Jamieson Cox

Pink, “Just Give Me a Reason”

Is there a reason Pink’s been mostly left out of the poptimism reclamation efforts that have led to the gradual critical embrace of Britney, Ke$ha, Carly, etc.? We’re living in a world where new Mariah Carey singles are getting Best New Track shine on Pitchfork hours after their release; how could Pink put out an album last year with at least four killer singles that was almost completely ignored by the pop Twitterati? I’m not just pointing fingers, either — I spent approximately 50 hours listening to Carly Rae Jepsen’s Kiss last year while relegating Pink and her new album to the wasteland of MOR (that’s “mom-oriented radio”, of course*). Her indefinite residence in my pop blind spot doesn’t make any sense. 

*Every time I talk to my mom about music, she asks me why I haven’t written about Pink yet. I think Pink might be her favourite active artist, and she’s not alone — an informal survey of friends’ mothers yielded incredible rates of Pink fandom. A million moms can’t be wrong, right? 

I want to shine a light on “Just Give Me a Reason”, which has to be the year’s quietest #1 hit, at least in my own critical circles. (This year’s #1s so far: “Locked Out of Heaven”, “Thrift Shop”, “Harlem Shake”, “When I Was Your Man”, “Just Give Me a Reason”, “Can’t Hold Us”, “Blurred Lines”. Yep, definitely the quietest.) It’s a duet featuring fun. singer Nate Ruess, himself no stranger to thinkpiece handwringing about straddling the pop-rock divide and millenial chart dynamics. And like last year’s world-conquering fun. hits — “We Are Young”, “Some Nights” — this song’s chorus melody is absolutely ruthless. It renders words unnecessary: Pink could just be making noises that happen to hit the right notes and it’d still be tremendously effective. When a layer of harmony’s added the second time through, I’m thrown into an unintelligible frenzy. There’s a undeniable physical force at work, waves working in conjunction to create a palpable thrill. 

Your mileage with the production will probably vary: Jeff Bhasker’s trademark spacious percussion serves as the song’s underpinning, and it’s a track that’s wearing a bit thin after being omnipresent over the last few years. Ruess is an acquired taste for some, too. But Pink absolutely slays, her voice rich, aching, and agile. I found myself stuck with the radio for an extended stretch of this morning, a rarity, and this song was one of the most reliable pleasures out there, right alongside “Blurred Lines” and Bruno Mars’ “Treasure”. I still need to make my way through Pink’s discography to find out if “Don’t Let Me Get Me” and “Trouble” are as fun in 2013 as I remember them being a decade ago. In the meantime, this song is fantastic — if you’ve somehow skipped it or dismissed it as mediocre pap, give it, and her, another chance.

Camera Obscura, Desire Lines

Since the beginning of May, the album release calendar’s been absolutely relentless, or so it seems from my neck of the woods: Deerhunter, Vampire Weekend, Daft Punk, Disclosure, The National, Majical Cloudz, Classixx, Laura Marling, Eleanor Friedberger, the After Dark 2 compilation… The larger point is that it takes a special album to rise above the very high average level of quality that’s reigned in recent weeks. The album I’ve listened to the most over that time frame is Camera Obscura’s wonderful Desire Lines, a marvel of warmth and craft that’s received a sliver of the attention it deserves. 

Thinking about the dozens of times I’ve played this album over the last little while, I keep returning to the idea of comfort. Desire Lines is a mug of steaming hot chocolate with twinned marshmallows floating at the top, it’s a towel freshly pulled from the dryer, it’s hitting the snooze button with Sunday morning confidence. It’s the warmest possible blanket, delivered by the world’s most talented snuggler. Tracyanne Campbell’s rich, honeyed vocals are consistently excellent, but the rest of the band hits its marks in much the same way: the rhythms are frisky without being distracting, the guitar lines are full, luminous, and maddeningly melodic. When all of these elements are wrapped together in tight little pop packages, the sound’s something like walking into the aftermath of a very hot shower: a heavy warmth settling on your skin, pleasant but far from oppressive, mildly cleansing. 

And the lyrics! This band has always had a way with killer quips and punchlines, and Desire Lines is no exception. “New Year’s Resolution” has enough itself to bring the average feeling listener to its knees; I spent a solid fifteen minutes going back and forth over Campbell’s description of the new year’s first shot at a worthy kiss, offered in the wicked January cold. (And how are the writers out there going to deny this? “New Year’s resolution to write something of value / a New Year’s resolution to write *something* would be fine.” The real talk asterisks are mine.) Sometimes it’s not poetic or funny, but simply effective, like the repetition of “I knew what you were talking about” on “Troublemaker” until you’re right there in the room, staring daggers yourself. 

