The Land of China, Part 3

After we were fired, on our first and only night in the Compound, my three fellow volunteers and I had a powwow to plan our next move. We had a decision to make: we could a.) call Scott, our American liaison, and ask to be transferred to another school that wasn't surrounded by barbed wire and wouldn't fire us, or b.) cut our losses and travel around the country, having tried and failed to secure a volunteer teaching job for more than twenty-four hours. Truthfully, I was already losing interest in the idea of teaching English for the summer, and was prepared to move in a different direction. I had been traveling around China for a week and a half by now, and was growing accustomed to the freedom. Teaching English had seemed like a good idea when I signed up, but now that I was actually in China, I had no desire to be restricted by a class schedule and, God forbid, the time required to plan classes and grade assignments. It quickly became clear that I was in the minority, however. The other volunteers still wanted to try their hand at teaching, and since I was terrified of being left alone, I went along with them.

Not to be lost in this story: although China can be chaotic and at time downright ugly, it also has some unbelievably beautiful spots. Slender West Lake, with its wooden bridges and traditional pleasure boats, was like the China of my imagination. 

We called Scott, explained the situation to him, and asked if there were any other teaching vacancies. It took him a while to work something out - like two full days. During this time, we holed up in a hotel in Yangzhou, fortunately on the teaching company's dime. We were stuck in a kind of limbo, in which we weren't sure whether or not we would be staying in Yangzhou, or whether or not we would be allowed to teach at all. In 48 hours, Scott called to tell us he had secured another gig for us in the city of Nanjing (where Krista and I had already been), a few hours away. So we hopped a bus to Nanjing, where Scott met us and accompanied us to another hotel. It was his job to travel around from city to city and school to school putting out fires like this one. His superior communication and problem-solving skills made him highly qualified to be the C.E.O. of cheapchinavolunteering.com (or whatever his shady program was called).That night, Scott snapped into action: he took us out to a club, got roaring drunk, danced the Running Man on a stage and passed out in our hotel room some time after 4 in the morning. Truly, it was an impressive display of professionalism.

Having done his job, he left us the next day, with the assurance that the directors of the new school would contact us in a few days with the details about our teaching appointment. Sure enough, two directors from the school arrived at our hotel that evening. We would begin teaching "soon," they told us, but we needed to be moved to a hotel closer to the school. We piled into a van with all of our things (including Craig's five duffel bags) and they drove us to a hotel on the other side of town, where we were to stay until further notice. The school's representatives lacked the ability to communicate clearly with us - or else they just didn't feel like it- and so we never learned the answers to some of our most basic questions: like, when did our classes begin? And where was the school? And why had we been shuttled to three different hotels in as many nights? And was it really the best use of a school's resources to house four volunteer teachers in a different cheap hotel every night? The following night, we were taken to yet another hotel on the outskirts of Nanjing - basically the Chinese equivalent of a Super 8. The building was hard to see from the main road, because it was behind a KFC.

These guys are everywhere in China. I must have stayed in at least eight of them.

By now, I was starting to wonder whether I would ever actually teach a class in China. But at 7 the next morning, I was awoken by a knock. Shaking off a mild hangover, I answered the door and was greeted by one of the school's representatives, nattily dressed and grinning politely. My class, he told me, started in an hour.


I threw on some clothes, gulped down a cup of instant coffee and was in the lobby in ten minutes. I was expecting to be driven to the school, but the representative was apparently not expecting to drive me. "How do I get to the school then?" I asked him. He looked puzzled, as though this question hadn't previously crossed his mind. "You call cab," he finally responded.


So I walked out of the hotel, to the road in front of the KFC, and hailed a cab. (They were everywhere in this city, and actually in every city I visited in China. And they were really cheap.) I pointed to the name of the school, which the representative had written on a note card for me. The cab driver shrugged - but without argument, he drove me three blocks to the school. What a waste of 70 cents.




