they've never seen your sentimental side

all the music I loved from 5:45pm til midnight

I lied. I said I was going to write about the first week of my fourth year of #1000wordsofsummer but then I wanted to write this instead.

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courtesy of Kaden, circa 2015, after his co-worker at Whole Foods said “Olympia is a special place, isn’t it?”

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In the morning, when I made my black tea, I also brewed a cup of chamomile and put it in the fridge, so I could drink it, cold, on the hour-plus drive from Northampton to Belltower Records in North Adams. I bought The Last Match by Aislers Set on Bandcamp so I could listen to it on the drive. It’s the only thing I’ve been wanting to listen to lately. It reminds me of this time of year in 2003, 22 years ago, right before Kaden and I got together. It reminds me of driving to work at McDonald’s this time of year, in 2003. We saw Aislers Set twice that season, once at the weird venue by the Olympia bus station, with The Quails and Hella. Kaden, V., J., and H. all shared ONE PBR in the bathroom (we were 19, 20). T. and M., the younger boys we smoked weed with, kept saying, “The drummer of Hella has 1000 arms!” We saw Aislers Set again, a few weeks or a month later, opening for Le Tigre in Seattle. The biggest relief of my adult life was acknowledging I didn’t like red candy. The second was acknowledging I didn’t like Le Tigre. But I always loved Aislers Set. Kaden and I are obsessed with the narrative lyrics in their song “The Walk.” It’s the weirdest, sexiest love song.

I kept trying to tell Kaden he’s heard Linda Smith on NTS, but he could never quite figure out who I was talking about, and he didn’t feel like going to a show, wanted an evening home alone, anyway. I’d seen flyers posted around Northampton for at least a month, holding it in my mind. I knew, from the first poster I saw, that I would go.

Western Massachusetts is a trip. I don’t know. The little towns are actual little towns (villages??), not exurbs like in the Pacific Northwest, not rows of broke-ass strip malls, mostly vacant, interspersed with shiny fast food joints, though every village out here does have an architecturally appropriate Dunkin’. But this time of year, so green and lush, the road I was on reminded me, alternately, of the Jackson Highway in Lewis County, or the Olympic Peninsula. It was just before golden hour, I left at 5:45pm to get to the show at 7:30, the temperature dropping from high eighties into the seventies, hazy. There was a brief, intense downpour, the kind we never experience in the chronically rainy Pacific Northwest.

Unspool, I kept telling myself on the drive, trying to remember to breathe. Unspool. The road dips and curves. I was getting a headache. Unspool. Seas of green on either side. I drank my chamomile iced tea.

I was stressed that there would be nowhere to pee at the record store. Just after the rainstorm, I saw a large gas station and cut across two lanes to pull in. A display of windshield wiper fluid or something blocked the hallway to the restroom, with a print-out sign saying it was for customers only, and to ask the clerk for the key. I didn’t need gas. I bought a Polar soda in a flavor I’d never seen (grape), for Kaden, I’m avoiding fizz and gluten and dairy right now after a food-sensitivity trigger fucked me up for half of May. I thought it would be, like $2.99 but it was $1.59. In front of me, a small woman in her late fifties or early sixties bought scratch tickets. She asked for ten. The clerk, the nicest gas station clerk I have ever encountered in my entire life, a young man with strawberry blonde curls wearing a Walmart T-shirt, I suppose from his second job, explained to her that she didn’t have to pay cash, but she lobbed back that she wanted to pay with money from her savings account, not checking. She counted out $80 and asked how many were left on the spool. Four. She said she would take those as well, she didn’t want someone coming up behind her (me) and getting the winning ticket. The clerk clucked sympathetically. “I’ve seen it happen,” the woman said. “Now I’m going to go home and have a beer!” When I asked, it turned out the bathroom wasn’t locked, after all. The woman sat at a little table, scratching her tickets, earning her beer.

My phone was gonna die before or during the drive home, and I didn’t have a charger with me, and I hadn’t been clocking landmarks. I’d been streaming Aislers Set with one service bar. I was not convinced I was in the right place for the show, I didn’t realize the record store was inside one of those converted early industrial spaces we have out here. You ever need to pee on the road in Western Massachusetts, find one of those early industrial buildings converted into business spaces. They’re pretty reliable and eerily empty.

“I guess this is the most awkward event I have ever attempted to attend,” I texted Kaden, who was on a mission to find a copy of this month’s Poetry magazine. “Also I don’t care…lord knows I’ve been the weirdo at small weird shows before! It’s who I am.”

