I went to Cheapo a few days ago, a new and used record store here in Austin on South Lamar, with a list of six new albums to pick up (new to me). In no particular order they were: Ray LaMontagne, Trouble...Okay, stop right there. That is the only album I should have picked up. I should have walked straight to the Ls and then straight to the cash register, but nOOOuooo. I have to ravage through the rest of the other 25 letters to see if there are any other names that ring a bell, maybe something I was looking for a few months ago but never found.

Though I do allot myself a research stipend for this sort of thing, I am just not picky enough. I throw down fifteen bucks like its crowding the space in my wallet or something. Actually it is, with all those flippin business cards. I've only called like two of those people back who've ever handed me a card. It's like I need the potential to be in contact with people. I've got people. I've got numbers. I've got this guy in Jersey right: "Heyyyyy! Mista Vaughn. How ya doin'?...No problem I'll cancel the dinnah...Yeah, I'll book the flight tommarra." I mean really, I should hang on to those those cards.

So Trouble, by LaMontagne. This guy is a miracle. He grew up in a family with one mother and six brothers, all from different dads. He said he has only talked with his birth father for a minute and a half in total over the last twenty years. While trying to take care of the family alone, Ray's mom found a roof for the kids wherever she could. This wound up being in a variety of places including but not limited to: the backyards of a friends, in cars and tents, a cinderblock shell on a Tennessee horse ranch, and a New Hampshire chicken coop.

After graduating from high school, he left home and worked the graveyard shift at a shoe factory in Lewiston, Maine. He described an experience that occurred four years after leaving his family when he awoke to Stephen Stills' "Tree Top Flyer" on his radio alarm clock:

"This was a particularly dark and weird time for me," he recounts. "I never saw the light of day for months. One morning, after I'd worked there for about a year, I had my clock set for 4 a.m., like always, and I woke up to this amazing sound coming from the clock radio. I just sat up in bed and listened. Something about that song just hit me. I did not go to work that day; I went to record stores and sought that album out. It was called Stills Alone. I listened to it, and I was transformed. It killed me…it was huge. You don't know how those things happen. I just knew: 'This is what I'm gonna do.' That morning really changed everything-my whole life."

I've listened to those songs at least once almost everyday since I bought the album and, I've been pressed to the verge of tears nearly every time. The songs about his mother are wrenching. Once while I was in the car listening to Burn, the fifth track on the album, my entire body felt like it was falling through my gut. The marrow in my bones felt as if it were lava and then ice, and then I felt as if the middle of my body were an infinite space. It's a good pain to feel, the kind that reminds you of the endless nature of the heart. The feeling of finding and then losing somebody you love can destroy you, reduce you to a pile on the floor, and then send you packing a changed man or woman in less than twenty four hours. LaMontagne shoves that emotion through 10 songs lasting fifty minutes or so.

Bravo Mister LaMontagne. Bravo.

From time to time I'll be posting a short message about things that I am recommending, I stole this idea from www.mcsweeneys.net. That's my first recommendation to you, check out the site.

Check these guys out too:

Smoke and a Crepe' -- Tim Douglass
Steinbeck and Shiner Bock -- Mark Douglass
Rahabs and Gomers -- Kevin Still
Julie Whitaker -- Julie Whitaker

Dear Kid,

What's the big idea? I show up at Bull Creek boulder with a couple of worn out climbing shoes and a bag half full of chalk, and there you are strutting around with your little kiddy water shoes making those fart noises every time you take a step. It's distracting kid. Take off the darn shoes if you're gonna hang around like that. And just because I look cool, doesn't mean I've got giant suckers at the end of my arm instead of hands. Your telling me to scale the impossible routes on the wall because you saw some girl do it last week only makes me want to take your little fart shoes and shove them in your mouth. Oh, and kid, leave my keys alone. I don't want to have to yell at ya anymore for using my Volkswagen keyless entry device as a pocket knife to scare your little brother, especially when I'm about to solve the most difficult bouldering problem of my life. See ya around kid.

Whatever,

Ryan Vaughn
Austin, TX

I had a flashback two days ago which forked in a fuzzy choose your own adventure kind of way. Two blocks up from where I live, there is a trail that weaves into the thick green forest of the Austin Hill Country. I took off late in the dusk of evening as the sun was growing deep red, so as to make the trek a little more melodramatic (What if I get lost? Huh? What then?). The path I was on runs for a quarter mile or so down the length of a row of houses next to the middle school, and then suddenly leaves you isolated from civilization, dropping steeply in a zig zag manner down one of side of the Barton Creek ridge. My feet felt light and quick as I skipped down the steps, avoiding a broken two-by-four here and there, constructed against a slice of rock which enabled the final plunge down to the creek.