I entered the building and signed my name at the front desk. Aside from a bored looking woman sitting behind the desk, no one was there to greet me - no principal, no other teachers, no volunteer coordinator. The receptionist pointed me in the direction of my classroom down the hall. I entered the room, where roughly thirty teenage students were already present, and I was on my way.

Truly, the actual teaching was the most conventional part of my experience in China. At this point, I had already taught a year at Wootton High School in Rockville, Maryland. Class sizes were around thirty, and the population of the school was almost one third Asian. I had never been the only white guy in the room before, but in certain classes at Wootton, I wasn't too far from it. Besides, as I soon realized, most of these summer school students in Nanjing spoke average to above average English. They weren't too far behind most of my students back at Wootton.

Since I hadn't really been expecting to teach that day, I had to scramble a little bit to come up with three hours worth of lesson plans on the spot. It wasn't as hard as sounds. The idea was just to make them speak to each other in English, which they were more than happy to do. I remember that one of my activities involved having them give and receive compliments, which turned out to be pretty amusing. "I think you are very clever!" one of the boys told his partner. "Thank you for the compliment!" the partner responded.

Cabbage: Great as an ingredient in coleslaw, but not really an appropriate namesake.

Many of the students already had English names, some of which they had been assigned by another teacher at some point, and some of which they had chosen for themselves. Some of the boys named themselves after NBA players. There was Tracy (for Tracy McGrady), Allen (for Allen Iverson) and Kevin (for Kevin Garnett). Some others had given themselves names that were not names at all. Like "Cabbage" and "Seven" and "Qoo" (pronounced "Koo"). Others didn't have names at all, and wanted me to assign them. I was happy to oblige. I asked one boy what his Chinese name was and he responded with something I didn't understand. "Let's go with 'Howard'," I said after a moment's pause. He was pleased. "From now on I will be Howard," he proclaimed, as though I had just conferred a knighthood upon him.

Stay tuned for Part Four, in which my brief teaching stint comes to an end and I attempt to flee the Chinese government.

The Land of China, Part 2

In Shanghai, we met the program's coordinator, responsible for matching volunteers to schools. This guy (I don't remember his name, but let's call him Scott) couldn't have been older than thirty at most, but he spoke fluent Mandarin, which was apparently enough of a qualification. Scott told us the name of the school where we would be working, placed us in a van with two other volunteers, and instructed us to call him in the event of an emergency. And with that, we were off to the town of Yangzhou, several hours away.

Yangzhou is famous for its fried rice - not at all a bad claim to have. My meals in China were unpredictable to say the least, but Yangzhou Fried Rice was consistently excellent. It was also one of the only dish I learned to order in Mandarin.

On the four-hour trip, we got to know our fellow volunteers. One was a recently divorced 40-something British woman named Lisa (I think) - a high school teacher looking for an adventure following her recent split from her husband. The other was an American of around the same age, whom I'll call Craig. Craig wasn't a bad guy exactly, but he was a big doofus. In many ways, he embodied the  stereotype of the loud American tourist - mispronouncing words with alarming regularity, speaking in loud, abrasive English, and telling everyone who would listen that he was from Washington, D.C., "my nation's capital!" (It turned out he was actually from Columbia, Maryland, which is no more D.C. than Baltimore.)

This was not a person I would have chosen to spend time with back home, but since Craig and I were the only guys, we became room mates by default. Once we arrived at the school (more on that later), his first act was to empty a giant duffel bag - one of the five he had brought along with him - onto his bed. It was full of baseball cards and candy.

"These are to give to the children!" he explained, upon seeing my incredulous stare.
"What children?"
"The children of Yangzhou!" He pronounced it "Young Jew," long after we had heard the city's name correctly pronounced, multiple times, as "Yong - Jo."
"You mean, the children at the school?"
"No! The children on the street! I'm going to bring these with me when we go out, and when we see a little kid, I'm going say 'Nee How!!' This is a present from America!"

