The Lassiter Coast

One last note about the Ray LaMontagne concert, I promise. He's so melancholy and easygoing and he travels through his life so languorously that I kept hoping he would segue from something slow and meaningful -- but phenomenal and poetic -- to something poppy like "Barbara Ann." He's in Chicago again in April at the Metro.

I checked into Will's blog, Ennui, yesterday and read Matt Lazzara's essay. It was a little spooky reading something written by someone who died a year ago, as if those words ceased being meaningful simply because there was no longer a voice behind them. But the message was undeniably clear and simple. I'm a fan of Thoreau's and in essence, Matt was imploring all of us to stop being caught up in material things or even capitalistic things -- those things that define just minutes of every day, but put together we are immensely distracted and essentially get nothing done, nothing substantial that enriches our base cores and souls anyway. I cannot imagine what it must be like to slowly die -- the pain, the looks in other people's eyes, the increasing infrequency of people coming around, the fucking knowledge of it all, but to imagine what that's like might just be the key. To find out truly what we are and what we need -- which may just mean a simple tweaking from our current character arcs -- is essential. I am a very self-aware person, as my mother would sit me down as a kid on a semi-regular basis and point blank tell me "You need to change," which to a seven-year-old is against the grain of childhood. I still though self-evaluate all the time and hope that I am on the right path. But I still get caught up in the nonessential things in life. Figuring out what those are and ridding them of my consciousness is a great goal, and one I hope I can achieve. I always liked Matt, though barely knew him. We had English together one year and though he was unlike me in his punk personality, he was one of the funniest persons I've ever met. Bitingly funny. If its possible to turn something horrible into something good, I imagine that Matt is right now happy that he still has an effect. That is why he wrote it in the first place.