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Dave Bry: Yes! Great to run into you Miles, and to meet you, Cece. I just wrote an embarrassingly florid recap for two Pavement-head college friends under the subject heading LIGHTNING BOLTS OF AWESOMENESS and included the sentence: "Basically, I had the feeling, while they were playing THE HEXX, that all my dreams were coming true." So, yeah. Man, what a night.

Miles Klee: My favorite lightning bolt was probably the one that forked horizontally over the stage and lit up the sky right as they hit the chorus of "Stereo." The crowd released this, like, GAWWWW sound, a sort of drooling at the sublime.

Dave Bry: Yes. That was the moment when it was like, Oh, this is very special night. The storm making it better, not worse. Listicle Without Commentary: Top Ten Lightning Bolts at Last Night's Pavement Show.

Cece Lederer: "The Hexx" was just about the best live version of any song I have ever heard. I was also oddly heartened by the hippie-bros behind me who sang along to every song. Seriously, I always HATE when people sing along at concerts. It makes my skin crawl. I'm here to see them, not you. But the infectious enthusiasm of these guys smoking fat J's and addressing each other with "yo" and "dude" made me feel a sublime camaraderie. Everyone there had spent countless hours listening alone, but now we were listening together. And even though we are, as a rule, "Haters," we could all revel in the joy of music together. And there was something about the rain that gave it a Woodstock '10 feeling. We're going to stick it out and we don't care about the rain because, let's be serious, we don't care about anything.

Dave Bry: The vocal anti-umbrella sentiment was enjoyable, too. The folks in back (the fratty-bro-hippies, maybe?) shouting for people to put down their umbrellas. I see their point. It is kind of obnoxious to put up your umbrella and block other peoples' view at a rock show. Like, Give it up. We're all getting soaked here. (And don't block my view.) I never considered umbrellas as being anti-rock before. But I guess they really are. Rockers don't mind getting a little wet. They're singing in the rain.

Miles Klee: Did it seem like there were no hipsters there? Another point for Gen X: they are hipster-repellent. Though, Cece, I was pretty sure you were gonna punch that girl in the poncho who was fretting about her iPad getting wet.

Cece Lederer: And she was texting the whole time. Do you think she was the mystery texter at My Bloody Valentine too? It just breaks my heart when I think of all the 17-year-old girls blowing pot smoke through the fan in their bathroom window, listening to Wowee Zowee and NOT at the concert because this waste of hair straightener got the tickets that were rightfully hers! You're right that there didn't seem to be any hipsters. There must have been an Animal Collective show somewhere in Bushwick. I did, however, notice that 1 in 5 guys looked exactly like Malkmus. I also couldn't believe how much fun Malkmus looked like he was having. I think he might like Pavement ALMOST as much as I do.

Dave Bry: And that has not always been the case at Pavement shows. The whole band did seem to get into the spirit of the rain-storm-faithful. They sounded genuine in their "thanks for sticking it out with us..." stuff. And of course, they rewarded us by playing their very best songs. I was worried I would not hear "Here," because they hadn't played it the night before. But then, on a night like last night, they had to play it. A wet and soaked and exhausted and beautiful song for a wet and soaked and exhausted and beautiful night.

Cece Lederer: NOT ENOUGH EARLY TRACKS!!! Such as: "Debris Slide," "Forklift," "From Now On," "Box Elder," "She Believes," "Angel Carver Blues/Mellow Jazz Docent," "Home," "Baptist Blacktick," "My First Mine." Also: "AT&T."

Miles Klee: I found myself wondering where Malkmus got his really comfortable-looking plaid shirt. I feel myself slouching toward slackerdom. I think it all began with some cool older cousins of mine gave me a book of Matt Groening's "Life In Hell" comics when I was way too young for it.

Cece Lederer: I may just be a part of Generation X. It's defined more by transcendent ennui and technological proficiency than it is by year anyway.

Dave Bry: I've always been confused by the term. I suppose it's a can't-see-the-forest-for-the-trees thing, because I'm smack dab in the middle of it. (And I have to admit to the weird feeling that comes for me at a Pavement show: there is no band that makes me feel more dead-center demographic stereotype than they do.) But I've always thought that that was kind of what they're talking about in "Fight This Generation." Like, fight this idea of us being lumped together and summed up with this monochromatic catch-all label. But maybe that's not what it's about it at all. And I'm well aware that I probably live up to stereotype from the perspective of others as much as anyone else. But I'd still like to fight that idea.

