“Who knows how to make love stay?

1. Tell love you are going to Junior’s Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if loves stays, it can have half. It will stay.

2. Tell love you want a momento of it and obtain a lock of its hair. Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on three sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of the burnt hair and use them to paint a moustache on your face. Find love. Tell it you are someone new. It will stay.

3. Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning.”

—Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

I saw him forty-five minutes earlier, sprawled at a table at a not-at-all depressing airport bar, one of those fauxstaurants marooned in the middle of Terminal C that pretend that mozzarella sticks and a hostess stand will make you forget that a security screener just saw your digitally rendered genitals.

He was sitting by himself and the three empty beer glasses probably explain why he didn’t realize that his sweatpants had taken a vacation south, giving everyone on their way to Gates 30-39 an eyeful of ass crack. (Normally when I see other people who wear sweatpants in public, I assume we’re soulmates, but they have to be in the center of the Venn diagram of ‘Wears Sweats’ and ‘Conceals Entire Ass.’) He was totally unconcerned, though, with one hand resting in the heather grey fabric hammock that stretched between his thighs while the other was using his car key to scrape at his ear canal.

“He’ll probably be sitting beside me for the next seven hours,” I thought, shrugging my backpack higher onto my shoulders and trashing the receipt for my impulse-buy paperback. (Has anyone ever bought a Michael Connelly book ouside an airport? I’m asking for a friend. A friend who has a stack of Harry Bosches from O’Hare and Newark and Phoenix Sky Harbor.)

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I’d shoved my bag under the seat in front of me, fastened my seatbelt and was wondering how often the flight crew disinfected those safety cards when he dropped into the seat beside me, smelling like a frat house futon. I flicked my eyes his way, giving him a nod and the same tight-lipped expression I make when I’m doing math in my head.

“Man,” he said. “MAN.”

I’d already gone back to wondering if you could get Toxic Shock Syndrome from an airplane seat.

“Look over here for a second,” he said.

I did. Stupidly, I did.

“You got a set of eyes that could make a man get hisself in trouble,” he said, giving me a look that knew trouble, misdemeanors and getting escorted out of an AutoZone.

I had no idea how to respond to that, so instead I mumbled a thank you before looking at my lap, suddenly very interested in tracing the raised letters of Michael Connelly’s name with my finger.

“Man, those are some real nice eyes,” he said again, and I could feel him staring at the side of my head. I could also feel my ears getting red, either out of embarrassment or as some kind of Awkward Interaction defense mechanism.

“Flight attendants, prepare for gate departure,” the captain mumbled from the speakers as the plane slowly shuddered backwards.

I shoved Mr. Connelly into the seatback pocket, leaned over and pulled my bag toward my ankles. After rifling through each pocket, I finally found what I’d hoped I’d remembered to pack.

Earplugs.

And an eyemask.

Disclaimer: I thought I’d posted this already, but found it in my Recently Opened folder, leaning against a Word doc called ‘Pub Rock Wish List’ and an Excel spreadsheet charting which of my neighbors have been parking illegally. No I’m not very popular, thank you for asking.

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My sister was seatbelted into the passenger seat of my car as I nudged my front bumper toward I-40. “Hand me my phone,” I said, immediately tailgating a van with a multicultural stick figure family smiling from the back window. “We need some music.”

She rolled her eyes hard enough to loosen both retinas. “Great,” she said. “I hope it’s something obscure and British.”

It was. I played Lloyd Cole for the rest of the afternoon, singing along with ‘Sean Penn Blues’ and ‘From the Hip’ while she alternated between clawing at the armrest and trying to guess what four digits would unlock my phone.

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A week ago A month ago FOREVER AGO two friends and I drove to the Arts Center in Carrboro, North Carolina, which is stashed at the far side of a strip mall, a Fleet Feet and a pizza joint away from its PBR-soaked sibling Cat’s Cradle. The Arts Center is a venue that seems to lend itself to whispering to the box office staffers and sincerely apologizing if your Chucks squeak on the hallway tiles. It’s intimate and understated, which made it the perfect spot for a Lloyd Cole show.

He’d driven himself from Florida earlier that day, arriving without an opening band, backing musicians or any pretension whatsoever: just before the show, he’d apparently been outside, walking past his own promo pics and slipping unnoticed between people who held tickets with his name typed down the center.

Cole, his acoustic guitars and his Dad Jeans took the stage at eight on the dot. I hadn’t seen him live before and was a little unsure what to expect. His lyrics tend to be full of empty hearts and empty houses and women who left him before he had the chance to leave first, while his album covers are a collection of increasingly furrowed eyebrows and tightly clenched cigarettes. If the Misery Scale stretches from zero to Morrissey, I expected him to be on the far right side.