He was serious too. In any circumstances, it is impossible for a white guy to keep a low profile while walking the streets of Yangzhou. Despite its substantial size and general pleasantness, it tends not to be a popular destination for western tourists. But it was extra impossible to blend in with Craig at my side.

"Neeeee How!" he barked to one frightened child after another, waving his hand in their faces as though they were all deaf, before depositing a 2001 Topps Derek Jeter in their little hands. "We love your country!"

The worst part was that I didn't have any choice but to associate with this guy. There were only four of us, and to announce that I was going to split from the group to do my own thing during our down time was tantamount to an open declaration of disdain. So instead, I tried to put on a happy face as I explored this new city with the self-appointed ambassador from the metropolis of Columbia, Maryland.

And then there was the school itself. I hadn't heard of Yangzhou before volunteering to teach, but I was pleased when I heard I would be stationed in a large city. During the evenings, I assumed I would cruise the streets, check out the bar scene, maybe find the local expat community. So I was surprised, needless to say, when the van pulled up in front of an imposing compound, complete with guard towers and fence covered in barbed wire. It was ten miles from town.

"Don't worry!" the school's volunteer liaison assured us, "You can call cab to take you to city. Only twenty minute away." We were also encouraged to return by 10:30 PM, at which point the school's gate closed for the night.

It proved to be too much to hope that our summer POW camp at least had nice accommodations. Our rooms were dirty - there was no getting around it. They were sparsely furnished, with only two small cots. I remember what looked like an antique witch's broom propped up in the corner. Worst of all, the room had no air conditioning - a large problem when the temperature regularly tops one hundred degrees. I had come to China expecting adventure, and was more than willing to put up with rustic living conditions. But I hadn't signed up for a Gulag either.

I've been looking on Google Maps for the school, but I don't remember what it was called or exactly where it is. This is a school outside Yangzhou. It might be school where we stayed for a night before our abrupt dismissal. Kind of intimidating, although the towers appear to be made out of an appealing cherry-finished wood. 

I'll say this for Craig - he wasn't passive and he wasn't going to accept the situation. So he complained - firmly and maybe a little rudely, although given the the situation, I could hardly blame him.

And in response to his complaints, the school's liaison "fired" us on the spot. By complaining, we had shown disloyalty, he reasoned, and he obviously couldn't trust us. We would be allowed to stay the night, but would be escorted off the grounds of the compound first thing in the morning.

Sure enough, a woman knocked on our door at 7:00 AM the following morning. (I remember that, for unclear reasons, she was carrying a parasol.) And she watched as the four of us - Craig, struggling to wrangle his five duffel bags - made our way to the gate.

The Land of China, Part 1

In baseball, there is a time-honored maxim that "hitting is contagious" - that is, that good hitting inspires more good hitting. I think the same sentiment applies to writing. After reading an excellent piece about fatherhood by my good friend Steve Orders, it occurred to me that the old "Bank of Barron" has been collecting dust for more than two months now. Luckily, I'm spending the next month and a half at my school's front desk, where I'll be resuming my receptionist duties. Not a ton happens during the summer, which means I really have no excuse not to write. In fact, it was this very job, with its wide swaths of free time in front of a computer, that enabled me to start the blog a year ago.

Chairman Mao's Little Red Book was all over the place.

While cleaning out a drawer yesterday, I came across a journal that I kept during my time in China ten years ago and was immediately overcome with nostalgia. My first thought was the obvious, "I can't believe it was ten years ago." My second thought was that it is incredibly unlikely that I will ever take a trip like this again. I don't just mean that it is unlikely that I'll return to China, although I guess that's true too. What I mean is that I now have a wife and kids, and a house with a lawn that needs to be mowed, and the inclination to want to make at least a little money during the summer instead of just bumming around a foreign country. So I'm going to go out on a limb and say that in the unlikely event that I ever return to China, it won't be for six weeks and it won't be entirely without an itinerary and it won't involve a sketchy program I found on the internet.

