given to fly

Friday night I was on a front porch with some friends drinking tea and watching the storm come in until the temperature dropped and the rain got horizontal.

And after a Sunday afternoon of attempting to create a garden out of the sides of the fences in my back parking lot, and taking my own photo walk, Frank picked me up to go see Pearl Jam downtown.I haven't seen him since we saw the Dirtbombs back in '08 and we caught up and reminisced about back in the day and where everyone is now and how everything's changed since then.

I've never seen Pearl Jam before, somewhat avoided it for economic reasons and also during the Bush II years when the albums weren't so great and there was a lot of political ranting that I didn't feel like listening to.

But I like this last record and despite the steep ticket price, the show was good and long, one song after another that I loved and never expected to hear live... amazed that Eddie Vedder still has that kind of energy and I also realized throughout the course of the night that I know all these songs but I still don't totally know what he's saying in half of them... guess I'm not a real fan, hmmm?

They were the soundtrack though for a lot of us growing up in the burbs and these songs brought back so many memories of cutting class and driving around Cleveland listening to the radio with my dad in a beatup 1985 Pontiac 6000 station wagon, borrowing his wornout flannel shirts (I still have one by the way, but my roommate told me I'm not allowed out of the house in it), banging on a crappy acoustic guitar and a friend of mine singing "Last Kiss" on a hot sticky day, shelving library books to my tape of "Yield," angsting out to "Black." The first time I heard "Even Flow?" Damn.



There's a part of me that loves a good nostalgia trip and gets sentimental over weird things, but I'm so glad I'm not 19 anymore and hanging out with people based on if we liked the same bands or both looked weird because now that I look back on it, a lot of those people really weren't all that nice.

anyways, this is what was played...

Wash, Hail Hail, Corduroy, Got Some, In Hiding, World Wide Suicide, Force Of Nature, Immortality, Go, Even Flow, Army Reserve, Unthought Known, Daughter/WMA, Sleight Of Hand, Johnny Guitar, Do The Evolution, The Fixer, Why Go, Just Breathe, Given To Fly, Leash, Porch, Wasted Reprise, Life Wasted, Black, The Real Me, Smile, Alive, Indifference