Napster has blocked my ass.

I got a craving tonight to hear Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes." I have it on cassette, but both tape decks in my stereo are busted and my Walkman, which I had jacked in through the video in port, has finally died after many years of reliable use. There's a terrible cassette player in the little portable stereo I have, but as I said, it's terrible. So I went looking for it on Napster.

BZZT. No results found. I guess it's time to download a Gnutella client.

I'm freezing. I've had the window open all evening for fresh air after having it closed all day against pollen. The pollen count has been huge lately and I have been feelin' the love. Sniffly sneezy itchy. I still haven't gone back in to the allergist to start getting shots. I know, I promised to take care of that. I'll get through the move and then I'll go.

Anyway. Risa and I went to Grendel's near Harvard Square tonight for drinks and food, then wandered around for a while, eventually settling on a wall in the square.

There was a group of kids sitting nearby, twentysomethings who haven't figured out that punk is dead. They looked like half the kids I knew in DC in the mid-eighties. Lots of biker jackets and studded bracelets and Manic Panic hair. With them was a black Great Dane wearing several spiky collars. As he came near us, we noticed that the Dane was terribly thin. All of his ribs and vertebrae were showing.

Some of the kids around Harvard Square are homeless. Some are runaways, some former runaways, some just down on their luck. I don't know that the Dane's owner is homeless, but it's a fair guess from the look of the dog. Risa and I looked at each other.

Risa's immediate instinct was to go buy some food for the dog. My immediate instinct was, for a change, not to get involved. I realized I had become sort of afraid of these kids somewhere along the line. Giving someone food for his dog is a potentially provocative gesture; it touches on all kinds of issues of pride. And I was afraid.

She bought some food anyway (me pointing out that she should probably buy cans that open without a can opener) and some dog treats and gave it to the dog's owner and just kept moving. Neatly done. But I'm still wondering why I reacted the way I did.

At 14 and 15, I was tolerated by some punks and skins in DC who I met around the Back Alley and Dupont Circle. They had an uneasy truce with my friends. I was careful not to piss any of them off, and they dealt with my very underage self without static. Everyone kept me out of sight of the few really intense (read: mental) individuals, including a scary little skin named Victor, and all was well.

Then two of my friends got jumped by fifteen people after a TSOL show. I'd planned to go to that show also, but I'd gotten sick or grounded or something at the last minute and had to bail. A guy confronted my friend Patrick on something, then knocked him down and started kicking him. The rest of the group, including Victor, jumped in and helped. The other friend ran for the car and pulled up next to Patrick, getting punched through his open window when he stopped the car. Patrick got free and dived into the car; someone smashed the windshield with a rock as they pulled out.

I can't remember how badly Patrick was hurt, but nothing too serious. He was lucky. But I was the luckiest. I wasn't there. I would not have been spared for being a girl. I would have gotten the shit kicked out of me.

I saw Victor a few months later, and I was afraid of him. He was preoccupied with a limp, passive blonde girl I didn't know. I met his eyes once and kept moving. But I was out of the scene.

Maybe the reason I was so uneasy was lingering wariness from the TSOL incident. Maybe I'm just getting old. I learned something about myself tonight, but I'm not sure what it is.

First things first: I'm listening to Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes" on repeat. Lots of thanks to Cyndi for sending it to me, even though I'm on a dial-up modem and it took thirty minutes to download. It was worth the wait. I love this song. I keep thinking of John Cusack in Say Anything..., standing in the rain with his boom box over his head.

Today was a little strange. I ate something yesterday which didn't like me and spent most of the night, uh, getting rid of it. When I got up to take the trash out, I had only gotten about three hours of sleep. I was so tired all day that everything seemed a little unreal, which wasn't a bad thing provided I kept moving.

I went out to run errands, then took the subway home. I had to change trains at Government Center to get on the green line; I jogged up the stairs just as a green line train pulled in. Running for the train, I passed a small, dark-haired woman with a guitar who was playing something terribly familiar. I turned around and took another look at her through the window of the train and realized it was Mary Lou Lord. And then the train pulled out.

I first met Mary Lou in the summer of 1995. She was playing on the sidewalk on Newbury Street, just a small woman with a guitar and an amp and a voice like an angel. She was working her way through Richard Thompson's "1952 Vincent Black Lightning" ("I've seen you on the corners and cafes, it seems / red hair and black leather, my favorite color scheme...") and had accumulated a thick semicircle of listeners. I joined the group, straddling my bicycle in case I got bored.

An hour later, I was still there, sitting on the ground with my arm looped through the frame of my bike. When she wrapped up her set, she bummed a cigarette off me and took the bike for a quick spin around the block. We hung out and talked for thirty minutes or so until her ride appeared and she had to go.

After that, I saw her fairly often on Newbury Street, playing for the tourists and selling her CDs. I always stopped and spent some time with her, sharing cigarettes and laughs until her friends came to pick her up. And then she was gone. Someone told me she'd signed with a major label, but that was all I knew. She was just gone.

The next time I saw her was in 1998, on a promotional poster for her new album. Sony had released a slick, overproduced CD with lots of effects on her voice and someone else playing guitar. She spent some time touring to promote the CD, then dropped out of sight again. I heard sad rumors of exhaustion and a drug habit, but no one seemed to know for sure. Eventually I stopped thinking about her except when I played her CDs.

And now she's back, doing what she loved best in the first place: playing the streets and the subways. Tomorrow I think I'll take the subway back to Government Center and see if she's around. I'd like to sit with her and sing along again. It's been a long time.