The story of my trip is pretty convoluted actually, and when most people asked me about it upon my return, I tried to provide the Reader's Digest Program: "I tried to teach English in China. It didn't really work. I ended up basically bumming around the country for six weeks instead. In spite of my disastrous experience with the teaching program, it was actually a great trip."

Here's the longer story, as I remember it:

At some point during the 2006-2007 school year, I decided that rather than return to summer camp for the umpteenth time, I wanted to do something a little spontaneous and adventurous. So as one does, I combed the internet for all sorts of weird programs abroad. One of these was a summer camp in - I kid you not - Siberia. (On beautiful Lake Baikal, "the Blue Eye of Sibera"!) Thankfully, my dad talked me out of this one. I had never longed to go to China, but the internet was rife with
opportunities to teach English there. Almost all of these programs offered only volunteer work, and volunteers were required to pay their own airfare, but housing and meals were generally free. At school one day, I happened to talk to my colleague Krista about my search and it turned out she was looking for something similar. She referred me to a program she had been considering, which offered American teachers the chance to spend a summer teaching ESL at schools in China. We both interviewed (a rigorous process consisting of a ten minute phone call), and after filling out some paperwork and paying a visit to the Chinese Consulate in Glover Park to procure a Visa, we were on our way together.

Lake Baikal does actually look pretty impressive. On the other hand, summer in Siberia still sounds like a questionable proposition.

Some months before the trip, we were told that we would be stationed in Yangzhou, a "town" with a population of around 4.5 million - or more than a half million larger than L.A. While Yangzhou's description in Lonely Planet sounded appealing enough, we wanted to see more of the country too, and so we arranged to fly to Beijing a week early, to fit in some sightseeing before getting down to business. This part of the trip was fairly conventional. Krista and I stayed in a small hotel in a "hutong" or narrow winding alleyway near Beijing's massive main train station. In a few days there, we hit most of the biggies: Tienanmen Square, the Forbidden City, lunch at the famous Peking Duck Restaurant, a long hike on the Great Wall.

We meant to travel down to Tai Shan, the sacred mountain south of Beijing, but due to a combination of mishaps and poor translations, we missed our train there and wound up going instead to the city of Nanjing, which we actually found quite lovely. Its Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum looked like it had been

Nanjing's humble memorial to Dr. Sun Yat-Sen. The Chinese aren't really into subtlety.

built for a god and could only be reached by climbing approximately 7000 steps, but it was indeed an incredible sight, unknown to most westerners. The next stop was Shanghai, a few hours away, where were to meet our fellow volunteers at small hotel. It was there that we would be sent off to our posts at various schools around the country. Now in the hands of this organization we had found via Google search, we would be forfeiting our autonomy. And it was at this point that our trip went off the rails.

Part Two to come...

Remembering the Rachels

Ten years and a few months ago, Rachel Smith, a student in my eleventh grade English class at Thomas Wootton High School in Rockville, Maryland, took her midterm exam and then, almost immediately afterward, got into a car with her friend, Rachel Crites. The two girls were reported missing about twenty-four hours later. Within a week, they were found dead, lying side by side in a station wagon in a rural area of Loudon County, Virginia.

Smith (left) and Crites (right)

The subsequent investigation suggested that the two girls were romantically involved and that their deaths had been part of a suicide pact. A key piece of evidence was an excerpt from Crites' journal: "Wherever I end up laying, whether buried or cremated, I want to stay with my true love, buried next to her. This is my choice. I'm sorry." Needless to say, the media was all over this disturbing story. In the weeks to come, fingers would be pointed in the direction of Wootton. Should Rachel Crites, an alumna who had graduated the previous year, been allowed to routinely visit her friend Rachel Smith at school? Should she have been allowed, in some cases, to join her for the entire duration of her classes?

