Newtown is my hometown

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 17:29:00 +0000

I DRESS ROBOTICALLY for a party friends had planned months ago, a party I now have no stomach for. I nod and smile because I am expected to nod and smile, in the midst of kind, genuine, and very smart people. At any other time I would feel lucky to be among them, but I am mostly not there, floating a few feet above myself, in the low-hanging unreality of butchery and loss. I do not mention Connecticut, even when it’s peripherally brought up. A few people express vague condolences or make easy jokes—both understandable as a way of dealing with an intolerable subject. But I do not respond. Speaking about it cheaply would seem like a betrayal.

This weekend I will fly to JFK—silently aware of the grim ballistic association—and then drive with my wife and eight-year-old daughter to Newtown, CT.

To celebrate Christmas.

Ten bands I will be forced to listen to in hell

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 14:15:00 +0000

I’M GOING TO HELL. You know it and I know it. But I’m fairly sure it’s not going to be of the William Blake-etching variety. There will be no eternal fire, three-headed dogs, or seas of percolating sinners. There will be no cloven hooves or torture racks or rounds of cribbage with Pol Pot and Hitler. No, my hell will almost certainly take place in a windowless basement room buried deep in the purgatorial nethers. The ceilings and walls will be slathered an institutional shit-brown. I will be in the center of a wet cement floor, Duct-taped to a broken lawn chair, with old Victrola megaphones stuffed in each ear.

And I will sit there. Forever.

Listening to scratchy mp3s at top volume.

For untold millennia.

Salon.com > Sean Beaudoin

Newtown is my hometown

Ten bands I will be forced to listen to in hell