This album is so generous, so ready to be loved. There’s something new to celebrate in every song, from the measured, horn-freckled bloom of “I Missed Your Party” to the gentle pedal steel of the title track. It’s not especially flashy or exciting, but it’s lovingly crafted and immaculately performed by a group of experts with a firm handle on melody, atmosphere, and the fine gears that turn the human heart. I think you’ll find your own little corners and cracks to occupy if you find a bit of time to give Desire Lines a chance, and if you do, please — drop me a line. I want to share this album with you because it shared itself so readily with me. 

Majical Cloudz, “Mister” / “Turns Turns Turns”

Majical Cloudz is a Montreal-based twosome signed to the city’s white-hot Arbutus Records (see also: Grimes, Blue Hawaii, Doldrums, Braids, Sean Nicholas Savage), made up of Devon Welsh and Matthew Otto. Welsh heads up composition, and Otto contributes production and performance expertise. Their new record Impersonator is a stark, idiosyncratic vision of confessional pop music that relies heavily on Welsh’s rich voice to bear considerable emotional weight. Welsh can handle the load, and the album’s best songs find him grappling with the titular act of impersonation, along with some key related concepts: posturing, loneliness, and the effects that ripple out from our actions and choices. The mid-album duo of “Mister” and “Turns Turns Turns” captures the lion’s share of these ideas in just a few minutes by linking together to form a remarkably honest, affecting loose narrative.

“Mister” is one of the friskiest songs on Impersonator, with a rippling beat, brisk pace, and theatrical vocal turn. It’s a song with plenty of movement, appropriate given its role as the first half of this action-reaction pair, and it’s driven by need and temptation. The singer has escaped the shackles of a relationship marked by harmful codependency and fear — “I feel I’m not without your love / and your eyes don’t scare me,” and admittedly this interpretation is leaning on “not” as a reference to the singer’s existence rather than an absence of love — and is trying to fill a void of affection with an impulsive reactionary maneuver: “I feel the mood to love myself / I want to be loved.” He’s drawn in by the nameless, faceless “they,” asking a question like sirens calling out: “Hey mister, don’t you want to be right here?”

The entire scenario reeks of posturing, of willful ignorance. Despite his apparent wealth of experience — “I’ve seen it all before” — the singer dons a mask, giving in to lust and loneliness even though the resulting pleasures are almost certainly temporary. The nameless others are wearing a mask, too: it’s right there in the use of “mister.” As terms of endearment go, “mister” usually leans towards affectation. It’s a designation employed by people who are striving for maturity and grasping at straws, delivered in a faux-flirty tone. The characters of “Mister” are relying on each other for shallow fulfillment in a futile quest for something whole, and our singer has already realized his mistake by the song’s end: “I’ll come down / I’m feeling down.”

If “Mister” is focused on impulse and cause, then every inch of the astonishing “Turns Turns Turns” deals with effect. Consideration and reflection are embedded in the song at a basic sonic level: the billowing waves and echoes that fade in and out like memories after a rough night, the portion of the beat that finds Welsh sighing, “I know,” thought after thought until it’s just another sound. There are acres of space between notes and beats in the same way torturous instants can dilate and stretch from seconds into hours. The first real line of lyric only serves to hammer the point home: “I did / something / free, I / can’t tell if it’s wrong.”

In the harsh light of the next day, the singer has been forced to shed his mask and consider the ramifications of his actions. The chorus takes the form of a vulnerable plea, hope for something good and easy, a lighter path just from breath to breath; all the while, it turns it turns it turns. What’s turning? Hands on a clock, figurative gears inside his head, bubbling up and cycling the same way “I know” has become part of the beat, an omnipresence. By the second verse, he’s come far enough to issue a warning, or perhaps a note to himself: “Watch out / when you / faced by / what you don’t know.” It’s better to admit defeat than try to fake it.

The pairing of “Mister” and “Turns Turns Turns” and the bravery and truth of the message within is indicative of the depth of care and craft that went into Impersonator, and the success of the pairing is a testament to Welsh’s talent. A less direct, humane vocalist would struggle beneath the weight of the songs’ guiding themes; Welsh grabs them and holds them aloft as if to comfort everyone listening, saying, “Hey, I’ve got this.” I’m thankful for that awesome strength.

