consistently arbitrary since 2001

It came to me then that every plan is a tiny prayer to Father Time
Last night Shan and I went out to dinner, bought our copies of Death Cab for Cutie's Plans, and then sprawled on her couch, liner notes in hand, and listened.

Afterward, we were both so depressed we had to go out for beer and tater tots.

Not, as one might now presume, because the album is bad. Quite the contrary. Only an album this good can make you feel despair. A bad album can't make you feel anything but disdain.

Death Cab's last album, Transatlanticism, was stunning. The culmination of what they couldn't quite achieve on The Photo Album, it was pure and perfect, and it dug a little deeper into you with every song. It was sweet and sad and painful, and nearly impossible to turn off.

In the wake of that, it might have been easy for Plans to disappoint. But Death Cab didn't make the mistake of trying to top it; they just took it and ran with it. The two are tied to each other, one of the band members said; if Transatlanticism is the inhale, then Plans is the exhale. And it is: halting and uneven and cathartic, the breath you heave when you've finished sobbing. Transatlanticism was pristine; Plans is messy. And that's what makes it good.

Plans is, I think, about inexorability; about the things in life you just can't fight, and how you try to hold on anyway. About death and waning love, and trying to find your footing when you don't know where you stand. It's heavy and complicated and a little haphazard, lurching from the shiny little pop gem that is "Soul Meets Body" to the all-acoustic "I Will Follow You Into the Dark"; from a slinky "Crooked Teeth" that sounds like some other band entirely to the fragile, ethereal "Brothers on a Hotel Bed." And that's OK. That's life.

I'm sure the song on this album that will get the most attention, that people will most often call their favorite, is "I Will Follow You Into the Dark." It's beautiful. It is. It's the declaration of love that everyone wants to hear: I'll be with you. You won't have to go alone.

But it's not my favorite. Partly, I suppose, because I've never known love like that. It resonates most when you have love, not just want it. But there's another reason, too, a lesson I learned seven years ago and wish I never had. And it's this: Death is something you do alone. You can cling tight all the way there, but you cross that line in solitude. Maybe someday, romance will overshadow reality for me. But right now it doesn't, and maybe that's why I find Plans' other, starker portrait of love and death so much more affecting.

Thick with sorrow and vivid, too vivid, "What Sarah Said" is like a sharp, swift kick in the gut. "And I rationed my breaths, as I said to myself / That I'd already taken too much today / As each descending peak on the LCD took you a little farther away from me," Ben Gibbard sings. And every time, something inside me crumples into a ball and starts to shake. I suspect that "What Sarah Said" takes anyone who has watched someone die back to a place they'd rather not go, to haunted rooms and smudged memories of the person they loved. It's delicate and gorgeous, and I both love and hate it; I don't know whether to never listen to it again or to listen over and over in the hope that the repetition will rob it of its impact.

What I know is that by the end of Plans, I find it a little hard to breathe; and that when I drove home on the interstate last night, with the windows down and the music up, a chill on my face and guided by city lights, it felt good in my ears and on my tongue. I know that it breaks my heart a little every time, in the way of things that are beautiful and temporary; that it makes me want to cling tight to everything I will one day lose; and that it will be a while before I want to listen to anything else.

Good work, boys.

Death Cab for Cutie, "What Sarah Said"

Tuesday, August 30

In due time we'll finally see there's barely time for us to breathe
Every so often, I wake up and I feel wrong.

I don't know why it happens and I don't know what it means.

It feels like insomnia. You lay there. You roll over. You pull up the covers. You try the other side. You stare at the wall. You turn on music; you turn off the music. You roll over. You close your eyes and try to clear your head.

But you don't sleep.

You get restless and tense; you want out of your own body. You ask yourself again and again why you can't sleep, as though the riddle is what stands between you and REM. But the question is vague, and no matter how many times you ask it, you can never answer.

I slept just fine last night. But I've been tossing and turning all day.

The Postal Service, "There's Never Enough Time"

Monday, August 8

So here I'm sitting in my car at the same old stoplight
I did a lot of things today, but somehow what stands out the most is the egregious amount of time I spent sitting at traffic lights that staunchly, stubbornly, exasperatingly refused to change in defiance of all logic, justice and traffic flow. Minutes upon minutes, possibly hours, of my life spent inhaling pollution and accumulating road rage.

There must be someone I can sue.

Aimee Man, "It's Not."

Friday, August 5

Snapshot
It's 12:32 a.m. I'm not sure why I'm at all interested in sitting in front of this computer right now, since I spent ten hours of my day in front of one already. But it's new. It's wooing me.

It's warm. Not overly so, just enough to sit here in a tank top and shorts and eat a fudgsicle comfortably. My apartment is old, though, and it gets stuffy and exudes a stuffy old-house smell when it's hot and I have to leave it alone with most of the windows closed. If it were mine, I would put in new carpet and paint all the walls, but it's not.

I've been listening to Death Cab for Cutie's The Photo Album. It reminds me of senior year of college; it came out that year, and my roommates and I listened to it a lot. I remember the words floating through the dark when I played it as I went to sleep. I remember sitting on my friend Jeremy's porch, and people with beers in hand crowded in our living room and on our front stoop. I remember being angry at someone who wouldn't have me and wouldn't let me go. Warm light spilling from the kitchen and spreading across the slanted ceiling of my attic room. The hushed tones of Shan and I talking in murmurs late at night.

Sometimes I wish I could go back.

There's an adorable boy who works at my Trader Joe's. I frequently buy the chocolate lacey cookies, which are horrible for me but delicious, and he always expresses his fondness for them when he's ringing up my groceries. I now know, however, that he prefers the macadamia ones while I prefer the almond, so maybe it's not meant to be.

