Red Blue Green

On Thursday I graduated from college. I now have a little roll of paper that says I have a bachelor's in biophysics. I woke up that bright and windy morning, put on my dad's old dark red marble swirl tie and had a breakfast of bagels, fruit, and too much coffee at Jess' apartment. Most of the people who'd passed through that place the past couple of years were there: Sam, Ani, Veli, Jordan, and others. And all their parents and relations, who in Veli's case had come all the way from Bulgaria. One token Chang. Then we walked to the gymnasium, slipped into identical black caps and gowns (various stoles, the significance of most of which was never explained) and lined up in alphabetical order. I was flanked in the early Ch's by people I'd never met, despite theoretically having spent the last four years with them. In the men's room downstairs some guys were popping unknown white pills. I wondered why anyone would want to be high before several thousand people in the sun on graduation day.

On the lacrosse field we took seats in ranks of folding chairs. Many important-seeming people gave speeches. Bill Nye, our commencement speaker, implored us to change the world and create new ways of living--which I'd intended to do anyway, just not in ways that would affect anyone else. Maybe I should reconsider? We walked across the stage, a swooping metal-and-canvas construction which had for several evenings loomed at one end of the field as a spectral portent of the imminent, the wind ripping the caps from our heads. When it was over, we did not throw our caps--secretly, I wished we would have.

I was adopted as an honorary Begans that night as I went with Jess and her family (plus Thom--already the dutiful son-in-law) to Helmand's for dinner. I was honestly overwhelmed by their generosity: besides Flannery, I'd met Jess' family exactly once, and I didn't even ask to be invited. Actually, a couple of other people offered to have me join them on graduation night when they learned my own family would not be coming (my brother is taking his high school entrance exam this weekend and my mother must make sure he studies; getting into school is more important than getting out of it). Once in a while things happen that warm my heart and make me grateful for other human beings.

Despite all the pomp and circumstance, college didn't truly wind down until after midnight that night, when the graduates, now mostly in street clothing, gathered in the Glass Pavilion for one last round of cheap college cafeteria food, bad music, and lousy beer (school subsidized). Finally caught up with Anne there after saying for a week that I'd see her before she went back to Colorado. But when people finally scattered from there into the night for destinations unknown--some of them were permanently skipping town as early as the next morning--it was decidedly unceremonious, the quiet steps of quiet feet out of a quiet campus, the staff cleaning up strewn about plastic plates and crumbs, a last group or two of people huddled around tables; what were they clinging to? Marching bands and orations can't hold a candle to what one misses passing in the blink of an eye. I ended the night the only way I possibly could have: sitting with Jess in her mostly empty room in the Allston and not finding the right words, the wall lamps looking even more starkly ancient in the absence of her many posters and photographs, glimmers of old truths revealed by the disintegration of the ephemeral.

I owe virtually all of my personal development and maintenance over the past year-plus to Jess. I will miss her very much.

Last night, a day after I graduated, Diamond and I played a gig. It was at the Load of Fun gallery, opening for Ruby's Rhymes With Opera project. The show was at 9; we'd rehearsed about an hour total, starting that evening at 6. We cabbed down (neither of us having a car; yet another reason we are not rock stars) with laptops, interfaces, guitar, mixer, cables (they will be the death of me), and MIDI controllers. We played semi-improvised ambient electronic with Diamond handling most of the beats and synthesizers, and me handling most of the guitar squalls and drones. It was a lot of fun and our haphazard set seemed to be well-received by the audience (strange seeing so many academic music types gathered in this ghetto hipster warehouse), though most of them didn't realize our set was not a soundcheck until halfway through. The Rhymes With Opera pieces were fantastic, especially the last piece, which Bonnie sang. After the show we went to Joe Squared across the street where we drank with the other musicians and Ruby's father, who'd come all the way from Iowa to see her premier. The jazz band playing inside, Oxter, covered Radiohead's "The National Anthem," making last weekend the third weekend in a row I had seen a Radiohead song performed live. I ended up talking a lot to Ruby's friend Ashley, who was a sculptor and ceramics specialist from western New York; as Diamond and I left, he said to me that I really have to curb my attraction to older women (speaking of old truths).

Now I am on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina with John, Mike, Maura, and Diamond. John's family rented this suite in some kind of absurdly posh resort and we will be here until next Friday. Tonight we ate and found a missing purse at Sonic's where the waitresses jet around in rollerskates, and I shambled through the Atlantic surf while drinking Yuengling and singing Sonic Youth's "Diamond Sea."

More thoughts on all this and more later.