It doesn’t sound like me, because I am trying too hard to ensure that it doesn’t. And if it sounds forced sometimes, that’s probably because it is. I have been trying to imitate other people’s voices. And this is frustrating to me because it’s never going to work half as well as just using my own, right as it comes to me. This may not seem terribly important to anyone who is reading this, but it’s a pretty big problem.

I’m also feeling musically adrift again. It’s been happening more and more in the past few years. I still enjoy most of the same music that I used to, and most of my new discoveries are in the same vein, but I think the simple fact is that I don’t need music in the way I used to. I don’t need it to comfort me and embody my (mostly melancholy) feelings. The simple fact is I just don’t feel that melancholy anymore. The feeling has largely been replaced by some anxity, some momentary stabs of sadness, but I’ve grown out of the teen angst. I don’t see how this could be anything but good.

I’m finally starting to feel comfortable calling myself a writer. For the past few years I’ve felt as though this term was too hallowed and important to apply to me, but I’m growing into it, I guess.

Also, I just got an SLR, so this is me being even more of a hipster douche.

photo credit to Brockit Photography, which I work for sometimes

Drink it. Get tipsy. Recycle the cans. Probably pee a few times, since alcohol is a diuretic.

You are also going to need some live music. Preferably a local or semi-local band, but a good one, one that’s put out a record or two. You know. It’s even better if you are at least somewhat acquainted with them, and they know you by sight, and you are in the front row.

Por ejemplo.

This was it. This was my perfect moment. We were talking about perfect moments at one point this summer, when some of John’s friends (and mine too, I suppose — I wouldn’t call them my not-friends, but they were really his first) were sitting in our living room, and Annelise, who was in Quiz Bowl with both of us, said that she had one in sixth grade, coming back from the annual Camp Nesbitt trip. She was sitting on the bus, surrounded by her friends, and it was a beautiful day and she knew that she would be home soon. This idea stuck with me, and eventually it allowed me to give a name to a sensation I’d never been able to categorize before.

John and I were at Farm Block Fest, in Ahmeek, Michigan. It had poured the night before and rain leaked into our hand-me-down tent, leaving us soggy and dispirited. But then, later in the day, the sun came out, and we decided to have lunch at the Fitzgerald restaurant (named after that ill-fated ship), and we swam in Lake Superior and I wore my graduation dress. It was already a perfect day.

Something about standing in front of that stage, outside, in the summer, surrounded by exuberant people, with the perfect amount of alcohol in my system and John standing next to me…I was so happy. These moments are always bittersweet because you can never quite tell when they’re going to end, but you know that these are the times you wait for on those terrible days. These are why you are alive.

Because I cannot think of a better way to sum up this entry, here is some Ezra Pound. It was originally much longer, but then he cut it down to these two lines.

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Summer nights at the KBC. I don’t know why I look so disconsolate, and now I’m worried that I always look like this in social situations when I think that no one is looking.

Not everything was wonderful, including car troubles and our 7-hour wait in traffic before finally being able to get in, but all of this seemed to disappear on Friday morning when we woke up in our tent, almost smothered by the heat, and set about figuring out our schedule for the day.

The thing that the nice, crisp SPIN and Rolling Stone and NPR pictures of Bonnaroo don’t show you is that living in close proximity to 69,999 other people for four days gets disgustingly smelly and grungy, especially in the heat. The dumpster and Port-a-Potty and sweat smells followed us pretty much wherever we went. I usually take pretty meticulous care with my appearance, out of habit and a touch of OCD if nothing else, but there was little I could do here. Any and all makeup melted off of my face within a few minutes, and modest, (fashionable) attire was just too hot to keep on for very long. Swimsuits were really the only option. So, John and I wandered around the 700 acre farm like perspiring, unkempt zombies, our Camelbaks strapped to our backs, not in search of brains, but rock n’ roll.

Let me just say that, while we do have overlapping musical tastes that made the trip worth it in the first place, there are some differences also. My current obsession with The National is not shared by John, nor my long-standing love for Tori Amos. In our last few minutes, he ran to watch Against Me! while I inhaled a bottle of Dasani near one of the Budweiser stands. But, with some tolerance and give-and-take, we made that shit work. I didn’t see a single show that I didn’t enjoy, and I think he can say the same.

My favorite, by far, was the Dead Weather. I wasn’t really expecting this; I like their albums, and I respect good ol’ Jack White as a modern rock institution, but, much like I need to temper Led Zeppelin with some vagina music every once in awhile, the Dead Weather always came off as too testosterone-heavy. This was possibly due to the fact that Alison Mosshart, of The Kills fame, can sound oddly like Jack White, and when they do duets on Dead Weather albums, sometimes you can’t tell whose voice is whose. (It’s eerie.) She never seemed like enough of a presence; she was always getting drowned out by the bass, or the kick drum, or some other guy’s voice.

