You Can Kickstart Buffalo Clover!

So, you know that The Butcher is friends with the one chick from this band, Buffalo Clover, which put out one of my favorite albums of recent years. Well, they’re doing a Kickstarter to pay for their next album and for twenty bucks, you can get the new album and the last album. Hell, for two thousand bucks, they’ll write a song about you.

You and your ill-fated affair with John Rich.

Yeah, you were all “Who would give two thousand… oh, they could do a love song about me and a star-crossed romance with John Rich? I get it.”

Or, I guess it doesn’t have to be John Rich, but it’s hard to understand why you wouldn’t go for it.

Anyway, I don’t know them. The Butcher is, after all, quite a bit younger than me, so, if he knew them in high school, I was already in college. So, they could secretly suck. Or be made entirely of boogers. I don’t know.

But I did love their first album and hope to get to hear this one.

Hazelnuts

I noticed yesterday that all the hazelnuts have leaves. It’s five years from nut to nuts, they say, but I don’t know how old any of our sticks were when we got them.

It’s a kind of ordinary truth that things just go on. And it’s kind of a relief and kind of an insult. People died. A lot of people’s lives will never be the same. The dog still has to be walked. The small hazelnut trees/bushes unroll their leaves and stretch them out in the sun. The wind blows. Soon enough, it rains.

It helps me understand the apocalyptic dream we have as people. We want to believe that we are important enough that even nature will notice our passing. Certainly, if we’re all gone, we think, that will show this old world that we meant something.

But we’d be gone and the water that drips down the rocks by the far field would still nourish the moss that grows there.

Nature isn’t nostalgic.

I am, though. I am.

Boston

The thing I just can’t stop thinking about is that somewhere out there is a guy who is almost as surprised as we are about how many people were injured and how many people died and what their names are and what brought them to be there at that particular moment and which family members and friends and strangers were almost there, but five minutes too early or five minutes too late.

And that guy is delighted.

Each new bit of information is, for him, a great somewhat-expected gift.

It’s hard for me to express how angry that makes me. People should die of old age or cancer or, my god, if they have to be murdered, it should be by someone who targeted them, not just because they weren’t five minutes earlier or five minutes later, because they didn’t duck into a building to use the restroom at the right moment.

It’s the Death Lottery aspect of it that pisses me off. Well, no, we all have our ticket and don’t know when our number will be called. It’s the rigging of the Death Lottery, the taking glee in being as surprised by who came up as the rest of us are horrified–that fills me with rage.