Classixx’s new album Hanging Gardens nicely complements Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories because they traffic in different kinds of heat. Even at its most fluid (“Lose Yourself to Dance,” “Get Lucky”), there’s nothing wet about RAM: the air between instruments and vocals is thin, quick, dry. Hanging Gardens is humid, sticky, keenly aware of the effects of moisture. It’s evident in the wobbling synth line of “All You’re Waiting For,” warped like an asphalt mirage, and it permeates the entire record. Notes trickle down like beads of condensation on a glass of lemonade. 

There are five or six songs on the album aimed like homing missiles at your upcoming patio barbecue or beach-bound road trip, liquid disco-pop cuts with short, potent vocal hooks. (“Do you like bass? Do you, do you like bass?” — “I’ll Get You,” another winner) My current favourite is “A Stranger Love,” which seems specifically composed for that moment in a pink-red sunset when the colours start to slip and the day’s heat breaks, a transition into something cooler. It’d also slot in neatly with the Washed Out songs that lean heavily on beats and aren’t scared of the dance floor, like “Lately” (from the Life of Leisure EP). It might’ve been a monster had it dropped as a single during Peak Chillwave c. summer 2009; I’m happy to have it here in 2013, ready for deployment on a summer mix along with some of its Hanging Gardens counterparts. 

Daft Punk, “Fragments of Time”

1. There’s only one way to experience this song at its best. You have to trust me. It’s the last day of recording in Los Angeles, and Todd Edwards has just packed up the last of his personal items and is preparing to leave the studio. Thomas and Guy-Manuel are sitting helmeted at a recording console, adjusting some levels and speaking quietly. Todd looks upon them fondly and turns for the door. The sun is just beginning to set, hanging heavy in the sky; the light is blinding. He stops, turning to look at the robots hovering over the console. He starts singing “Fragments of Time,” coming up with the lyrics on the spot, occasionally tossing in jazz hands, a single tear rolling down his cheek. Upon finishing, he takes a small bow and salutes, then steps into the glow, the door closing slowly behind him. I choose to believe that’s how this song was created.

2. I can’t say enough about the control and skill exercised by the rhythm section in this song, especially during the transition from the chorus into the solo portion. While the drums and bass are lively and active throughout the verses and chorus, spraying showy little fills everywhere they can, they really step out front and drive the pace around 2:56, even as the pedal steel and guitar maintain their place from the previous bars. When the talk-box (I think?) roars to life soon after, it’s ecstatic and surprising, but it didn’t just pop up out of nowhere — the groundwork had already been laid, rhythmically speaking, in a very neat way. I love hearing the craftsmanship and care present in that brief sequence, which could’ve been maybe 80% as good with half the effort; the polish and attention to detail was worth it. 

Daft Punk, “Touch”

In the last few days and weeks of 1 B.R.A.M., I told anyone who asked that I was steeling myself for minor disappointment with the album. I knew that I had filled my internal hype reservoir to such an insane depth that it would take a flawless, life-altering record to justify my expectations. It’s been roughly two days since I heard Random Access Memories for the first time, and it’s not quite on that level, mostly because the level itself is unattainable by design. But there are moments and segments that leave me thinking that the hype might’ve been justified anyway, and a few such moments make up “Touch,” a supremely batshit, utterly brilliant odyssey bracketed by the album’s two most immediate tracks. 

As “Touch” moves through its eight-plus minute runtime, it’s backlit by a palpable joy and reverence for a wider range of concepts and sounds than just “dance music”: operatic musicals, ABBA-style pop, interstellar fables, the simple, elementary click of a beautiful melody or the harmony of notes blending together. Many of the album’s best moments exist because Daft Punk had the power, vision, and money to find collaborators and performers with the skill to take that joy and reverence and translate it into song: the sheen and glow of “Lose Yourself to Dance” and “Get Lucky,” the wistfulness of “Fragments of Time,” the sheer scope of “Contact.” (It doesn’t get much bigger than having NASA give you carte blanche when you need a sample.) The idea motivating “Touch” is humanity, and our everyday struggle to maintain and find it within ourselves and the people around us. Daft Punk found Paul Williams for this, a man who has written an anthem for legendary puppets and written and performed a movie musical in the guise of a disfigured phantom; he’s excellent, ably emoting through the disco of the song’s first third and returning to close the narrative loop at its end. 

