Posted on by Matt Thomas

Craig Finn on Nightlife and Adult Relationships II: Killer Parties

Killer Parties (Live) — Nights That Almost Killed Us, Nights That Made Us

Note: This is the second part of our series on songs of The Hold Steady that take up the intertwined themes of nightlife and the complexities of adult relationships. Part I is available. This piece will deal with “Killer Parties,” specifically the live version from A Positive Rage.

“Killer Parties,” written by Craig Finn, closes Almost Killed Me (2003) and provides its title line. But the 2008 live version is the definitive one for me — a 10-minute slow burn that opens not with guitars but with an invocation. Finn’s spoken intro sets the terms for who this band is, who the audience is, and why these communal nights matter.

I. The Invocation

Before a single lyric, Finn does what Finn does: greets the tribe.

He jokes, he rambles, he self-deprecates, he misdirects — and then he lands it:

There’s so much joy in what we do up here. Thank you for sharing that joy with us.

That’s the thesis of The Hold Steady.
Everything else is commentary.

The band isn’t just a band; Finn isn’t just a frontman. The Hold Steady is a community, a lineage, a shared memory palace built out of long nights, near-misses, inside jokes, loud guitars, and people who actually want to be there.

When I saw them twice at the Brooklyn Bowl in 2018, I wrote:

Hold Steady fans are pretty much fanatics… They were super possessive of their space, they all seemed to know each other. One guy sized me up and said, “I want to not like you, but there’s some kind of aura around you, man.”

That’s the thing: the fans are a little cliquey, but the band itself is radically welcoming. Finn means it when he thanks people. He means it when he says he’s met half the room. He means it when he collapses the distinction between performer and audience:

“We are, and you are, The Hold Steady.”

That’s what the spoken intro really says.

II. Charlemagne and the Unsaid

The song opens with a classic Finn move — an elliptical report of something that happened, but we’re not going to get the details:

If they ask about Charlemagne,
be polite and keep it vague —
another lover lost to the restaurant raids.

Charlemagne is the old recurring character, drug-dealer-adjacent, always on the edge of calamity. Did he OD? Get busted? Get swallowed by his own myth?
Finn doesn’t tell you. He protects the dignity of the fallen.

This is identical in spirit to the opening of “A Bathtub in a Kitchen.”

I’ve known people like this. You’ve known people like this. Someone falls off the map, and when they resurface, it’s a new person in the same body. The specifics get blurry; the compassion gets sharper.

III. Leaving, Loving, Running

The next verses broaden out:

We left because we were young and in love.
We left because we needed space.
We left because we heard about this mythical country called the United States.

When Finn sings that line, he’s not being literal — he’s describing the classic American story: the pilgrimage to the realbig city. The wide open possibility. The idea that somewhere else — New York, especially — is where the real life is.

I relate.
I left my hometown and moved halfway across the world.
Finn moved from Minneapolis to New York; I moved from Spokane to Asia.
And like him, I sometimes feel pangs for what I missed.

But I needed space. I needed something bigger.

IV. Killer Parties

Then we hit the geography of sin:

Virginia for lovers.
Philly for brotherhood.
Pensacola for pills.
Ybor City for the nights that go too far.

And then the line we can quote directly:

“Killer parties almost killed me.”

Finn doesn’t romanticize this. He’s looking back at the nights that were ecstatic and dangerous at the same time. Nights that reshaped his body chemistry. Nights that made him who he is.

I’ve had my run at nightlife — nothing like Finn’s, but enough to understand the way one night can rewrite your wiring, for better or worse.

V. The Blur and the Transcendence

The final verses repeat themselves, because that’s how memory works:

We partied (I think?).
We departed from our bodies.
We woke up in Ybor City.

The nights are a blur — Finn partied but gets the details secondhand. What he does remember is the transcendence, the weightless moment when the body gives out and the self floats somewhere above it. And then the long, punishing hangover that follows.

For me, Ybor City has always functioned like El Dorado — the mythical endpoint of the American night. Maybe Finn has been there; maybe he hasn’t. Maybe you can only reach it by running the gauntlet of long days and longer nights. Maybe you can only get there by losing yourself a little too fully.

I’m not sure Ybor City would be good for me.

VI. The Ex-Introvert Who Still Wants the Night

And here’s where my story threads into the song:

I am an ex-introvert reinvented as an extrovert — something I’ve talked about with several friends. I’m too old for some of the clubbing I once did, but I still love the nightlife, still love running around, talking to strangers, seeing where the night wants to take me.

And it takes you to strange places.

I think this is the real theme of “Killer Parties”:
the appeal of the night, the call of the road, and the deep human need to leave the known world and find out what’s waiting elsewhere.

I return to this song in all kinds of circumstances — when I miss the road, when I need a reminder that the self is porous, when I want to remember what it felt like to be new somewhere.

VII. The Circle Closes: Community

And yet — for all the mythology and all the escapism — Finn always brings it back to community.

The Hold Steady isn’t just Finn narrating the lives of misfits. It’s Finn saying:

We survived the killer nights.
We made it home.
We found each other.

The live intro becomes the retrospective moral:

There’s so much joy in what we do up here.
Thank you for sharing that joy with us.

And so the whole arc — the wandering, the leaving, the nightlife, the blurring of memory, the near-death nights — ends where it must:

With the people who showed up.
The people who stayed.
The people in front of the stage.
The people who are, themselves, The Hold Steady.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

Craig Finn on Nightlife and Adult Relationships I: Most People are DJs

I. Setting the Frame — What the Song Is “About,” and What Finn Says It’s About

“Most People Are DJs” appears on Almost Killed Me (2003), track three if you don’t count the spoken prologue. If “Killer Parties” is the band’s thesis on community, “Most People Are DJs” is the thesis on the scene—why it’s fun, why it’s corrosive, and why it matters.

Finn himself once said:

“Just a reaction to life in NYC in the 2000s… The part I don’t get is when I get emails that start with ‘Come see me DJ’ and end with ‘Here is what I’m going to play…’ I think DJing, like rock criticism, tends to be a way for people to participate in the ‘scene’ without the risks to the ego that go along with producing art.”

His hedge—“Of course, I don’t apply this to all DJs”—isn’t convincing. And that’s okay. Artists don’t owe us diplomatic consensus statements. What he’s really saying is: there is a gap between creating and curating. Between risk and commentary. Between the ones who make things and the ones who play things.

Now: I don’t fully agree with him.
And that’s part of what makes this song fun to write about.

Because the truth is:
Finn is reacting to a very specific time and place—New York in the early 2000s—where the “scene” was swollen with people who wanted proximity to art more than they wanted the agony of making it.

But he also wrote a song so overflowing with confidence and adrenaline that, even if you disagree with the premise, the song still wins.

II. Alliteration, Lineage, and the New York Scene (Early 2000s)

One thing that hits immediately in “Most People Are DJs” is the density—the alliteration, the internal rhyme, the almost cartoonish velocity of the lines. Finn came out of Lifter Puller, a band whose songs were so tightly coiled with alliteration they were practically tongue-twisters set to guitars. That sonic fingerprint carries directly into Almost Killed Me.

“Jet skis into the jetty,”
“skipping off the good ship,”
“searching for the merchant”—
this is Finn still flexing the Lifter Puller muscle.

But something is different now.
A subtle pivot.

With The Hold Steady, the alliteration stops feeling like a hallucinatory fever dream and starts to feel like a narrator in full command of his mythmaking. LP was chaos; THS is authorship. LP was young-person disorientation; THS is a guy in his early thirties cataloguing his own survival.

