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Showing posts from October, 2010

Dan Deacon saved my life

Dan Deacon, a guy from Baltimore, will be playing tonight at the Southern. I'll be there. I'll be dancing. I'm kind of excited about it, but in a way that makes me think it is not really going to be happening. I discovered Dan Deacon thanks to NPR's All Songs Considered podcast. The song Get Older came on while I was at the gym, trying to build my body out of sadness. My marriage had ended a month or so before, and I was living in Albemarle County with a friend. During my marriage, I didn't create any music. I experimented very little. I had done so a lot during my first marriage, but somehow the urge to make noise didn't really come to me when I was married the second time. The traumaI had turned inward because we had started a family and I had to work, and I felt so serious all the time. Life was no longer about having fun, and I was married to the wrong person. Of course, I still mourned the end, because I had thought I was going to live out my days wit

Name change

Why Citizen 2,840,201,999? Why the last number? Which I've somehow forgotten, by the way. I came up with the original name for this blog off the top of my head, thinking it was about where I would stand in the rankings if a global census sorted the human race by birth order. I assumed that given there were about 6.2 billion people at the time, and I was in my early 30's, I was somewhere just after the middle. Now I've since learned that there are more people alive today who were born after me, so I've moved up in the rankings. I assume now that I am the 2,840,201,999th person who showed up on this planet one day and had to figure out how to get by. I picked the word 'citizen' because of a sense that we're all here on the same planet, and we may as well recognize each others' common values as much we can. I write mine down part of my journey here on occasion. I study government and public policy as a reporter, in part because I feel a sense that

Something has to give...

I'm standing here on one knee, crouched down behind the beer cooler behind the bar at Court Square Tavern. My last customers left about 10 minutes ago, and I've got nothing to do really but type. One out of every eight Saturdays is busy, and tonight ain't a snake-eye. I've got a song screaming out over the speakers, D.O.A. and Jello Biafra singing a cover of "We Gotta Get Out Of This Place" and it seems appropriate. I can't keep working here, not under these conditions, all by myself. It's too slow to merit putting a second person on, which means I have to cook, clean, dishwash, and serve the customers. In a perfect world, I would love that challenge. I love when life's a video game with impossible expectations, yet I come through anyway. But it's not a perfect world. And, this is really getting to me, the stress of being all alone in a place that should be doing better, but isn't. I have no power to get people to walk up the street