I’m more interested in what comes between, as “Touch” jumps from funk to jaunty, brassy pop to sweeping, electro-cosmic vocoder-choral fantasia to a bouncing orchestral return. There’s an ambiguity to the lyric that holds these movements together as they spiral out of control and fly back into orbit that’s ineffably human: “Hold on, if love is the answer you want // Hold on, if love is the answer you’re wrong // Hold on, if love is the answer you’re home.” Being alive means that any of the three options above can be true at any given time. They aren’t mutually exclusive, either: love can at once be the answer you want and also totally the wrong answer. It’s a remarkably honest, organic statement, maybe the most touching one on an album from two robots whose best moments tap into a wholly unsynthetic, semi-unexplainable magic. 

13. “Motherboard”

12. “Within” 

11. “The Game of Love”

10. “Giorgio by Moroder”

9. “Give Life Back to Music”

8. “Beyond”

7. “Doin’ It Right”

6. “Contact”

5. “Instant Crush”

4. “Lose Yourself to Dance” 

3. “Get Lucky”

2. “Fragments of Time”

1. “Touch”

markrichardson:

http://printedinternet.tumblr.com/

http://jamiesoncox.tumblr.com/

http://theremixbaby.tumblr.com/

http://jakec.tumblr.com/

http://airgordon.tumblr.com/

http://contrarybritt.tumblr.com/

Day 1 of From URL to IRL: Internetpalooza.

Vampire Weekend, “Hannah Hunt” 

My first and only girlfriend was named Hannah. We used to sit in her basement and watch reality shows on MTV Canada when the weather wasn’t nice enough to jump on her trampoline or bike around the lake. We kissed at a party one night in May, and when our friends and classmates hooted at us and we looked up burning it was with one of those fleeting rushes of young, local celebrity. 

One thing I’ve learned is that any meaningful relationship can only really be understood by the two people in it. I can’t stop listening to this song even though I have a lot of other things to do, in large part because it takes that statement as truth and treats it with respect. “Though we live on the U.S. dollar, you and me / we’ve got our own sense of time.” “Hannah Hunt” is riddled with details but leaves their ultimate significance for our consideration: the crawling vines and weeping willows somewhere along the road, the frozen beaches of home, the thick paper used as fodder for an infant flame. It’s a gesture of kindness, an invitation to then imagine our own such sticky moments. I don’t know what “A man of faith said hidden eyes could see what I was thinking” means to Ezra Koenig or Rostam Batmanglij, but I know what it means to me, and when the song blooms like their feeble Santa Barbara fire it’s a late July sunset over that lake, it’s quick heat at a high school party, something I shared with my own Hannah once. 

Oh, and I only remembered this half an hour after posting: the song we listened to most together was “Walcott,” tucked at the end of the debut album from this very band. 

This is going to be a quiet Internet week for me, because I’m bringing my boyfriend home to meet my family (!!!), but before leaving I wanted to pop in and say this: I’m so, so happy for Jason Collins — like, unimaginably happy, the same way I’m happy for anyone who has the strength to come out and live their fullest, best life. I’m so proud, too: proud to be gay, proud to love and play basketball, proud to find myself in communities who universally rejoiced over yesterday’s news. 

I saw a few people turn a critical eye towards yesterday’s events: will he find a team next season? Would this matter more if he was a more talented, individually successful player? Was the response from his peers littered with double-speak and iffy support? And I get that, I do — I’m usually one of those people, observing and inviting discussion. But not yesterday, and not even today. All I want to do right now is celebrate Collins’ courage, so utterly ordinary and yet also incredibly extraordinary. Here’s to a bright future, for him and for everyone.

See you in a few days!