And that survival intersects directly with Finn’s take on the early-millennium New York City “scene.”

If you didn’t live there then, it’s hard to reconstruct the vibe, but from the outside—I was never a New York resident, just a visitor—it felt like every bar and backroom was filled with:

  • people wanting to be seen
  • people curating themselves more than expressing themselves
  • self-mythologizing in real time
  • and a thousand micro-scenes stacked on top of each other

New York has always been a city where people come to reinvent themselves, but in the 2000s, with the rise of the internet, music blogs, Vice magazine, and the early social media era, there was suddenly an audience for every aesthetic micro-gesture. DJ nights proliferated not necessarily because people loved vinyl but because DJing let you participate in culture without risking the humiliation of failure that comes with creation.

Finn clearly bristled at this dynamic—at least enough to write this song about it.
But crucially: he’s not sneering. He’s needling.
He’s amused and annoyed in equal measure.

Because he had just spent years in a band (LP) that nearly no one outside Minneapolis cared about. He’d paid his dues in the purest sense—tiny clubs, no money, hardcore kids, bad drives, worse mornings—and so when he encountered the Manhattan version of a “scene,” it must have felt surreal. A party ecosystem where participation wasn’t dependent on talent or risk, just aesthetics.

And so the song becomes a little manifesto:

Some people create.
Most people curate.
I know which side I’m on.

But I don’t fully agree with Finn here. DJing, like criticism, can absolutely be an art. Plenty of DJs are actual geniuses of sequencing, mood, texture, and propulsion. And Finn’s own songs rely heavily on the idea that everyone constructs a soundtrack for their life. He lives inside the psychology of people who soundtrack their heartbreak, their addictions, their breakthroughs, their mistakes.

So his jab at DJs is both sincere and playful—an elbow thrown by someone who knows perfectly well that without DJs, nightlife wouldn’t exist.

Still, the tension is productive.
It pushes the song forward.
It gives it its bite.

This is where Finn’s shift from Lifter Puller to The Hold Steady becomes clear:
LP described nightlife as a labyrinth; THS describes it as a world he made it out of, barely, and will now narrate for the rest of us.

Almost Killed Me is a debut in name only—it’s actually a rebirth.

III. The Ice Machine, the Trash Bin, and the Myth of Mis-Spent Youth

If the early verses of “Most People Are DJs” sketch out the external landscape—Ybor City confetti, jet skis, five-second dealers, Phil Lynott doppelgängers—then the center of the song turns inward. The gaze shifts from the scene itself to the person who once tried to survive inside it.

And it starts with a line that sounds like a joke until it doesn’t:

“I was a teenage ice machine…”

It’s metaphorical, but also literal in the sideways way Finn always manages:
a kid who kept it cold, kept it contained, kept taking in whatever the night handed him. Drinking until he dreamed, and when he dreamed, dreaming only of the scene. It’s the way youth can feel like preparation for nightlife, not the other way around.

Then comes the image of the little lambs looking up at him—those younger kids just entering the arena. There’s no arrogance in it; it’s simply the moment you realize you’ve shifted from participant to veteran, from the kid on the floor to the older presence leaning against the bar. It’s an eerie, recognizable sensation for anyone who came up in tight little music worlds, whether Minneapolis hardcore or the DIY venues that orbit all cities.

And then the next admission hits harder:

“I was a Twin Cities trash bin…”

Here Finn stops ornamenting the story. He talks frankly about taking everything the scene gave him and jamming it into his system. He doesn’t romanticize those years—he frames them as messy, hungry, adrenaline-charged, and sometimes self-destructive. It’s the classic Hold Steady blend of humor, regret, and affection for the person he once was. Anyone who’s lived through their own version of that era understands the mixture of pride and embarrassment that comes with looking back.

Then the song shifts again, suddenly back in a room, back in a body:

“She got me cornered by the kitchen…”

It’s one of those instantly recognizable nightlife moments—some stranger with a lot on her mind talking too closely, too sincerely, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Finn’s response, “I’ll do anything but listen,” is both funny and revealing. It’s the impatience of a younger self who wants motion, wants noise, wants the next thing, not the emotional monologue of someone he’s just met.

But the real anchor of this section comes next:

“We’re hot soft spots on a hard rock planet.”

This is the line that echoes back to the earlier “tiny white specks” but deepens it. We may be insignificant on the grand scale, but we’re still soft, still human, still easily bruised. For all the bluster and late nights, there’s vulnerability baked into every corner of the scene. Finn recognizes it, even here, even in a song that pretends to be about DJs and parties.

And this middle section becomes the emotional axis for the entire track. The drug years, the clubs, the kitchens, the impatience, the kids, the tiny planets we all carried around–it’s Finn turning his own biography into something mythic and still somehow intimate. It’s the moment the song stops being an anecdote about nightlife and becomes a portrait of the person who lived it.

IV. “Teenage Ice Machine”: Finn’s Youth, My Youth, Everyone’s Youth

This is where the song really cracks open — the run of verses where Finn folds his own misspent youth into the larger portrait of nightlife. It’s the part where the memoirist in him steps forward.

“I was a teenage ice machine / I kept it cool in coolers and I drank until I dreamed…”

Finn describes his early years in Minneapolis with blunt clarity: he was taking whatever the night handed him, jamming it into his system, chasing scenes and dreams and any story worth telling. He’s frank about the drugs, the bravado, the hunger. And that image of “kids like little lambs looking up at me” shows the strange dynamic of growing older inside a scene — one day you realize the new kids think you know something. They think you’ve made it out of the maze.

And Finn knows these kids. He knows their impulsiveness, their devotion, their need to be part of something burning and bright. He knows it because he lived it.

“I was a Twin Cities trash bin / I did everything they’d give me…”

It’s funny, and a little raw — Finn admitting he was just shoveling it all in, whatever “it” was. And the lines about being cornered in the kitchen and doing “anything but listen” land perfectly. This is the social physics of nightlife: the way adrenaline and self-invention outrun patience or reflection. The kitchen confrontation is a tiny scene, but it captures the whole era — Finn always moving, always dodging, always hungry for the next thing, the next rush, the next room.

And then the knockout line:

“We’re hot soft spots on a hard rock planet.”

This connects back to the earlier perspective shift — from Minneapolis sidewalks to this tiny-blue-dot cosmic backdrop. It’s Finn’s version of existentialism: the world is hard, unforgiving, indifferent; we are temporary flashes of warmth against it. But the point isn’t despair. The point is urgency. You don’t get that many nights where it all lines up. You don’t get that many years where your body and your heart and your recklessness harmonize. You take the nights when they come.

This is where the song clicks for me. That line is the thesis.

V. “Everyone’s a Critic and Most People Are DJs”: The Thesis and the Tension

“Baby, take off your beret
Everyone’s a critic and most people are DJs
And everything gets played.”

This is the line that gives the song its name and its pulse. Finn has already sketched the landscape — Ybor City’s chaos, New York’s 2000s absurdities, his own Twin Cities coming-of-age — and now he turns outward, toward the observation that set this whole song off in the first place.

Finn has said himself that this was his early-2000s response to the particular New York ecosystem where everyone wanted to be adjacent to culture without the exposure of making anything. The emails that said “come see me DJ, here’s what I’m going to play,” the ubiquity of people who curated rather than created. And he delivers the line with this mixture of mockery and affection — like a guy who remembers how much he once needed subcultural scaffolding and who also knows how flimsy that scaffolding can be.

