"you can't stop the rain," she says.

Dec 24, 2002 01:12

it has been an eventful few days and i have a lot to talk about i think. life has been moving along at full throttle and i have been enjoying it.

yesterday was the acacia strain record release in springfield, MA. after picking up kyle, nick, and andy and eating tofu chicken fingers at grasshopper, i think we were all quite ready for the show. so we found the fat cat with relatively little difficulty and the rock commenced.
we met john preston outside the club. he is a good kid and i like him alot. he had struck me as pretty awesome when he came to maine with erebus a few years ago and all my experiences with him since have only corroborated that impression. it was good to see him again, and hopefully it will not be nearly as long until the next time.
as far as the bands were concerned, the first few were mediocre. i'm not sure who played first but they were ok, pretty moshworthy metal. ludivicho technique, despite possessing a great name, rather sucked. perhaps if they found themselves a bassist they could have something going for them. as a 3-piece i was not impressed though. light is the language were, as one might expect, excellent. the kids went nuts for them and it was fun to watch in general.
the acacia strain played last and were amazing. kyle got kicked out for stage diving during the first song because he is a sucker. the metal was thoroughly rocked and the mosh was fantastic. i have to admit that i am pretty impressed by western massachusetts kids' respect for each other and apparent lack of in-fighting and bullshit. lopez destroyed shit, including my chin, and i had sooooo much fun. dan broke the neck off his guitar on somebody's head, proving his mettle in a most obvious fashion. the band ended up selling all of the cds they had brought with them, making more than $1200 on cds and shirts. i am really proud of all of them and wish them the absolute best in the future. i think they could blow up.

this brings me to what i really want to talk about. when the acacia strain was about to play their last song, vincent said a few words that really hit me. his mother and sister were there (because they are awesome and supportive and wonderful) and he dedicated the song to them, as well as "anybody who has ever lost somebody they love." it was kind of odd, but i found myself literally choked up- i was very close to tears. having known vincent for nearly my entire life i knew he was talking about his father. i had never heard vincent acknowledge, even that indirectly, the influence that his father has had on him. i suspect that may be because when i was closest to vincent, he was probably too young himself to quite grasp the effects of his father's death. so the statement struck me a solid blow; it was a surprise, yet also made an incredible amount of sense. it was illuminating, really, and i felt like, in that moment, framed by a beautiful, painful song of lost life (not just a father's but a son's) i found out something about one of my oldest and most cherished friends. i remembered when vincent's father died; i was very young but certain parts of that time are still clear. as i believe it was for vincent, it was my first personal experience with death. i wonder if even he really knew what was happening; the permanence of it all, the incompleteness of his father's life and now his own, the things that could/would never be regained.
so my nearly-flowing tears were a combination of many things- sadness over loss and broken spirits, a reaction to the sheer emotional display from someone i love so much, my own happiness in seeing vincent again, a quiet wish that i should be so strong, so resilient, so supported, so powerful when the time comes that i must deal with death again. true loss has been conspicuously absent from my life so far, and i only hope i have what i need to cross those bridges when they come.
so to see vincent was refreshing. the whole experience of the weekend was incredible and i hope to return soon.

upon my return i was able to keep the goodness coming by spending the evening with jenna. we watched field of dreams because, being the dork that she is, she had not seen it yet. i hope she enjoyed it. i enjoyed her. i have reached the point where i am completely comfortable with her- totally able to be myself. hopefully my now-apparent geekiness won't scare her off. just like interstates i think we could go far.

"her smell lingers in my sheets, and in my shirts"
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