The light comes back on

2024 was a remarkable year. It was remarkable for a lot of reasons, many of them bad. But in regards to my own life, the ways in which it was remarkable for good reasons easily surpassed any previous year I'd lived.

During 2024, there were four different experiences I had that made me feel, truthfully, like I'd ascended to some higher plane of existence or been transported to a magical realm, where I was in touch with the universe and the essence of what it is to be alive in a way that the events of normal day-to-day life don't even approach. This might sound like a description of some crazy psychedelic drug experience (I can't speak to that personally), but it isn't. It's just that I got to do some really, really amazing things. And I've had other such experiences in my life, but never so many in a single year.

One was the honeymoon Erin and I took to Spain in early March, perhaps a topic for another as yet unwritten post. Another was witnessing a total solar eclipse in person. It goes without saying that a third was becoming a father - really not just the birth experience (although that was the most profound) but also many little moments since that I've shared with Erin and W.

The fourth was the most cathartic and emotionally powerful concert that I've attended in my life, which if you know me you know is really saying something. The concert took place on March 22, 2024, at Revolution Hall in Portland, Oregon, and was played by one of my top two (with Okkervil River) favorite bands ever, Typhoon, in celebration of the tenth anniversary of their album White Lighter.

 

The concert not only marked the tenth anniversary of one of my favorite albums, it also, I realized during it, marked a closing of the door on the most tumultuous ten year period of my life.

The short run of White Lighter tenth anniversary shows that Typhoon did in March of 2024 was actually a bit belated, as the album was released in August 2013. So let's jump back in time to August 2013.

Typhoon had come up on my radar earlier that summer, when I saw them listed among upcoming shows at the Beachland Ballroom and Tavern in Cleveland and thought they sounded interesting. I hadn't yet listened to any of their music. I didn't know that the band's lyrics were largely inspired by lead singer Kyle Morton having nearly died from complications stemming from Lyme disease, and were thus about grappling with mortality and the fragility of the human body in both dark and hopeful ways.

White Lighter was released on Tuesday, August 20, 2013. Three days later, on Friday, August 23, my first wife Cara was admitted to the hospital after it was discovered that she had a blood clot in her calf, and it was subsequently discovered that her lungs were full of blood clots. Early the next week, she was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. Needless to say, my whole world was turned upside down.

A couple weeks after the initial hospitalization, I listened to Typhoon for the first time. I had no idea what I was getting into. No idea how relatable the music would be. No idea that the music of Typhoon would become one of the most important things that would help carry me through the next few years of my life, first living with a spouse who had what was almost certainly terminal cancer, and then living as a young widowed person and struggling through physical and mental health problems of my own.

It's funny that the album with which I would form a stronger emotional connection than any other in my life was released within days of the event that would lead to it having that emotional resonance. If I'd listened to White Lighter on its release date, I'd have liked it a lot, but it would likely have just been one of many albums that I liked a lot. A week later, everything had changed.

And because White Lighter is the single most emotionally meaningful album to me, and I already knew very well that anniversary concerts of favorite albums could rank among the best things I'd ever experienced, when I saw that there would be tenth anniversary shows I knew there was no way I could miss out on attending.

I took a long weekend and flew to Portland the day before the concert. My whole visit was great. Non-concert highlights included several really fantastic meals, a visit to Powell's, the world's largest bookstore, and a round of disc golf at Pier Park, a very highly rated course that quickly became my favorite that I've played.

A very exciting birdie!

I also did a huge amount of walking. It's well known that "getting your steps in" is good for one's physical health. It's becoming more well known, but is still underrated, how beneficial long walks can be for mental health and emotional state. Between the honeymoon in Spain and the Portland trip, I'm pretty sure March 2024 is the month in which I've walked the most in my whole life, with several different days of over 20,000 steps each. Is it a coincidence that this happened during what was easily one of the best months of my life?

A lot of the walking I did was in the lush, sprawling expanse of Forest Park, one of the nation's largest urban forest areas. Being able to spend time in nature that's readily accessible from a city is a great thing, something I love about my home of Cleveland Heights, and Forest Park is probably the best such place that I've encountered in my travels.

 

Repping another favorite Portland band, Joseph. 

It's a pretty magical place, but the magic of walking through those lush woods didn't compare to the magic that took place in Revolution Hall on the night of March 22.

This was, in fact, the second time I'd seen Typhoon play a show in Revolution Hall. The second time, in fact, that I'd seen Typhoon play a tenth anniversary show in Revolution Hall - the prior, on November 5, 2017, was for the tenth anniversary of their record label.

Both shows came at very momentous times in my life. Just as my introduction to Typhoon, and first time seeing them live, had also come at a very momentous time in my life. All for very different reasons.

I got to the venue early to make sure I could get a good spot near the stage. There were two openers - the second, the Fourth Wall, I had seen open for Typhoon once before, in 2018, and it was great to see them again. Anyway, between waiting for the show to start and waiting in between acts, I had plenty of time to think about the band I was there to see and how their music had woven itself into those ten years of my life going back to White Lighter's release.

I even took the time to read my previous blog entries about Typhoon. I felt grateful to my past self for having written all those entries. It was a good reminder of why I write. It was a good reminder of what all I had been through to get to the remarkable place I had reached.

One of those entries was called Wait for the light to come back on. I wrote it after that previous Revolution Hall show in 2017. The title comes from the lyrics of "Artificial Light," the opening track of White Lighter and a song that had often moved me to tears when I saw it performed live.

On that November 2017 visit to Portland, I was still reeling and emotionally devastated from what had happened the month before - an out of nowhere (to me) breakup that was the most traumatic thing I had ever experienced.

Which, considering I had previously been widowed at the age of 31, is obviously saying something.

Taking a very long walk around Portland and then seeing an amazing Typhoon concert had provided a major respite from the pain I was experiencing. I think it was really the beginning of my healing process, although that process took a long time.

In 2024, once again, the combination of a long walk around Portland and an amazing Typhoon concert had a profound effect on me.

I realized something as I stood there in the crowded concert hall and thought about all my past experiences with Typhoon and the words I had written. All those concerts and the things that had been going on in my life when they happened. September 2013. March 2014. September 2014. November 2017. January 2018. June 2018. April 2022.

What I realized was that, ever since August 2013 - the release month of the album whose tenth anniversary this show was celebrating - I'd carried with me an inescapable feeling that the life I had was not the life I was supposed to have. There was just something wrong about it.

Turning 30 and then a couple months later learning that your wife has stage IV lung cancer will do that to you, I guess.

But I also realized that there had been one short-lived period of time within those ten years when that feeling had gone away. When it had felt like everything had fallen into place and my life made sense again.

It was an illusory feeling. Now that I have a child of my own, I can see even more clearly how absolutely insane it was that my (also widowed) girlfriend of April through October 2017 had pushed me into a stepfather role for her four-year-old daughter within a month of us meeting in person. But I didn't realize that at the time.

I can see clearly now something that I was aware of at the time but then, I think, didn't want to admit was true after it ended. Those months in the summer of 2017 actually had been the happiest time in my life. (Had been! But that's no longer true.) It didn't seem right when I had been happily married to someone with whom I shared nine years of my life to say that the happiest time in my life was instead a short-lived relationship with someone else, but honestly, it was true, and it was because being a parent (for all intents and purposes, albeit not in a formal or legal sense) was the most magical thing I had ever experienced. And thus, suddenly having that parental role and that relationship with that child stripped away from me was the worst trauma I'd had to endure.

I realized something else. When I thought back on my life, there was a clear line of demarcation, almost as if I had lived two different lives. There was the period of my life that felt immediate and familiar and real. And there was the time before that, a time that almost felt like a past life.

That line of demarcation was August 2013. The month in which White Lighter was released. The month in which everything in my life changed.

When I think back on the events of August 2013, there's an immediacy to them, as if they didn't happen all that long ago, even though it's now been over 12 years. And that's also true of all the important events that have happened between then and now.

But go back a little farther in time, and I find that events of even, say, July 2013 feel like they happened in a different lifetime. It's an uncanny feeling, although it's one that makes sense when you consider what happened.

So this concert celebrating the tenth anniversary of an album by one of my favorite bands was also much more than that.

The first time that I saw Typhoon live, it was amazing to witness the 11 members of the band all cram onto the tiny stage of the Beachland Tavern. I'd never seen anything like it.

I was too close to to fit the whole band in one picture, but you can see how crowded the stage was.

In the years since, various members of the band had had to move on to various other responsibilities in life. The size of the band had shrunken considerably. The most recent time I'd seen them, April 24, 2022 - the day after my second date with Erin, and a significant date for other reasons - a version of the band about half the size of the original had taken the stage at El Club in Detroit.

They'd played a great show, but it couldn't quite compare to what had once been.

On March 22, 2024, the full Typhoon lineup whose music had taken hold of my soul ten years previously once more took the stage at Revolution Hall. I had always thought, when I saw them, that the band seemed like a family. And this was like the best kind of family reunion. It felt like things were once more the way they were supposed to be. It felt euphoric.

And the music hadn't even started.

It's hard to put into words what I felt when the oh so familiar opening notes of "Artificial Light" filled the room, and what I continued to feel for the rest of Typhoon's set that night. But I'll try. As I remember it, a powerful physical sensation washed over my body and I somehow felt both intensely excited and remarkably calm, and at peace, and most of all just blissful.

 

I joined in with much of the rest of the crowd in heartily singing along to many of the words. That sort of communal experience with a concert crowd that is so passionate and so there for the music is a wonderful thing whenever it happens. Here it was extra wonderful, both because of what the music meant to me, and also because the feeling I had of the band being like a family somehow extended to the entire audience. It felt like, in that room for that one night, we were all one big family.

