2003-04-27 - 12:50 p.m.
"My brother got me a toy for my new car, a stereo that plays .mp3 files, so I've been cutting large swaths of my CD collection onto a handful of cds and anyway the other night I had one on random and this song came on and I thought of you immediately.
Green light, 7-Eleven, you stop in for a pack of cigarettes you don't smoke. Don't even want to...
I don't know why but the image of you buying cigarettes not to feed an addiction but as a deliberate gesture of desperation, a "fuck you" to the universe for turning out the way it did, seems to fit your recent writing style, as well as many of the things you've told me.
I remember one of the earliest conversations we ever had, about this band, about how we both missed the younger, passionate, idealistic U2, how this joke of a sour lounge act bitterly sipping on stiff gin lime-twisted martinis or whatever, just had to go.
And I have to say that I miss the younger, passionate, idealistic Jess, that this bitter reclusive malaise of yours is ill-becoming and as disheartening for the observer as it must be for the sufferer. And I have to say that I am sorry for the way things worked out, that I do, sincerely and profoundly, apologize for my part in it, that I, too, wish it hadn't turned out the way it did. There isn't a ready vocabulary for this stuff, and on rereading that it sounds like I'm trying to patch things up and get us (back?) together: I'm not, for reasons obvious and sound.
Anyway I'm not sure what the point of this all is; it sounds drunken and maudlin. But ... I would like you to feel young again, or possibly for the first time. Young, hopeful, passionate, idealistic. Full of wonder and rhetoric. Will you do that?"
