I know The Pernice Brothers‘ repertoire better than I know The Smiths’, but I’m fond of both, so the combination — an excerpt from Joe Pernice’s 33 1/3 book on “Meat is Murder” — was the main factor in my decision to spend $5 at the used book store last week. Well worth it! Pernice writes about what it was like to be a teenage straight guy for whom the album was a life-soundtrack, wholly a part of the experience of being completely infatuated with a girl & her smoking habit, surviving a classmate’s suicide, and living in Dorchester, MA in 1985. This morning, my reading pace/excerpt length/train speed were perfectly-aligned, and so the trip was all-reading with nothing left over for the ride home (except, I guess, for the rest of the collection).

P.S. Joe Pernice wrote a song about my town, Somerville, that makes me proud to live there (and was an element in my effort to feel more optimistic than afraid when I was making my move from the midwest). Hearing him sing “I’m gonna take a lover. Gonna take her back to Somerville. Show her around the neighborhood, re-case the place and settle down” how could I not look forward to living there?

And, while we’re down here, ignoring the topical boundaries around this blog, those that would suggest it’s about commuting, not living in Columbus, Ohio, I’ll note that one of my favorite memories of living in that city is biking home with T. on a warm late-spring or early-summer night, after the Pernice Brothers show at Little Brothers (RIP). The streets of our neighborhood were empty, we could swerve and loop around on our cruisers, enjoying the flatness of the land & the road, and we saw an animated, illuminated deer (yard ornament) perched in a tree, something we’d never noticed during the day, which made our little part of the city feel even more magical, capable of such secrets.