Miles Klee: Oh for sure-"Gen X" is as lazy a label as "Millennial." It's awesome, though, that "Fight This Generation" can feel to me like a rallying cry against whatever intangible shittiness I do sense in my own age group. I dunno! Pavement lyrics are cryptic enough to be multivalent; they can still be applied all over the place. Which I suppose is what gives these songs a timelessness whereby rock critics today can finally start to say: "It wasn't by any stretch the most popular sound back then, but it's turned out to be among the most enduring."

Dave Bry: They'll be like the Velvet Underground, maybe?

Cece Lederer: At least we're not "The Greatest Generation." That's some shit to live up to.

Cece Lederer will be buying scalped tickets to Friday's show. Miles Klee is thinking about it. Dave Bry is still toweling off.

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Sorry for making you take all those water-logged maxi pads and tampons off my car.

You were only ten. This was 1988. I was seventeen and a new driver. I'd bought an eight-year-old, metallic-blue Toyota Corolla from our dad's friend Alice for a dollar. It was a junker-rusted doors, yellow foam cushions poking through ripped vinyl seats, trunk that flew open around corners sometimes-but I invested $180 in a new carburetor and it ran well enough to help me deliver Danny's pizzas and get me to school every morning.

Of course, a teenage boy's first car offers other advantages, too. And mine earned the mostly-joking, not-very-original nickname of "The Pussy Wagon" from two platonic girl friends, Jennifer and J.P., after I was lucky enough to have one of my first sexual experiences in the backseat. (The episode became slightly famous among my circle of friends because Matt McCabe had come knocking on the fogged-up window asking if there was a person there. "Yes!" I told him. "Go away!" He knocked again, "Dave, it's Matt. Is there a person there?" I could have killed him. "Yes!" I shouted. "Fuck off!" He knocked again, asked again. Was he deaf? Was this a prank? Did he want me to tell him her name? I stopped what I was doing, clambered into the front seat and opened the door a crack. "What the fuck, man?!" He was standing there with his girlfriend, Mary, who I'd driven to the party we were parked outside. "Sorry, Dave," Mary said. "But is my purse in there?" It was.)

A couple months later, on Mischief Night, the night before Halloween, Jennifer and J.P. played a good trick on me by decorating the car with fake cardboard license plates stenciled "P-WAGON" and a truly impressive number of maxi pads and tampons, which they stuck all over the exterior using the little adhesive strips on the back of the maxi pads and tape for the tampons. They were very thorough. There must have been 500 maxi pads on there. Fewer tampons, but you couldn't see much metallic blue.

Dad found it in our driveway in the morning and enjoyed the joke. He was good about things like that. I got a ride to school with someone else and congratulated Jennifer and J.P. when I saw them. The problem started the next day, when dad asked me when I was going to remove the feminine hygiene products from the already-less-than-attractive car that was parked, for all to see, in front of his house.

Like many teenage boys, I was extremely squeamish about all things related to menstruation-a position that, thinking back on it, was largely put on. I think I just thought guys were supposed to be that way, all freaked out and uncomfortable at the first mention of a girl's period; I associate it with Scott Valentine, who played Mallory Keaton's boyfriend Nick on Family Ties. I think he got the heebie-jeebies about the subject one episode, and, I don't know, I guess I thought he was cool. The way he said "Yo" all the time and stuff. (This probably goes pretty far towards explaining why I hadn't had sex earlier than I did. It was hard growing up in the 80s.) Anyway, I adopted that stance and refused to touch the pads and tampons. I told dad I would make Jennifer and J.P. do it. He shook his head, disappointed.

Then it rained.

I had no idea how absorbent those things are! The pads ballooned to the size of bricks-like giant sodden baby diapers. The tampons were like dog bones, plumes of cotton exploding out of their thin cardboard tubes. My car looked like a quilted Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. It was way more disgusting-and Dad was way more insistent about it being cleaned up. I was way less happy about the notion. And Jennifer and J.P. just laughed and laughed.

The rain stopped. Days passed. The stuff stayed inflated-like those aspirin-sized capsules that blow-up into foam dinosaurs when kids put them a bowl of water. (Magic!) This was their new shape.

