We saw Yo La Tengo last night. Apparently the first time we saw them was something like 26 years ago in a tiny club that was a tiny house in a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona. One of those places that’s somebody’s house on a barren, stripped lot, walls painted black inside, and one day so many bands have played there, it’s a thing. All of a sudden it’s a club. But the beer’s still in a keg. No one can ever use those floors in the day light again. I can barely remember a club like this, and certainly don’t remember Yo La Tengo there, so many bands ago, but I know I’ve seen them a lot of times since, even though they live in New Jersey. Georgia sings like a beautiful angel, and they’re all a little older than I am.

From a little ways back from the stage now, Georgia looks the same, but then when I walked up front, in my clogs because my foot hurts enough not to stay up front the whole time, she had the same kind of skin in her neck that mine turned into this year. Kind of crinkly and loose and doesn’t look like my real skin. It just showed up one day and now I see it if I look at my own neck with glasses on. Georgia seems calm about this, at least that’s how it looks on stage.

At the end, super late, like 10:30pm, past people our age’s sleep time, they did one song in French, already the whole time I couldn’t help but to think about all the people in the club in Paris, having the same kind of night as us until they didn’t. I’m pretty sure every single person in there was thinking the same thing.

The rest of the weekend was dog show, the rest of the weekend was work and playing with the dogs. It was windy and cold, and I had the best walk with Banksy because when she started to stare at the blowers, I told her let’s just walk, and she did.

So it’s funny out there now, we’re all hoping to get old, but freaked out about it too. And then catastrophic events happen, so many deaths so nobody can even try to get old so they can get freaked out about it. We’re lucky to have Yo La Tengo to remind us just to keep going, we’re lucky to have dogs, they do the same thing. We’re lucky to have an icy clear day to walk out into and just keep going.