materialized into actual songs. So maybe they're poems, or pieces of poems. I don't know, but I'm going to call them lyrics, because that's how I always thought of them. With this particular notebook, I hit the mother load. Every other page dawned line after line of angst-ridden, emo-fueled gems. I couldn't help but laugh. I mean, some of this shit is just so bad. Taking Back Sunday has a great line in one of their songs that goes, "those words, at best, were worse than teenage poetry." That's exactly what this notebook was filled with - bad teenage poetry - written by a 22 year old. I'm not ashamed of it, though. Much like the playlists, it was a labor of love - or maybe more accurately, a labor of unrequited love. I could instantly tell that so much of what was vomitted all over these pages was fueled by an ill-advised, and in retrospect, embarrassingly sad obsession with my friend Ryan. I mean, the ringer that I put myself through over this girl was unimaginable, and while I'm not sorry for it now, I can look back on it and see as clearly as I see the sun through my window right now what a fucking jackass I was. And THAT is the beauty of finding something like this. I can read over my desperate attempts to pour my heart out in a meaningful way and realize just how much I've changed from then to now, as well as recognize all the ways in which I am very much the same. Scratched out words and torn off corners tell the tale of a frustration that is still very much alive inside of me, albeit not as consuming as it was when I was continually trying to find ways to re-write the you could slit my throat..." line by Taking Back Sunday. In the years that have followed my Ryan-rants, I have fell like a ton of bricks for another girl, and while I did spiral back into the occasional one-man binge-drinking sessions and throw a haymaker or two at inanimate objects that are known to splinter into sharp, potentially damaging shards when struck (both staples of the Ryan days), I didn't let it consume me the way it did back then. I call that maturity, folks. (Or at least a healthy decline in my retard sandwich intake).
As I complete this stroll down memory lane, the sun has made its presence fully known, and the time is 7:33 AM. Luckily it's Sunday and I have nothing to do today. Besides, I only have a few more weeks to monastically deprive myself of sleep. Wait, did I say monastically? Maybe I meant masochistically. At this point, I'm too sleep-deprived to know the difference.
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