Being a ten-year-old girl, you had a much more reasonable attitude towards the situation. And being my little sister, you were always looking for ways to score points with me. I think I gave you a dollar for what must have been an hour's worth of work. When dad got home that evening, he was pleased to see it taken care of. When he heard I'd had you do it, he shook his head again.

So, really, this is as much a thank you as it is an apology. But I am sorry for being such a Scott Valentine about the whole thing.

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I'm sorry for wearing sweat pants to our first dinner date and for getting stoned before meeting your parents for the first time.

This was in 1999, before we were married. We'd been friends for a couple years at that point, and had recently started seeing each romantically-the result of a particularly drunken night at the WXOU Bar on Hudson Street, near where we lived in the West Village. I'd asked you out for a first proper dinner date, to Hangawi, a fancy Korean restaurant on 32nd Street.

It's funny now to think about what I was thinking as I got ready to meet you. It was a Saturday, and I had been wearing a pair of green sweatpants that I used to wear on weekends. They were the kind that George Costanza used to wear on Seinfeld, the kind that Jerry once said announced to the world, "I give up. I can't compete in normal society." It occurred to me that I might change into something else, but I stood in my bedroom and thought for a minute and decided against it. I put on a white polo shirt and my Converse All-stars and walked out the door.

It wasn't that I was trying to feign ambivalence, to give the impression I didn't care enough to put on pants with buttons and belt-loops. I had made it very clear, in fact, that I wanted us to be girlfriend and boyfriend. If anything, you were the one who took some convincing. (Glaringly easy, in hindsight, to see why.) My thinking, as best I can explain it, was more along the lines of "take me as I am." I was a guy who wore green sweat pants on a Saturday. I wanted to make a good impression, but changing pants for that reason felt wrong. Like I'd be faking it, presenting myself as someone I was not. This type of thinking makes very little sense to me now and is derailed by something as simple as the fact that I certainly didn't wear those sweat pants exclusively. I had lots of other pants, many of which I often changed into before dinner without much thought at all. But that day, I felt myself in the hands of fate: These were the pants you put on this morning, these are the pants you shall wear tonight.

I don't know. I used to be really superstitious, too. And that's just a terrible way to live. I was smoking too much pot those days, I suppose.

Which brings me to the second part of this apology. A couple months later, our relationship having miraculously survived my sweat pants, you'd arranged for us to go to dinner with your parents-my first time meeting them. Bored, sitting around my apartment that afternoon, I came to the same kind of question as before: Here was a situation in which, on any other day, I would be smoking pot. Should the fact that I was soon to be meeting these important people, the parents of the woman I was falling in love with, should I let that change my routine? I knew that I'd be brighter-eyed and clearer in conversation if I refrained, and I definitely wanted your parents to like me.

But then I thought, well, the way things are going, chances are I'll be spending a lot of time around these people in the future. There would be lots of days like this. I wasn't planning on making any major changes to my personal lifestyle. They might as well get to know me half-lidded and cloudy-headed. I packed a bowl.

Dinner went fine. Your parents turned out to be groovy 60s-types anyway. Towards the end of the evening, after I recognized a reference one of them made to the Steve Martin-Lily Tomlin movie All of Me, and mentioned that it was as a favorite of mine, your dad said, "Anyone who appreciates All of Me is all right by me," and my heart felt warm in my chest. I'd lucked out.

Still, thinking back, it seems pretty stupid. There's a reason most people would choose not to get stoned before meeting their girlfriend's parents. Just like there's a reason to change out of sweatpants before going on a date to a fancy restaurant. Making decisions based on principle rather than pragmatism is a prescription for failure. Even more so when the principle is so confused and self-defeating.

Was all this a test for you? I guess in a way it was, odd as that sounds. Not that I'd meant it that way. But I remember the expression on your face when we met at the restaurant for that first dinner date. You looked down at my sweat pants, and then back up to me, and gave a bemused little sigh. "So this is how it's going to be, huh?" You thought for a second more and said, "All right."

Again, I lucked out.

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I'm sorry for shouting out my window at that old lady who used to tie her dog up outside Famiglia's pizza shop. And for my lack of creativity.