I was wrong. “You probably think I’m a miserable bastard,” he said, before apologizing for spending almost thirty years glaring at us from LP covers and CD cases and the other side of an iTunes library. He repeated sentiments like that in his soft lilt, insisting that he was totally well-adjusted and well-loved before launching into another song about picking his way through the wreckage of past relationships.

And that’s the skill that Cole has. He can talk about being a happily married father with two kids and “a Downton Abbey haircut” and a lawn that he mows on long Massachusetts weekends before completely—COMPLETELY—selling you on a song that’s so vividly written, you can smell the cigarette butts and self-loathing in his bachelor apartment.

His voice is deeper and richer than it was during the Commotions era, back when he sang about Rattlesnakes and asked one of rock’s best rhetorical questions. At times, I thought he sounded like Roy Orbison, which meant I would periodically whisper “Hey, doesn’t he sound like Roy Orbison?” to the unfortunate people on either side of me, staring at them in the reflected stage lights until they agreed with me. He filled the setlist with songs that covered his entire career (including some unreleased ones), threw in a “Famous Blue Raincoat” cover before transitioning seamlessly into his own “Butterfly” and did a pretty spectacular Tom Waits impression before closing with “Unhappy Song.” (“I have very few regrets,” he said. “Except maybe inviting schoolchildren to sing on this record.”)

The songs I remember (and put into a Spotify playlist) are:

Lost Weekend
Are You Ready to Be Heartbroken?
Unhappy Song
Like Lovers Do
Weeping Wine
Pretty Gone
Brand New Friend
Perfect Skin
Forest Fire
Like a Broken Record
Mister Wrong
Butterfly
Undressed
2cv
Don’t Look Back
Pale Blue Eyes (Lou Reed cover)
Famous Blue Raincoat (Leonard Cohen cover)
Kids Today (Currently unreleased)

(Well, these and several others that I might recall if I’d been paying attention instead of raising my eyebrows and mouthing “Roy Orbison” in my friend D’s general direction).

Cole has a new, largely crowd-funded record coming out in June but there’s plenty of time to catch up on his back catalog between now and then. To me, he doesn’t write songs as much as he sings short stories (which seems appropriate for a guy who turned a throwaway Raymond Carver line¹ into an album title). If you want to spend the evening immersed in Lloyd Cole 101, I’d drop the needle—virtual or otherwise—on Don’t Get Weird On Me, Babe (in its entirety), the 1984-1989 Commotions anthology before skipping around to standout songs like  “Writers Retreat!,” “Like Lovers Do” and “Morning is Broken.”

¹This is the story I’ve always assumed it was from but I could be wrong because I’m not a reliable journalistic presence like Wikipedia or CNN or something written in a Subway bathroom.

You can get a beat from a broken heart/
You could write the book while falling apart/
You can have it all save the one you want/
Going for a song

I was stranded on the moving sidewalk, shifting my weight impatiently behind a tour group who had bunched themselves up in the middle of the conveyor belt. I was somewhere between terminals at Washington-Dulles, either halfway gone or halfway home, depending on whether you gate-checked your optimism or not.

The walls were lined with shots of American Beauty or some other patriotically themed installation, photographs that are supposed to capture iconic scenes from sea to perfectly shining sea but instead look like the default screensavers that came with your last Dell.

The Capitol at sunset. A grain silo at sunset. George Washington’s granite face staring at a South Dakota landscape. At sunset.

The next to the last picture was just past the end of the moving sidewalk and, as the tour group shuffled past with their slices of Sbarros and stuffed neck pillows from Hudsons Booksellers, I realized that the frame that was supposed to backlight it had burned out.

I felt terrible for the photographer, who’d probably stood for hours—days—in a field waiting for all of the wheat (or whatever harvestable grass that was) to bend in that particular direction and for the sunset to catch it JUST LIKE THAT before capturing it on a memory card. Days or weeks or months later, he submitted that photo to the Dulles Airport Interior Decorating Committee and was delighted when it was accepted, knowing that hundreds of thousands of slightly annoyed air travelers would have the opportunity to see HIS OWN WHEAT PHOTOGRAPHY! Celebratory drinks were probably poured. A future of taking background shots for the Wheaties box was dreamed of. Maybe he stepped off that same moving sidewalk, lingering in front of that same picture to think about What It All Means, lost in the pixels until a red-faced man clipped his Achilles tendon with a rolling suitcase. 

Or maybe they just ordered it from a stock photo company.

Either way, that one unlit, overlooked picture caught more of my attention than the two dozen landscapes and seascapes and other-scapes that were hanging to its right. There’s probably a metaphor there but I’m not going to look for it, not now. My Sbarros is getting cold.