come, take a walking-trip through happiness.

it is always strange to encounter people of whom i have such limpid memories, but they don’t recognize me at all. around eight years ago, i remember him wearing some kind of powder blue jacket, watching him carefully drag on a parliament, exhaling the smoke over clark street, after we had just seen ‘a hard day’s night’. i remember walking to the brown line in winter, him towering over jenn and me, hands in his pockets, i am trying to recall the way he walked- no, sauntered- down western avenue, like the coolest dude in the city. and he was to me, at seventeen, and i guess even at twenty-seven. he was self-deprecating and snarky in a way that i have always found immensely charming. it is probably only by virtue of jenn’s bag with a giant union jack on it that he even associated with us at all. no one else would probably ever have gotten away with calling me ‘wannabe eurotrash’ and me praising them for their astuteness. while all the boys i knew were excellent at ignoring me, he watched intently as we sat on his couch and i played ‘stairway to heaven’ on his acoustic guitar. once he picked out japanese grindcore seven inches to play for us, slipping them in and out of their sleeves excitedly while jenn and i tried our best to feign interest. he took us to jinx and tried to eat his peanut butter sandwich and ignore jenn and me while we giggled like idiots at tim kinsella making drinks behind the counter. with just three years on us, he seemed so much older. and now he has no idea who i am, i had to be drunk to even stand in front of him. then afterwards, i walked down division street sulking, lamenting, i will never kiss a boy who has hair that nice. and then- i remember that i have a picture of him that i took when we ran into him at a fucking BIS show probably in like 1999, and then i have to reassess my memory. i guess it is better that he didn’t recognize me at all, instead of recognizing me as the girl who he used to make fun of for wearing flip flops. in my mind he will always exist as this kind of paragon of coolness, even if now he is somewhat drug-addled and one of the worst dancers i have ever seen.

what happened the rest of the days i spent in australia? i haven’t been able to think about it or write about it. in sydney: the museum of contemporary art, harry’s cafe de wheels, meeting up with russ aka my favorite australian of ever ever, to newtown for records, falling asleep listening to the cityrail trains flit over the tracks along elizabeth street. i would like to be bored right now, waiting for a flight to melbourne. melbourne? i remember lots of coffee. warm weather. the suburbs: prahran, fitzroy, collingwood, st. kilda. i never got used to hearing the trams rumble past our hostel, each time it sounded  like a thunderstorm coming. every day we walked the few blocks from our hostel to the beach, via acland street for tiramisu and cakes or gelato to eat while wandering along the esplanade. seagulls. luna park. walking down carlisle street a million times in four days, the tick tick ticking of the crosswalk signals. trying to figure out what exactly a milk bar is. melbourne was all sore throats and leaves on the ground, hook turns and bob dylan. the morning we left, such a thick fog had descended over tullamarine that we couldn’t even see the planes from the waiting area beside the gate. flights were cancelled, it was like the country didn’t want us to leave. sunken clouds are no match for a boeing 777, though.

two weeks later, i checked my phone at some drunken one in the morning, and i had received text messages from people in australia. i couldn’t tell when they were sent. i don’t know why they took so long to get here. i still don’t know what time zone i am in. no one told me that i would be jetlagged for weeks. i didn’t realize how far away it was. it all felt like a place i had been to before. either i am home, or i dove off st. kilda pier and am still floating on my back in the ocean.

i think i have listened to this one song about 200 times today. no lie, i burned a cd with 14 tracks, all the same. i did not want to hit repeat. i needed to memorize every chord progression and handclap and drum beat as soon as possible, a song this perfect needed a place in my brain’s catalog immediately. and, i drove aimlessly over my lunch hour listening to it turned up so high it would not get any louder. i have a tendency to do this with certain songs, sometimes i will listen to something and it will get stuck like an arrow through my eardrums. you know how certain songs can make you feel cool? or can make you smile for no reason? or be excited to wake up? or feel like you are flying? i am not even going to talk about the song. it makes me want to die a thousand deaths all over my desk: i will never create something i can love as much as this, i love this band more than anyone has ever loved any band on fucking earth.