It was early 2001, I think, shortly before we all had far more to be worrying about than the nuisance of noise pollution. But back in those comparatively carefree days, I was very much bothered by the loud, raspy barking of a dog that was routinely left leashed to a lamppost on Hudson Street, three stories below my bedroom window. It would happen every day, at various times: long, long sessions of barking, 45 minutes, an hour sometimes. After a while, when I'd hear it start up, I would look out my window and see the dog, a medium-sized mutt with dingy, matted fur, looking plaintively in the direction of the deli-mart across the alley from Famiglia's pizza, and barking and barking and barking.

It drove me crazy. I'd been working from home for a couple years at that point. I was used to the sounds of the city, able to tune most of them out. But something about this particular's dog bark-maybe how sad it sounded, along with its incessancy-got to me in a different way. There was a cruel and inconsiderate dog-owner out there, making the lives of at least two living beings worse. I complained a lot about the situation to my girlfriend, who I shared the apartment with and would soon marry. But she worked in an office, and so heard the barking only on weekends or the rare nighttime episode. And she is generally less bothered by things than I am anyway. Other than her, I didn't know who to appeal to. I'd never actually seen anyone out there tying up the dog.

One day I wrote a note on a piece of yellow legal-pad paper and taped it to the lamppost while the dog was there barking. "Please don't leave this dog tied up here," it said. "It is obviously unhappy and it barks and barks. This is unfair to the neighborhood and unfair to the dog." I felt pretty stupid, seeing it there in my handwriting. I looked down at the dog, who wasn't paying attention to me, and then just walked away.

Nothing changed. Weeks passed.

I was at the end of my rope the night that I finally saw her. It was a weeknight, Tuesday maybe, and later than usual, ten o'clock or so. Quiet out on Hudson Street, other than the dog's barking, which had been going on for a half-an-hour. Quiet inside our apartment, too, other than my ranting about the social contract, etc., which had been going on for about as long. Emily was sitting in bed, trying to read or something. I'd staked out a position at the window, watching the dog, waiting for the owner. When she appeared-sort of waddling out of the deli-mart, a short, heavy-set woman with white hair, maybe in her 60s-and stepped to the lamppost and began untying the leash, I jumped up and ran into the bathroom, where the window in the shower provided a more direct angle from which to shout.

I stepped into the tub, the crinkly plastic shower curtain cold and dry as I pushed it aside, and opened the window and stuck out my head. "Hey, lady!" I said, and heard Emily questioning my actions from the bedroom. "Don't tie your dog up there anymore! It barks too loud!"

My voice echoed off the buildings, louder than the dog's barking. The old lady didn't even really look up to see where I was. She dismissed me with a sort of feh-style wave of her hand and said, and croaked, "Don't tell me how to care for my animals."

It was like she'd heard it all before-she had, I suppose-but simply did not care. She was super New York; she had bigger problems to worry about.

"Come on, lady ..." I started, but she cut me off.

"Ahh, shut up!"

I was stunned. The gall of this person. But standing in my bathtub at ten o'clock at night, craning my neck out the window, all hot in my ears, I didn't know what to say.

"No, you shut up!" I shouted back.

I shook my head to myself in the pause that followed. I am not very good at shouting at people.

Then the phone rang. I told Emily I'd get it and pushed back the shower curtain and stepped out of the tub and walked into the kitchen where the phone was.

"Hello?"

"Dave?" It was Nick, my old roommate, who now lived in the building next door. On the sixth floor, with his girlfriend Eva.

"Hey, Nick." I said.

"Did I just hear you shouting out your window?"

"Oh, man..."

Nick started laughing. Did you just tell someone, "‘No, you shut up?!'"

I should have known better than to have gotten involved.

Dave

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I'm sorry for throwing rocks at your house.

That was me that night, back in the winter of 1987. I was a sophomore in high school. My friends Will and Ted and I were coming from a party at Nancy Dorn's house, down the block. We were loud, laughing, wasted-drunk. Someone had brought a bottle of vodka. We sat around a coffee table in the den, filling tall glasses and chugging long gulps-daring each other to do more. We had to go fast, Nancy's parents were only out for the evening. One time when it was Ted's turn, he said he needed a chaser, and asked me to get him some water. I went in to the kitchen and found a bottle of gin-Nancy's parents' I suppose (there's another apology due)-poured a healthy, refreshing-looking glass of that instead and took it back to the table.

