London. Twenty-two Scotland Green. Standing behind his new front door in a small barbershop off Tottenham High Road, 89-year-old Aaron Biber sweeps up a pile of hair from where his floor tiles used to be. It is morning, unseasonably warm and quiet. The September sun creeps in through a fresh pane of shatterproof glass, and lights the tiny room. Two men pass through carrying painted-black pieces of wrought iron fence. The men are strong, but they struggle. Even divided into pieces, iron is very heavy, resistant to human force, effective.

It has been nearly two months since rioters smashed through Biber’s doors and windows and tore his 41-year-old shop to pieces, nearly two months since they finally stopped, and went away … Read more at The Morning News.

More at the London blog.

More at the London blog.

Every now and then I smell something that transports me immediately to a different time, a different city. It floors me that I can be riding my bike on a street in Chicago and in one breath be looking through the cloudy eyes of a child walking into a candy shop in Eagle River, Wisconsin. Fudge. Caramel. Little green army men carried home in a pocket and parachuted down to a stretch of grass near the lake. Sitting in a steel chair on the back porch with a BB gun at dawn. Grandma. Grandpa. Coconut twists for breakfast.

The memories from Eagle River are mostly good. If I look hard enough, there are some not so good ones as well. But that’s all fine. I don’t spend much time with either. The one breath is all I get. It’s all I want. Which is good, because it’s all that’s left. I take it in and move on.

Sometimes I find myself alone and at peace and with my guard down some on a Saturday night, and so I stay a little longer.

Sometimes I can hear in one song an entire town, an entire year, or even a specific night. It may last several breaths. Or, if it’s one of the real good nights, an entire albums worth. But even on those longer runs, I look forward more than back. I liken it to a scientific study. I gather data and look for new discoveries. I analyze and juxtapose the past with the present. I measure the progress, or lack thereof, and I learn from it. I take it in and move on. I do not go back. I do not wish to.

To go back, I feel, is to give up. I see it all over the faces of so many people, all over the streets of so many cities. It is a look of indifference. It is a look that combines defeat with contentment. It is a look that says, “maybe my child will do the things I have lost interest in; maybe my son will have the balls to overcome the mediocrity I have come to accept; maybe my daughter will have the audacity to examine the gorgeous and destructive world around her, the same one I have given up on; maybe if I wish real hard my calcified memories will be made real again, like that movie where the mannequin comes to life, or the one where little Tom Hanks finds the Zoltar machine and becomes big Tom Hanks; maybe if I pray super extra hard for it and don’t eat meat on Fridays during Lent there will be great vigor and swing in my stride yet again, and I can go back to eating McDonald’s.”

I am not saying the look on my face is any better. But it’s different. And it’s honest. And it’s one I can stomach.

Sitting stale and stagnant is more than I can stand. It brings on a feeling not unlike being held under water. In the search for air, I invent projects that grow increasingly large and difficult with each go-around. I aim to be cold and distant and to myself, so I am better able to be warm and kind and compassionate toward others. I don’t know if that will make sense to anyone else, but it makes perfect sense to me.

I work hard to distract myself from the boredom and depression that distracts me from working hard. It’s a vicious cycle that will likely be my demise. But so be it. If given the choice, I will wear running shoes to the raging end over flip-flops to the dull eternity, every single time.

Life is a place where I am doing time. Nothing more and nothing less. I just want to get on with it and keep getting on with it until my parts break and I am unable to. The way I see it, all the hours and days are going onto a list somewhere. And I take pride in mine. When I reach its end, I want running down it to be like running the Boston marathon. To trudge through line after line of canceled television show, dreary bar, beach vacations and phone conversations would destroy me; then as well as now.

A blank page and a stopwatch. That’s all we get. Until we don’t. What we dreamt of doing doesn’t mean a damn thing.

That may sound harsh or morbid to some, but I disagree. I say life is morbid. I say life is harsh and sad. And it is in how some choose to confront it that I hear the greatest things. I hear singing and guitars. I hear trumpets, and organs, and wild chatter lining small rooms and dimly-lit streets of cities at night, under skies so crushing and beautiful that one cannot help but to walk them far, and wide, and smiling. I hear echoes of the fear of death drifting further away each year—and whispers of the fear of life riding off with it. Though really they sound the same.

Still, I’m glad the memories are there. As much as I think I’d like to take them all back, or throw them all away, I know that they’re necessary. I had (and still have) a lot to learn. And I’ve only ever been capable of learning The Hard Way.

But there is at least one Subaru memory that involves no direct wrongdoing on my part. It might be the only one, but that’s probably an exaggeration. In any event, it’s not a good memory. It’s as vivid and somber as ever and it’s on my mind a little tonight. So here we are.

I’m not going to break it all down, but I once had two friends. They were twins. I lost track of one of them and the other one died on New Year’s Day about 10 years ago. I miss them both, and I hope the one who’s still alive is doing better than he was the last time I saw him.

I’m pretty sure I was driving the green Subaru on the day of the funeral. Yes, it had to have been the green one. I would have been around 21 then, and therefore driving the green one. It was sunny and there were a few other people in the car with me. I was probably smoking a cigarette and had definitely smoked many more before it; windblown ash all over my black clothes, for certain.

There wasn’t much talking. Just the death, the thoughts of the death, and the music. We were listening to the only album by the band Agents of Oblivion. I have associated that album with death (and in some ways, birth) ever since. I’m not sure if it’s because of that day or if that day is why I was listening to the album, but I suppose it doesn’t matter.

The rest of the day consisted of the wake and the funeral. The rest of the day was very bad.

Sitting here now, it remains difficult for me to listen to the album unless I’m going through a rough time, or feeling the slow sting of death drifting in.

As I read the news over the past couple days, it seemed to be mostly death. It happens sometimes and those are the breaks. But sometimes it happens way too much, way before it should, to way too many people, all over the world and and all at once. The recent events in Norway, China, the US, the UK, Syria — I could continue to jump around the globe, but won’t — got to me. They got me good and left me with a feeling of anger and depression and helplessness that I still don’t know what to do with.

It guts me when anyone dies too soon. And while I am terrified of trivializing even a single life, I will say that music is one of the only things that helps to quell the grief. Similarly, I feel the Agents album is one of only a few that comes close to making a bizarre sense, and peace, of death.

I know it’s a long shot that you will hear in it exactly what I do. But still, I suggest giving it a go the next time you feel the weight pushing down. It might help you to feel a little less paralyzed. In which case, you will have helped me to feel the same.

I don’t believe in karma, not in the spiritual sense anyway, but I do believe in something like it. Be good to each other and spread it around the best you can.

(Chad, in case you ever read this: I really hope you’ve found a way to get over it at least a little. It was an accident and not your fault. Please get in touch with me, if you’d like to.)