Babies and twin dogs, waterlight, minor surgeries, ocular prosthetics, te amo le mas / Santo, hearts skipping beats and struggling to catch up.

Guy on the other side of wall here, “You hear about this whole Pixies reunion thing?” and I explain my concern, the fact that I liked having them sealed off in the past, the albums and b-sides and shows, everything caught in amber and not to be fucked with. Very concerned, agitated, knee jiggling. They do not belong in 2003; they need to stay put.

At my grandfather’s funeral this past May I was told I should stand up and say something, maybe. This was like 45 minutes beforehand. I panic, my mind reeling, getting super-nervous as if this was suddenly all about me. I don’t want to. I’m not prepared. I could’ve put something together on the plane, had I known, arranging the words with cold precision, fine-tuning for maximum impact. I’m sitting there, in the front row, glancing around. I’m in a rec room at the old folks’ home, a pool table shoved against the far wall, a coffee urn, board games stacked in a bookcase, a room full of people who only met my grandfather over the past year. I’m in Colorado, where he was not from. It suddenly becomes crucial that I mention Texas, somewhere, in some capacity. Texas has to get in this room somehow because that’s what’d been missing. Texas gets a bad rap, I said, something like that, but it’s what made him great, it’s what I hope lives on in his heathen progeny, here, hundreds of miles away.

I looked up what I wrote on September 10, 2001. I remember I wrote it late that night, after midnight, so Movable Type dated it the 11th. I later went back and changed the date to the 10th, just to make clear that I’d written it before, because it almost seemed as if I’d written it after.