Many of the words that I sang most enthusiastically were words I had quoted in one of those old blog posts: Typhoon lyrics that make me think of Cara, posted a week after my first wife's death, a post that marked my transformation away from being someone who never shared his innermost feelings with, well, just about anyone. The emotions I experienced seeing those songs performed live at this tenth anniversary celebration, singing along, and thinking about everything those words meant to me and everything that had happened over those ten years, well... it was just a transcendent experience in the unique way that live music can transcend normal human experience, but even more transcendent than any other live music experience I've had before or since.

Although so many of those lyrics had meant so much to me going back to 2013 and through the ensuing years, there was one set that now took on a greatly heightened significance. From "Young Fathers":

Now I'm as old as you were when you had me
Should I be afraid? Should I start a family?

In 2015, I explained, "The above is not really so much related to Cara, but sticks out to me because I am in fact now as old (31 years) as my mother was when she had me."

It was a weird feeling at the time, thinking about how at the age my mother was when she became a parent, I instead became widowed.

Kyle Morton, speaking between songs at the anniversary concert, provided additional context to these lines. When he was at the age his parents were when he was born, he thought he was going to die. He wrote those words thinking that he would never get to be a parent himself.

He introduced album closer "Post Script," an absolutely heartbreaking song, by saying that he had written the song for Danielle, his wife; it envisions her life after his death. It had been ten years since that song was released into the world. Ten years since I had listened to it and the rest of the songs on White Lighter over and over while pondering my suddenly uncertain future.

I've talked to both Kyle and Danielle (frontwoman of now defunct band Wild Ones) multiple times at previous shows, by the way, and they're both just absolutely lovely people.

So here we were, ten years later. Kyle had not died. He was very much still alive, and as he explained in what was news to me, he and Danielle had been able to start a family. They had a baby girl!

During the show, it had already been very much on my mind that the crazy journey my life had taken over those ten years had all led up to me meeting Erin and now to Erin, back home in Cleveland, being pregnant with our child. At the revelation that Kyle and Danielle's journey had also led to them having a child - ten years after I had listened to those words, "Should I be afraid? Should I start a family?" and had wondered whether I, too, would ever have that experience - I felt this sense of... I guess I might call it cosmic connection. Sometimes it just feels like everything is as it's meant to be. This was one of those times.

All along, what I had really wanted in life was to meet someone with whom I would like to start a family, and then start a family with that person. Now it was happening. 

After the astonishingly beautiful performance of "Post Script," a song that sticks out in my memories of the first ever Typhoon concert I attended when those 11 musicians crammed themselves onto the tiny Beachland Tavern stage in September 2013, the band left the stage to thunderous applause. They returned to play an encore featuring several songs from their other albums and culminating in a rousing performance of "Reed Rd.," a fan favorite live song that never made it to an album (until it was included as a bonus track on the White Lighter 10th anniversary release) but that I fondly remember closing out the show at my second Typhoon concert. That show had been in March 2014, so almost exactly ten years in the past.

What a ten years it had been.

I walked out of the concert almost in a daze. It had been just so powerful, so beautiful, so overwhelming an experience. It was truly one of the most amazing experiences of my life.

Although since W's birth, the list of experiences similarly or even more amazing has rapidly expanded!

I had spent ten years carrying a vague feeling that my life, in some fundamental way, was not the life I was supposed to have. And now, now I no longer felt that way. I now felt that yes, things are right with my life, this is where my life is supposed to be. I was already starting to feel this (when you've spent so long carrying that feeling of things not being right, it's not easy to shake, even when things do start to really go right), but I think that night in Revolution Hall (importantly, I think, coming on the heels of an amazing honeymoon with Erin in Spain) is when that feeling really solidified itself in my mind.

Because life has been so busy and it's taken me so long to get around to finishing writing this post, I now have the benefit of being able to look back over the two years since that night and see that yes, that's really true. I feel so much gratitude.

Looking back, it seems even more remarkable now. I truly believe that that night in that concert hall induced a permanent and beneficial change in my brain. Not just in the way that the formation of any long term memory permanently alters some neural pathways, but a much more profound and fundamental change in the function of my mind.

Music, man. It really is something.

The day after the show, I did a lot more walking around Portland, including a stop at a record store where Typhoon's music was being played over the speakers. I was not surprised at the affirmative answer when I asked the guy at checkout whether he'd been at the previous night's show. That night, I caught a red-eye flight home with a brief layover in Chicago.

But then my flight from Chicago to Cleveland was cancelled.

While in the airport in Chicago, I joined a video call with Erin and our realtor as they viewed a house. We were still in the midst of a lengthy house search. It would be almost a month later when we finally found our home. We closed on it, incidentally, on the two year anniversary of our first date.

It turned out that the best way for me to get home from Chicago was to take a flight to the Akron-Canton airport, an hour's drive from home. Erin drove there to pick me up (the original plan would have had me taking a train from the Cleveland airport to our side of town). It's always a crazy journey for us!

I was extra happy to see Erin when I walked out the doors of the airport. On the way home, we stopped at a GBH (great blue heron) rookery that Erin had spotted from the highway on a previous drive we'd taken. A love of GBHs has been a significant feature of our relationship from early on. We parked, got out of our car, and looked at all those majestic birds tending to their nests.

I stood there with my wife and thought of the nesting that we would be doing in the near future.

The cold and wind and rain don't know (The Erin and Jeff Oasis concert experience)

On August 24, as Erin, W, and I drove from Montreal to Toronto for the last stop on our Adirondacks + Canada vacation, we were at a service plaza when I overheard some people talking about a truck fire having shut down the highway somewhere on the way to Toronto. We looked up driving directions and were dismayed to see that our drive, which was already set to be about tied for our longest ever in a day with W, would take considerably longer.

Despite this, we still made time for a stop at the amazing Big Apple roadside attraction that we'd become aware of in December 2023 driving from Toronto to Ottawa with an embryonic W on board. I don't regret the stop; it was everything I hoped for and more, but it likely did contribute to us driving into the Toronto area in the dark with a screaming W in her car seat behind us. She did eventually fall asleep in the car but woke up when we reached our Airbnb, leading me to take a short late night bike ride to a weird grocery store to buy some milk.

The whole thing was certainly worthy of Erin and Jeff Experience™ billing, and a fitting lead in to the Oasis concert the next day that we were in Toronto to see. Oasis's first North American show since 2008. An event that would be unforgettable for many reasons, some good, some bad, but I wouldn't change a thing because it all came together to make the whole experience even more unforgettable.

I realized in the days leading up to the concert that Oasis had been the first band I was really into of my own accord as opposed to because of my parents playing a band's music. I was in 7th grade. "Wonderwall," "Don't Look Back in Anger," and "Champagne Supernova" from the band's smash hit second album (What's the Story) Morning Glory? were all over the radio. I bought the album on CD and loved it and at some point also bought the band's debut Definitely Maybe. Then their third album Be Here Now, released in August 1997, became the first album whose release I ever anticipated. I remember following news about it on the primitive websites of the era. I had absolutely no clue at the time how central my love of music would become to my life, but I was excited about that album, and in some ways that was a preview of my future.

Be Here Now was widely regarded as disappointing. I didn't like it as much as its predecessors, but I still liked it a lot. Something interesting happened, though, which is that I kind of stopped being as much of an Oasis fan for reasons that simply highlight how impressionable children and teenagers are. As I recall, the modern rock station in Columbus (99.7 The Blitz) didn't play Oasis, and therefore I got the impression that they weren't as "cool" as other bands I liked such as Pearl Jam, Nirvana, or Smashing Pumpkins. I still listened to Oasis some - I had a weekly paper delivery route in high school and I strongly associate those Oasis albums (along with several other albums I have) with listening to them while doing that route - but I didn't really consider them a top tier favorite band anymore. And then for some reason, as an adult I basically just stopped actively listening to Oasis, although I'd still enjoy their hit songs if I happened to hear them somewhere.

When the much hyped 2025 reunion tour, bringing the notoriously feuding Gallagher brothers back together, was announced, though, I realized I'd really like to go. Toronto was the closest date and it would work to hit the night one show there on the way back from our vacation. It was something I was looking forward to, but not thinking about that much, but then in the weeks leading up to the show I got out my old Oasis CDs (which, unlike most of the hundreds of CDs I own, I had not ever previously ripped to my computer) and started listening to them and listening to them again and then I found I was getting really excited.

There was a great energy about the city of Toronto on August 24, the day of the show. As we went about our day, we'd occasionally see someone in Oasis apparel, and we'd smile at the recognition they were likely going to the same show as us that night. It would be the biggest concert I'd ever attended, and although I usually opt for much smaller shows, it felt really cool to be a part of something so big. And it really was a big deal, bigger even than most stadium shows. Really the most comparable thing I could cite to the feeling of being in Toronto that day would be being in Cleveland when one of our pro sports teams is in a championship series.

At one point we were walking through the city and saw a long line of people and wondered what they were lined up for. As we got closer we noticed a decent number were wearing Oasis gear. Then we saw that they were in line for an official popup Oasis merch store. I had no interest in waiting in the line, but just the sight of it raised my excitement further.

The concert was at Rogers Stadium. If you know anything about Toronto sports venues, you might think that's the Blue Jays' downtown ballpark. If so, you would join Erin and me in being incorrect.

Hearkening back to another moment of confusion about concert venue locations when Erin and I were planning the trip to California that ended up including our Yosemite elopement, when I first told Erin about the Oasis concert in Toronto we both thought it was at the Jays' stadium, but when I actually went to look at tickets, I discovered that "Rogers Stadium" is a completely different venue from the Rogers Centre where the Blue Jays play. Rogers Stadium is a 50,000 capacity outdoor concert venue that opened earlier this year on the site of a former airfield about 10 miles north of downtown. Which is pretty weird.

