My Angel Stepped Out of Heaven

The fantasy is always the same.

Well, that's not true. The fantasy is always similar. Perhaps we're in a record store. I walk by and casually glance at the stack of CDs in her hand...she notices. "Before and After Science is my favorite..." I offer sheepishly, gesturing at the disc on top. "Yeah, I love Another Green World so much," she replies. We spend the afternoon listening to records and drinking her absinthe, alone together, together alone.

Or perhaps it's an Art Brut concert. I spot her amidst the hipsters early in the set and keep casting sidelong glances toward her throughout. We eventually notice each other in earnest as we're the only ones who know all the lyrics to the XTC cover. I buy her a gin and tonic and we stay at the bar after the concert, talking about Fall b-sides until the bouncer kicks us out.

Such are my thoughts at seeing the creature known as femina hipstera mascara, better known as the Hipster Cutie. Such flights of fancy are generally enough to satisfy my urge to speak to the fairer sex and only rarely do I leave kicking myself for not actually approaching the girl.

Fast forward: in the summer after I graduated college, I found myself with several friends in Chicago for the second annual Pitchfork Music Festival, an outdoor concert hosted by the internet's most powerful bastion of music opinion. It promised to be a three-day spectacular of rocking out (independently), amusing t-shirts and ill-advised hairstyles. In short, my kind of place.

The weekend would also serve as a much-needed vacation for (and from) myself. I had just quit a dead end job due to a combination of laziness and arrogance. While away, I intended to take stock of my life, which was on the cusp between "post-collegiate bohemian" and "worthless layabout." I figured I could squeak out about two more months of sitting around my apartment before my lack of income and pesky need for sustenance would force me to get a job. The only rational choice, then, was taking a vacation from doing nothing so that I could waste money at a faster pace and cook up some new schemes.

Since my amigo Brandon and I had failed to get tickets for the Friday night performance, we went out and got totally hammed while our friends hit up the concert. After getting us tossed out of two bars, he bought a case of Bud Light and we drank it on the way back to the friend's apartment where we did our passing out at night. Exactly the sort of mature, reasoned decision that you would expect from two recent college graduates.

The next morning, I was dragged from my alcohol-induced coma just in time to get on the El train and make it to the show. I was sitting in the sun on the El platform, nonchalantly enjoying the last gasps of my hangover from the night before when I felt a sharp jab at my ribs. I turned angrily to my friend Brandon when he pointed me in the direction of the most otherworldly creature I have ever seen. I fell instantly in love.

Fortunately, the girl wore an iPod so the three males in our party could talk about her with little fear of being noticed. She seemed to be light years away, metaphorically and literally, as she started at the ceiling and smiled, clearly entertained by whatever she was listening to (and, presumably, by the three idiots obviously salivating over her less than teen feet away). I prepare to imagine the two of us frolicking at the concert...and then, suddenly, everything changes.

I made a rather crude joke at my friend Brandon's expense, causing him to put all of his considerable frame into attacking me. I flew out of my El seat and into the aisle. The girl noticed and started laughing before removing her earphones. "Hey, are you guys going to Pitchfork?" she asks in a thick Chicagoan accent. It sounded like music.

We responded that we are, in fact, headed that way. Our new friend, it seems, is also going to the hipster fest. The six of us chatted briefly as the train came to a stop and we prepared to switch. What happened next is the sort of thing that I can only liken to the feeling a mother gets when her child is trapped under a large boulder. I employed a focus and a clarity that verged on precognition. I could see three and four moves into the future and somehow knew exactly what to say. I perfectly boxed out the other two guys and they tacitly took on the role of wingmen, as per the Code of Guydom.

In the train station, I made a joke about the fact that both Brandon and I were wearing plaid shorts. "Did you guys plan that?" she said. "Oh, yeah. I'm Brandon and this is my life partner Blake..." he said. She laughed and I introduced myself with my actual name. I missed hers as I was deafened by the blood rushing from my head to other parts of my body.

[NB: Her name actually became something of a topic for discussion throughout the rest of the trip. My friend Kelly SWORE that it was Angela. I was adamant that she said Amanda. The other girl in the group, Brooke, felt her name had been Andrea, though not strongly. She's in my phone as Amanda...I suppose she'll stay that way, unless I ever actually call her.]

The rest of the trip to Union Park took half an hour and we had to wait outside the gate for another forty-five minutes (apparently Yoko Ono demanded a soundcheck). Throughout that whole period, I delighted her with a variety of stories. We talked about Chuck Klosterman, Led Zeppelin, Jaegermeister, purchasing literary materials and other topics too numerous to mention. At one point she laughed and said "You should be a professional storyteller! You get so excited." I smiled and considered asking her to marry me.

As we entered the Festival, we got split up. I was then alarmed as someone jumped on my back--it was Amanda. "Hey, they swiped my vodka!" she said. Apparently the guards took any water bottles that hadn't been sealed. "You have to go get it back!" In that instant I resolved to kill every single guard on the grounds, but she started laughing. She and I exchanged phone numbers--and I'm pretty sure she entered me as "Blake"--and promises to meet later then headed off to enjoy the day's festivities.

I saw her twice again that day, once during the Grizzly Bear set and, more substantially, after Cat Power. She made a comment about turning gay for Chan Marshall and I nearly died. When my group of friends went out that night I planned to call her but I thought I remembered her saying she wasn't twenty-one and lived outside the city. "Oh well," I thought, "I'll call her tomorrow."

The next day I would leave my phone at home. I wouldn't see her again before we left. In fact, I may never see her again. I comfort myself with the fact that it's better this way: since I didn't see her, I can imagine she would have slept with me. Had we actually met on Sunday, I would probably have blown it.