But I don’t totally agree with the dismissiveness, and that’s part of why the line hits so hard for me. I think critics can make art, and DJs — literal or metaphorical — can shape the emotional weather of a room. I DJ my own life, like anyone who uses music to modulate their mood or define a moment. Spotify is my deck. The commute is my booth. There’s a pleasure in that autonomy that isn’t fake or lesser, just different.

Still, I get Finn’s point. There’s a risk he’s insisting on: the risk of putting something authentic into the world, the risk of failing publicly, the risk of making something instead of just spinning something. And this is the part where he plants his flag:
he is a maker, not a curator.
And he’s calling out everyone else — kindly, but unmistakably.

The song is gentler than the critique. It’s not a scolding. It’s a reminder: life isn’t a playlist you assemble from the safety of the booth. You have to actually step into the room. You have to actually take the hit.

This is where the song becomes more than a snapshot of early-2000s New York. It’s a life instruction.

Get in the game.

Because eventually everything gets played — your choices, your nights out, the people you loved, the things you messed up, the mornings you woke up on the floor of a city you barely knew. And at the end of all that, you want to be able to say you did it, not that you watched someone else do it.

VI. The Night Rolls On

The final verse snaps everything into focus. Finn works backwards through the chain of a night out—doctor to drugs, packie to taxi, taxi to club—like retracing the evidence after the damage is done. It’s funny and a little grim, but honest: this is how people actually live when they’re young, restless, and trying to outrun something unnamed.

A thousand kids fall in love in these clubs; a thousand end up bleeding.
Two thousand don’t sleep; two thousand still feel pretty sweet.

That’s the gamble of the night. Always has been.

And this is where my own life sits closest to Finn’s. I’ve said before that I’m an ex-introvert reinvented as an extrovert, and the night has been part of that transformation. I’m long past the age where I should be closing clubs, but I still love the energy of being out in the world, meeting people, letting chance decide the direction. The night takes you to weird places, sometimes beautiful and sometimes sketchy, and if you’re wired like me—or like Finn—that current is hard to resist.

And then there’s Ybor City, which in the Finn cosmology feels half-real, half-mythic. A kind of El Dorado of the American night. Did he actually go there? Maybe. But in the logic of the song, it doesn’t matter. Ybor City is where you wake up when the night has taken you further than planned. A place that might kill you or crown you, or both. I’m not sure Ybor City would be good for me. I’m not sure it’s good for anyone.

But the truth is:
the pull of that world—the risk, the release, the possibility—is part of what makes these songs hit as hard as they do.

VII. Closing Thoughts

In the end, Most People Are DJs isn’t one of Finn’s masterpieces, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s a mission statement disguised as a party track. An early announcement that he wasn’t done writing about the night, about the kids who rush into it headlong, about the way music becomes a map for people who don’t quite know where they’re going but desperately want to get there fast.

The song is chaotic, generous, a little arrogant, and very alive—exactly what Almost Killed Me needed to be. It sketches the outlines of the universe Finn will later fill with addicts, romantics, bartenders, prophets, screwups, saints, and that long list of people who show up again and again in his songs because he sees them clearly. Because he was them once.

I keep returning to it not because it’s Finn at his deepest but because it’s Finn at his most open-throated:
young, wired, taking in the world at full volume.

It’s the sound of the door swinging open on everything that would follow—from the great epics (Separation Sunday, Stay Positive, Teeth Dreams) to the late-career short-story gems. You can hear the whole project of The Hold Steady rumbling under this song, even if Finn himself shrugs the song off as a joke at the expense of DJs and critics.

Maybe that’s the secret: sometimes the songs artists dismiss end up revealing more than the ones they cherish.

For me, this one captures something essential about the moment you step into the night—
when the lights go up, the bass starts running, and you feel, for just a second, like anything could happen.

It’s a snapshot of youth, of movement, of mischief and possibility.

And yeah—
I still feel pretty sweet.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

Scenes from Hamilton College VII: Senior Year at Hamilton

Note: This is the final part of the Hamilton series. Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V and Part VI are available.

There’s something between us
And it’s changing my words

His Name is Alive

After I got back to Hamilton from New Zealand I was in a pretty good place mentally and physically, but re-entering the Hamilton matrix with a side of senioritis would change that pretty quickly. I was set to room with John Innes, Jonathan Cooper (who was also from Washington), and one more guy who I think was also from Washington. I was fine with this arrangement, as I loved Innes and Cooper, but circumstances would quickly put an end to this configuration.

Possibly the very first night I was back on campus I met up with Ian and we went to a party in the woods. There I met L. and maybe also her roommate Kate. Kate and L. were freshman, and L. and Ian were tight, although it was kind of hard to say what the exact parameters of their relationship was. In any case I didn’t know any of that yet, and simply found L. captivating. She was from Russia and I believe her father was related to the diplomatic service in some way, although I’m not totally sure.

This first night there may or may not have been a bonfire, as there were several bonfire parties that term. I remember at one of these several people got super drunk, predictably, and the President of the College had to issue a statement to the school newspaper. He said something like, “after investigation, we believe there may have been alcohol provided to minors in the woods.” May have been. Just possibly. Anyway, that was a different night. This night I met L., hung out with her for a while, and then lost track of her, which can happen in the woods. I spent the rest of the night searching for her, going from quad to quad on the Kirkland side of the campus (where I was set to live) asking after her. It just so turned out that she spent that same night looking for me.

I was so captivated by L., and also Kate and their whole set, that I left the Innes/ Cooper rooms and moved onto Ian’s couch, who was rooming with Miche back on the older side of campus. Innes and Cooper had a whole different set of friends by this time, and there wasn’t going to be a lot of overlap, so I essentially moved out. This was kind of a shitty thing to do, but I did what I did, and another guy who wanted the room just sort of took it over.

The group of people I was running with were basically “co-op” people. In addition to the fraternities and sororities on campus, there was a co-op which was full of alternative types. It was kind of a reverse frat, with vegans, druggies, environmentalists, LGBT folks and the like. At that time in my life I was sort of that ilk and gravitated heavily. One other girl who was around the scene was Nadine. I wrote about her a bit before and will re-print that here:

When I was in university I was trying to hang around some artsy chicks, and was lucky enough to know a few. One day I was hanging out with them and a few girls I didn’t know came over. One of them was called Nadine. These new girls were super cool, and Nadine in particular was so cool as to be a little intimidating. She was from Eastern Europe. I definitely wanted to hang out with Nadine, and sure enough she invited me, right away, to accompany them all somewhere. I hesitated, for some reason. Maybe I didn’t know the first rule of improvisational theater, which is “yes and…” Yes and means, basically, follow the person that goes before you. I would have followed Nadine pretty much anywhere, however I said “I don’t really know you guys,” I said. “Well,” she replied, “this is how you get to know us.”

(The Nadine incident confirms one aspect of my social relations. I’m a Gemini sun with Mars in Leo in my 10th house. I am, basically speaking, not afraid of people. At the same time, I must admit that there is a certain class of beautiful women whom were I to meet them it might take me a second or two to find my tounge. This would include Brit Marling, actress and creator of The OA, Emily Haines, lead singer of Metric, and Kristin Stewart, actress in Personal Shopper. Nadine was not quite in this stratosphere, however she was pretty close.)

Nadine was right of course; I just wasn’t used to making friends quite so quickly. I came to my senses and went with Nadine and the crew. That was a good move.