Even weirder is that the stadium was built to be temporary - after five years it will be demolished to make way for planned development. Apparently the Toronto area needed a really big outdoor concert venue and this was decided to be the best solution to the problem (for now, I guess?). At one of the first concerts held there, Chris Martin of Coldplay called it a "weird stadium in the middle of nowhere."

As we'd find out, this was a very accurate description.

Doing some research on Rogers Stadium as vacation approached, I learned that after the venue's inaugural concert, some fans had had to wait up to two hours to exit the stadium, but that the issues causing this had mostly been worked out in time for the Coldplay show. Still, the location was not convenient, to say the least. It looked like taking a train and walking from the station was our best bet. Google Maps showed about a 15 minute walk from the station to the stadium. Not bad, right?

In typical Erin and Jeff fashion, we decided to ride bikes from our Airbnb to the train. While handing W off to the babysitter, the topic of rain came up (it had sprinkled on us in a park earlier in the day). I looked at the weather on my phone and saw a 0% chance of rain through the 11 pm hour.

We biked to the subway station, locked our bikes up, headed down to the platform, and boarded a train with lots of Oasis fans already on board (another train, jam-packed with people headed to the concert, had departed the station a couple minutes earlier just as we got to the platform). Again, it gave a fun feeling of being part of something really big. Apparently there were two train stations at which we could exit that were supposed to have similar walks to the stadium. We weren't really sure whether one was better, but at the first of the two, a bunch of people exited our train, so we followed them.

When we emerged onto street level, we could see the weird stadium looming in the distance, and it truly did look very weird and very in the middle of nowhere. We started walking, following other concertgoers, and soon realized we were getting farther away from the stadium. Then we came to a street that was where the Google Maps directions would have had us turn, and saw a sign saying we couldn't go that way, and to continue to another street, so we continued to walk and the stadium continued to recede into the distance behind us until we finally turned toward it.

It turned out that the walk from the train station to the stadium gates took more than half an hour. On the way, some cycle rickshaws passed, offering a faster alternative to the lengthy walk, for what I'd imagine was a substantial fee. Each was blasting Oasis songs from speakers.

I think everyone making that long walk felt a shared sense of bewilderment, like, what even is this place? What are we doing here?

We finally reached the stadium in time to hear, but not see, the last couple songs by opener Cage the Elephant while we waited to use the bathroom and then finished walking to the grandstand entrance.

As we waited for the main event, it was fun to just look around at all the other people and soak in the excitement. People of all ages (we were probably at about the average age of the crowd). I especially enjoyed seeing how excited the younger audience members were, people who weren't even alive when Oasis's most popular music was released. A couple of Gen Z girls in front of us asked Erin to take their picture with their handheld digital camera, which is apparently a trend with that cohort, which I love. There was also a teenage boy with his parents who was wearing a t-shirt of perhaps my favorite Oasis song, "Supersonic," the title stylized like the familiar Oasis logo, and a bucket hat - I glanced his way when that song came up in the setlist and loved seeing his reaction.

When this tour was announced, a lot of people wondered if it would really work. Would the Gallagher brothers manage not to be at each other's throats? Could they even make it through a whole tour? Would the band be able to bring it on stage like they did when they were younger?

Wonderfully, the answer to all these questions was a resounding yes. The songs sounded as great, or even better, in concert in 2025 as they had when I was spinning those CDs in my bedroom or my portable disc player in the '90s. The Gallaghers seemed genuinely happy to be on stage together. And man, the band just has this seemingly effortless swagger that few modern rock bands can pull off, and they still have it after all those years off, and it's really fun to experience in person.

 

If you want a more in depth review of an Oasis reunion tour show, I really liked this one: How the Oasis Reunion Has Become 2025’s Most Wholesome Story. I guess this post is more about the wild experience we had in seeing the show than it is a detailed review of the show.

But back to the show, everything was going great, basically matching my expectations (every night on the tour had the same setlist so we knew what we were in for), when about halfway through Oasis's set I noticed some ominous clouds rolling in to cover the previously clear skies. That was funny, I thought, given the 0% chance of rain I'd seen forecast, but of course, clouds don't always mean rain.

It was during the song "Stand By Me," which, it must be noted, contains the lyrics, "The cold and wind and rain don't know/They only seem to come and go away," that I started to feel some drops of water descending from the sky. I laughed, and looked around to take in other's reactions. It was a fairly light rain. It wasn't really bothering me, and especially given the timing, it kind of added to the fun and made the whole thing feel like even more of an Event.

I figured the rain would pass over, or come and go away, as it were, in short order.

I was very wrong!

In fact, the rain continued, and grew in intensity, becoming, at times, an actual downpour. It wasn't a warm night, either, so it felt rather unpleasant! Looking around, very few in the crowd had come prepared. I saw a few people who'd donned ponchos and I envied them a little. I was at least fortunate to be wearing a ball cap so my face was shielded; Erin didn't have even that.

The show went on. Liam Gallagher donned a hooded jacket, the hood pulled over the top part of his face as he sang, and between songs interjected some amusing comments such as comparing the weather to Manchester's, and also firing back at critics who said they were only doing this for the money because why would they keep playing through such miserable conditions if it was only about the money. He really seemed to be reveling in the situation!

 

The way the light show interacted with the rain was also cool to see.

So, a thing about this weird stadium is that, unlike a normal outdoor stadium, there's really nowhere to go to escape from the weather. (I don't know what would happen if truly severe weather hit during a show - it seems a little frightening to contemplate.) I don't know that I would have tried to seek shelter; I don't know if many of the people around us would have, but we didn't really have a choice. We were stuck there, getting drenched on a cool night in the middle of nowhere near Toronto, watching an Oasis concert. I had thought we were having a crazy experience during our long trek to the stadium. I'd had no idea what a crazy experience we'd been in for.

During "Live Forever," another of my favorite Oasis songs, I think I had a slightly manic grin on my face as I belted out the lyrics, "Did you ever feel the pain/in the morning rain/as it soaks you to the bone?" The whole thing was just so wild. The concert concluded perfectly, with the thrill of singing along to "Wonderwall," one of the most iconic songs of my lifetime, with tens of thousands of other people, followed by a performance of "Champagne Supernova" that concluded with a fireworks display, something that would have seemed over the top at most any other concert I've attended but felt just right at this one. An image of a setting sun filled the giant video screen behind the stage as the show ended and we began to file out of the stadium with the rest of the drenched but thrilled audience.

The whole thing was just such an epic experience. The crazy things about it - the weird venue with its absurdly long walk to the entrance, the heavy rain on a night with none in the forecast - as irritating or unpleasant as they might have been in the moment, they ultimately just made the experience more memorable and in a way I'm glad for all of it.

It's funny. In high school I got this weird impression that Oasis wasn't as "cool" of a band as a lot of the other music I listened to, and I think this had a long-lasting effect of making me basically stop actively listening to Oasis, but it turns out that I still really like them and in fact like them more than a lot of the other music I was listening to in high school. I started listening to my Oasis albums again in preparation for the show but have ended up listening to them a lot more since seeing the band live. Definitely Maybe and (What's the Story) Morning Glory? are genuinely great albums.

I remember well what my favorite songs on those albums were when I was younger. It's interesting to me that all my favorites from back then remain favorites now, but there are some additional songs that didn't stand out to me back then and have now been added to my favorites list. An indication of how my taste in music has evolved and expanded. Those albums must have been influential in the course my taste in music initially took. So, so much music has entered my ears and my brain in the decades that have passed since then. Some aspects of how my brain responds to music remain similar. Some have changed.

In the '90s, I don't remember being aware of the term "shoegaze"; as an adult, I became a fan of the genre, but never realized until revisiting their albums that Oasis had basically done a shoegaze song and a really good one at that, "Columbia," on their debut album, and that song is now one of my favorites by the band.

It's kind of staggering to think about how much I know about music now in comparison to how little I knew when I first got into Oasis. But I knew when I heard their music that I liked it a lot. And hey, I still do!

Thankfully, as we exited the stadium, we found that departing crowds were permitted to go the way that Google Maps had incorrectly suggested that we'd be entering, so it didn't take a ridiculously long time to get back to the train. Also thankfully, it was no longer raining when we rode our bikes through the cool night from the train back to our Airbnb, where a sleeping W awaited us.

Oh, but then she woke up when I was going to bed and took a long time to fall back asleep. The Erin and Jeff experience, indeed.

First family vacation!

The week before Memorial Day, Erin, W, and I went on our first real family vacation!

Well, we'd previously spent a week in Lake Placid in October, but with my parents joining us - and thus able to babysit W - so this was indeed a more "real" family vacation experience. Just Erin and me with our child. A whole new experience for all three of us. And it was a great experience.

We spent most of the week in Virginia, in Shenandoah National Park and then heading down the Blue Ridge Parkway before staying in a yurt near the charming town of Floyd. The trip started, though, with a stop in Pittsburgh for an important concert. Rather than recounting every part of the trip in detail, I wanted to write about two specific things that rank as two of the highlights of my year: seeing Pearl Jam live for the first time in 15 years, and going hiking as a family.

Pearl Jam

Pearl Jam were my favorite band in high school and college, and although I've since mostly moved on to listening to other music, they remain an important part of my life, as well as one of the best live bands I've seen. Somehow, though, I had gone 15 years without seeing them live, after concerts in 2003, 2006, and 2010 that were all among the best I've ever attended.

2010 was the last time they played in Cleveland, and their tours in the years since became much more limited, but after the show Erin and I attended on May 18 at PPG Paints Arena in downtown Pittsburgh, I feel very foolish for not having traveled to see them in the intervening years.