I resolve to keep her number as a souvenir.

When You Sleep

I have never slept well. I have never slept well because I am a ridiculous person: I am terrified of zombies. I recently discovered this is (sort of) a problem that many of my friends share. A number of people I know wrestle with insomnia. These people, however, are kept conscious by totally pragmatic troubles: paying bills, the existence of true love, the possibility of nuclear holocaust, et cetera. My eyelids hang open until the wee small hours because every time I close them, I see an army of undead corpses shambling toward me. Clearly, I am in need of professional help.

This is nothing new. One of the many terrors of my childhood was the inability to sleep. One entire summer my parents thought I was seriously ill. I likely looked this way because I only slept between six and ten a.m. for an entire two month span. You see, on the day that school let out, I watched Ridley Scott's Alien for the first time. Every night that summer, I lay awake quaking in abject fear, certain that a xenomorph would crash through my ceiling and rip my face off should my eyes even flutter shut. I would finally succumb to exhaustion around dawn, only to be jarred awake, soaked with sweat a few hours later in time for "The Price is Right." That was a horrible summer.

Before that, during the period I now refer to as my religious phase, I was kept awake by a paralyzing fear of missing the Rapture. In retrospect, this seems a bit naive. I doubt that the ressurected Lord would bypass someone merely because they were asleep. Fear, childhood and religious fervor know no such reason.

The earliest tormentors I can recall are vague memories of some sort of witch and ghost, sort of an evil duo that I believed would spring from beneath my bed. When I think about these two, though, I can only remember them doing some sort of malevolent (but basically unharmful) dance that looked like the choreography from a Scooby Doo episode. Anyway, my point is that I have never been able to get a good night's rest because I have a hyperactive imagination that has been spoiled by years of violent horror films. Even now, about once a month, I wake up drenched in sweat and screaming because of a recurring nightmare that takes a very specific scene from Zach Snyder's Dawn of the Dead. In fact, one of the main reasons I want to become famous is so I can meet that son of a bitch and knock his block off.

Consequently, I will always be the kind of person who buys two dead bolt locks. I will also always staunchly defend the right to bear arms, lest we ever need to defend ourselves from the recently departed. It seems like too big of a risk to take a chance on. Thank me when the time comes.

In the interim, I have considered several options for getting some rest. I toyed with the idea of sleeping pills, but I've never really been the doomed starlet type. For a short time, I thought about drinking myself to sleep with a bottle of Early Times every night. After careful consideration, however, this seems dangerous (and worse still, expensive). NyQuil was promising but the dreams were just too exhausting and I ended up sweating through my sheets every night (although no monsters were involved). And then I discovered My Bloody Valentine.

Amongst my roommates and I, MBV were something of a punchline for a long time. The British band served as shorthand for everything that was wrong with Pitchfork and music snobs. (NB: The internet webzine named their 1991 masterpiece Loveless the best album of the 90's, later to be shifted to second in a rehash of the same poll.) Eventually, I picked up a copy of Loveless on while I was taking a break from the men's store where I pretended to work while ogling girls and sleeping in the stock room. I spun the record a few times but never really got a lot out of it; the vocals were indecipherable and the guitars sounded like a migraine. For the most part, Loveless just occupied the space in my collection between Mountain Goats and the Old 97's.

Then one night I was convalescing with the worst case of strep throat I've ever had. I honestly considered slitting throat just to feel a different kind of agony. The only pain medication I had was some leftover hydrocodone from a minor surgery a few years before. I popped one in my mouth and put Loveless in my player. I'd heard it was a stoner album, so I figured it couldn't hurt. At least not as bad as my poor throat did.

And then time stopped. The first few tracks slid by unobtrusively, priming the canvas for what was to come. By the time track five kicked in, coincidentally titled "When You Sleep," I felt like the roof of my room had been ripped off. I could actually see the guitar sounds and it was amazing. I felt like I was riding a dolphin through the stars while tripping on LSD (that pain medication was major league stuff). The next track--"I Only Said"--came on and I was in a field of those fire plants from Mario Brothers with a psychedelic Yoshi. He passed me his sunglasses. When I put them on, the night sky exploded in colors. Something crazy was happening.

Track eight, "Sometimes," was the soundtrack to an intergalactic strip club filled with dancers that blinked in and out of existence, every color of the rainbow. I laughed and I could actually see the "HA HA" coming out of my mouth. How had I lived twenty years without this music??

As the album drew to a close, I was finally drifting off to sleep...I think. I remember as the shimmering synth notes of "Soon" filled my room, I imagined myself, still in the dinosaur's sunglasses, dancing with every girl I had ever loved. We were all laughing and jumping in slow motion. The walls fell in around me.

I awoke the next morning, still groggy from the pill, and stared down at my CD player for a long time. How had I missed it before? The watery, dreamy guitars...the whispered vocals, like the most important secret you'll never hear...the thudding drums that, mixed just a bit louder, would crush your ribs...the pounding, cardiac bassline...

These eleven tracks are, in a word, magic. This is my second favortie album of all time, behind Imperial Bedroom. Since that amazing night when the cosmos aligned, I have listened to it roughly five hundred times, in various states of altered consciousness. Every time I get something new. Stoney sober or blackout wasted, there is always something I'd never quite noticed before. MBV brainchild Kevin Shields has said that much of it was written during and for the period right before you fall asleep, when you're aware of how absurd your thoughts are. I find it difficult to grace that liminal stage of consciousness now without this record. I sometimes will shout myself awake just before drifting off unless it's on.

So there you have it: I may never love a woman and I'm terrified of fairytale monsters, but I had one hell of a drug trip one night.