I find Nadine’s approach to new people fantastic. It can be a little risky to apply it all the time, but in general it’s a good starting point.

It was at this first meeting with Nadine that we all watched about 25 minutes of The Little Toaster, which was the very favorite movie of one of the girls. The Little Toaster is the story of a brave toaster who leads a group of appliances across the country to reunite with the family that left them behind when they moved. The Little Toaster is a trip.

Another girl I met early that semester was Francine. Francine was actually someone I think I met though Innes (Innes and I still hung out and I guested on his sports talk show, as I have mentioned). She was a lesbian, and had a hip-hop radio show on WHCL. Francine kind of hung out with the co-op people too now that I think about it, so I guess there was more friend crossover than I thought. Francine was also a freshman and was really cool. I would later re-encounter Francine when I visited Hamilton after graduation, which I’ll get to later.

One day in the campus coffee shop on the Kirkland side (which I think was new senior year), I picked up a book by the Polish writer Bruno Schulz. I happened to liberate it, and Schulz became my very favorite writer for a time as I read all his works and his biography as well.

I mentioned that Ian and L. had a kind of equivocal relationship, and this is true. I won’t go into too much of the details to, for once, respect people’s privacy, however it was equivocal enough that I felt I could seek out time with L., at least as a friend. I think I came on a little too strong though, because although we did hang out, she also periodically pushed me away. I was listening quite a lot to a band called His Name is Alive, and their record Home Is In Your Head. The band’s leader, Warren Defever, is from Livonia, Michigan, however their record first came out on 4AD in the U.K. in 1991 and was re-issued on Rykodisc in 1992 in the U.S. HNIA is art pop, very abstract and very good. The have a song called “There’s Something Between Us,” and the lyrics go like this: “There’s something between us/ And it’s changing my words/ Please don’t listen/ It’s not what I mean to say.” I was often kind of tongue-tied with L. and I felt a lot like the narrator of “There’s Something Between Us.”

To take a break from all that action, I would take Chris’ car which I mentioned in my junior year piece and drive to clear my head. One day I got stuck in the deep mud on some farm and spent an hour trying to extract myself. I think it was not long after this that Chris finally got fed up and took away my key privileges. This was overdue; I was overdoing it. Nonetheless, I was pretty bummed because for reasons passing understanding I really loved borrowing his car.

I did help L. though with her art class, which I have written about elsewhere. Here is that story, slightly edited from the original.

At university I was a pretty good student, but I was sometimes lazy or preoccupied and didn’t always finish my papers on time. When this happened, I would write, or just talk to, my professor and spin an elaborate tale. My style was not to make anything up, not to lie about a sick grandmother or anything like that, but rather to take whatever kernel or truth applied (for example I wanted to talk a long walk in the woods instead of studying), and build it up. This might sound something like:

“I started working on your paper, and got a good way into it, but then I remembered when we were looking at Thoreau and I got really inspired. I needed to get out of my head and into the woods, just like Thoreau. As I was walking so many ideas came into my head and I just couldn’t help but write them down, and that started to become this whole long thing that kind of displaced your essay. I’m really sorry about that, and I think I can maybe apply some of my Thoreau thinking to the essay and come up with something really good.”

Something like this would usually buy me a week or two. College professors, it turns out, don’t really give a damn and enjoy a good story as much as the next person. So I leaned into this, and, to give myself a little credit, usually delivered on the essay in the end. Anyway, word got around that I was pretty good at getting extensions, and other students started coming to me asking me to write excuses for them. I said sure—the ghostwriter instinct was in place early—and would ask them “what excuse do you want to go with?” They would feed me something and I’d spin a one or two page tale out of it. “Go with this,” I’d tell them, and it usually worked.

There was one female student that I had a crush on and would basically have done anything for. And it turned out that she was taking a class in Art History from a woman professor I had also studied with. This professor was a little prickly, but cared about her subject and liked me for some reason. I knew this, and used it. My girl friend (sadly not girlfriend) was dealing with some personal issues and I had already written a few elaborate excuses for her. The shelf-life on these guys was running out however, and she asked me if I would speak with the professor in person on her behalf. Although I was not currently a student in the professor’s class, I agreed and went to the professor’s office. I went with something like this:

“As you know, my friend ‘L.’ has had a lot going on and has had a hard time meeting her deadlines. She feels really bad about this and knows she needs to get back up to speed with your class soon. I remember well what an interesting and enlivening class you teach, and know that L. feels the same. We are just looking for a little more flexibility so that she get can things sorted out and get all her work done. Do you think there is anything we can do about this?”

Of course the professor said sure, she can have all the time she needs.

I pulled a related move to the extension begging in Political Theory class, which was a freshman class I had to take as a senior for graduating credit. The professor was called David, and he had on-his-sleeve ambitions to be President of the College. He talked about it openly, and regularly, which I thought was interesting. He never made it, but he give it his all.

Now I mentioned I had a bit of senioritis, and this is true. After excelling at Otago, suddenly classes were the last thing on my mind. But for some reason David interested me and I would often go to his office hours and chat. There, he told me more about his political ambitions, and we kind of became buds. To his great credit he recognized that I was a senior moonlighting in a freshman class and cut me a lot of slack. For the final presentation we were assigned a group and it was like 25% percent of the grade, or even more. It was supposed to be an in-class presentation worked on over weeks on an aspect of political theory, and I was partnered with one poor freshman guy who was in over his head with me. I told David we were not going to do the presentation in the classroom, and we weren’t going to do a traditional presentation at all.

Instead, I said we would present on Gandhi’s theory of non-violence through a demonstration. As I mentioned in my New Zealand piece, I had read a lot of Gandhi and could pretty much talk off the cuff. So on the appointed day, I took the whole class to a kind of semi-outdoor amphitheater area and somehow procured a dog and a knife. I rattled on about Gandhi for a bit and then handed the knife to my partner and said “now he could stab the dog with the knife if he was in a dire emergency and starving, but Gandhian non-violence teaches us that even in that circumstance not to use violence.” The whole thing was totally absurd and I was milking my friendship with David, but he gave me an A-, which was pretty much the fairest piece of grading I’ve ever received. I was and remain grateful to David for probably saving my honor roll status and for seeing me for who and what I was at the time.

The actual President of Hamilton at this time was called Eugene Tobin. I didn’t really know Eugene, and from my perspective he didn’t have a big impact on my time at Hamilton. The president when I enrolled was a guy called Hank Payne, and I thought he was kind of a suit, but I didn’t really have strong feelings one way or the other. President Hank later threw himself out a window in New York City I believe, so he some issues I didn’t know about and his sad ending gives me some perspective, and compassion, for him. Anyway, after graduation, as I have mentioned, I came back to visit and saw Francine. She was embroiled in an issue where someone had allegedly carved an anti-gay slur into the door of an LGBT person on campus, and she and others felt Eugene was not doing anything about it. She took me to a town hall where we staged a kind of protest and someone directly called him out on his lack of action. He replied with a highly hedged statement that between the lines made clear he did not believe the story. This did give me pause, because I had to admit I was just visiting and did not know all the facts.

