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2009-08-18 - 2:41 p.m.

Last week I got a back-stage pass to a big rock show. The band's singer's sister is my friend and she let me and some others tag along. They are a hard-rock band, progressive rock. Hard progressive rock, maybe. A room full of their fans looks like this: Lots of dudes in black shirts, lots of tattoos and long beards. Lots of stern faces. Some mohawks. A few girls. From where we stood, to the side of the stage, we could see clearly the front-line fans packed in close. They had serious looks on their faces and they knew all the words. Before the show, we drank the band's beer (Stella Artois, heavy Belgian beer, Sierra Nevada, Corona). The drummer opened my beer with his drumstick when I couldn't find a bottle opener. We wore stickers on our shirts that said "All Access." Late in the night, drunk, trying to find the band's dressing-room door, I opened the wrong one. It was some kind of sound-control room. the guys sitting in front of rows of knobs and lights all had headsets on. One of them looked at me sternly. This band isn't my favorite but I liked the show plenty. I left the club happy, my legs sore from all that standing but my ears ringing in that way that makes the regular street-sounds feel muted and far away and not quite enough.

So in an interview I see that one of the Austrian actors in the new Quentin Tarantino movie loves the word "smithereens" and I think I know what he means. I play with words in my head a lot. I do amateur etymology. Yesterday, during a bike ride, I was thinking about the word "confide." I was thinking that "con" means together or a group of something and that "fide" must be related to fidelity and therefore means truth or honesty. That felt satisfying, to be able to do that with a word, and I felt like I could now use that word in a way that was somehow more earned. It's like changing an engine belt or a flat tire. Or making a risotto or planting bushes or, sometimes, even from reading and falling in love with a really good poem.

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