How, one might wonder, did we pull off going to an out-of-town Pearl Jam concert on a trip with a baby? Well, that's a story in itself!

I'd expressed an interest in going to the show for some time, but had felt uncertain due to the very expensive (resale) ticket price. I guess eventually I just had to remind myself, if I have a good chance to see one of my favorite bands live, I'm not going to regret going, no matter how much it costs. And that ended up being even more true than I'd anticipated.

It turned out that a good high school friend of Erin lives in the Pittsburgh area, and his wife works at a daycare, and a coworker of the wife was able to babysit. Convoluted? Perhaps, but leaving W with someone who (1) takes care of small children as her job and (2) was personally vouched for by the wife of Erin's friend seemed safe.

It also turned out that the house where W would be spending the evening was a ways away from downtown Pittsburgh, basically in the middle of nowhere. We got a hotel in between the two locations, and after going out for an early dinner with W (during which she drummed on metal plates as Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark" played over the restaurant's sound system!), we drove to drop her off.

A very interesting thing I observed during the drive: as we came around a turn on a winding country road, I saw a turkey vulture in the road chowing down on a dead groundhog. Another groundhog, this one still alive, was at the side of the road, apparently watching. The vulture flew away and the live groundhog scampered off as we drove past.

After dropping W off, we drove back the same way. The vulture was back - and so was the groundhog. I suspect it must have been mourning its companion.

Animal behavior never ceases to fascinate.

On to the show.

We parked in a garage close to a half mile from the arena and got to our seats in time to see most of the opening set played by Australian band Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers. Those young ladies (the band has been around for 10 years but the members were 15-year-old high school students when they started it) could rock, and I really enjoyed their set. What an honor to be chosen by Pearl Jam to open for them, and I think it's very cool of Eddie Vedder and co. to have given them the opportunity.

I was obsessed with Pearl Jam from the ages of, oh, about 16 through 22. Although I continued to like them a lot, and never ceased to be aware that I'd been obsessed with them during a formative time in my life, I think in a way I forgot just how much I'd loved them.

The opening notes of Ten deep cut "Garden" filling the arena as Pearl Jam started their set quickly brought all that back.

Although not recognizable to most of the general public like "Alive," "Even Flow," "Jeremy," or "Black" are, "Garden" was a song I always really loved when I was a teenager listening to Pearl Jam's iconic debut album. It was a song I hadn't previously seen performed live, and one that doesn't get played all that often.

A really great thing about Pearl Jam concerts, and a thing that sets their shows apart from those of any other band I know, is that they vary their setlists so much from show to show, meaning that you never know what you might hear and that each individual concert really feels like a unique and significant event.

To wit, they had played another show in Pittsburgh two days prior (in retrospect, I really wish I could have attended both), and among the 26 songs played on night one and 27 songs on night two, there was only a five song overlap. This is typical for Pearl Jam. Other bands I've seen over the years (and there are a lot!) generally range from playing the same set every night of a tour to playing a lot of the same songs while varying a handful of songs from night to night. No other band I'm into does it like Pearl Jam.

And although I've complained about the paucity of shows the band has played in recent years, I have to give them credit: playing such different setlists from night to night on a tour has to take so much more work than playing mostly the same set of songs every night with a few changes, and it's really remarkable for Pearl Jam to keep doing this so far into their career and with such a huge catalog from which to draw.

 

Erin, more of a casual fan, had some interesting comments on the reactions of the audience to the performance. She mentioned watching how people would respond upon hearing the intro to a favorite song they hadn't expected to hear. As a diehard fan, this experience truly is an amazing thing about these shows. She also said that looking out across the packed arena and seeing how into the music everyone was, it almost felt like watching a cult. I think there's some truth in that. A concert like this can be very much akin to a religious experience. But unlike most cults, this is a good thing. 

There were a number of songs I was especially thrilled to hear, including long time favorites of mine like "Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town" (a song I was kind of obsessed with about 25 years ago), "Immortality," and the ever familiar "Alive" (Mike McCready's live guitar solo is truly a thing to behold).

 

One that took me by surprise for how excited it made me was "Insignificance" from underrated 2000 album Binaural, which might be the Pearl Jam album that for me is most tied to a particular time in my life. 

And one song that I was not at all expecting to hear and that really brought on the emotions was "Hunger Strike" by Temple of the Dog. Had I realized ahead of time that the show fell on the anniversary of Soundgarden/Temple frontman Chris Cornell's death, I guess it wouldn't have been surprising.

In November 2016, I went to Philadelphia to see the first show of the first, and only, Temple of the Dog tour, commemorating the 25th anniversary of the grunge supergroup's one album. It was an astonishing performance. "Hunger Strike," the band's biggest hit, features Eddie Vedder sharing lead vocals with Cornell, but Vedder wasn't present for that 2016 show. The rest of the members of Pearl Jam, who were also the rest of the members (along with Cornell) of Temple, were all on the stage that night. Cornell's death the following May hit me harder than any other celebrity death has - I'd loved his music for most of my life.

Eight and a half years after that Temple show at which Chris Cornell, backed by Mike McCready, Stone Gossard, Jeff Ament, and Matt Cameron, sang those familiar "Hunger Strike" vocals but Eddie Vedder was absent, I got to see Eddie Vedder, backed by Mike McCready, Stone Gossard, Jeff Ament, and Matt Cameron, sing "Hunger Strike." It felt like a full circle moment and like a completion of something that had been unfinished. And given events of my life over the course of those years, that felt fitting.

This was the last show of Pearl Jam's tour, and thus they really delivered by playing an extra long set, clocking in at 2 hours and 40 minutes and ending at 11:40 pm. Perhaps not ideal when you have a lengthy drive into the country to pick up a nine-month-old from the babysitter's ahead of you, but man, was it worth it for me. It was such an epic experience and absolutely one of the best concerts I've ever seen.

It was later announced that long-time Pearl Jam drummer Matt Cameron (who'd been with the band since 1998 after they'd gone through four different drummers in their first eight years of existence) was leaving the band. Thus, this show had marked the final concert of the "Pearl Jam with Matt Cameron" era, making it an even more momentous occasion and making me even more glad I'd attended.

My dad told me once that one of his only regrets in life was not seeing Springsteen live when he was younger, and those are words I'll always remember. This concert was a reminder, when you get a chance to see a band that's really important to you live, you shouldn't pass it up.

And now moving from one really amazing experience to another...

Hiking as a family

Going on hikes together has been a big part of my and Erin's relationship from the start. On our second date, we went on a 4.7 mile hike in Cuyahoga Valley National Park. We got engaged on a 12 mile hike in the Adirondacks. The day after we got married, we went on a 10 mile hike in Yosemite.

Naturally, we were greatly anticipating going hiking with W, and hoping that she'd be amenable to doing it as a baby.

Early in life, she was very resistant to our attempts to get her in a wearable baby carrier, causing some worries that family hiking was something we'd have to wait quite a while to do. We gave up on the carrier for months because she became so angry whenever we put her in it.

Good friends had kindly provided an Osprey hiking backpack with baby carrier for us to use with W in our hiking endeavors. Our first practice run was on a cold winter day when we went to the Shaker Lakes Nature Center for a short hike on snowy trails. W seemed okay but not thrilled at first, then started crying, then fell asleep. Not an inspiring outcome, but it was very cold.

We took W in the hiking backpack one other time before our vacation, on a longer but still fairly short hike with some friends at a metro park. She still seemed to be trying to make sense of it all, but by the end seemed to be getting into it more.

Our first real hike as a family? It was a big jump up from those practice runs.

The day after the Pearl Jam concert, on our drive from Pittsburgh to Shenandoah, we stopped in the George Washington National Forest to hike Big Schloss, a peak on the border of West Virginia and Virginia. It's about a 4.5 mile round trip with a total elevation gain of about 1100 feet. The bulk of that comes in the first 0.8 miles - 600 feet of climbing before the trail levels out and follows a ridge to the peak.

 

It's a really cool hike, one Erin had done before and I'm glad she suggested it; the scenery as you traverse the ridge and then reach the summit was really gorgeous and also different from any other hike I've done.

A 600 foot climb over the course of 0.8 miles is pretty steep hiking, but I've done worse, and I've done much lengthier stretches that were at least that steep on other hikes. I had definitely not, however, done anything like it while carrying a baby on my back. Coming at the very start of our very first real hike with W, it was quite an introduction to hiking with a baby!

In fact, although the length and elevation profile of this hike were fairly modest by my normal standards, this was, no exaggeration, the most strenuous and physically taxing hike I've ever done. I've done all sorts of extremely strenuous distance running and cycling over the course of my life, but hiking? Hiking had never felt like this. My legs felt so heavy and I found myself basically gasping for air at points.

And you know what? It was great!

I've always found great satisfaction in challenging myself physically, testing my limits. It's something that I haven't done as much in recent years, not for lack of desire, but because my joints could no longer handle that intensity of running or even cycling. But now I found that simply walking up a mountain while carrying W on my back provided a great challenge. An unexpected benefit of parenthood.

The more important thing, of course, was whether W liked it. And she did - she seemed to love it! She babbled excitedly, looking around at the scenery and taking it all in. She also caught a couple naps over the course of the hike (one on the way up, one on the way down), looking so precious as she rested the side of her head on her little hand in the carrier.

At the top, we crossed a cool wooden bridge and reached some rocks with just breathtaking views of the surrounding mountains where we got to hang out for a little while, just the three of us, our little family.

 

On subsequent mountain hikes we've let W out of the carrier at summits, but on this particular one that seemed questionable so we kept her in the carrier. We enjoyed a nice snack, including some cheese, a W favorite.