Anyway, with the help of David and my advisor I got through the semester and was set to graduate. Mason Anderson visited just before graduation and he and I drove up to Montreal. This time we did not visit a gentleman’s club, but we did drop in at a pub and request the house band to play The Pogues. They kind of laughed at us, but then broke out a decent version of Dirty Old Town. This was the same trip that I got my one and only speeding ticket, driving John Innes’ car “The Grabber.” I got pulled over at the bottom of a massive downhill where the cop was hiding in the bushes. He totally ambushed me and I told him so. “My radar just got checked,” he said, which I’m sure was true but was not the point. Then, it turned out that The Grabber was uninsured, probably as a result of lack of funds on Innes’ part, and I thought I was in real trouble. The cop though waived the insurance thing and just wrote me a speeding ticket–presumably because he knew he had pulled a fast one with the downhill trick. So I guess I got off easy.

At graduation I wore a little purple flower in my hair and a photographer from the local paper took a picture and ran it. Innes says I graduated in linen of course, but that may or may not be true. For better or worse there are a lot of fables floating around about my time at Hamilton.

Overall, I had a good time at Hamilton. If I had had more money I would have liked to go to NYC or Boston, Emerson perhaps, but that would have been pretty useless given my lack of funds. I met a lot of great people, Ian and Jake, Marc Campbell and John Slack, Brett and Miche, L. and Kate, Jen and Jenny, Nadine and Francine, Ann and Rochelle, Jonathan Cooper, and many more. For some high school years are the best, for some college–I sort of muddled through both sets of years but there are many memories that stick with me still. I hope I have done justice to a few of these in this little series.

Dedication: For Hamilton. I was an early decision admit (probably the only way I was getting it), and it wasn’t too bad of a decision.

Posted on by Matt Thomas · 2 Comments

Scenes from Hamilton College VI: Junior Year in New Zealand

Note: This is Part VI of the Hamilton series. Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV and Part V are available.

They all come and peep through a hole in the wall
Keep the bastards guessing
He likes to take the long way home,
It’s another fine decision

Peter Jefferies

I spent a full academic year, the second semester of my junior year and the first of my senior year, at The University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. Otago is a pretty good university, but Dunedin is pretty small and kind of country. Overall, it was a good experience, but I was flat broke and not on a meal plan due to an oversight by I guess myself and my parents. More on that later.

After I landed, I spent one night at a hotel and bought a bottle of wine, for the first time in my life. I was of legal drinking age in New Zealand. I drank about three-quarters of it and was a little hungover the next day. At Hamilton people did not drink wine.

The first few days I was on a homestay in the country with a sheep farming family. The father spent the day watching cricket, and then would rouse and take the sheep out and move them around, with sheepdogs and all. I remember going to a local pub with two of his sons and their friends and we had five or six beers and they drove home. On the drive home they tried to run over rabbits on the road, and roared with delight when they got close. That was a scene.

Then, I went back to Dunedin, and met my roommates who were all in graduate school studying to be teachers. These were Tim, Ho (who was of Maori descent), Sharlene, and Donna. Tim was a musician and there was a large piano in his room. The roommates were good folks, however I think I disappointed them a little because they asked for an American roommate and were apparently expecting someone really flamboyant and loud. I was not that, and kept to myself much of the year. One time though that I lived up to their expectations was when Tim once again said “you’re from Washington D.C.” and I said “I’m not from fucking Washington D.C., I told you before I’m from Washington State!” Tim said to the roommates, “I told you rooming with an American would be fun.”

There were a number of other exchange students from the U.S. there and I got to know some of them a bit at first, but for some reason I was a little standoffish, and we didn’t hang out much after the first week or so. I was back into running, not smoking and barely drinking, although I did go out once with Ho and his Maori friends and got blasted. I would run 8-10 miles a day, sometimes more, and was in training for a marathon.

As I mentioned, my food situation was bad. We had neglected to put me on a meal plan, and I think my parents didn’t even know this, and at first I chipped in what I could to the communal roommate shopping. However, they ate very poor quality mutton all the time and I just couldn’t hack it. Mutton is pretty bad at the best of times, and cheap mutton is awful. So I went off the roommate plan and ate mostly trail mix for dinner. Trail mix, it turns out, is among the best value for money food around. I would buy raisins, peanuts, and carob chips and that’s what I ate at the flat. For lunch I would eat one apricot yoghurt bar and a cup of coffee, costing around $3.50 NZD. I would eat super slowly, taking about 45 minutes to finish the apricot bar and somehow this made me feel like I’d had a meal. I was living on about $7 NZD a day and was hungry all the time. With this and the running, I was also super thin.

At Otago I studied some more literature, and also a lot of Indian History, with a focus on Ghandi. I learned a great deal about Gandhi this year, and found him interesting. One incident I recall was in one class on Buddhism the professor assigned a paper on Zen. I had the bright idea to turn in an empty paper, which I thought would be symbolic, but the professor was a step ahead of me. “Don’t try and turn in an empty paper for this,” he said, “I’ve seen that move before.”

One more interesting thing that happened was when I was invited to the faculty club for drinks by my Australian literature professor. He was in his 60’s and was an Otago lifer. At first I was kind of flattered to be invited, however on arrival it was clear he had other motives. He started hitting on me in a most egregious manner, and it was obvious he had done this many, many times. I had two drinks and politely removed myself. To his credit this had no impact on how he treated me in class, and things went on as normal. I guess it was all par for the course.

The Otago campus was on the north side of town, and the south side was said to be pretty rough. “Don’t go down there,” I was told more than once, “it’s dangerous.” But I thought it couldn’t be that dangerous, so one day I walked down there by myself to check it out. There were a lot of industrial areas and such, and it was a little run-down, but I got home safe just fine. I suspected that “dangerous” in a New Zealand context might mean something a little different than in a U.S. context.

My roommate Sharlene had a friend who just had a breakup and Sharlene wanted us to get together. She invited us both to a party, and sure enough we started making out, under a table as I recall. It just lasted that one night, but Sharlene thought it was hilarious. “They were pashing,” she cried, “pashing away.” Pashing is apparently Kiwi slang for kissing, or maybe it was a Sharlene original.

Sharlene had a stepfather and I visited his house once. He had a nice car and complained on and on about how many tickets he would get from traffic cameras. Traffic cameras were on the scene in 1995. This appeared to be his only topic. He should have driven more carefully.

After the pashing incident, there was another girl who was interested in me. I forget her name, but it started with an M. M. was really into me, maybe because I read a lot and so did she. There was a kind of club place for students with TVs (I remember watching the O.J. Simpson car chase there), and I would hang out there. M. would come in and lob a snickers bar from over my shoulder for me and buy me a coke. This was really nice and super helpful because I needed all the calories I could get. M. wanted to get together, but I wasn’t into it. We did spend a fair amount of time together, at the club and going to the bookstore with another friend of hers.

As I mentioned, I was in good running shape this year and actually went out for a marathon. I was doing great through the first half, but started to fade really bad around the 20 mile mark. I had terrible blisters and pulled my groin and couldn’t imagine doing another 6 miles, so I pulled up. I asked a couple with a car for a ride to the finish line where there were buses, and they gave it to me but made it clear they were not impressed with me packing it in. I wasn’t impressed with myself either, but marathons hurt like hell.

In addition to running, and starving, I also went out for Aikido. Aikido is a Japanese martial art, and I was already well on my way to my Asian Studies minor and was getting into all things Asian. Aikido was taught by a white couple, and this was their life. They were ok teachers, but the atmosphere was just a little culty. Despite my father’s fears, I have never been amenable to cults-like scenes. I stuck with it for a number of months however, and managed to get my first belt.