On stage, though, she was astounding and powerful. She was unlike any female musician I have ever seen before. Not open and earnest, like Ani DiFranco, or playful and mischievous like Tegan and Sara. Not sultry and in-control, like Tori Amos, although she was very self-possessed. She was just wild. She threw everything into that performance, and you could tell. It was hot and miserable out in the audience, and I don’t imagine the stage was much different; she was wearing dark jeans, a black camisole of some kind, and a leopard-print jacket. (Jack White is very into color schemes, and all of the male band members were just wearing black and white; she, however, was allowed the leopard print. It certainly helped her stand out.) She was very quickly soaked with sweat, and her long dark hair was disheveled and stringy. You would think that this would be an unattractive look, but it really, really wasn’t.

My camera is shitty, but I think you get the idea. She also gave Jack White some of the sultriest looks ever seen on a Jumbotron, but I was too slow to catch them.

So that was my favorite part. I told John that I thought it was cool because The Kills never would have attracted the same kind of stadium audience; they would have been in one of the smaller, more intimate tents, and her performance might just have seemed over-the-top and odd. But there, in the stadium of Bonnaroo stages, with the Dead Weather, she was absolutely amazing.

Other than the Dead Weather, I think Regina Spektor might have been my favorite, despite our hour-long wait in miserable heat to see her.

I was so sad to leave. This had been my dream for years, and now it was over — all that was left was the long, arduous drive back to Upper Michigan (slightly tempered by a visit to our friend Lauren in Elizabethtown, Kentucky.) I don’t have much besides these pictures, a Regina Spektor t-shirt, and a few other things — my dirty wristband, my water-soaked festival guide. But now I’m back, and everything feels just a little bit different.

I do think I want a new camera for my birthday, though.

This is not him, but he looked very much the same during his life — he eventually went gray around the muzzle. His eyes were a peculiar amber color, though, and I read somewhere that this was some kind of breeding defect. He died on Easter of 2006, when I was seventeen.

I saw a German Shorthaired Pointer on a leash outside the Subway near our house a few days ago, and I felt a tug in my navel region. It was like catching a glimpse on the street of someone who looks exactly like your childhood best friend, but they’re still the same age and you’re an adult now. And then you realize that they’re someone completely different and you go on walking.

I’m back in the U.P., I’m listening to some band called Horse Feathers, and after about a week and a half of slightly terrifying uncertainty, my summer has a more definite shape. Saying goodbye to my obscene amounts of leisure time is going to be rough, since I had grown accustomed to sleeping until 11 every day and drinking on inappropriate nights of the week, but some structure will probably be good.

Living on my own, or rather on my own with someone else, hardly feels that different from being at college, except that John and I are far more insular, and I don’t even notice. Sometimes I feel like I take too much of my life for granted, and I wonder what my fourteen-year-old self would think of me now. I hope she would be happy that being out from her mother’s thumb was most definitely in her future, as was living on her own and being in a good relationship with a nice boy. Why couldn’t I just have been more patient? It seems silly that I was so desperate for these things when I was younger, but then again I had no way of knowing that they were inevitable. Six years, and everything that they bring, seem eternal when you are fourteen.

At any rate, this is my life: I’ll be interning for the L’Anse Sentinel, about 40 miles away, since the Daily Mining Gazette’s parent corporation is in an apparent uproar about the federal regulations on unpaid internships business and I still haven’t heard back from them a week after I was supposed to start, and I’ll also be doing some pieces for this Web site: http://keweenawnow.blogspot.com. Minimum-wage jobs are, as always, elusive beasts, but I’ve applied for about six over the past week or so, so I guess we’ll see. People are a lot more inclined to hire you when there’s no money involved.

In our natural habitat

Here we are, muggin’. I should also add that the housemate that lives directly above us has atrocious taste in music, and the walls are thin. This is the only downside.

Is it a grave if the person's not dead yet?

The thing that was strange was that there was only one date, which could only have meant that he was still alive back then, in March of 2009. I’m reading a Paris Review interview with him right now (because this is how literary dorks procrastinate) and he’s still alive today, although he’s 90. This is such a weirdly personal thing — to see the grave, and plot, that someone has picked out for themselves, in anticipation of their own death. He saw that patch of grass and said, “Yup, this is it.” He probably also chose his epitaph. He’s lived in California his whole life, so it’s fitting that he be buried in Los Angeles. And it is a very nice cemetery.

On Kindles and e-books: “A book has got to smell. You have to hold it in your hands and pray to it. You put it in your pocket and you walk with it. And it stays with your forever. But the computer doesn’t do that for you. I’m sorry.”

“We should forget about teaching children mathematics. They’re not going to use it ever in their lives.”

Ray Bradbury, I think I like you.