I'm not an amateur sleuth, and I'm not interested in reopening the investigation today. Instead, I want to take a moment to think about Rachel and about the community and my reaction to her death. I was stunned when I heard the news. How could you not be? I was a first-year teacher at Wootton High School at the time, and I was trying my best just to tread water. Before I started teaching, I used to watch a show called Boston Public, which chronicled the lives of (mostly unrealistically attractive) teachers at an inner-city school. Like most shows, Boston Public made life in a school seem much more exciting than it really is. Every week, a teacher would sleep with a student, or a kid would die in a gang fight. It was tv, though, and it was pretty entertaining, and I was willing to accept that this was an exaggerated version of reality. The Rachel Incident would have been too melodramatic even for Boston Public standards - except this was real life. In some ways, it took away my innocence as a teacher: teenagers, even the healthy ones, are messy and fragile, and what they present to the world is only a fraction of what's really going on. Crazy things happen at high schools.

I can't pretend to have known Rachel well, but I did interact with her for an hour a day during what turned out to be the last months of her life. She sat in the front of a class of thirty-two students. From my admittedly limited perspective, she didn't seem interested in any of her classmates, and the"cool" boys in class would sometimes antagonize her. Mostly, though, they left her alone and vice-versa. Rachel participated in class regularly. She was bright and creative, and she had plenty to say. She made no apologies for her sometimes brusque manner: she was, it seemed to me, in school to do a job. She wasn't actively unfriendly to her peers, but she also wasn't there to make friends. (I learned later, at her funeral, that she had actually had plenty of friends - many of them from her summer camp, I believe.) I saw Rachel smile only infrequently, as on the two or three occasions that she would linger outside the classroom, talking to a friend right up until the bell rang. After the news broke, I realized that her friend - who always grinned politely when I shooed her away at the beginning of class - was the other Rachel. I had had no reason not to assume that she was a current student.

The detail that haunted me after Rachel's death was her performance on her English midterm: she wrote an outstanding essay on The Great Gatsby and earned an A, the highest grade in her class. I will never understand how a person can spend hours preparing to take a test, and then spend a full two hours actually taking it, knowing all the while that it is the last test she will ever take. At the risk of sounding like an armchair psychologist, I believe it couldn't have been the work of someone bent on taking her own life.

I wish I had known Rachel a little better, and I regret that I didn't make more of an effort to know her. Ten years later, Rachel's death continues to stick with me, along with a sense of guilt - misguided or not - that I failed to notice warning signs in a young person who was drowning in plain sight. It reminds me how little I truly know about the kids I see every day. And on my good days, it reminds me to be a little bit nicer to them, because who knows what else is really going on in there?

Opening Week!

I first started following baseball midway through the 1991 season - a good year to pick up the sport, since it ended in one of the best World Series of all time. (Twins over Braves in 7 Game, Jack Morris, Kirby Puckett, etc.) By the time the 1992 season rolled around, I had drunk the Kool-aid. After more than nine years, my dad had basically resigned himself to the fact that I would never be a baseball fan, and was thrilled when my interest finally developed, better late than never. When he saw that his Red Sox were at Yankee Stadium for opening day, he immediately picked up two tickets, even though it was a weekday afternoon game. Fourth grade be damned.

The game was great: Mo Vaughn, in his first full season, hit a huge home run. Roger Clemens pitched a complete game (in defeat, but still). Sadly, the Red Sox lost. And even more sadly, the loss would turn out to be a harbinger of a decade of futility by the Red Sox and, soon enough, dominance by the Yankees. But no matter: I got to watch batting practice, I kept score (using a kind of primitive score-keeping invented by my dad to cater to a nine-year-old), I had a hot dog.

Me - every year.