I don’t remember listening to a lot of music that year because I don’t think I had a stereo in my room, however, one day on the radio I did hear a song I immediately fell in love with. This was “The Fate of the Human Carbine,” by a Dunedin artist called Peter Jefferies. It was spooky and weird and totally captivating. Cat Power would later cover it, and lines from this song serve as the epigraph for this piece.

One more thing that happened this year was that Jenny from Hamilton visited. I don’t think she came specifically to see me, but I’m not sure. I was traveling, with god knows what money, in the New Zealand Alps which are on the South Island there and are really lovely. Jenny and I stayed at a hostel, and hung out which was really cool. That’s the same trip when I went for a walk in deep snow and almost died when the snow suddenly came up to my neck. Deep snow is almost as dangerous as the ocean, it turns out.

Those are my memories of New Zealand. Despite being so broke I had to eat a 45 minute apricot bar, it was a good year and I got really good grades. My academic focus would fall off, however, when I got back to Hamilton, but that’s a story for the next post.

Dedication: For apricot bars and trail mix. You literally saved my life.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

Scenes from Hamilton College V: Junior Year I: Sega Battles, Reading Dates, Jake Leaves

Note: This is Part V of the Hamilton series. Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV are available. This post will look at the first semester of junior year.

Tiger lily girl
Standin’ cross-eyed in the corner
Tiger lily girl
Standin’ toungue tied in the corner

Luna

Whereas in the summer before my sophomore year I got in good running shape in order to go out for the cross-country team, the summer before my junior year is a blur. At some point around there however I applied to go abroad for a year. I chose New Zealand, but only after my father rejected Nepal. He thought I might join a cult or something, but he didn’t really have an understanding of my interest in Asia, what it consisted of and what it did not. New Zealand was the next best thing.

I believe I was lined up to go to New Zealand before beginning junior year, so I knew that I’d only be at Hamilton for the first term. Junior year I roomed in Carnegie dorm, which was just across from North, back on the main part of campus near the English building. I lived with Kevin, Brett, and Chris. Brett and Chris I had known since freshman year and Kevin was Chris’ friend from childhood. In the room next door were Ian, John Innes, Marc Campbell, and Miche. All of us were close since first year as well, so it was kind of getting the gang back together. Although we were in separate rooms, both rooms were kind of communal and we all hung out.

The quads in Carnegie were quite a bit bigger than those of North, and the living situation was much improved. People had sort of settled down as well by then, and the situation was much more contained than North. I liked Carnegie and liked my roommates. We were all pretty easy going.

Chris had a car, a blue one, and I got in the habit of borrowing it. A lot. It got so I actually had his keys because I used it more than he did. I don’t really remember where I would go, mostly just drive around and such, but one incident sticks out as memorable regarding the car. This had to do with a girl called Meryem.

I had met Meryem maybe the year before at a dance at Sig. She danced very provocatively, was tall and lithe, and, well, she turned me on. Meryem was from Turkey and had a bad relationship with her father, which was a common topic for her. Although we only saw each other a few times as sophomores I think, we somehow reconnected as juniors. I took her for a drive in Chris’ car and although I had no money I think I managed to treat her to a meal. I was so low on money that we had to get gas and I faked filling the tank and just put in enough to get home. I didn’t want to be seen as skint, although I was.

Meryem talked a lot about her father on that drive, but we talked about other stuff too and listened to Robbie Robertson’s excellent album Music for the Native Americans. I recited her some of my poetry and talked about Leonard Cohen. The drive, sort of a date I suppose, went well enough that I got up the courage at the end of it to ask her out again. She said yes, but said why don’t we do reading dates. “What are reading dates?” I asked. She said a reading date is when she would come to my room and we would read next to one another on the couch, and then I would go to her room and do the same. This was not exactly what I had in mind, but it was kind of interesting, so we did a home and home set of reading dates. My roommates came in during our date and asked, “what in the world are you two doing?” We explained the reading date and they laughed. It was a live and let live culture and I think they were happy if I was happy.

We only had those two dates, and then I lent her the Robbie Robertson CD and never got it back. I saw her again briefly senior year, but the spark had dimmed. Overall, it was an interesting interlude.

One of the big events of that first semester of junior year was the Sega Hockey championship match with Innes. As I mentioned earlier, Innes usually schooled me. He would play the Calgary Flames and I would play the Detroit Red Wings, as I recall. But I was getting better and thought I could take him in a best of set of games. I don’t remember how many games it was, maybe just three, and everyone from the dorm gathered round to watch. It was all tied going into the last game, and then Innes’ water on the elbow kicked in and I beat him in the rubber match, either 2-1 or 3-2. Innes complained and complained, whining that it wasn’t fair, but it was fair and I beat him fair and square. I retired from Sega Hockey after that–why not go out on top?

That year Marc Campbell was deep into Luna’s 1994 album Bewitched, and although I was already familiar with their Lunapark album, Bewitched was better. I fell in love with that album, and the band, and have been a big fan ever since. They are in my top five bands of all time.

Another incident that I believe happened this year was a trip to Montreal with Brett, Miche, and I believe John Slack. Innes did not come for some reason. I rode with Brett in his car, and we spent a day or two there. While there, we visited a gentleman’s club at Miche’s insistence. Now there were wealthy people at Hamilton and then there was Miche. Miche was loaded, from a Cambodian-Swiss background. I knew he had money, but at the club he spent it like water, ordering dance after dance and dropping c-notes left and right. I paid the $15 or so to get in and could afford nothing else so I just stood there, like a dweeb. As a group though, we paid our way that night. I got even closer to Brett that trip and realized how much we had in common.

One other thing from junior year was club basketball. I had considered going out for the Hamilton basketball team as a freshman but chose cross-country instead. So we all played club basketball and Kevin was super competitive. I would always wear a Shane MacGowan shirt with an intentionally offensive lyric on it. I won’t quote it, but you can perhaps look it up. It’s from his first solo record. Anyway, a player on another team told me, “I like you but I don’t like your shirt” (echoing by the way exactly with the Sig alum told me at the freshman Halloween party). But that was exactly the point; I wanted to rile up the competition. We got to the final of the club championship and lost by a bucket. Kevin took this hard.

After one semester I was off to New Zealand, so the next piece will take up that experience. However, one bit of business that needs to be addressed is Jake leaving. He actually left at the end of junior year, and came back after I graduated and graduated himself. I didn’t know why he left, and still don’t. Also, I don’t want to get too graphic in my speculations, so here are some possibilities, humorously rendered.

Speculations on Jake Leaving Hamilton:

So why did Jake leave? Here are some speculations:

i) He left to pursue a quixotic quest to reunite the living Beatles. He always did love them. Perhaps Ringo Starr was involved.

ii) He was abducted by Irish leprechauns. Jake’s last name is Irish, and I think he may have identified with the Irish. Shane MacGowan likely had something to do with it.

iii) He may have been hanging a little too much with ol’ Funky Donny Fritz. Curtis John Tucker had a lot to do with it.

iv) Jake was always deep into British fiction such as P.G. Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh. He could quote these books from memory to an astounding degree. Bertie Wooster and Charles Ryder definitely got involved.

v) He could have had health issues of one kind or another. The Cleveland Clinic may have played a part.

vi) A woman. There is always the possibility of a woman, man’s greatest weakness. Marlene Dietrich’s granddaughter may have had a cameo.

vii) Could he have been in a cult, and been involved in a group wedding of some kind? The Moonies may have had an oblique role.

Those are some ideas. No doubt there are wide of the mark, however the fact is, Jake left and Hamilton was the lessor without him.