• I spent a lot of time listening to Devendra Banhart with my friends in high school, specifically Rejoicing in the Hands and Cripple Crow. The most difficult song I ever learned to play on guitar was “The Body Breaks.” I remember reading Rolling Stone and stumbling upon the review for Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon, and then arranging a trip to the CD+ outlet in the mall to pick up a copy. I think four or five of us saw and heard in Banhart the image we had fashioned for ourselves: a bit arty, a bit whimsical and off-kilter, a bit weird, but still possessed of a sense of melody and purpose. His output trailed off and faltered towards the end of the decade, but his newest album Mala occasionally recaptures the magic that ran through his earliest work, never more so than on the mid-album instrumental “The Ballad of Keenan Milton.” I didn’t know the name before hearing the song. Keenan Milton was a skateboarder who accidentally drowned twelve years ago at a Fourth of July party, and the song perfectly captures the ache for someone long lost, sadness and anger having mellowed into something softer and sweeter. The first night I heard it I fell asleep with the song on repeat. It makes me feel that same ache for a few years ago, playing an acoustic guitar in the bowels of our high school’s theatre, bullshitting and cackling and making future plans. 
• Charli XCX’s debut True Romance hasn’t left my speakers since it began streaming on Pitchfork Advance a few weeks ago. I don’t exactly recall what I was expecting, but when listening I always think, “This is completely exceeding my expectations!” Most of the standouts are singles that were previously released — “Nuclear Seasons,” “You (Ha Ha Ha),” “You’re the One” — but at least one new cut has immediately joined the ranks of the finest Charli songs. Everything I need to know about “So Far Away” is contained in the spinning kaleidoscope of a synth that forms the song’s backbone, a sound I found immediately affecting; when I think about dizzying, ultra-powerful infatuation, this is the sound I’ve been hearing all my life. (“Before you came into my life, I missed you so bad.”) When I make the effort to focus on Charli, I sense the same dark energy and charisma that drives her intrigue on every one of her other songs, papering over a few iffy lyrical moments, but most of the time I just let her fade away. This is one of those rare songs where the sound immediately takes me somewhere and I choose to ride that feeling to its ultimate destination, and she functions as just another component of that sound here. (I learned while zipping around YouTube for a link that “So Far Away” might’ve been recorded as early as 2009, and pulls heavily from a song of the same title by a British producer named Paul White, which itself seems to sample Todd Rundgren, and that Charli’s version was included on the UK and Australian releases of the You’re the One EP AND her Heartbreaks and Earthquakes mixtape from last year. The more you know!)
• I’ve spent maybe a week and a half focusing on EDM, and here are a few of my incredibly amateur conclusions: 1) almost every producer is like a baseball player that either hits a home run or strikes out, and there isn’t much variance in the batting averages (certainly no one is smacking singles and doubles and frequently getting on base) 2) the only two components affecting a song’s success are melody and magnitude, the former’s meaning being obvious and the latter meaning the size of the release that arrives upon hitting the chorus 3) there’s something called the Womp Spectrum with Avicii at one end (nearly pure house) and Skrillex at the other (once and future king of the drops), and everyone else falls somewhere between those two poles in their own work 4) there are a disturbing, startling lack of prominent women producing, from what I’ve seen 5) Calvin Harris’ “Sweet Nothing” is probably the best song ever recorded 6) Cazzette’s “Beam Me Up” has already taken over college campuses and has a good chance of being everywhere this summer 7) Avicii is my favourite producer going out of this scene — he has a certain touch and handle, especially on his longer mixes (“Silhouettes,” “X You”) that i) isn’t too far distanced from critically beloved stuff like Todd Terje and Lindstrøm and ii) is much more apparent than in everyone else’s work. I still have some diving to do. 
• Smarter, more invested people are going to say a lot about this than I am, but the video for “Body Party” came out last night, and suffice it to say that the presumptive favourite for the year’s best song now has the brilliant cinematic rendering it deserves. I want to focus on the dramatic interludes between Future and Ciara quickly, only to say this: I know that they’re celebrities and so every interaction between them needs to be taken with one hundred grains of salt, and that it’s commercially beneficial for Future to appear in this video, and that I and everyone else in my Twitter feed are way too invested in this relationship to be considered healthy, functioning humans, BUT I’ll be damned if my eyes didn’t start to water when they introduced themselves and Future held her hand for a few seconds longer than necessary. (P.S. I’m leading the Future for Best Supporting Actor campaign, please email for more details. “They don’t call me the Future for no reason.”) Their whole conservation is adorably awkward but crackling with a true chemistry that’s immediately palpable to anyone who has ever been attracted to anyone else (I think.) I want to believe in CiBandz, I really do. 
• One more thing: allow me to remind you that I’m visiting New York from May 10-13 and that you should contact me if you’re available to get together quickly for a meal or a snack or whatever. I’m also soliciting food recommendations, because if I’m being absolutely honest 90% of my hopes and dreams for this trip revolve around food. I’m already going to Shake Shack once and probably Mighty Quinn’s for barbecue stuff — please tell me your favourites and I will probably eat them. (And get in touch so we can eat them together!)

