4/05/2004 09:59:00 AM

I was driving a bit today. As I catatonicly turned on the radio while the fluids and electricity shot through my driving machine I was surprised to hear a Nirvana song--surprised because I had left the radio on NPR. I double checked the station. I even triple checked it. Nirvana is not the normal course, nor is music from any act, on NPR morning commentary. This was the cause of my bewildered, thick-fingered button pushing on this particular Monday morning.

Just as I began thinking that these odd circumstances were simply another portent pointing to the possibility that my mind was creating all of reality and it just so happened to want a bit of Cobain, Novoselic and Grohl this morning the soothing voice of Marcia Sillman came on speaking over the music in that you-know-that-it's-NPR fashion.

Today, it seems, marks the beginning of the 10 year memorial of Kurt Cobain's final moments on Earth. Listening to the program brought back floods of familiar memories--those combinations of scent and texture, sound and vision that the word memory seems too vacuously austere to imply. I remembered the first time I heard Nirvana coming from a dubbed tape one balmy summer afternoon driving on the small feeder roads through an industrial district of Dallas. I remembered the flannel, the economic anxiety, the heady conversations over the mundane, sacred and profane that made up the moments that encrusted those times as their natural, somehow unifying perimeter. Those pre-Internet boom, pre-9/11, pre-turn of the millennium days of quiet expectation.

I remember the day Kurt was found in his Seattle home. I remember. I remember we lived in a downstairs apartment of an old college dormitory. I remember the news casts, the memorials and radio-mediated words of an angry wife and somber lover leading the throngs who appeared throughout Seattle in volleys of "We love you Kurt!" followed by "Fuck you Kurt!"--the bluntly intentional contradiction etched into the crisp Pacific Northwest air heavy with rain. I remember that Sarah and I made our own memorial. We drew outlines of our hands in red whiteboard marker on the small, wood-lined board that hung on our door. Between them we scrawled:

We love you, Kurt
1967 - 1994