That’s a wrap on junior year at Hamilton. It was a good, but brief term and New Zealand would bring a wealth of experiences, and also the most money-crunched year of my life.

Dedication: For Miriam, with whom I went on three dates. I hope you enjoyed the CD.

to be continued…

Posted on by Matt Thomas

I’m Reading Anais Nin’s Diaries

Note: This is a post from a few years ago. As I am now also writing my “memoirs” with the Hamilton series, I thought it would be a good time to bring back Anais. She is an amazing writer and truth-teller.

I’m reading Anais Nin’s 1947-1955 unexpurgated diaries called “Trapeze.”  That’s what I am doing.

Anais Nin is high level. Anais Nin is a dangerous writer. Anais Nin is fucking excellent.  Here is a little bit:

“One handles the truth like dynamite. Literature is one vast hypocrisy, a slant, deception, treachery. All the writers have concealed more than they have revealed.”

“My father died mad. He did not understand what happened to him. I want my suffering to be useful. I want the novel to teach life. I want the novel to accomplish what the analyst does.”

“Great lovers never trust each other.”

And…

“The diary cannot ever be published.”

So that’s it.  I’m reading Anais Nin.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

Scenes from Hamilton College IV: Sophomore Year II: The Sports Show, Ann, Getting Fired

Note: This is Part IV of the Hamilton series. Part I, Part II and Part III are available. This post will take up my friendship with Ann, the Sports Show John Innes and friends had, and losing my job at the print short.

I was living in the delta
Wasting most of my time

Car Seat Headrest

I mentioned in Part III that I was on a sports talk show on the college radio station, WHCL. This was called Sports Corner. John Innes was the leader; it was his show. A friend of ours called Jeff Kingsley was on the show, as well as myself. Kingsley was a huge Buffalo Bills fan, and he stayed on top of the sports news, especially the NFL. Innes was always super prepared, and taped the shows which he would later play for his dad when we got back to Washington State. I sort of kept up with the sports scene, but I was mostly there for comic relief. I would crack jokes and make fun of stuff, but was definitely the third banana on the show.

The radio station didn’t have a lot of bandwidth so the listeners were mostly on campus and Clinton locals, but I recall Sports Corner having a number of regular listeners who would call in. From my point of view, the callers were the best part of the show. We treasured our listeners and gave them plenty of airtime. I never told any of them to “cold compress ma’am.” I was a regular for sophomore and the first part of junior year until I went abroad to New Zealand. When I came back as a senior I think I just guested. I remember one show where Innes asked me what kind of sports were big in New Zealand. I said “marbles, marbles are really big.” I was just fucking around, but it was pretty funny. Although I was only marginally prepared, Sports Corner was a blast and Innes was a great host. He totally could have done it professionally.

I also talked in Part III about Ann. Ann was Ian’s girlfriend sophomore year, and I got to know her pretty well. Ann sort of took over where Rochelle left off in the mothering department, but she was really different from Rochelle. More intense. Ann didn’t like smoking and she tried to stop me from doing so, to no effect. I remember once, I think it was junior year actually, where at a dorm party she grabbed my cigarette from me and threw it out the window. I just shrugged and lit another one.

If Ann was intense, she thought I was. Innes and Ann and I were hanging out once and Innes said “M.A. (that was my nickname at college) is the chillest guy I know,” and Ann replied “I think he is the most intense.” Well, someone will maybe eventually get to the bottom of that one. One day I dropped by Ann’s room and there was a big jigsaw puzzle partially done. I started picking at it, and she stopped me. “That’s for me and Ian,” she said. Must have been some puzzle. Another time I went to Ann’s house with Ian and she tried, I guess, to pair me up with one of her friends. This wasn’t going to take, but we all did sleep, clothed, in the same bed that night. I don’t think I got a lot of sleep.

While some friends came and went at Hamilton, Ann I was close to sophomore, junior and senior year. After graduation she moved to the U.K. for a bit. I wrote about this elsewhere and will reprint it here.

“My friend Ann from Hamilton College went to England after graduation and she and I exchanged a few letters, back when people still wrote letters. She wrote me that she was drinking some, so I wrote a poem about my image of her over there. The original poem had two or three more verses, but they were terrible. Then a little while back I reconnected with Ann, which was great, and re-worked the poem, which wasn’t. It might have been a little better, but it was still bad. These two stanzas, on the other hand, are awesome, and maybe that’s all there ever needs to be said about Ann in England, you know?” Here is that poem fragment:

Ann belle princess of the isles
the orbs whisper your name even if you’ve gotten piles
or if you’re on the game

Buxom barmaid or bellicose barfly
begs the inevitable question
booze improves the poet’s eye. but ruins her digestion

I still like it.

Ann has read some of this blog, and even contributed a piece as a guest writer, which is not currently live.

The other big event sophomore year was when Deb fired me. I mentioned that as a freshman I skipped work some, and the next year this pattern was exacerbated. I still had no money, however work was becoming really tough. This was not Deb and Sally’s fault at all–I just couldn’t hack walking all the way up the hill just to collate. Instead, I spent time in the woods jumping off little cliffs and messing around in the late afternoon. No hard feelings; looking back I should have done things differently. I don’t remember exactly when I was fired, but I think it was about two thirds of the way through the year.

That’s it–this is a short one. There are a bunch of other things that may have happened this year or the next, so I’ll cover some of these in my upcoming junior year pieces.

Dedication: For Ann, the belle princess.

to be continued…

Posted on by Matt Thomas · 2 Comments

Scenes from Hamilton College III: Sophomore Year I (with cameos from Sonic the Hedgehog, Ani DiFranco, and Candle Time)

Note: In Part I and Part II of this series I wrote about my freshman year at Hamilton. Part III will take up sophomore year where I lived down the hill in Bundy Dorm.

All you ladies and gentlemen
Who made this all so probable

Big Star

After freshman year I returned back to Washington State for the summer. I have written glancingly about this period, suffice it to say I was not up to much. Still broke, I did have a short lived girlfriend but she dumped me mid-summer. I spent a few days moping around playing nerf golf at my parents’ house, then got over it. I don’t remember much else from that summer except that I got back in good running shape, and when I got back to campus in the fall I turned out, once again, for the running team.

One thing I neglected to mention in my pieces on freshman year is that I actually competed on the JV running team at Hamilton for a time and ran a few races. I was not in great shape that year, and JV was not that exciting. As I have written, I had other pursuits. Sophomore year, however, I was in better shape and had a shot at making the top five. The only other runner I recall was called Harry. I thought Harry lived in Sig, but Jake tells me he was in a frat called THX, about which I remember nothing. In any case, Jake knew him. Harry was a hardcore runner and scolded me about my lifestyle, wanting me to devote myself to the team. I was not going to do this, but I was able to run with Harry and the first team for a number of practices. In the long run though it didn’t work out–they ran mornings and afternoons, and my summer shape wasn’t going to carry me through a hyper-competitive season. I was a good runner, but I just didn’t have the drive. Sooner or later I left the team, this time for good. I look back fondly on Harry however–he was right; I was lazy and needed a kick in the rear.

As a sophomore I roomed in a double with John Innes (there were two John’s in my friend group, John Innes and John Slack), in a dorm halfway down the hill to Clinton called Bundy. Marc Campbell was also on our floor. Ian was living in his frat, but spent a lot of time in Bundy as he was dating Ann, someone who I became close with over the year as well. Jake was over at Sig and I didn’t see much of him, mostly for geographic reasons.