"Here you go, man," I said. Ted took a deep breath, downed half a glass of the vodka and quickly reached for the chaser. "Ha ha," I said, as he ran into the bathroom to puke.

Everyone except Ted really liked that joke. He would get me back, though, more than a year later (memory like an elephant, he had) with tequila disguised in a bottle of light beer. "That's for that time at Nancy Dorn's house, asshole," he said, as I was leaned over a garbage can in Kevin Thistle's backyard.

Anyway, this is the kind of idiots we were. And we were full-on that night, still early as it was, probably around 11 o'clock, when we spilled out of Nancy's. No one knew what to do. We had nowhere to go. Everyone else left. So we just started walking. Ted was extra riled up, I think, because he'd left Nancy's house without making-out with her, which is something he got to do sometimes but not always, and particularly not after his supposed friend had made him puke in front of everybody by giving him gin instead of water. Upon getting out on to Northvale, he tried to karate kick a little wooden lawn display thing in a neighbors' yard, but he'd missed and caught his foot over the top, and fallen flat on his butt. This was about the funniest thing that Will and I had ever seen. And Ted soon joined us in laughing and then just shouting curse words at the sky. "Fuck it!" he shouted. "Yeah, fuck it!" we shouted. "Suck my dick!" "Yeah, suck my dick!" Cursing just to curse. Punishment, though, basically, for anyone unlucky enough to share our sleepy suburban town with us.

None of this is to excuse or even explain, really, the fact that as we staggered, cackling, past your driveway, I picked up a handful of gravel from your driveway and threw it at the façade of your house. It could have broken a window. I'm very glad it didn't. For all I know, you had children, even babies maybe, sleeping inside. The question of what I was thinking barely applies. That I was some kind of rebel? A punk rocker? In my Army-Navy-store trench coat, like Judd Nelson in The Breakfast Club, and L.L. Bean duck boots, laces left loose, but just so, with little knots tied at the ends, to keep them from slipping out of place. Embarrassing to remember.

We must have been making enough noise on our approach for you to be on the alert, because not ten seconds after the pebbles strafed the shingles-I'll never forget the sound, a clatter like shuffling cards-your garage light flicked on. Then you were there, in your yard, a bobbing flashlight beam racing towards us. "Holy shit!" Will shouted, and we took off.

We crossed Northvale and bolted into someone's backyard. You followed us, close, maybe thirty yards behind. But you didn't say anything. Not "Stop" or "Hey, you kids!" Nothing. There was just the herky-jerk bounce of the light when I turned to look. This made me think you were very serious and I realized that you had more in mind than just chasing us off your property. "Go! Go! Go!" Will said, from right next me, all of us still laughing as we ran. "He's coming!" It was clumsy, sprinting all bundled up, and so drunk. But we kept our lead. Maybe you were wearing slippers? Maybe you were old?

Adrenaline cleared what had been a blurry night. I remember the particles of mist in the halos of back porch lights as we went from one yard into the next. In front of us, hedges appeared. Ted lowered his head and charged into them. I followed, thinking we'd burst through like football players or something. No. There was a chain-link fence inside, or just on the other side, that absorbed us for a moment then flung us backwards and then onto the hard winter ground. Stunned, amazed, we got up quickly and kept going. Will had found the perimeter and we went around that way. Another yard. Then came a tall wooden fence, the kind with flat, pointy pickets and two horizontal crossbeams. Will, who actually did play football, and very well, for the school team, jumped up to climb over. I watched as the whole length of it, forty feet probably, all tipped forward with his weight and fell flat with him on it. We howled and kept going. Will scrambled up, Ted and I passed him. Then there was the pool that the wooden fence had enclosed. Covered in a taut, springy tarp for the winter. We didn't see it, and screamed when we found ourselves stumbling, splashing, knee-deep in very cold water. I fell forward and caught myself with my hands, soaking my coat before scrambling out.

We kept running. Slogging, really, now in wet clothes, to the edge of the next yard, where we slowed, and then walked, panting, not believing what had just happened. It was like the scene in The Naked Gun when the guy drives into the oil tanker and then the missile launcher and then the fireworks company. I don't know when you'd stopped chasing us. Before we'd hit the hedges? After we'd knocked over the fence?

