josh stupidpunkgirl what are you thinking? you're next to me but so far away everything changed in a short time and how do we get back what was once there? i want to touch you again. and i don't want you to hurt me i'm so scared i don't trust myself anymore than i trust you so when we're together what are you thinking about i want to be held by you again and not just be friends i'm so stupid though because everything has changed and i don't know if i like you or just the good memories 010301 ... brown cardigan boy and maybe we all have this statue molded in our mind, but we're unsure if we should kiss it. misconception is akin to empty expectations. 010302 ... bijou josh, he....eaaah. forget it. it's not even worth trying to explain. 010626 ... alice hmm... 030305 ... alice i think we're too perfect for eachother. its scary how good i feel when im with him. 030305 ... belly fire a stupid, snobby boy at work who spends too much energy pulling pig-tails and throwing worms at the girls just to get noticed a boy who is 20 going on 7 030305 ... mandy my future husband. i am so excited. 050929 ... misstree he gave me a choice and i don't know whether to prause or curse him for giving me that moment to pin the next five years on. 051008 ... raze i know three of these. the first josh has been one of my best long-distance friends for some years now. the second lives here, and though i haven't spent much time with him, we have fun when we do get together. the third is a bit of a flake, albeit a well-meaning one as far as i can tell. he used to live here. now he lives somewhere else. i wouldn't consider him a friend. i don't think he'd consider me one either. two out of three ain't bad. 140317 ... raze i never said anything about the first josh i knew before any of those other three. we courted each other. there's no other way to put it. it wasn't a competition to see who was cooler. we liked each other so much, so fast. we wanted to present the best versions of ourselves, as damaged as we were. what kickstarted the friendship was learning we both loved the wooden stars album "mardi gras". no one else around here had any idea the band existed. neither one of us thought we'd ever meet anyone who knew about them. we were giddy. "what's your favourite song?" "i think maybe 'cigarette girl'. that was the first one i ever heard." "you know that song's about pot?" "really? i never thought about that." "yeah. 'she's a good cigarette. the kind that makes you forget.' so good. i think my favourite might be 'country violins'." "but then 'wyatt and pam in the botanical gardens' is great too. maybe that's my favourite." we played each other songs we'd written, showing off our scars, sitting on the grass in the backyard of the townhouse he shared with gord and mark and julie. i played him something that wasn't finished yet but was most of the way there. he let me detune his grandfather's beat up old acoustic guitar to some place it had never been before and didn't want to go, and i talked him through the different parts of a song i was too shy to sing. he did the same thing with one of his songs. we both liked to ignore easy verse-chorus patterns. we both loved the velvet underground. we jammed out "i'm waiting for the man", singing through our smiles. he introduced me to modest_mouse, polvo, the dirty three, elliott_smith, sebadoh, eric's trip, built to spill, and blonde_redhead. i introduced him to the music that laid the foundation for some of what he was listening to. syd barrett, big star, chris bell, my bloody valentine. i heard cat_power for the first time when julie found "moon pix" in a box full of josh's CDs and put it on. i went home and found an interview with chan marshall when the internet was still a bit of a ghost town. she said, "i feel bad, i feel bad, i feel bad," and i just wanted to hug her and say, "i know," and cry, and cry, and cry. josh's singing voice wasn't anything like his speaking voice. when he talked it was like the rest of him. effortless ragged charm. when he sang it was different. there was this quaver. it always sounded like he was about to drift off-key but he never did. his songs were about the same thing my songs were about. wanting to connect. failing to connect. wanting to die. failing to die. love and drugs and seeing a black hole where the future was supposed to be. we might as well have been the same person, except he was an alcoholic and he knew how to drive, and i wasn't and i didn't. he got me on the radio. i'd never been on the radio before. it was the local campus radio station. there was one microphone i had to angle between my face and my guitar. i was so scared my hands were shaking. i got the DJ to record the whole thing on a blank cassette tape. he didn't just let me play a few songs live. he interviewed me and played songs from some CDs i brought with me. i felt like a rock star. at the townhouse, josh played the tape all the way through twice. he and julie sat there looking like proud parents. he was going to play the tape a third time, but he got drunk and forgot. drinking turned him into someone else. he started saying stupid shit. he broke one of my windows. he tried to stop drinking on his own. it didn't work. i never saw anyone so miserable to be drinking coffee instead of liquor. he checked into rehab after getting busted for driving drunk. he came by and apologized and paid for the window when he was making amends. my dad said he looked like a beached goldfish. he was straight for a while. then he thought he could start drinking socially again. he thought he could control it. we got together and drank guinness and talked about turning twenty. i told him i wanted to go out drinking by myself on my birthday and write. just write. "i guess that's stupid," i said. "no," he said. "it's not stupid. i think it's romantic." he came back to my place. my dad was asleep upstairs, so we listened to ELP and supertramp on headphones. we whisper sang along to "sister moonshine" and "still ... you turn me on" and we were ten years old again. it wasn't the last time we saw each other. i'm going to pretend it was. it would have been a good ending. 210817 what's it to you? who go blather from