Bundy was a way different story than North. First, I spent a lot more time in my dorm room with John Innes. Innes would watch the soap opera Days of Our Lives and insist I watched it too. I could have cared less, but watched it to be a good friend. We also played Sega, almost exclusively Sonic the Hedgehog and Sega Hockey, at which John usually beat me (however not in the biggest matches, as I’ll get to later). Innes liked rap music and had a pretty good collection. I could get into some of the rap; I liked Public Enemy, KRS One, De La Soul, and a minor band called Basehead which wasn’t really rap. However I was by then deep into what would today be described as alternative or indie music, so Innes’ taste and mine mostly diverged. We were both good about sharing airtime though, so he got to know my music and I his.

The record I listened to the most, by far, that year was Big Star Third: Sister Lovers from the then mostly forgotten American band Big Star. I loved this record (which was on Rykodisc), and played it endlessly while trying to advance in Sonic the Hedgehog. I stuck my mattress in the closet and hung a tapestry over the door area so I had a little cubby to sleep in. Overall, the whole scene was much more domestic than the pretty chaotic North.

Other than Marc and John Innes, I don’t remember exactly who the other guys who were on our floor, but I’ve been reminded that John Slack was one of them. Ian and Jake were living in frats, and over the year I got to know a new crew of people, including several girls. These included firstly Jenny and Jen, who lived in the female area on our same floor (maybe the second floor? Innes will remember). Innes and I became very close to Jenny and Jen, and spent almost every evening hanging out in their room doing something called “Candle Time.” Candle Time was pretty much exactly what it sounds like–we would turn down the lights, light candles (which was probably against school rules) and talk for hours. We would talk about our days, people and goings on in the dorm, and just life in general. It was really wholesome and again, a major change from North.

Candle Time lasted, in my recollection, for a number of months, but not all through the year. Despite spending so much time together, there was no romantic involvement, although I believe Innes and Jen did get together later, and briefly; I’m not really sure. I think it was supposed by some that I myself had a crush on Jen; however although I liked her a lot this was not the case. I did have a little bit of a crush on Jenny, but she had other people who were interested in her and we all hung out so nothing ever happened. That was fine–it was actually really nice to just have close female friends with no expectations.

Jenny and Jen were both from the upstate New York area, broader Rochester as I recall. My guess is they came from relatively less money than many of our classmates, who came from preppier areas, and schools. I actually visited Jenny’s house once or twice, and I think a bunch of us slept over once and watched the film Glengarry Glen Ross. These included Amy Holland, who was one of the coolest chicks around. She was called “Red,” on account of her red hair, and was totally my speed. Everyone else fell asleep during the movie except Amy and I and as I recall she loved what is, to be fair, a pretty stereotypically male film.

Jenny’s house was nice, but seemed pretty middle-class and maybe that’s part of why we all bonded–the richer kids, although I obviously hung around with them a lot, had their own life ways to some extent. I remember one evening Jenny and I went to see the band The New Dylans on campus. I thought they were a good band, and had found their cassette at the campus radio station where John Innes and I had a sports talk show. Their record has a song I liked called “The Prodigal Son Returns Today.” They sounded kind of like a minor league Big Head Todd and the Monsters or something, and are kind of dated today if I’m honest, but I was excited for the show. At first it was pretty full, but people left little by little and by the end it was just me and Jenny. The band played their hearts out for the two of us, including encores! After the show, I joined them for a cigarette outside and chatted. I told them that I really liked the show and they said thanks and all with no mention of the fact that the venue was totally empty. That’s professionalism, I thought, and I imagined that as a band trying to break through playing small colleges and sending cassettes to radio stations they’d had their share of ups and downs. I doubt they are still around, but if so I’m rooting for you guys!

A bigger star that played Hamilton was Ani DiFranco. I saw Ani several times, both on campus and off, as she was pretty huge in New York State at the time. She had not yet released “Dilate,” which came in 1996 and was her mainstream breakthrough to the extent she ever had one, but she was a star on campus, mostly with the women but with a lot of the guys too. Ani put on a great show, and I totally got the appeal. She was kind of the Jeff Rosenstock of the day I suppose.

Shawn Colvin also came, and I knew some of the people who were assigned to take care of her backstage. They reported that she was a total asshole, asked for coke, and generally threw her weight around big time. Shawn Colvin was OK, but no so great that she could act like a diva I don’t think. Full on divas are acceptable-like Joni Mitchell might be a diva and what are you going to do–but minor league divas pretty much suck.

Anyway, like I say over the year although we still saw each other, I saw less of Jenny and Jen, and more of other people like Ann, Amy, and Matt Thornton. I’m not sure where Matt lived, maybe Bundy and maybe not, and I don’t recall either how or when I met him, but we soon became fast friends. Matt was full speed ahead, and argumentative, but I can handle my own in an argument, and I really liked him. Matt ran with an interesting group of friends, including several Asian-Americans who I believe lived on the Kirkland side of campus. Hamilton used to be a guys’ school and Kirkland was the attached girls’ school. Then at some point they merged, but the Kirkland side and the old Hamilton side always felt distinct to me and were separated by a bridge.

One time we were talking about going to New York and Matt told me about some clubs for Asians that he was interested in. Matt’s friends told him that he (or I) could not go to these clubs because we would get the shit kicked out of us. Had to be at least half-Asian apparently. But I think Matt went to these kinds of clubs anyway and did not get beat up, because he just sort of rolled that way.

Matt and I and Ian did go to New York eventually, and spent a few days uptown at some person’s apartment where I commandeered a prime sleeping space and we ordered pizza three times a day. I believe this was actually after graduation, as Matt transferred before graduating from Hamilton.

As I mentioned in an earlier piece, this was also the year Ian and I went to Boston to see music shows. We went with a fellow called Cale who was a freshman. Cale was cool, and also we liked him because of his name, reminiscent of John Cale, violist for the Velvet Underground who Ian and I were both fans of. With Ian and Cale I felt like I was in good company–we were all very simpatico.

My academic performance sophomore year was just OK. I took more English classes, and also started to take some History classes including some Asian History with Tom Wilson. Tom Wilson was a good professor, but I think he was one of those guys who really saw himself at U. Chicago or Yale or something. A lot of academics are like that. Nevertheless, Tom was good–tough but fair–and pushed me to really deepen my research abilities. Outside of Tom’s class, my effort was a little mixed, and during the dead of winter I skipped some morning classes because the climb up the hill was just too tough. The winters in upstate New York are pretty brutal, and I preferred to stay local down in Bundy a lot of the time.

One more thing I remember from this year is starting, and then dropping, photography class. I had an old camera that barely worked, and was interested in learning how to develop film in a darkroom. However, photography class was really expensive because we had to regularly buy these huge rolls of film which cost like $50 at the school store. A classmate I’ll call C. to protect his identity told me, “just tuck your pants into your socks and drop the film down your pants and walk out. That’s what I do.” But I wasn’t going to steal film all year and there was no way I could pay the outrageous costs. On top of that, I wasn’t all that good–certainly my classmates outclassed me, crappy camera or not. So I dropped it after six weeks or so; however now that I think about it I may well have met Matt Thornton in that exact class. It’s a possibility.

Note: That will do it for Part III. In Part IV I’ll write more about my friendship with Ann as well as the Sports Talk Show we did on the Hamilton radio station.

Dedication: For the whole Bundy dorm, actually. It was a pretty chill year.

to be continued…