Let’s make a list:

• Camera Obscura released a single today. It’s called “Do It Again,” and like most Camera Obscura songs, it’s absolutely excellent. My Maudlin Career is a horrendously underrated record that had the misfortune of being released in 2009, a year that saw career defining releases from several indie heavyweights and peak #chillwave coverage. “Do It Again” is perfect pop craftsmanship in much the same vein as that album’s lead single, “French Navy,” light and bittersweet and totally charming. The summer release calendar is already looking very crowded, but I’ll find plenty of time for this song and its parent album. 
• I’m not sure if it still exists, but Esquire once had a running feature focused on things that men shouldn’t do. I used to read this magazine regularly, and one month it was mentioned that men should never use emoticons. (This was maybe four or five years ago.) And while it’s lame to admit that I tried not to use emoticons because some haggis-brained editorial assistant tucked it into a magazine, that’s exactly what I did. I mention this because in recent months I’ve started to sneak the odd face into my communications, usually a :) or ;) or ;( or my personal favourite, :’). I sent one in an email to a coworker today. It felt right. A man knows when his emoticons are appropriate and uses them to augment his communication at his own comfort level. >:( to Esquire for the unnecessary waste of half a decade of solid faces.
• I tried to create a Branch last week to talk about Deerhunter’s new album Monomania, which had leaked a few days earlier. I’m intrigued by the possibilities of the platform, because I think it could fill a niche for conversations that are too long or detailed for Twitter but unfit for email chains or continuous reblogging. It failed fairly quickly: just a few posts, a handful of participants. It was a quiet death. There are plenty of potential reasons why this particular effort failed: Deerhunter isn’t quite popular enough to sustain a discussion, the time of day choice was poor, I don’t have the social sway necessary to involve people. But there’s one in particular I want to focus on: Branch’s removal of the “Ask to Join” feature. Up until recently, you could set up a discussion and post the link, and potential participants could request entry into the group pending your permission. This made a lot of sense to me! However, it seems the button has recently been removed. This means that there are only two ways (to my knowledge) to involve people in your conversation: open invite links that grant permission as soon as they’re clicked, and more direct invitations via email, @-mention, or DM. I think the removal of this feature is a major mistake, because it a) underestimates the power of the hierarchy of Internet intimacy, and b) skews the system towards power users. It’s easy to go into detail with both of these points, but quickly: Internet relationships are like real relationships in that you need a bit of history before you DM or email or engage in more direct forms of communication. You might have a mutually following relationship with someone, but that doesn’t mean you feel comfortable DMing them to talk about something. This dissuades conversation starters from inviting potential and/or obvious participants. Power users with more experience, stronger connections, and larger follower bases will feel more comfortable directly contacting people for participation, and will have their “open invite” links more widely circulated. I don’t know what the tipping point is for that positive experience, but I think I found myself on the wrong side of it. 
• I spent much of March listening to “Pressure,” by Danish duo Quadron. The producer half of the group has fallen into prominence as one half of Rhye, whose album from earlier this year remains one of my favourites of 2013 thus far. Quadron’s second album is coming out in June, and it’s poised to find similar levels of success — if anything, their chance of breaking into something like the mainstream is probably much greater than Rhye’s, because they work within a more accessible pop framework. Anyway, “Pressure”: this song is flawless, achingly sung and radiating a palpable warmth. There’s something about that descending vocal in the chorus, slowly falling like a finger traced along a sleeping spine; I want it to soundtrack movies, moments, humid drizzle. I want that sound in my life forever!

I’ll finish this off tomorrow evening with Devendra Banhart, Charli XCX, EDM, and NYC food solicitation.

I’m not religious or spiritual by any means, but if I believe in something, I believe in the first few seconds after a long run: a glimpse of ultimate mind-body communion, a chunk of sweaty, salty, thirsty transcendence. I dream about running the Boston Marathon someday. It’s one of running’s high temples. My heart is broken today, it’s absolutely splintered, and as much as I’m angry at the world and dark with the thought that irregular, senseless acts of violence are part of being alive, I’m mostly just aching for all those people who were out there on the course, fighting for 3:59:59, struggling just under. An ecstatic, shining moment in their lives has been forever tainted; around the world, a sanctuary has been compromised. 

After posting this, I’m going to tie on my running shoes and head outside for a bit. It’s the first real day of spring here. Every step is a tribute. I don’t know what else to do.