The next day, as I got off the school bus, I was welcomed by the school principal, a very friendly man with an unpronounceable last name: we called him "Dr. A." He smiled down at me and, with no trace of bitterness or sarcasm, asked, "How was the game, Alex?" I wasn't exactly sure how he knew where I had been. Possibly, he knew that yesterday had been opening day and just put two and two together. Or maybe he had overheard me tell my plans to anyone who would listen. At nine years old, it may not have even occurred to me that there was any reason to keep them secret. Looking back, I have to applaud Dr. A's sense of perspective. I'm sure he took his job seriously, but I think he also knew that my memories of that game would outlast my memories of that particular day of fourth grade.

There's no way I could have realized how lucky I was to attend opening day. I've been to a ton of baseball games since then, but I've only been to one other opener: the Braves' first game at Turner Field in 2009, against the Nationals. And that one was just a dumb luck, right place right time kind of deal.

I can't just drop work and assorted other responsibilities to go to opening day - especially now that I have children. But the thought still crosses my mind every year. The next best thing to actually attending opening day is coming home from work at 3:00, turning on the tv and cracking a beer. On a Monday afternoon, this is decadent enough to make me feel that I'm at least doing something to mark the beginning of the season. I kept the tradition going this past Monday.

My wife says she can relate to that old song from Damn Yankees, "Six Month Out of Every Year," in whichbaseball widows bemoan the loss of their husbands to the baseball season. That's me alright: from April through October, baseball is a big part of my life. The games are always on the radio when I drive, and on tv in the background while I grade papers. The ESPN scoreboard updates are always open on my computer while I do anything else. In fact, I've checked them no less than twenty-seven times since starting this entry. The men in the Damn Yankees song complain about their crappy Washington Senators. My teams - the Nationals and the Red Sox - have both been pretty competitive lately, but the equivalent for me has to be my fantasy baseball team, which continues to stink, year in and year out, no matter who I draft.

It pains me to admit it, but football has obviously surpassed baseball in the estimation of most sports fans in this country. Not for me. Baseball is at the center of many of my most meaningful friendships. It's the central focus of some of my best memories. It gives me a little jolt every morning when I realize that, even though I have to wake up, I at least get to check the box scores. With apologies to Christmas, this is the most wonderful time of the year.

Feel Like a Brand New Person

A while ago, a blog called The First in Line posted a story I wrote about a Weezer concert I attended with my friends in 1997, right after our freshman year of high school. I enjoyed writing it, and remembering the experience, and so I wrote a piece about another more recent concert: Tame Impala at Merriweather Post Pavilion last June. I never submitted that one to the blog though, and in fact, I forgot about it until last weekend. When I tried to submit it then, I realized that The First in Line seems to be taking a break. In fact, my story about Weezer, posted on July 31st, is still at the top of their archive of recent stories. I tried submitting it to another music publication and was rejected more or less immediately.

It turns out my blog is not as discerning as most other publications, especially when it comes to my own writing, so for now I'll just post it here. And incidentally, this song has the highest number of plays on my itunes and is still firmly stuck in my head.

I haven’t lost the capacity to become enraptured with a new band. But – partly because I teach high school, and I maintain what I like to think is a healthy distance from my students, and partly just because I’m a little older – I think I’ve lost the capacity to feel a kinship with a new band’s audience. These are the two main conclusions I’ve reached, while sitting on the grassy slope at Merriweather Post Pavilion, alongside my friends Nick and Steve, waiting for Tame Impala to take the stage. Tame Impala is an Australian rock band whose front man Kevin Parker is, at thirty-one, a few years younger than I am. Their sound, however, is a kind of a throwback to the late sixties and early seventies. (To me, Parker’s voice sounds strikingly like John Lennon’s.) And for this reason, their genre is almost always described as “psychedelic rock.” So they sound a bit like bands from before my time, and their main fan base is decidedly after my time. I would conservatively guess that the average age here is about twenty. More than a handful, I’ll wager, are here celebrating the end of their second year at College Park.