Back on the street, we split up, in case you'd called the cops, and headed off in separate directions to sneak into our parents' houses and make up lies to tell the next day.

I don't know if I've ever had more fun. Still, I wish I hadn't done it, for what it's worth.

Dave

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Sorry for flashing you.

I was living at 1612 Mason Street that summer, in an apartment on the bottom floor of a grey-and-purple building by the corner of Green Street in North Beach. A particularly picturesque San Francisco spot. View from the roof out over Fisherman's Wharf to Alcatraz in the Bay. The trolley tracks ran right past.

The only way I was able to afford such a nice place was to share its two bedrooms with four friends from college. I'd been asked to take what a kindly dean referred to as an "academic hiatus" after my sophomore year. I thought I'd get a job and start a new life. But that was a recession summer. Jobs were not to be found, even for someone with my credentials. I ate tuna fish sandwiches and potato salad every day, saving every spare bit of cash for rent and the amazing pot a friend of a friend brought us down from Humboldt County. The only furniture in the apartment was a kitchen table and chairs. We slept on futon cushions and didn't much decorate.

Or hang curtains on the windows in my bedroom. Those that looked out onto the sidewalk, and the street, down the middle of which, every half-hour or so, a red-and-yellow cable car full of tourists would slowly clatter and chug its way towards the intersection. My roommates and I joked about living in a fish bowl and carried our clothes into the bathroom to change after showering. But as the months passed and I got more comfortable in the apartment, I started walking back into the room in a towel and changing there. You could hear the trolley approaching from a block away, so there was always time to cover up. Eventually, though, probably due in part to the listlessness of unemployment, I stopped making the effort.

What did I care if a couple tourists saw me naked? Consider it a free perk or a hidden tax that accompanies the price of a ticket. A new kind of San Francisco treat.

This was early in the handheld video camera era. I remember being struck by the number of people who rode the cable cars with the things fixed to one eye, held steady, filming the façade of every building on the route. I always thought they were missing a lot that way, sacrificing 360 degree scenery for dull documentation. Didn't they want to look around? It didn't seem like a fun way to spend a vacation day. Perhaps for this reason, and perhaps also because of the potency of the Humboldt pot, I got a real kick out of it the first time I saw a guy's face pop out from behind his camera, eyes and mouth open wide, having spotted the whole of me through his lens. It'd give him a story to tell. Spice things up a bit.

Soon I took to air-drying after a shower, staying naked on purpose, waiting to hear the trolley come and standing right up in the window, hands on my hips, stoned and giggling to myself as it passed. It was rare that anyone noticed-only two or three gawkers and pointers over a month or so of this-but I very much enjoyed the thought of the people who might have caught me on camera without noticing in real time. That would be a fun home movie screening. Greetings from San Francisco!

But if you didn't find it fun, well, sorry. Also, please keep in mind what Mark Twain said about how cold it is in San Francisco during the summer.

Dave

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"Oh, you lost your jobs?" he said, in a deep monster voice. "I'm sorry."

Then in the higher voice of another character, "We're just kids!"

"Okay."

Then back to the sounds of laser blasts and clashing swords, etc. But it seems that someone's been eavesdropping on the grown-up conversations at holiday parties.

After contemplating the psychological effect my unemployment might be having on my child, and wondering if there might be any percocet left in the medicine cabinet, I got out of bed and went in to the kitchen to fix his lunch for school.

My wife, in pants already, was preparing to leave for work. She'd made him breakfast and gotten the newspaper, which I found on the counter. Here's the headline stretching across the front page: "Poll Reveals Trauma of Joblessness in U.S."

Out of 708 unemployed adults surveyed last week, it said, "Almost half have suffered from depression or anxiety. About 4 in 10 parents have noticed behavioral changes in their children that they attribute to their difficulties in finding work." The article, and three accompanying profiles of out-of-work Americans (losers!!!), is full of depressing anecdotes. Evan Gutierrez, who lost his job as a music director in Los Angeles, has moved his wife and newborn son into a smaller apartment and applied to a church's goodwill fund to help pay the rent while he looks for work. "We grow up with the impression there's a correlation between effort and the fruits of your labor," he said. "To be honest with you, I have very little confidence I'm going to be able to turn this around. It just feels completely, completely out of my control."

2009, ladies and gentlemen! This year can not be over soon enough.

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