The descent was, of course, not nearly as physically taxing, but I did find I had to be extra careful descending steep sections of trail while being so top heavy. I've since picked up a hiking pole and have been very glad to have it.

At the end of the hike I took the backpack off, set it on the ground, and looked down at W, and she looked back up at me with just the most delightful smile on her sweet little face. She looked so happy - and I felt so happy. Hiking in the mountains with my wife and daughter and discovering that my daughter enjoyed it so much was probably one of the most magical things I've ever experienced.

We did several more hikes that week, and having found how much she liked it, W became visibly excited when I'd put her in the hiking backpack and lift it up off the ground. It was just so great.

A recent Adirondacks vacation brought a lot more family hiking, and W has continued to love it. I'm looking forward to the years ahead, as she grows first into a toddler who'll provide an even greater challenge for me to carry, and then into a child who can tackle the trails herself with increasing skill and speed, just as I did in my youth. And I'll always remember Big Schloss, our first family hike on our first family vacation. 

Live through this and you won't look back

I've loved music for pretty much my whole life, but 2005 was the year I really became a Music Fan, the year that I started going to concerts all the time and music became one of my main obsessions. And I've loved many, many albums over the course of my life, some from before that era (that set being dominated by Pearl Jam) and countless in the years since, but there will always be a special place in my heart for albums that I fell in love with in the early days of me being a Music Fan. Albums like Rock and Roll Part Three by Ozma, Chutes Too Narrow by the Shins, Let Go by Nada Surf, and Picaresque by The Decemberists. Although not quite as significant in my life, Set Yourself on Fire by Montreal-based indie pop troupe Stars is definitely another such album, so I was very excited when I saw the album's twentieth anniversary tour would be hitting the Beachland Ballroom on February 13.

 

Erin and I went (shout-out to our friends who tag team babysat when our original babysitting plans fell through, making it possible for us to attend) and it was a great show! It was also a timely show, which I'll get to in a bit.

Making this show extra special for me was that, in my 19+ years of being a Stars fan, I'd only previously seen the band live once, also at the Beachland, and that was way back on March 31, 2008. Yes, someone who was born on the day I first saw Stars live would be able to drive by the second time I saw Stars live. Scary, huh? Fun fact (to me, at least), this was a new record for the longest gap between consecutive instances of me seeing a band live, eclipsing the previous record held by Ozma (July 2007 to December 2019, also a 20th anniversary album show).

A really great thing about being a music lover, and a thing that's really cool because you don't know it when you first become a music lover and then you become more and more aware of it the farther into life you get, is that listening to a certain beloved song or album can transport you to a time in your past when you were listening to the same music. Perhaps when you first heard it, or when you were listening to it a lot, or a particularly memorable instance of you hearing it. And the more music you accumulate in your brain over the years, the more opportunities there are for this to happen.

Set Yourself on Fire takes me back to my first year of grad school. Back to a time when I was working in the same lab where I now work, with the love of my life (sea slugs)*, but when my life was otherwise completely and staggeringly different, and there's no way the me of then could have imagined the events between then and now.

*this is an inside joke, the first of many (well, of several) in this post

Thursday's show started out with a lovely set by Toronto singer-songwriter Lydia Persaud, whose powerful voice filled the room. Her soulful songs seemed to command the attention of most of the audience; it's always nice when you don't encounter too much of a notoriously chatty concert crowd, especially during an opener's set.

Persaud was accompanied by guitarist Christine Bougie, who it turned out is her partner. Erin almost instantly recognized Bougie as having been part of the Weather Station's backing band at shows we saw in Toronto in December 2023. I'm frequently in awe of Erin's memory.

 

Not surprisingly, the musicians, both opener and headliner, commented on the horrifying events currently unfolding in the United States. This wasn't the first time I've seen a Canadian artist say something about how they really like Americans and really like playing here and express their sympathy and worry about what's happening to our country. It seems appropriate, so I'll just quote myself from when I wrote about another Weather Station show in September 2021:

There was another thing that [Tamara] Lindeman said during the show that really struck me, in a sad way. She said that it was good to be back in America. She noted that the news from here is "intense" (no kidding!), but whenever she actually comes here, it's really nice. It's a nice place, she said, "and it always will be."

The way she said "and it always will be"... it was one of those things where you say something and the words you use express certainty, but you don't actually feel certain, you actually are just hoping that it will be true.

These really are scary times. And as I drove home, I was thinking about how, when I was a kid, I was told all this stuff about the USA being the greatest country in the world, and a lot of it was BS, but I do think that back then, it was at least generally the case that this country was admired by people in other countries. Nowadays, people in other countries feel bad for us. And for very good reasons! I've been aware of this before, but Lindeman's words really drove it home for me. And it did make me feel sad.

Good lord, how I wish times now were merely as scary as they were in September 2021.

Persaud and Bougie were collecting donations at the merch table for TransOhio and I joined a lot of other audience members chipping in on our way out of the venue.

Set Yourself on Fire is an album that's catchy and beautiful and at times dark but more than that hopeful. Stars are a very earnest band, so much so that when I was a young Jeff, I think I probably felt a little self-conscious about liking some of their especially earnest-sounding songs. I think I'm past that now. Live, they came across as very endearing. The flower arrangement decorating the drumset definitely fit their vibe.

The album begins in a memorable way, the authoritatively declared spoken words "When there is nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire" seguing into the opening notes of "Your Ex-Lover is Dead." Stars' set started the same way, a recording of those familiar words playing, and then the music kicked in and we were off!

There were several points during the show with great audience sing-alongs, and the outro of the opening song was one, with Torquil Campbell urging the crowd to join in singing the repeating line "Live through this and you won't look back." The song is about a breakup, but the words "live through this" seemed to carry an extra sense of urgency in light of, well... *gestures in the general direction of everything* this.

The way the bouncy synth intro of third song "Ageless Beauty" enters on the heels of the dreamy ending of title and second track "Set Yourself on Fire" is one of those perfect moments in music. "Ageless Beauty" is such an infectious song. I was obsessed with the song for a while when I first got the album, and every time I hear it it's easy to understand that obsession. It was a thrill to see live. Amy Millan's vocals really shone. As co-lead vocalists, Campbell and Millan are each indispensable to the Stars sound, and the way their voices played off each other, sometimes within and sometimes between songs, was great to experience up close.

One thing about this album is that it's inextricably linked to an era of time not just in my own life but also in history. Several songs are directly about or seem at least partly inspired by the Iraq War, and it's unsettling to look back on the years of the George W. Bush administration and think about how it seemed like things couldn't get much worse in our country, and then contrast that with what's happening now.

(To be fair, I guess I should mention that the Bush administration was worse for the people of Iraq.)

The lines "Keep watching the sky/'Cause you might get lucky again" from "He Lied About Death" are an obvious 9/11 reference. Indeed, Bush did greatly benefit from the horrific events of that day. Hearing those lines today, though, I can't help but think about how the sky-high approval ratings he experienced in the aftermath of the attacks (peaking around 90%!) could never under any circumstances happen for any American president in our modern hyper-polarized political climate. And yeah, in retrospect I feel silly for having temporarily approved of the job Bush was doing, but the loss of even the possibility of having real national unity in the wake of immense tragedy (see, for example, the conspiracy theories that rapidly spread after the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Helene last year) is just so sad.

There were several small lyric alterations in response to current events. The line "We're gonna chase the demons out of town" in "Soft Revolution" became "We're gonna chase the Nazis out of town."

The liner notes of Set Yourself on Fire, now twenty years old, include the words, "by the time you hear this the world might be ending, or beginning... whatever happens, BURN... goodbye fascists everywhere..." Maybe it's worth reflecting on how the epithet "fascist" has so often been hurled at various people, many of whom were really bad in various ways, but who weren't really fascists. And now here we are, with actual fascists in charge. Like, Elon Musk was literally doing Sieg Heils at the inauguration.

This isn't fun material for a review of a mostly very fun concert, but this is the world in which we live!

The last song of the album, "Calendar Girl," is another one I really love, and it ends the album on a beautiful and hopeful note. Interestingly, I remember long, long ago really loving the lines, "But I can't live forever/I can't always be/One day I'll be sand on a beach by the sea." Interestingly, because that was many years before I felt a strong personal connection to songs grappling with mortality (see: most of Typhoon's discography). The live performance of the song was an acoustic audience sing-along with the band bringing out a trombone and French horn to add to the saxophone that had been nicely utilized through most of the concert. The band and audience together singing "I'm alive... I'm alive..." was really a lovely way to end the main set, another of those special moments that can only exist when you get a band in a room with a group of people who love their music.

I've been seeing more and more of these album anniversary shows in recent years. It seems to be a trend, and it's a trend I like! Seeing a band play a career highlight album front to back and then follow it up with a sort of abbreviated greatest hits selection from the rest of their catalog is a great way to spend an evening. After the thirteen songs of Set Yourself on Fire, Stars ended up playing nine additional songs, and while there are certainly other songs of theirs I wish had been included, every one of the songs was great to experience. I was especially glad to hear "Elevator Love Letter" and "Dead Hearts." At times, I marveled at Millan's ability to still hit the high notes in her songs. Campbell gave an amusing reaction when he, on the other hand, wasn't quite able to in "The Ghost of Genova Heights" and then settled for singing that section at a lower pitch.

Millan wasn't present on stage during that song, then reappeared for encore closer "No One is Lost" wearing a rad "Ageless Beauty" jacket - a fun way to close out the show.

 

Erin hadn't really been familiar with the music of Stars previously, but she "did her Stars homework" before the show and ended up really liking it. It was a great show, and it was great that we could enjoy it together. I feel more and more that music is a fundamental and nearly essential part of human life, and times like these make it all the more apparent.

