the best song will never get sung, the best line never leaves you lungs

i had spent the last 6 minutes of my 20th year of existence on the no. 6 CTA bus, travelling back home from the wilco concert. the first 4 minutes of my 21st year of life was also spent on that bus, as it pulled into east hyde park boulevard. and as i walked up that short stretch of road home, i realise that i have hardly ever felt as lonely in my life.

i had taken the bus downtown too early for the concert. on impulse i decided to take it all the way to millennium park. the holidays are always kind of depressing for me, cos as a family we never were very holiday-ish. and i suppose seeing everyone else out and about, being happy while i was walking about all alone and feeling so out of place with the world was a bad way of starting the night.

the concert was every bit as wonderful as i'd expected. it was a lengthy affair, with wilco playing a set that lasted a little over 2 hours. the 2 encores alone had a total of 9 songs, so i would estimate somewhere around 20 songs were played in all. the first song they played that really had a huge impact on me was "i am trying to break your heart". it was the first wilco song i had heard from an album (yankee hotel foxtrot was the first wilco album i had bought) and it has really stuck with me for a long time. "jesus etc" was a little unexpected, but amazing to hear live. "muzzle of bees", which i heard during the tweedy solo concert on campus was really amazing with a full band. the last song of the set proper was "i'm the man who loves you", which is also great live.

the first encore was just absolutely amazing though. they came back and tweedy didn't have a guitar. and i thought to myself: "this is it, they are going to play the song". and they did. "hummingbird" is just such an awesome song. and seeing it live with jeff tweedy just barely whispering the words into the microphone is an experience. they followed that with "via chicago", an obvious crowd favourite and perhaps my second favourite wilco song of all time. that checks off another one of the things on my list of things to do before i die - watch wilco perform "via chicago" in chicago. they did a new song after that, probably one of the better ones in my opinion and followed that up with "the late greats", which (besides inspiring the title of this post), is perhaps one of their most unique songs. which was a little unexpected. they followed that with "california stars" though, which was great. but to close the entire concert, they played "heavy metal drummer" followed by "kingpin" (which unfortunately seemed to be the only song they played off the summerteeth album). and it was just absolutely astonishing the level of noise that came from the crowd when the band got the audience to scream. in the end, the only 2 disappointments i had were that they didn't play "spiders" and "forget the flowers" (which looked to have been a staple on their set list for this tour). all in all a great concert.

but i suppose right now, writing about it leaves only a slightly sour taste in my mouth. i suppose i have never ever felt this lonely in my life. at this point, it seems as if nothing that i care about is within reach, and no one in this world would ever reach out to me and pull me out of this mess. it's a bad day, and i have a feeling it's going to be a really bad year.