Shake It Up in Shaker Heights

Why did Craig Finn name-drop Shaker Heights in a song, anyway? Diamond says he and I should go on a double date with Mia Clarke and Ros Murray from Electrelane. Like that's ever going to happen. If it does, though, color me converted.

Fled Baltimore after six days of isolation for the colder comforts of Pittsburgh. Caught a lift on a Greyhound. Real Hold Steady-an cross-country jaunt, that. Talked to one girl from Salisbury who was busing out to Nebraska to see her best friend of friends for one of their biannual meetings. I hope in a few years I'll like someone well enough to travel halfway across the country to see them twice a year. I would've sworn Andrew was that guy, but I haven't seen him since last October. When I got to Pittsburgh, I talked to a lady who was from St. Louis, but was going to Chicago from DC for her commercial vehicle transport gig.

Last night was some sort of madness. Mike, Diamond, John and I came into Cleveland from Pittsburgh and met up with Maura. Then we went to a party at Maura's friend Cat's house. One of the wilder things I've seen: Brian brought around some spicy home-brew beer for our sampling; I shot beer pong with Maura's friend Bailey, who reminds me more of Fiona in a mischievous sprite-ish manner every time I see her, against Mike and John (and lost miserably--it was no Will/Glenn alliance); the basement was almost saturated with smoke; people disappeared frequently behind closed doors into the bedrooms to indulge. Cat sat Diamond and me down on her roommate's bed to make sure we were taking care of Maura down in Baltimore. Diamond held up a large quadruple beer bong for the locals. The stereo played Folk Implosion. Snippets of seemingly-important conversations flew by as I passed from room to room but I couldn't hang on to any of them in my drunkenness. Eventually I bundled up in a blanket into the corner and fell asleep.

A confession: I had a serious internal debate on whether to ask Maura and her friends for an E when I realized they had it. It's the only drug so far that I have any desire to try, and maybe it would be best to get this nonsense over with while still in college and being entitled to some measure of stupidity; on the other hand, I wasn't friends with the vast majority of people there (actually they were very nice, even though I'd only known them for a few hours), and being drunk, I couldn't confidently either confirm or refute Diamond's concerns of long-term effects. In the end, I didn't do it. I still might, when the right time comes. Such a time might never come, but whatever.

There was a party tonight too, at Bailey's; a much tamer affair involving Middlebury and Princeton students and wine. And now I find myself in a familiar position: hanging out with friends, yet somehow on my laptop and writing in a blog. I've been with these guys for three days and I'm already feeling a need to get away again. I'll probably want to escape to Maria's soon. Feeling again like I'm playing a background role in someone else's story, watching from the periphery of someone else's drama.

I do not understand how Maura and John's dynamic works. John's one of my best friends--has been for at least two years--and I still can't be convinced to take his side on the breakup. I remember the night that whole scheme began to deteriorate: John was crashing at my place, but I decided to go to bed early at 2AM (early for me on a weekend) when he still hadn't returned, figuring he'd decided to sleep over at Maura's, only to be woken by his phone call as soon as I'd gotten to bed asking to be let in, and when he showed up at the door he revealed he'd spent the entire evening hanging out with another girl, whom he "couldn't sleep with, even though Maura and he weren't on definite terms" (more or less paraphrased). From that moment, there was no convincing me he was the good guy in this scenario, if there was a good guy. So I do not understand why Maura still seems closer to him than to any of us other kids who run with them; I do not understand why she drove down to DC to hang out with him shortly before finals; I do not understand how his constant poking and rib-jabbing can be endearing in any way.

This is not some sort of loner angst statement; it just seems I've completely failed to grasp the basics for dealing with other human beings. I wrote an entire rulebook, figuratively speaking, on what I expect of myself categorically, but though I constantly revise it, sometimes it seems I should rip it up entirely.

Along similar lines, I do not understand why Mike is still open to getting back together with Hannah, who broke up with him to begin with, and now texts him saying she's "85% sure" she wants to get back together with him (up from a previous estimate of 60%, which in turn was down from a yet-earlier estimate of 100%). For me, at least, this kind of haphazard handling of relationships would probably nullify any kind of attraction I had for the other person; after all, if there can't be some kind of stable happiness, what's the point? Of course, in a recurring theme, what makes perfect sense to me fails to correlate in any way to what people do in reality. On the other hand, I don't know how to live my life except in the way that makes sense to me. I don't like this whole thing of living in a world where nothing that happens makes sense to me and nothing that makes sense to me happens. They say you got to fall in love with whomever you can (actually, Craig Finn said that again), but it's damn hard when people don't seem to even exist in the same way I do. Just like walking drunk past locked doors at a party behind which people are getting high. On the bright side, this disconnect means I won't break any hearts when I go.

I was listening to the Stars album, Set Yourself On Fire, just now. It's actually quite good--I guess I overlooked them in my Pham-provoked boycotting of Canadian indie pop. Many of the songs are quite sweet and audacious, and all of them are very meticulously assembled; particularly, "Ageless Beauty" and "One More Night" are really excellent tunes. The lyrics are quite bold, talking about relationships without trying to pretend they're actually talking about war or whatever, and they're good lyrics too. But I almost feel like I don't have the right to listen to music like this, and more, to enjoy it and take it to heart. I feel like I don't know anything of what love songs like these talk about, and all the empathy and emotional response I have toward them is false. I should stick to my droning feedback instrumentals and keep my head buried in a bucket of digital distortion where it obviously belongs.

Craig Finn wouldn't have written this entry. Craig Finn would've been high as hell and passed out or raving about getting born again. Maura's parents should meet him.