All I had to do was keep throwing one foot out in front of the other. My breath sounded desperate. Raspy and rhythmic bursts of air turned to puffs of smoke around my flushed face. The crunch of rock and leaves echoed against the trees. The creek made noises louder, and then softer, and then louder along the trail where I was now running in the opposite direction, against the flow of water. The air was cold in my lungs and stung the back of my throat. The more I ran, the more the cold air seemed to clean my head of excess thought; I felt again, as I often do when I run, what it was like to be a kid.

When I emerged from the forest at trail exit, opposite the one which I had begun, it was nearly dark. I passed in front of an old friend's house not too far up the street. This friend of mine was an unusual one, maybe one of the more mature of my friendships at this age (11 to 13). It seemed purer to me than other friendships that I had at the time, perhaps because we had no practical reason to be friends. We weren't in basketball or soccer together, we didn't go to camp together, etc. We simply made for good company.

As I was walking in front of his house last night, I thought of a time when we had hiked together through some of the same old trees and brush that I had seen on the trail. We weren't following a particular path though, and we snapped and discarded any branches that impeded our passage. Eventually, we came to a cliff's ledge that was too steep, making it impossible for us to continue. Rather than viewing the long drop as a possibility for instant death, my friend and I attempted to slide down the hill skidding to a stop as close as we could to the edge without falling off, often halting with various appendages dangling over the side of the sharp decline.

Now this is where it gets kind of interesting. I know that one of us slid to the edge that day and was not able to hang on. One of us fell 25 feet or so and hit, hard, on the next small dirt ledge. But I can't tell you which one. And in fact, I don't believe that it matters which one of us actually fell off the edge. The event was recorded so furiously in my mind that I seem to have both perspectives seared into my recollection. On the one hand, I can see myself staring up at my friend wondering how I am still alive after such a spill. And then it's also as if I remember being the one who was looking down at my friend, wondering if he was hurt, wondering if I was going to have to drag him home, or if I would have to run for help. What was I going to tell his mom?

Now I know that it's not physically possible to occupy two points in space simultaneously, but my perception of the fall was some how recorded from both sides. The outcome and implications of the hurt or possible injuries that might have resulted meant the same to me either way. It was just weird; I was unable to divide our dichotomized perception of reality.

Here's what I was thinking as I walked the rest of the block past my friends house: perhaps the reason I'm always a little melancholy is because there is always something to mourn even if things look dandy from where I stand; and at the same time, I'm always hopeful that the smiles and laughs that resonate in the collective body of believers will cause us to rejoice with one another. I'm beginning to look a little harder into the eyes of the people I hug and kiss these days. They look familiar.

I work here at the writing center. A "writer's consultant" is the title they have given me, just a nice name for the underpaid tutor who works with the freshman composition students. Saddled with various pitfalls, the junior college, where I do most of my consulting, which feeds Texas A&M University, one of the largest agricultural think tanks in the world, has repeatedly amazed me. Much of our time and energy in the writing center is hopefully spent for the purpose of "making better writers," our proud motto emblazoned across the top of our dry erase board. Rather, it seems we are law enforcers of a kind.

Not surprisingly, most of the students which breeze through the door are not ziners, or bloggers, or newspaper writers, or short literature authors, or anything else exiting that has to do with careful word choice. A large portion of these students may not have any desire to be in school, and yet they are here, either because they are not ready to face the world of life-after-high-school-without-a-bachelors-degree or for the purpose of soaking up financial aid and then wringing it out steadily each weekend. Not all of the students I have seen are this way, but it is certainly a rare exception when a student arrives with innovative ideas spilling off the page. Instead paper after paper is sloughed across my tutorial desk, and I am told to "read over it; see if it's good". To date, I've received exactly 240 papers on abortion, 404 papers on affirmative action, and 220 papers on racial profiling. Oh yeah, and there was that one about an all-in-one nutrition bar designed to eliminate world hunger.

The problem it seems, is that these students really believe that they have little, if not nothing, original to contribute to the ongoing rhetorical discussion. For all the conventions good academic writing is expected to contain, at least in these classrooms, there is little talk about what really makes a quality piece of writing. How can we teach students that they must follow such and such a rule, when employing devices such as words to convey meaning, which are extremely volatile and subjective, is the primary means of our communication?

I'm not advocating that we retract all of our useful tools in teaching writers to put their thoughts into something more intelligible. But as in any art form, good writing must be inspired and coaxed (sometimes crushed) from the author, but not by placing them inside a maze of helpful hints.