and we don't have the time we had when we were younger

my freshman year in college i lived in the dorm room where bob mould tried to hang himself. that was the legend, anyway, although i'm pretty sure the location moved from room to room in bigelow basement at the whim of whoever was the residential assistant that year. even funnier was when someone told me that mould's ghost haunted the residence hall. when i pointed out that would require him to be, you know, dead, i got a blank stare.

you mean bob mould isn't dead?

no, he's not.

i interviewed him my sophomore year at mac, when i was general manager of the radio station. 'mcn was, is, and always will be more a punchline than anything else, although a decent enough opportunity for someone ambitious who wanted a career in radio broadcasting (is there any such person anymore?) to develop some good tapes. god knows, we were perpetually understaffed. see, wmcn falls on the dial at the unfortunate location of 91.7. which, if you're from the cities twin, you know is a mere twitch of a thumb from 91.1, home of minnesota public radio. as one might imagine, we had fairly strict limitations on the strength of our signal as a direct result. a whole whopping ten watts. which meant, on a good day, if you had a great antenna and there were prevailing winds from the east, you might sort of pick up the station in downtown st. paul. this was before the days of internet radio, so our audience was pretty much exclusively the couple square miles that formed the campus community.

mould went to mac for a year, i think. it might be two, but he was miserable and dropped out, which was great for the rest of us because husker du emerged as a direct result. he was in the cities doing some half-assed promotion of bob mould and i was interning for the city pages at the time, and somehow managed to bribe the music editor into passing along my request, which i think amused mould more than anything. we promised not to talk about the husker years, and it was actually one of the more memorable interviews i've ever done. and we didn't talk about that band, but about pretty much everything else. how music was changing, and how the digital format was in some significant ways changing music, making it disposable and consumable and discardable in ways it hadn't been previously. which, now that i think on it, was remarkably prophetic. if you don't believe me, think about how easily you can delete music off your hard drive, as opposed to that mountain of lps your dad still has stored in his garage, and not because he views them as collector's items. and it's not like i'm not as guilty of downloading music as the next person, but it has made music, and the acquisition of such, something of a non-event.

was incredibly gracious and well-spoken and when we went off air he indulged me a bit, let me ask about making that music during a time when punk was still finding a footing, when it hadn't become in its own right a commercial powerhouse. he was genuinely amused when i talked about how much that music had meant to me, given i was all of ten when the last legitimate album came out. he got it, though, that music in the modern era didn't define a time so much as a period, and that most benchmarks aren't cultural so much as personal. it's like, yeah, i can tell you where i was when the berlin wall fell, when the challenger exploded. and i can tell you the first time i heard husker du.

twelve years old, in the loft in our garage, sneaking cigarettes and it was sean's tape but aidan who put it in the cassette player and the sound quality was for shit but i remember hearing the drums kick in during those opening few seconds and it was like a light bulb over my head, like finding something i'd been searching for without knowing it.

which is a long and involved and roundabout way of saying that last night i dreamed in technicolor, with a kicking bass beat and a cadence that made my hands hurt in sympathy and it wasn't 1980 but it was that band, and a cigarette shared with a ghost who still smiles and laughs and watches out of the corner of his eye to make sure i don't get lost in the crowd.

i can't believe you got that right

and then there are things i'm never really sure how to talk about. like how the man who wouldn't talk to me for months, when this baby was still just cells and parts and not person, is the same man who every morning when i get up to get ready rolls over in bed and puts his arm out and snuggles with his grandson until i'm ready to get us both ready for the day. and everyone tells you no one can not love a baby, which is totally untrue, but he loves this kid more than just about anything, i think. and i don't know what it is. proximity, for sure. maybe the memory of a name. i don't know. i know enough not to think about it for too long, or to try not to, because i'm still not sure where i fit in the love so very apparent there. we are working on it, surely. but i know that he still looks at me and sees less than what was there before, instead of the so much more that there is.

and i was thinking, the other day, about loss, because as much as i've gained in the past few months there is a real sense of the other, literal and otherwise. and how even when it's not us doing the losing that we have such a pathological need to make it personal. i'm not sure if that's because it's the only way we can identify to share pain that's not ours or if it's because we're inherently selfish and can't deal with things that aren't ours. it probably doesn't matter, but it can get really annoying. when the pain is personal. which is maybe why there's a difference between sympathy and empathy. and i've definitely lost whatever thread of a point i started out with.

except for this: a memory, so strong it's a waking dream. a five-year old me, walking down the street from the daycare with my hand in my dad's. and his stride was so big and he was so tall and we talked about the wind in the willows and toadie and going on an adventure, bilbo, and dinners of hamburger helper beef stroganoff and macaroni and cheese and listening to star wars on bbc radio. and piggyback rides on that brother's back and sneaking smokes behind the garage and the music he used to play and how it changed the way i looked at everything. how safe everything was and always would be.

except for the part where it isn't, because it can't be. which begs the question, why, when we supposedly forget so much of the bad, does the good that remains hurt so much?