Tumbling

Some very brief highlights.

Grizzly Bear
Under the nearest lightning bug we pick at blades and speak like there isn't that human distance, like everything is simultaneous and close and these friends we've made are fingers. We fumble against each other as if by accident, but not.

Beastie Boys
I wonder if we're all thinking it when someone says, my god, this is so fucking awesome.

Phoenix
There's sugar in my shoes, or something. Rather than recall dances where my hands grappled themselves like comfortable strangers, I forget to be alone. I move because we all move and when I sing, we sing. The sound rolls and bounces us about, balloons bunched against a windy Sunday, and I consider between hey!s that this could be belonging.

Wilco
It's one of those guilts like, man I hope everyone is half as into this as I am, but when I can steal my face from the fury and chance it around I can't help but appreciate the reflected treetop pink in surrounding sunglasses, the blissful gathering calm and opening organ chords. And I wonder, if only for a moment, if this is back then. But as the clang and glide of guitars slip afternoon into evening our bodies are taken and those brown eyes dream and dream.

Band of Horses
All sun but a sliver cast by a lemonade umbrella, all sound and the dizzy of space, I am a lizard. There is a terrible local band playing a stage behind us, but if I turn my head this way and jab a cartilage earbud in I can just hear a shimmer through the trees. The seagreen is bed enough, the sky an expanse of time, music like its crackling over a homespun cassette and I am an X on a map, found.


Bonnaroo was an indescribable experience, among the greatest I've been blessed to share with beautiful friends ever. Returning is strangely like departing something more intimate than "real life," remembering like reflecting on a dream. I'll be back next year, come hell or adulthood.

My high streak continues into this, the latter weeks of June. Life has cradled me something tender and wonderful. The charge now is to just stay, just keep my head in this place-- this here now today you and me and us together, ethereal.

But I leave for Cambridge July 5. Mixed feelings. But those are for another post.

Anybody have anything they want me to write about? This felt good.

photos by Mike Locke

No, don't warn me

I'm finding it difficult to look back on a time when I was this happy. Perhaps in the wonder of childhood, when everything was new. There are things to be said about this happiness, the circumstance and perspective, but this is summer. Hardly a time for retrospect.

I'm here, now. And part of the pleasure is refusing the times I wasn't here, now, intrusion into my head. Certainly, I flit from memory to memory like a bird between branches just like you do. But these days I'm noticing the time I'm wasting somewhere, some astral plane if I may, other than the momentous and beautiful present. And I'm really trying to quit it, the bounding from guilt to worry and back, because it doesn't mean anything real to me anymore. We have, perhaps, learned to live in this impossible multi-temporal state of "where will I be next year?" when honestly-- we'll be right here, in the forever-present, as we were. And this journey our minds make is a distraction from everything that is lovely and going on currently. "Currently." Like the river we move with.

All this time talk, so to foil myself: Bonnaroo in less than a week and I am excited.

It's familiar, lying here while the morning blue peeks in, bird chirps between distant rolls of thunder-- and you, a fogless dream or a lucid memory, lovely as the sound that words make when we mean them.