Life continues to be a roller coaster

Note: I started writing this post about two years ago. Obviously, a lot has happened since then. Life has been very busy. I've been meaning to finish writing this the whole time but various things have gotten in the way. Now I'm finally taking the time to do it. I'm in a very different place in life now than I was when I started writing it, which I'm sure I'll reflect on at the end.

Now, picking up from where I started writing in early 2023...

2022 was, without a doubt, one of the strangest and most difficult years of my life.

When I was in seventh grade, I wrote an autobiography for a school assignment, and its title was Life is a Roller Coaster, a nod to my passionate enthusiasm for the amusement park thrill rides. I wrote a blog post about this several years ago, and near its conclusion, made this observation: "Life is a roller coaster. I'm struck by the fact that when I used that phrase as the title of my seventh grade autobiography, I had no real idea of what was signified by that comparison. I had no idea what a roller coaster my life would be."

Certainly, one could say that the phrase "life is a roller coaster" describes my life more than the average person's. Certainly, one could also say that that was not true during my childhood, when I gave that title to my autobiography. It was an eerie bit of foreshadowing, in retrospect.

In 2022, the Jeff's life as a roller coaster analogy reached new heights. (Heh. I couldn't resist.)

And oddly enough, on one of the most pivotal days of that year, roller coasters appeared in both the metaphorical sense and the literal sense.

On August 21, 2022, I was in New York City and as part of my trip I took the subway to Coney Island in Brooklyn, primarily to ride arguably the most famous roller coaster in the world, the Cyclone. Just as odd was that this was the second time in the last few years that I found myself at Coney Island and also at a major turning point in my life. In fact, thanks mainly to COVID, that previous Coney Island trip in May 2019 was the previous most recent time I'd ridden a roller coaster.

Before I describe the events of August 2022, though, I have to go back to August 2021.

Every year in August, my family takes a vacation to Lake Placid, New York, in the Adirondack Mountains. It's a tradition I cherish. I love it there. I love the scenery and the time with family and the chance to get away from normal life but perhaps most of all I love all the great outdoor activities - hiking and biking and kayaking and swimming. At the beginning of our August 2021 vacation I felt so exhilarated because I was at my best physical fitness level in over a decade.

Something that must be understood if you want to really understand who I am as a person is how central my athletic pursuits have been to my sense of self. Growing up, I probably stood out most to my peers for my academic achievements, but it was far more important to me to be a good cross country and track runner. That was what gave me real feelings of accomplishment. There's just something about pushing one's body to its physical limits and then experiencing the steady improvement as you do that continuously over a period of time that nothing else could match for me. If you asked me in high school or college how I identified myself, the biggest part of the answer would have been as a runner.

It's been many years since I've been able to do any substantial amount of running at all, due to injuries, and this has not been easy for me, but with time, I've been able to move on. Other athletic pursuits have continued to be very important to me.

Another thing that has been central to my life, unfortunately, is my struggles with chronic pain. I can happily say that in recent years I've been doing much better than I had been for most of my life going all the way back to high school. It's not something that I expect will ever completely go away, though.

Something about those myriad chronic pain issues is that they can generally be divided into two bins: pain issues that are caused by anything other than sports injuries, and pain issues that are caused by sports injuries. And the thing is, at any given time there have generally been one or two out of a big grab bag of pain issues that are mainly bothering me, and if what's mainly bothering me is pain not caused by sports injuries, then one of the best remedies for the pain is invariably doing a whole lot of physical activity. But then if I switch to being mainly bothered by pain caused by sports injuries (which might, of course, be brought on by, well, doing a whole lot of physical activity), suddenly doing all that activity makes me feel worse instead of better.

This has led to repeated cycling between times when I was super physically active for a while and times when I wasn't very active, not because I didn't want to be but because of how my body was feeling. Another way my life has been like a roller coaster.

From the spring of 2020 to the summer of 2021 something remarkable happened. For the first time since, really, I was 20 years old, I had a long stretch of time where I felt basically not limited by pain from doing all the physical activity I wanted. Well, with a caveat, I still couldn't run much at all. But cycling, riding my road and mountain bikes, had long ago replaced running as my main form of exercise. Although cycling is easier on my hip and ankles than running is, for most of my post-running career I still felt my body was placing limitations on how much I could do. And then, somehow, it just no longer felt that way.

2020 was such a weird time. I don't have to remind anyone of that. I was so worried about the pandemic and about so much else. But I was also very lucky to suddenly be working from home and able to make my own schedule and there were so many times that summer I just took off on one of my bikes in the afternoon and enjoyed being alive and being outdoors and being healthy and feeling the wind in my face and the air going in and out of my lungs.

As I rode more and more, I got stronger and stronger. I tracked my results on Strava and it started to feel like my old running days. I was doubtful at first that it would last. Always in the past, going back to age 20, there would be some setback and I would have to take time off and lose that fitness. So I tried not to push too hard. But that setback kept not coming. I don't know when exactly it happened, but at some point I started to think, maybe this time was different? Maybe a setback wasn't going to come? Maybe I'd be able to keep getting better at cycling for years and years to come?

It almost seems like a dream now. But it was real and it was amazing.

By the middle of summer 2021 I found that I was in the best shape I had been since I fractured my pelvis in a cycling accident in May 2010. Age 38, and able to ride my bike faster and farther than at any time since before I turned 27. It was so exhilarating.

Taking into account both my fitness and that I was able to do all those rides with a remarkably low level of pain by my standards, I genuinely think that in the summer of 2021 I felt the best physically that I had in 18 years. It's staggering to think about, now that I'm writing it out like this.

(That finishes what I had written in early 2023. Huh, I thought I had gotten farther than that. Oh well.)

But then, that August, as the trip to Lake Placid approached, I started to feel a weird pain in my feet. It felt like a pretty minor issue at first. An unfortunate thing about pain is that there are all sorts of things that feel like minor issues and really are minor issues and will go away on their own, and then there are things that will become major issues, and there's no way to tell them apart at first. As usual, going to Lake Placid, I didn't want to miss out on all the great cycling and hiking I could do there (there's just so much to do, and so little time for it!), so I pushed through the pain. This was probably a mistake in retrospect, but I also suspect that it was already too late, and I was already in for a bad time.

On one of my first days in Lake Placid that year, I set out on a ride on my road bike. It was a ride I'd done once before, in 2009. 2009 was the year when I reached the best physical fitness of my entire life. Thanks to the double whammy of horrible, long-lasting ankle tendinitis brought on by training for a marathon that fall and then the pelvic fracture when I crashed my bike the following spring, I had never since reached anywhere near that level of fitness.

This ride was a 36.7 mile loop with over 2600 feet of climbing within it, easily the hilliest ride I've done in my life. I titled my August 10, 2021 activity on Strava "The 2009 loop." On August 10, 2009, exactly 12 years earlier, I'd averaged 18.7 mph on the ride (two months and one day later, incidentally, I would come in second place in the first and only marathon I've ever run). In 2021 I averaged 18.2 mph. I was tantalizingly close to being in the best shape - on a bike, at least - that I'd ever been in.

I remember well how I felt upon completing that ride. Exhausted, but also exhilarated, and full of endorphins, and so powerful. It was an incredible feeling. It felt like I was on top of the world.

It wasn't long after that I felt like everything was falling apart.

(An odd thing about the life as a roller coaster metaphor is that on an actual roller coaster, the downhill parts are the most fun.)

I had a great time on the 2021 Lake Placid trip and when I returned home I kept up with my busy training schedule, getting out on one or the other of my bikes most days and continuing to set numerous Strava segment PRs. But it was starting to feel like that pain in my feet was not just a minor issue. It was sticking around and growing worse and then in mid-September it kind of suddenly got really bad and I realized, damn, this is a problem, I have to take things easy for a while.

This didn't lead to an immediate improvement. In fact, at first the pain just seemed to get worse. I recognized what was happening because I'd experienced it before. Being in a lot of pain feels really bad. Not being able to ride my bike very much when riding my bike had become my favorite thing to do? Also a really bad feeling. That added up to me being depressed. If I was struggling with my mental health for other reasons, riding my bike would be the best treatment. Now riding my bike made my pain worse. Maybe just going for a nice walk? That also seemed to make my pain worse.

All in all, a recipe for deepening depression.

Just as this was happening, my at-the-time girlfriend was falling into a bad period of mental health herself - and as a result, was withdrawing into herself and largely pushing other people away from her. This meant that suddenly, just when I really needed a lot of emotional support, I was hardly ever seeing the one person I had regularly spent time with since the pandemic started.

I don't know if I really blame her for it even now. She was in a very bad place and I don't know how much control she had over how she reacted. But it was definitely a sign that a relationship that had at first seemed great actually had serious compatibility issues.

Anyway, the whole thing really sucked.

And then, in the ensuing months, a bunch of really, really crazy stuff happened. I don't feel like spending time on it in this post. If you know, you know.

Fast forward to August 2022. At the start of the Lake Placid trip, in contrast to the previous year, I was in a horrible place. I think it was obvious to my parents when I showed up at the house they always rent. I'd spent the summer trying to salvage a relationship that should have been left for dead and it was really one of the bleakest periods of time in my life because something that had once made me so happy now only made me incredibly sad. I was also still not feeling great physically - the pain that started the previous summer had improved, but was still very much present, and I continued to feel limited in what I could do.

My spirits did rise considerably over the course of the two weeks on vacation. It was nice to spend time with my family, and I did enjoy a lot of outdoor activities, albeit on a limited basis compared to the previous year. At the end of the trip, rather than driving back to Cleveland as I normally would, I drove to New York City for a two-night stay (at a hotel in Jersey City) centered around seeing Sharon Van Etten, Angel Olsen, and Julien Baker at the last stop of their Wild Hearts tour, at SummerStage in Central Park.

