“You have to be somebody,” Lanier writes, “before you can share yourself.”

Perversely, this very much makes me miss New York →

But in weather like this, yes, we drink. Have you noticed how dark it is in the mornings now? You lay there in bed, coaxing yourself to give it another shot while totaling up the happinesses and disappointments in your time on this earth thus far. The disappointments never come up short, and the ledger is always balanced in the favor of sorrow. You sigh, you pull yourself up, you turn on the light, and it starts over again. It’s all gray and the dusk comes early. Some days it rains. It’s hard to even try.

Or this. And we’re done here.

Well, that's lovely

They asked us to look, and in so doing taught us we were blind.

This seems like the appropriate soundtrack for a beautiful morning in San Francisco the day after the Giants won the World Series as the country inches ever closer to the edge.

"I’ll do what I can to be a confident wreck."

Go vote.

Webster Hall, February 2, 2006, New York, NY – The National are angry.

The band – touring in support of a wonderful Alligator album that hasn’t made them rich as they think it should – are headlining the Plug Music Awards, a made-up ceremony in which the “awards” are handed out during set changes. They play last, surrounded by devil heads on the walls and indie kids on the floor.

They are the same band that will write Boxer and High Violet, be subject of a fawning New York Times Magazine story, and play a high-minded show at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. They are the same band that will eventually become successful enough that others accuse them of being boring, a claim that’s both driven by equal parts jealousy and fact. They are the same band that will get paid, find love, have children.

They are a band on the way, but right now, in this moment, they are pissed.

This show, it’s clear almost immediately, means everything to the group of five. They destroy their bodies on stage. They are desperate. Hungry. Vital. Overpowering. At one point, Matt Berninger sings so violently that he shakes the microphone cord out its slot.

A year from now, the lead singer will offer, “I think everything counts a little more than we think,” on Boxer’s “Ada.” Tonight, however, he has a different mind set: Nothing matters, except killing this show, even if it kills them.

Amtrak, October 26, 2010, Somewhere between Providence, RI and New York, NY – I have no idea if The National played “Available” on that February night four years ago. They might have – they didn’t have a huge catalog back then – but it’s not a great song. At this point, it wouldn’t make a two-disc “Best Of… The National” album. For 200 seconds, Berninger finds himself battling an alt-rock wall of noise in an effort to locate the slow, dark, melodic songs that the world associates with his band. He’ll get there – Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers cut “90-Mile Water Wall” provided the roadmap, and he inched closer on Alligator before perfecting the form on Boxer – but “Available” is a messy mix of ideas. I don’t know why they would have played the song.

But if you could compress the hopeless feeling overwhelming the room at Webster Hall – the frustration of knowing you’re good enough to succeed and but knowing that you aren’t – into 25 seconds, it would sound exactly like the stretch from 2:20 through 2:45.

Today, the National are a far superior band. They doused the fire present onstage at Webster and created magic from the smoke and the embers. But I’m allowed to miss the inferno.

What’s the weirdest or most interesting thing you’ve lip-read?

Well, I spend a lot of time in bars writing. Generally in bars the music is a little loud for me, so I wear earplugs, so I really can’t tell what people are saying, except by lip-reading. And usually I don’t care what people are saying, but you need to know what the bartender is saying. Like, “Courvoisier or Hennessy?”

What’s your answer to that question?

“Yes.”

It’s a Stellastarr* kind of day.

My friend Tom is the only guy I know who can successfully pull off a tight vest and scarf combination without looking like an absolute Park Slope jackass. He’s also the person who showed me I can organize my iTunes collection by the number of times I’ve skipped a song. These two facts are unrelated. They merely functioning as a way into a story about how yesterday (Tuesday) I learned that “All My Friends (Radio Edit)” was the most-skipped song (38x) in my 4,150 item, 19.48 GB music library.

(When I stumbled upon this information, I wasn’t wearing a vest. I was sporting Tom’s Cincinnati Reds hat that’s black with the a white “C.” It’s much too large for my head.)

If your friends are like my friends, “All My Friends” has at some point since its UK release on May 28, 2007 played a prominent role in your life. If you’re really like my friends (maybe even are my friends), you may still jump around like happy idiots when it comes on, yell the chorus along with James Murphy, and occasionally get thrown out of Brooklyn bars for repeatedly demanding that the man pouring drinks play it. It’s all in good fun, barkeep.

Here’s another fact: I don’t really like “All My Friends.” Hence, I think, the skips. I enjoy the idea of it – the jumping, the yelling, the friendship – but as an actual song: eh? “North American Scum” strikes me as more poignant; “Around the World” and “Daft Punk Is Playing In My House” more important; “Dance Yrslf Clean” flat-out better.

Pitchfork, the blogsphere, and most of my friends would disagree. But my iTunes skip counter doesn’t lie. Neither does the play counter, which hit 78 as I typed. Over and over, again.

It did not yield a great literature, but it made good use of fonts.