Twelve year-old M. just visited for the weekend and, since I make music videos every year with her brother, she picked this song for our first jam…

Click to play

After my super-talented friend Haniya left Smith College and got her masters in anthropology somewhere in London, she returned to Pakistan, formed a band with her cousin and has fast become a rockstar…as is evident by this, their first music video:

I’d like to dedicate this video to Myriad Pro Semibold.

1. The Guy Who Reads Sci-Fi During His Smoke Break was sitting on the bench outside our office this morning, reading sci-fi during his smoke break. He has a long goat-tee and a tattoo on his neck, he’s really anti-social but I can tell he’s paying attention to everything around him and I find the whole thing fascinating. For some reason, I am filled with glee whenever I see this kid on my way to Au Bon Pain.

2. Walking through the Boston Common at 10:15p, I was not ready to go home. Just at that moment, I stumbled on Shakespeare in the Park (“As You Like It”; I liked it). “This is my lucky day!” I said out loud, and sat down on the grass to watch the last 45 minutes of the dress rehearsal.

3. On the way downtown, a kid with a skateboard and some sort of concealed boom box came on the train. He stood next to me while wafting Radiohead’s “Let Down” directly into my ear. BLISS! “The emptiest of feelings/Disappointed people…” It was as if I was watching a movie of my day being made and someone had gotten the rights to the perfect soundtrack. “One day, I am gonna grow wings, a chemical reaction.”

4. Somewhere around MGH, I realized there must be sycamore trees, because it smelled exactly like all the Philadelphia summer nights of my youth, which reminded me of my grandmother, which reminded me that my life has already been really long, which reminded me that there is much more to come.

It was a small fish in the belly of your swelled hope; there was little chance
that the sea would not swallow it up. But what you must remember
is that it doesn’t matter, even as it seems that the sky
has imploded and an opaque silence has filled its once holy expanse;

even as the summer has come in sixth gear, hurling its guns high
out the window and making the neighbors scream; what a dramatic scene!
But it doesn’t matter.

Not because it isn’t fantastic in its wretchedness, but because the wretchedness is a mask
over clean nothingness, and the nothingness is what has actually eaten you
when you weren’t looking. You can work your way out. You can claw at it, poke a hole,

slam your sneaker against its sticky mouth until you no longer believe there is a mouth,
a hole, a masked sky, a wretched summer, a scene that matters. In their place
the sun will finally shine, and somewhere a hopeful whale heads east

with a school of minnows in its gut, all singing in harmony a pleasant melody you’ve
temporarily forgotten. Who knows where they will go? Between the still sand floor
and a lonely bouey, new fish grow.