Although the two weeks in Lake Placid had helped my mood considerably, it plummeted again when I got to Jersey City. Spending time with my family and especially my parents (the last few days in Lake Placid, after both my siblings had departed, was the longest period of Jeff and parents with no one else around that had happened since I became a big brother at age 2) had helped me feel better, but now I was alone again. Alone, again, for a trip to a concert that I'd originally planned to attend with someone else. Alone, thinking about all the previous times I'd been in similar situations - on trips to see concerts for which I'd purchased two tickets and then, for one reason or another, had ended up going alone. Toronto in September 2013 to see Ohbijou. Denver in June 2015 to see Belle and Sebastian. Portland, Maine in December 2021 to see Weakened Friends. Denver again in June 2022 to see Andrew Bird. And now New York.

I actually often really enjoy going on trips like that by myself. Sometimes I plan them as solo trips. But I was getting tired of having planned trips for two turn into solo trips.

I was getting tired of being alone, and being alone that evening left me with little to distract me from contemplating the horrible trainwreck my love life had turned into, and feeling miserable about it.

I did go to Liberty State Park along the water in Jersey City and it was a lovely evening with a beautiful sunset and great views of the NYC skyline. One thing I saw while there was a public wedding proposal. Actually, I noticed that some props were being set up for a public wedding proposal, and I hung around for quite a while (along with some other curious onlookers) to see the proposal take place. This was an interesting decision on my part, looking back. It was a cute thing to witness, but it was also very much a reminder of my own problems.

The next day, August 21, 2022, was a day like no other I've lived. In the roller coaster of life, there are some dramatic ups and downs. Perhaps never before have I experienced such dramatic ups and downs in a single day as I did on that day.

That evening was the concert in Central Park. My plan for the day was to travel by train from Jersey City to Coney Island, spend some time there, and then get on the train again and head to Central Park to get to the concert close to when the gates opened.

That morning I felt just as glum as the previous evening. In addition to being alone, another thing that was getting me down was that, thanks to me (predictably) pushing perhaps harder than I should have on outdoor activities in Lake Placid, my feet and ankles were again really bothering me a lot, and with my planned day including spending a lot of time on my feet, I was very worried that this would make it hard to enjoy myself - especially at the concert! Which would really suck, if that did happen.

Something I've realized about pain is that if you are thinking about and worrying about something hurting in a particular situation, there's a good chance that just thinking about it will make it hurt more.

It was about an hour and a half train ride from Jersey City to Coney Island including one transfer. On the train, I was listening to music, looking out the windows at the city scenery, and worrying about whether I'd be able to enjoy what should by all rights have been a very exciting day ahead of me.

And then something remarkable happened.

The Cyclone roller coaster came into view through the train windows, and my mood instantly transformed.

I've loved roller coasters since childhood. I remember how incredibly excited I felt about going to Cedar Point as a kid, looking out the car window at the coasters looming in the distance. As an adult, riding roller coasters stopped being something I do frequently... but that feeling of excitement never went away. An anticipatory feeling that can also be stirred in me by going to see one of my very favorite bands in concert, but by few other things in my adult life. "Like a kid on Christmas morning" is a common descriptor for the feeling.

And yes, sitting in that train car, where moments before I'd felt worried and sad, upon seeing the Cyclone out the window I suddenly felt like a kid on Christmas morning.

Minutes later I departed the train, walked the short walk to the famous Coney Island amusement park, and quickly obtained a card to pay for rides and made my way to the queue for the Cyclone.

As a young roller coaster fanatic in the 1990s, I'd read on the Internet about how this ride, built in 1927, remained one of the most thrilling in the world, and was a destination for any diehard coaster enthusiast. I'd always wanted to ride it but never got around to it until 2019, and it had lived up to the expectations that I'd carried with me (dormant and not thought of for many of those years) since childhood. There's just something about these old wooden roller coasters that exhilarates me in a way that few fancy modern rides can quite match. Far too few of them remain with us, and thank goodness that the Cyclone, regarded since its debut nearly a century ago as one of the best, is one.

Seeing the Cyclone had a profound effect on how I felt that day. Riding the Cyclone had an even more profound effect.

The wait for the ride was short. This is kind of amazing. One of the most important roller coasters in history, and still arguably one of the best in the world, on a hot summer weekend day. The Millennium Force at Cedar Point, one of the only roller coasters I like at least as much as I like the Cyclone, surely had hour-long waits that day. I think most people don't appreciate what they have with these classic wooden coasters, but hey, I'm not complaining about the short queues that result from this lack of appreciation.

I boarded the train, we exited the station and started up the lift hill, and that kid on Christmas morning feeling intensified.

As I mentioned, I'd been experiencing a lot of pain in my lower extremities, and was very worried about how I'd hold up in a day that would include a lot of time on my feet, something that invariably made such pain worse. I was especially worried about the concert that evening.

The train crested the lift hill, I let out a whoop of delight as we plunged downward, and I forgot about the pain.

This is normal. Pain has a huge mental component, and one of the best ways to reduce pain is to be distracted from it. A physical therapist of mine once used the example that if you were crossing the street and stepped on something sharp that went into your foot, you'd be in a lot of pain. But if a large truck were bearing down on you when this happened and you had to scramble to avoid being run over, in that moment you wouldn't even notice the pain from stepping on something sharp.

The ride was just as intense and fun as I remembered - so many sudden drops and turns and exhilarating g-forces and "headchopper" moments where you feel like you have to duck to avoid the coaster's structure (of course you don't really need to, but it looks this way) and for those two minutes I wasn't aware of that physical pain that had been bothering me so much earlier that morning, and that wasn't surprising, but what was surprising was this: for the entire rest of the day, the pain was at a dramatically lower level than it had been before I stepped into that roller coaster train.

It really felt like a magic spell had been cast over me!

My mood, naturally, was also much improved from where it had been earlier that morning and especially how it had been the previous evening. As you can see, I felt quite exuberant on the ride, and this feeling lingered:

(I'm wearing my beloved Julien Baker t-shirt in this picture, by the way.)

I spent a couple hours at Coney Island, enjoying a few more rides on the Cyclone, a couple of rides on newer and far inferior but still enjoyable coasters, a little walk on the beach, and a chili cheese dog and fries from Nathan's.

The last thing I did at Coney Island, of course, was one last ride on the Cyclone, and then I walked back to the train station and boarded the train for another nearly hour and a half ride to Central Park. My spirits were much higher than they'd been when I'd boarded the train that morning.

I arrived at the Park with plenty of time to spare, and spent a little time walking around, and also grabbed a (mediocre) pretzel to eat before heading to the venue. I'd heard about SummerStage at Central Park before but had never been there. I was surprised when I got in because I'd been expecting something bigger. It was a really nice setting for an outdoor concert on a good day for one. Before finding a spot close to the stage, I went to the merch table and bought this tote bag, not knowing at the time just how accurate it would be:

The show started early in the evening with a short set by opener Quinn Christopherson, which I enjoyed but which was basically a distraction before the three performers who I could hardly believe I'd all get to see in one night: Julien Baker, Angel Olsen, and Sharon Van Etten. Three women who have all made music I love and cherish and three women who had each previously played live shows tied to significant moments and memories in my life.

Baker was the first of the three to play. She's blown me away with her live performances every time I've gotten the privilege to see her (this was the fifth in person, plus one of my favorite streamed shows of the pandemic era), going back to the first time in July 2016 when this tiny young woman whose music I'd never heard before stepped onto the stage of Mr. Smalls in Millvale, PA to play an opening set for Daughter and left me utterly in awe with her heartwrenchingly beautiful music. The only thing I wished were different about this show would have been longer sets, and Baker's was especially short, but she made the most of the limited time. The set mostly consisted of songs from 2021 album Little Oblivions, one of my favorite albums of the 2020s.

 

Baker always brings such intensity to her performances and it's a marvel to see and hear. It's hard to believe that that voice emerges from the lungs of such a physically small person.

This was the final show of the Wild Hearts tour. Near the end of Baker's last song "Ziptie," numerous members of the tour crew and other bands (including Sharon Van Etten herself) emerged onto the stage to rock out to the extended outro, and it was a delight to see - especially because Baker herself seemed so delighted!

It was a joyous moment. I'd been riding an emotional high for much of the day, pretty much since I'd arrived at Coney Island, a gigantic contrast to how I'd felt the previous evening. But now the emotional roller coaster continued. After Julien Baker came the performance by Angel Olsen.

Angel Olsen's music was inextricably linked for me to the failing relationship that was the cause of most of my emotional distress that summer. When the relationship had been good, I'd liked listening to Olsen's music. When things went downhill and I started to really doubt the relationship would work, I mostly stopped listening to Olsen's music because it just made me feel sad.

After what had been a great day to that point, when Angel Olsen stepped onto the stage to begin her set, I found myself awash in the same melancholy feeling that had consumed me for much of that summer.

Olsen had released her new album Big Time in June, but I still hadn't been able to bring myself to listen to it, which was pretty telling considering how much I'd loved her previous two albums. I'd merely watched, once, the video for title track "Big Time." The song is a really sweet love song, a happy song, which is pretty unusual in Olsen's catalog. Since it was the title track, and it was a happy love song, I had the impression that this album would be much less sad in lyrical content than most of Olsen's work.

Because I hadn't listened to her new album other than that one song, this concert was my introduction to most of the songs Olsen played that evening. She opened her set with "Dream Thing" from the new album and I stood there and watched and felt miserable. She played "Big Time" next and my misery deepened because I was absolutely not in a place where I wanted to hear Angel Olsen play a happy love song.

But then something funny happened.