Someone once told me they wished they didn't have to waste so many hours sleeping. I didn't agree then. I liked sleeping. I still do. And back then I only got to do it about six hours a night. But now I understand. It's so much harder to relinquish the day when I spend so much of it on being an adult.

That said, I'm very sleepy, and it's time to let go of this one.

Monday, August 1

The little computer that couldn't
Today I deviate from my apparent obsession with posting about music to deliver a eulogy for my dearly departed laptop, which abruptly suffered an aneurysm and died last week.

Heretofore I had thought the most heart-stopping thing you could see on a computer screen was the frowny Mac face. That was until I experienced the last convulsions of a five-year-old Gateway laptop, which proceeded to crash multiple times upon startup, erase the background, eat the icons and then calmly announce, "Invalid system disk. Insert another and press any key to continue." Oh yes! How silly of me! BECAUSE I TOTALLY HAVE ANOTHER HARD DRIVE LYING AROUND. Really, if it's going to come to that, just flash a message that says, "Sorry, you're fucked." At least then I wouldn't have to call my father to ask him. And there would be some sort of polite acknowledgement of the loss I've suffered.

With the aid of copious quantities of vulgar language, I proceeded through the five stages of grieving, lingering particularly upon anger at my trusted companion not only for dying in the first place and forcing me to spend a wad on a new machine, as well as spoiling my dreams of two-computer utopia, but also for taking down with it the files I had wantonly failed to back up. Before anyone gets all haughty about the importance of backing up one's hard drive, A) I KNOW, and B) I wouldn't characterize my computer's contents as crucial, since they were mostly ancient school papers that for reasons I cannot explain I never condemned to the digital abyss where they belonged, and equally ancient blog entries in which I quoted a lot of song lyrics and complained about the many people and assignments standing between me and collegiate paradise in a cryptic way I then believed to be cool and now know is just annoying. However, I'd have preferred not to lose all the mp3s I didn't save because I knew I could rip them again, or the two years' worth of e-mail, or the things I was working on writing, or the big list of addresses of everyone to whom I might conceivably send a piece of mail.

At any rate, after dragging my friend Marcus with me to shop for a new machine, subjecting him to my moans of "Oh, my God. Oh, my God, OH, MY GOD," as I contemplated the quantity of money I had just spent, and cursing a lot as we attempted to set up the wireless connection, I reached acceptance. I confess that 160GB of hard drive space and access to iTunes played no small part in accelerating my recovery.

However, until its untimely demise, the laptop was a good little machine, and I loved it, even if I sometimes had a strange way of showing it. Like the time I spilled half a bowl of oatmeal on the keyboard. It hardly ever crashed and kindly putted away at downloading files that I should never have asked it to attempt at dial-up speeds. I wrote my first blog entry and burned my first CD on it, and it allowed me to compose my thesis, assorted other masterpieces of BS and some things of which I'm truly proud from the comfort of my bed and the couch, sparing my rear from prolonged exposure to the not particularly cushy folding chair at my desk. If it could have, I'm sure it would have comforted me during my 3 a.m. bouts of despair while composing said masterpieces. It was a trouper and I was certain it would be with me for years to come. Alas, it died young.

Farewell, little laptop. Rest in peace.

The only song I want to hear
The other day I made my friend Shan laugh out loud at work when I wrote her to say that I had just listened to the original version of Death Cab for Cutie's "Title and Registration," and it was so good I almost threw up.

It sounds like sarcasm, I know. And if I'd told her that a song of Creed's, for instance, was so good it made me want to stab myself with a fork, it would have been. But this was different. Because the urge to vomit is the highest compliment I can pay a song.

Music that makes me want to puke is rare. It takes a certain sort of song to inspire nausea, so I know well the ones that do it: Joni Mitchell's "Come in from the Cold." Coldplay's "The Scientist." Simon and Garfunkel's "The Boxer." Radiohead's "Fake Plastic Trees." Some bands have a knack for hitting the sweet spot; there's not a few Death Cab songs on the list, with "Company Calls Epilogue," "Tiny Vessels" and "This Temporary Life" foremost among them. There are more U2 songs than I can conveniently count.

They don't have much in common, these songs, except for one thing: They all just wreck me.

When I hear them, my stomach quavers and my heart beats fast. Sometimes I forget to breathe. It's like a guilty secret, this feeling; it presses on you, swelling until you can't contain it any longer. But even if I opened my mouth to tell, nothing would come out. There are no words for the elegant confluence of sound or the way it makes you feel.

So I put the music on repeat and let it give me chills.

I listen until I've memorized every chord change and shivered at every harmony. Until I can sing along without noticing. Until I could hear the music even if I went deaf.

For as long as I can remember, I've done this. It started on a turntable with my parents' record of "Swan Lake." I don't know how I found it among their hundreds of albums, but I listened to it relentlessly. It was just a small part of the whole piece I wanted to hear, the part that everyone knows, and I knew exactly where it began because I'd put the needle there so many times. I fell into a rhythm of my own, starting the song, listening, sometimes conducting, catching the needle and starting it again.

My parents must have loathed "Swan Lake."

But I craved it. It and the weird little giddy flip-flops my heart and stomach did when I listened to it. I didn't know then that music makes everyone feel that way, because that's what music is for: to give voice to everything you can't say, to dredge up what you try to hide, to tell you who you are.

It was only later that I understood: This is what it feels like to fall in love.

Death Cab for Cutie, "Soul Meets Body," which is also so good it makes me want to vomit.