At the show, I recognized three people, which is kind of wild, considering the show was tiny, more than an hour away, and I don’t exactly get out much. I spoke with an acquaintance I recognized from online; I’d looked her up and hit her up after I loved her supporter radio show on NTS. We made where-are-you-from small talk. I hesitated and my eyes rolled around in my head and I said, “Spokane, Washington,” which is, of course, the most recent place I’ve lived, and the place I most long to return to. But I think it was the first time I said Spokane instead of Olympia. My new acquaintance is from Richmond, Virginia, and she wants to go back. I love the dreamy look people get when they talk about the place they long to return to. I didn’t talk to the Northampton record store clerk who writes the best descriptions on his LPs, but I gave what I hope came across as small smiles of recognition to him and his partner.

The crowd was half old record store guys and half young girls. I have always been half old record store guy, and half young girl.

The first act, Kryssi B, was banjo and harmonica, run through effects pedals, guitars. Almost reminded me of early Cat Power. The audience sat cross legged on the ancient, refurbished wood floor, Anacortes style. The second act, Janines, were straight up twee. I was joking to Kier the other day about how I took offense at a Substacker’s description of a short story as “twee,” as “twee” is really a punk subgenre that includes like five bands. I hate when twee is used derisively, when what they mean is “manic pixie dream girl.” But it also got me wondering whether someone would ever describe my fiction as twee. I hope so. In Janines’ Bandcamp description, they cite Aislers Set as an influence!

Between acts, I was going outside, to my car, to drink water and eat gf chocolate sea salt granola and cassava tortilla chips. My hunger cues have been fucked since I took a break from gluten and dairy. I remembered I was allowed to take an ibuprofen. I didn’t take medication for six or seven years after going to massage school, and it’s still this impulse to not for as long as I can stand it. The parking lot was wet and warm and humid, and smelled like something I could barely remember. Maybe my grandparents’ house in summer. We don’t have humidity in the Pacific Northwest, we just have rain. The rain is clear and refreshing, and the air stays dry. It’s not like that when it rains in Illinois, or out here. I love it, I love humidity so much, it’s such a trip. The skin on my hands has reverse-aged by ten years since winter. I was meant for humidity. I was meant to be breathing in a parking lot surrounded by green trees and vines outside an old early industrial building, in warm damp air after a twilight rain, between sets. It’s who I am.

The third band, Cindy, looked like Y2K sleazebags and played sweet gooey narcotic waltzes. Linda Smith was backed by two guys, and they were freakin’ tight and subtle, cooling down the warm lo-fi pop songs with a clean finish. It reminded me a little of Lois, although Smith’s vocals are, I described while still sleepy in bed this morning, “less ethereal…not that Lois is ethereal…but on a scale of the ethereal…Linda Smith is…less ethereal.” I mean, the show was great. I would recommend seeing any of these bands if you get the opportunity. They’re all very lovely to hear live, in ways that don’t quite come across in their recordings.

My phone was at 7% battery, I used Maps only sparingly to get home in the dark. Western Massachusetts road signs are very well marked. If I’d paid better attention to landmarks on the way, I wouldn’t have needed it at all, though I think on the way out, Maps gave me a shortcut. I listened, again, to the burned CD Kaden had left in the CD player when he went to research at the Yale archives last week. The title, scrawled in Sharpie, is simply “ROCK!” but it’s actually a wild ride through metal subgenres, Kaden must have made it back in like 2007 or something. It’s so good. It has “Dragonaut” by Sleep and, one of my all time favorite songs, “Going Blind” by Melvins. A bunch of Y2K era stoner metal songs that live somewhere in my subconscious but I couldn’t tell you what they are. “You Could Be Mine” by Guns n Roses which I had completely forgotten about and insisted on listening to again first thing this morning. The last song, which was playing when I left North Adams, started again right about the time I hit Florence, close enough to home that I recognized where I was, “Chloe Dancer/Crown of Thorns” by Mother Love Bone, one of Kaden’s all-time favorites. It wasn’t quite over by the time I got home, exactly at midnight. My hunger cue was finally operating, I was fucking starving, and I ate a bunch of leftover roast chickpeas and eggplant, vermicelli rice noodles with hoisin sauce and sesame oil, maple granola with oat milk and sunflower butter and millet puffs.

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