Amber

We only get a leap day every four years. It's important to do something that you can forget about for the next three years, since internet services are keen to remind one of anniversaries that tend to be banal rather than memorable. (Algorithms have yet to figure out how to quantify specialness, except via reaction emojis, a poor metric.)

For weeks, I had been planning on attending this concert at Darkside Records in Poughkeepsie. It was one of those events that I had invite myself to on Facebook, which did not invest me. Had Amber worked this weekend, I would have tried to go on my own, if I could not induce company. Fortunately, she did not have to work.

I do not, in my daily life, feel as though my experiences are especially cool. I teach dysregulated boys in a residential setting. I write and edit books that few people read - though I'm rereading them for republication and enjoying them - but I do not feel cool. Going to a record store to watch a band improves that. They're not some no-name band, as one might expect from the lack of a cover charge. They are Magic Giant, whom I have never heard before, but it wouldn't matter either way. If the music was not abominable, I would have been satisfied. I would be getting more than I paid for, after all.

Amber looks gorgeous, which is not something I'm only saying because I have the good taste to be her husband. Before we leave for the concert, she puts on a little lipstick and has a purple floral barrette. She is exceptionally pretty, wearing dark purple plaid tights that look fantastic on her, one of the sexiest garments she currently owns. I am enraptured with my wife, a fine bit of arm candy. However weak my daily life may seem, she invigorates it.

Thumbing through vinyls of bands of whom I have never heard and those of bands old enough to again be in vogue, smelling the incense, I tell Amber that I am past the point in my life where I am cool enough to work in a record store. I remember college friends, drunk on Nick Hornby novels, drooling over their associates who worked at the record stores near campus.

Amber suggests that working the record stores was never a cool thing to do. It is retail, little better than working at a Hallmark. At a store in the mall, even one that sold music, no one seemed to be on the edge of culture. Cut that shop out of the mall, plop at near a college or city center, and the people behind the register gained clout. Their hair turned Crayola shades, or they were blessed with seductive indifference toward anyone who couldn't claim to have liked an obscure band before they sold out.

Magic Giant

Those I remember from college did appear to be far cooler than I felt, but this may have been by dint that they had both a broad and deep knowledge of music while I was barely beyond listening to what the local alternative station played. I was never secure in my ability to converse about music, which was always a point of supposed coolness. I owned mix CDs with music by Leonard Cohen and the Violent Femmes, but I played them when around people whom I foolishly thought this would impress.

While we're in the record store, I realize that Amber is not someone whom I must watch over, hypervigilant of her reactions. With most with whom I have been entangled, and a great number I called friends in the past, I would have to check in on them. I must make sure that they thought we were doing was cool enough, that I was not lame in their eyes for enjoying this. I'm past that. I do not care if someone does not enjoy what I do if they aren't going to be an utter wet blanket that I am not ceaselessly accommodating their attention span and their worry that strangers might see them liking something mainstream. (Though, if other people there saw them, wouldn't these people be as lame?)

I gave up a long time ago on being cool. If I am appreciated, that is nice, but I am not setting out to impress anyone whom I do not already love.

Magic Giant is amiable and fun, although we expected their set to be an hour-long and it is under half that. We sing along to their songs and hoot at the lead singer loses an article of clothing after each song. Maybe they abridged their set because he strips down to a t-shirt and jeans; there isn't too much farther he could do. They spend the next half hour of their set taking generally goofy pictures with people. The idea of this fills Amber with anxiety, so we leave the line for pictures of a band we did not know hours ago.

Amber

Live music excites me as few other things can. I cannot account for it. When I was a teenager, I was a habitue of The Chance, where I would see alternative bands whenever I could. I wish I had kept a journal then, even knowing how it would have read and how much it would contain the details of girls I should likely have forgotten. I tried once to find all the bands that had ever played there but came up short. The list rarely showed the opening bands and seemed to forget a good number of the headliners. I did not totally go to these concerts for the bands -- though I was thrilled to see some of them -- as much as to have the experience of going to a concert. Being there, in that humid, smoky room (this being a time before smoking at a club would get you expelled and fined) made me feel cool. This was my element, even if it was one against which I needed earplugs. My element, but it made me nervous, too. I wanted to be there, but on the periphery, observing and participating to the extent I could. I wanted to be there, not in my head, which is where I will warrant that I spent too much of my time.

Now, I can be at this little, brief concert without vanishing into myself.

Amber is beholden to the tethers of home, to her schoolwork, early bedtime, and beloved pets. I cannot fault her for these, really. I can work within these constraints, though it does mean fewer concerts that brush against midnight.

Soon in Xenology: Magical thinking and witchcraft.

last watched: Altered Carbon
reading: Sex and Rockets