It’s hard to accept that I’ve become one of the old guys at the concert. But all the same, I’m excited for this show in the way that I haven’t been in a long time. For the past two weeks, I’ve been listening to their latest album Currents on a virtual nonstop loop. The bouncy synth chords on “The Moment,” which sounds a little like a more sinister version of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” have burrowed their way into my ear. The mere thought of the hypnotic main riff on “Mind Mischief” makes me spontaneously and purposefully nod my head.

Me, Steve and Nick - approximately a half hour before the weather got ugly.

In an effort to save a few bucks, my buddies and I agreed to pick up lawn seats, instead of the more expensive seats underneath the covered pavilion. For the entirety of the opening band’s set, I’m glad for this decision. The opener is French Electronic group M83, whose music, despite my never having heard of it before last week, has earned a major following in its own right. I recognize one of their songs, a soaring ballad with a big, anthemic chorus, from an itunes commercial. Millenials have a reputation for being ironic about everything, but their sound is refreshingly sincere, and I hope it serves as the backdrop for a romantic moment between two of the College Park sophomores. It isn’t until after M83’s set that the first raindrops hit my arms. By the time the lights go down for Tame Impala, rain is falling at a steady pace.

Buying tickets to a show at Merriweather Pavilion, or any equivalent half-lawn/half-covered venue like New Jersey’s Garden State Arts Center where I saw some of my first shows, is like a poor man’s lottery. Do you save some money and go with the lawn seats, crossing your fingers for a lovely evening? Or do you pay a bit more for the peace of mind that comes with covered seats? We chose the former and, although it hadn’t seemed that way during the opening set, we were getting burned.

The good news, such as it is, is that during a rainy concert, there comes a point of saturation – both figuratively and literally – at which you stop caring about the rain, because you can’t get any wetter. Choosing appropriate clothing for an outdoor show had actually proven even more difficult than the question of whether or not to purchase uncovered seats. You don’t want to be too cold, so normally you might dress in layers. But you really don’t want to be carrying around a sweatshirt if it stays warm out – especially in the rain. And wet jeans are the absolute worst. For me, there was also the matter of dressing fashionably enough to look like any other (relatively) young person enjoying a summer concert. They say that as you age, you start to feel less concerned with what other people think, and in general I think that’s true, but weirdly, some of that old college self-consciousness starts to return to me when I’m in the presence of a bunch of college kids, even though I realize intellectually that no one really cares what I’m wearing. On this night, in the unlikely event that anyone was paying attention, they would have seen a guy willing to forgo style for comfort. My choice of gym shorts, a t-shirt and a bright orange raincoat felt fairly ridiculous at the outset, but as the rainfall became certifiably torrential, I felt increasingly pleased with my decision. Actually, the raincoat did little. The drops inevitably infiltrated my pockets, soaking my keys, phone and leather wallet. (I would have to use my wife’s hairdryer the next day, to dry out each individual dollar bill I carried.)

When, a few songs into the set, Kevin Parker shouted, “How’s everyone up there in the rain?” the crowd roared back to signify their total euphoria. I roared along with them, and my roar was genuine: none of the standard “I’ll humor you” tone I usually reserve for responding to the standard, “How are you feeling, Baltimore?” I was paying my dues to see a band I really liked, and I wanted everyone to know it, especially those bastards underneath the covering in front.

There was no point in feeling self-conscious now. I bought a round of Flying Dogs for Nick and Steve (the tall-boy cans) and brought it back to our muddy spot, about two thirds of the way back, dead center. I took a big swig and danced to that groovy bassline on “The Less I Know the Better.” (There is, to be sure, no other appropriate reaction to that bassline in any scenario, even for the usually reluctant dancers like myself.) I belted out the lyrics to “It Feels Like We Only Go Backwards,” even though I messed up a few of them.

By the encore, I was far beyond caring about the soaked contents of my raincoat pockets, focusing instead on the all-consuming rhythm of “New Person, Same Old Mistakes” – the last track on Currents, and the last tune of the evening.  I sang along with the chorus, “Feel like a brand new person,” and felt as though I had written it myself.