The third song in the set was another new song, "Ghost On." The opening lines of the song go thusly:

Tell me how I should feel
How can this heart learn how to heal?
When should I believe the things you say?
You change your mind from day to day

And those words shot straight into my heart because they matched so well with the thoughts and feelings I'd been having about that relationship.

No, Angel Olsen's new album was not an album of happy love songs. The title track, it turned out, was an outlier.

The funny thing that happened was, I started to feel better.

It's interesting how when you're feeling sad, sometimes hearing happy music can make you feel more sad, and hearing sad music can make you feel less sad.

The haunting performance of "Ghost On" had already shaken me from my melancholy. The next song in the setlist was another I'd never heard before, "Right Now." The first line of that song?

It's time to let it go

I think I probably laughed a little to myself at that point. Okay, I see what's happening here, I thought.

 

 

The next two songs were the only songs not from Olsen's new album, "Shut Up Kiss Me" from 2016's My Woman and the title track from 2019's All Mirrors. These were songs that I loved and that I hadn't much felt like listening to for quite some time, but now I was getting into the music. Next up was another new song, "Go Home." Choice lyric?

We watched it all burn down and did nothing, nothing

Yeah, pretty much! I thought.

Olsen closed her set with yet another song I'd never heard before, "All the Good Times." She introduced the song by saying, "Y'all ever been mad before? Me too, and when I do, it's kind of funny!"

 

(This is a direct quote. There are several YouTube videos people have posted from that concert that I've repeatedly gone back to and watched.)

It's probably one of the best breakup songs I've ever heard. And whereas in earlier songs from the set, there was a line here or there that stuck out to me, in this song pretty much every single line was relatable.

 

And I guess that was exactly what I needed to hear at that moment in time.

 

After Olsen sang the lines, "Was it always so broken? If these thoughts were spoken/Would it bring us together again?", she sardonically interjected the spoken "Definitely not" and I sardonically smiled, laughed and nodded.

My mood had been completely transformed over the course of that set. And looking back on it, it's really interesting to think about what exactly happened in my mind over the course of those 45 or so minutes.

Sharon Van Etten closed out the night, and whereas Angel Olsen's set had me working through all sorts of complicated feelings, Van Etten's was just a delight. It had been eight years since I'd seen one of her concerts, so I'd been eagerly anticipating getting to finally see her again, and she did not disappoint.

Van Etten emerged on the stage dressed in a sequined top and leather pants and along with her hair and makeup, as she began her performance I couldn't help but think how simply badass she looked.

This is a screenshot from a YouTube video posted by joelrchan.

 

She just had this aura about her that felt thrilling to be near. Julien Baker's performance had been in broad daylight; the sun had gone down during Angel Olsen's. It was now fully night and the light show illuminating Sharon Van Etten's shiny outfit gave her such rock star vibes.

A highlight of her fantastic set was "Mistakes" from 2022 album We've Been Going About This All Wrong. Van Etten introduced the song by talking about how she had always felt very self conscious about dancing, until she had a child, and when she danced with her child, she no longer felt self conscious, because it didn't matter what she looked like; she loved dancing with her child!

When I make a mistake
Turns out it's great, it's great, it's great

I loved this story and I love this song. Throughout the more up tempo songs in her set, Van Etten danced exuberantly, confidently, sometimes in a silly way but always in a joyful way that was delightful to witness. Dancing is such a great thing and I sometimes think about how people who are too self conscious to do it - at a wedding, at a rock or pop concert, even in the privacy of their homes - are really missing out on a great part of the human experience.

The show, and the Wild Hearts Tour, ended with Baker and Olsen joining Van Etten on stage to play "Like I Used To," a Van Etten/Olsen collaboration that was easily one of the best songs of 2022 and that I can't believe still hasn't been released in any physical format. It was such a joy to experience and you could see the joy on the faces of all those on stage as well, which was wonderful. I marvel again and again at the power of music and the wondrous effects it has both on those performing and on those listening to it, especially in a live setting. 

Another screenshot from a joelrchan YouTube video.

As the trio soaked up the raucous applause and I enthusiastically contributed to it, I found myself thinking, Wow, that was one of the best concerts I've ever seen. Pretty remarkable that that morning I had been worried about whether I'd be able to enjoy the concert. Also pretty remarkable that partway through the concert I'd been plunged back into a deep melancholy and had again emerged from it and now felt on top of the world. It had been a roller coaster of a day and it was a day I didn't want to end!

I joined the crowds walking out of Central Park and went to a nearby subway station, but instead of heading directly back to Jersey City I first made a stop for a late dinner (having not yet actually eaten dinner that day) at one of my favorite restaurants in the world, Coppelia.

There I sat at the bar and enjoyed a drink, an appetizer, an entree, another drink, and dessert (an especially delicious tres leches cake), and also just kind of enjoyed the feeling of being alive and being unreservedly happy. On my many solo travels I've come to find there's great pleasure in going out to eat alone and consuming some really good food and drink while also just sitting there and taking it all in, the other people in the restaurant, all the interesting little things that people say or do in the little moments of life. I think my appreciation of such experiences has greatly heightened since the pandemic.

Coppelia was a great nightcap to a great day. I then returned to the train and eventually to Jersey City, where I ended up walking some ways on a very lonely path next to the water before reaching my hotel. It was a little eerie. It was also beautiful.

I was in a still exhilarated yet also contemplative mood as I stared back across the water at the city. I marveled at it all. The sky. The buildings. The amazing day I'd just had. My crazy life.

Emotions are funny things. If you're in a really bad emotional state, it can feel like you'll feel that way forever and it can be hard to imagine feeling better. Then when you do feel better, it can seem like there's no reason why you shouldn't just stay feeling better and it can be hard to imagine you'll ever feel that bad again. But emotions are transient.

At the end of that magical day, I felt like I was so ready to just put all the bad stuff behind me and that my life was simply going to be better going forward.

Of course, it wasn't that simple in reality.

The emotional roller coaster wasn't over.

Once I got into a relationship with Erin, a relationship that (unlike my previous few) had basically no real reason it shouldn't work, things seemed perfect at first but then it was like my brain couldn't accept it and had to make up obstacles to the relationship succeeding.

I was wracked with horrendous anxiety, something that had been a long-running theme of my dating and relationship experiences ever since my first relationship as a widowed person traumatically ended. The relationship before Erin was one in which I frequently experienced dramatic mood swings as I cycled between feeling good and bad about the relationship, and now it seemed like somehow my brain had become entrained to those cycles and I would go back and forth between feeling totally at ease and happy with Erin and feeling deeply, viscerally uncomfortable - a pretty horrible way to feel when you know intellectually that the person you're with is a really good match for you.

It's been suggested to me by others that the feelings I was getting might be some form of PTSD or panic disorder. It was very hard to predict when, how intensely, and for how long these feelings would strike. The only predictable thing was that if I was feeling good, at some point I would start to feel a lot worse, and conversely, if I was feeling bad, at some point I would start to feel better.

"No feeling is final." These words from Rainer Maria Rilke's poem "Go to the Limits of Your Longing," which Erin shared with me when I was having a bad anxiety episode, became a mantra. (Extended quote: "Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final." Words to live by for sure.) When I was feeling really bad, and it was hard to imagine not feeling that way, I'd repeat the words to myself, "No feeling is final."

I think it helped.

Erin was very patient and helpful. She also got me to do at-home yoga with her. For a while we did it (either together, or separately on days we didn't see each other) almost every day. This also helped.

It was a long journey. There were a number of times when some significant experience or event happened and then I felt like I was all the way better and the feeling persisted for some time and I imagined concluding this post by saying something to the effect of, "and then [x] happened, and after that, the emotional roller coaster was finally over." Examples: Erin and I moving in together and then going on a great camping trip to Ohiopyle, Erin and I eloping in Yosemite... also several really good concerts. That's something really interesting I noticed. There were multiple occasions when I had been feeling pretty troubled emotionally and then I went to a really good concert and after that I just felt so much better and my head felt so clear, and not just in the immediate aftermath of the concert but for weeks. I'd love to understand the neural basis for that effect!

But over and over again, I'd go from feeling better to once more feeling very unsettled with life. For no rational reason, which I was perfectly aware of, and that made it all the more frustrating.

Gradually, though, the bad times became less frequent and usually less severe, and I started being more and more able to just enjoy finally having, well, I guess something like a normal life. Which I guess was what I was striving for all along, but I was also so used to having a crazy and traumatic life that it was difficult for my brain to accept at first.

Maybe those weird, anxious feelings won't ever be 100% banished 100% of the time, but for the last few months I'm finally at a point where I feel at least almost all the way better, almost all the time. There were a lot of things I did to help me get there, but I think two things were really the most important:

1. The passage of time. Time may not actually heal all wounds, but I think almost all wounds do become less painful given enough time.
2. Getting married to a great partner, and then having an amazing baby with her!

It's funny how events of the past are continuously recontextualized by our feelings in the present. All those difficult times in the early days of my relationship with Erin, that seemed so big and hard to overcome at the time, are collapsing more and more into a minor hiccup in our lives. And August 21, 2022? It was a tumultuous and thrilling and beautiful day when it happened. Looking back now, it feels like something more: a portal between the chaotic life I had leading up to that day, and the mostly happy and contented life I now enjoy.

The next time I got to ride a roller coaster after that day was in October 2023 at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, days after Erin and I got married. About nine and a half months later (people will be doing the math!), Erin gave birth to our daughter. Life is a roller coaster, indeed! And I'm sure it will continue to be a wild ride - but I also feel like, for the first time in most of my adult years, the emotional roller coaster aspect of my life has, well, pulled into the station and I've exited it for a while.

I wonder what little 12-year-old Jeff would think of all this.