april 23, 2002
the song has grown louder than ever before, as the streets i walk upon speak your name. and the words have gained intensity since last our eyes met. here listening, i want to sing along, softly, passionately, strong like the breath i once wove from the air of the night and gave away. today i give these to you..my thoughts, my words..as the lights in the city play the melodies that only the two of us can hear.

april 14, 2002
even though we are separated by miles and minutes and tensions we have made, you still have found time to relax in my thoughts. someone speaks of florida and i see your face. i find a letter with a crooked canadian postage stamp stuck on the front, and think of how you talked about your friends and your zine and the town where you lived. i think of all the many starbucks-es in boston and imagine you sitting in one of them, guzzling coffee that costs way too much. i play into the air of greensboro and wonder if you are there to hear it. i have been lost, and have lost...and all the while i think and think but never act.
maybe settling down is not what i thought it was, a black-and-white horror show named after donna reed. maybe instead it is what you do when you get tired losing people, tired of leaving them back in the last town and sick of trying to keep up real contact with imaginary typed messages. but still my mind loves to move. it gives me no choice but to travel, to see, to know what it's like to live here or there in this place or that. but i can definitely stay in this place, the one where we all live right near each other, the place held deep in my thoughts and way down in my heart, until we can sit in the dark and play old video games again, and write letters again, and listen to our music again, the way we used to do.

april 6, 2002
good god...they want me to be a trombone clinician. they want to give me a three-thousand-dollar horn with an f valve designed by one of those guys i have always wished to sound like, and have me go around and play it for people. and those people will pay to come and listen to me play, because they will think i'm good at what i do (even though i still don't think i am really.) they would like to call me one of the pros.
sweet lord almighty is it strange! and the sweet lord knows it, too...been there listening to me since i sounded more like a rusted-out fog horn than a trombone. been there to send me over to that hunk of metal every day, when i'm sad, when i'm excited, when i'm bored and hungry and tired. been there in my ears making me hear the things i hear every day and every night.
when they want to hang out and tell me what a wonderful sound i have when i play, i hear in my head only one reply..
good god, listen to that sound you have! and just take a look at all you have done.

april 2, 2002
yet again i'm standing at the foot of the hill, gazing upward at my next destination. this really is no hill at all, but a mountain, a bunch of mountains, miles and miles of mountains, all with peaks streching way up into the clouds. there are so many steps to take, it makes my knees knock just to think about it, and so many things to see up there that my heart races whenever i look.
but still i go. why not?
running at things head-on is fun, and if you stare at the unknown long enough, it might buckle and tell you all of its secrets.