As if on an automatic setting, my head kept right on bobbing as I trudged toward the parking lot, which by this time, was more of a marsh. Traffic moved slowly out of the lot, but having no plans for the following day, I felt none of the impatience that usually comes from sitting in a line of parked cars.

This picture is from our show - but our view from the lawn was nothing like this.

I first discovered rock concerts when I was fourteen years old, and for a while, there was a sense of euphoria that came from each one of them. That feeling has been hard to find lately, in part because I don’t go to as many concerts as I used to, but also, I think, because I’ve grown a little jaded. Tonight though, because I was with friends, because I had had a couple beers, because the rain had lent the evening a weird, though not unpleasant sense of chaos, and most importantly, because Tame Impala had just solidified my infatuation for them, that jadedness had evaporated. As I sat in that unmoving line, I pulled up Currents on my ipod and cranked the volume on my car stereo, contentedly drumming my fingers on the steering wheel while I waited for the car in front of me to move.

Get a Life

I've definitely given this matter more thought than it deserves, but I can't help it. I'm reminded of it at least once a day, often more.

Here's the story: for the past year and a half or so, I've noticed white sheets of printer paper bearing either Boston Red Sox or New England Patriots logos, taped to public property in nearby Northern Baltimore neighborhoods: telephone poles, electrical boxes, the backs of stop signs. Mostly, these "signs" - certainly a generous term to describe them - are scotched taped on various posts along Gittings Ave. and Lake Ave. And since my commute requires me to take at least one of these streets every day, the signs are basically unavoidable. I've also seen them in two other spots I visit frequently: the parking lot of the Giant on York, where they are posted on lamp posts, and along Roland Avenue, where they are stuck to parking ticket machines. Most recently, I've spotted a few smaller stickers that simply read "BRADY." I assume that whoever is behind these is also behind the Red Sox and Patriots signs.

At first, I took note of these signs because, as a Red Sox and Patriots fan, they caught my eye, and truthfully, because I couldn't help but see them every day. There isn't much else to look at while sitting at the long light on Lake and Charles: a random white xeroxed Red Sox logo kind of stands out. But as I have continued to look at them day after day after day, I've become fascinated on a human interest level. Who is posting these signs? What is he hoping to accomplish? I need more context here.

In writers' workshops, students are sometimes asked to create the backstory for a random stranger - a person on the subway or at a diner or at a bus stop - whom they find intriguing. This exercise becomes harder when you've never actually seen the person, but I'll give it a go anyway.

In my mind, the mystery Boston Fan is not from Boston and has probably never been there. He likes them because they're good, but he won't admit that to anyone. Instead, he'll say something like he liked the Patriots logo when he was little, and just started following the team. He's around 20 years old, and has graduated high school. He's taking classes at CCBC and has a job at Giant, but lives with his parents. He is obviously a He, by the way.

I don't have an actual photo of this guy's handiwork. Basically, just visualize a piece of white paper with a Sox logo where the peeling sticker is.

He lacks a sense of purpose, and he thinks he is much funnier and much more subversive than he actually is. He is under the impression that posting these signs in random spots around town is clever and edgy. Best case scenario, what will happen? An Oriole fan will stop at a light, catch a glimpse of a Red Sox logo and then, like a cartoon villain, clench his fist and curse that dastardly Boston team? A Ravens fan will careen off the road and into a ditch, having been driven mad by the sight of a Patriots logo? Did he ever think that his weird little prank would end up raising the ire of (or at least the baffled curiosity) of a fellow New England fan?

Ok, so this guy is clearly an easy target. Some poor soul who obviously who has too much time on his hands. Some guy who desperately seeks attention, and doesn't quite know how to go about getting it. I'll give him this, though: he's gotten me to fall right into his trap.