a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.” The minister said that people take every line of the Bible literally except for that one, when it is the only line that is meant literally.
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2011: “It was kind of a beautiful day—only saveable sentence.” This one I remember quite vividly. I’d spent almost a year working on a novel about six high school students who end up stranded on a desert island. I was stuck with the story so I decided to take a couple weeks away from it and then reread it. When I returned to it with clear eyes, I found absolutely nothing—no heart, no wit, no joy. It had to be scrapped, except for that one sentence, “It was kind of a beautiful day.” I still like that sentence, though. It ended up in The Fault in Our Stars.
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2010: “Her eyes on His eyes on.” According to my phone, this was the first note I made in the app. I assume it was written when I first noticed the pun inside a lyric from my favorite band, the Mountain Goats. Their song “Jenny” is about a girl who has just acquired a yellow-and-black Kawasaki motorcycle, and the narrator who loves her. One of the song’s couplets goes, “And you pointed your headlamp toward the horizon / We were the one thing in the galaxy God didn’t have His eyes on.” That line always reminds me of being in eleventh grade, lying in the middle of an open field with three friends I loved ferociously, drinking warm malt liquor, and staring up at the night sky.
Being the one thing in the galaxy God didn’t have His eyes on gets a solid five stars from me, but as for the Notes app: I give it three and a half stars.
THE MOUNTAIN GOATS
I DON’T KNOW HOW TO TELL YOU about my love for the band the Mountain Goats except to say that it is genuinely unconditional. I do not have a favorite Mountain Goats song or album; they are all my favorites. Their songs have been my main musical companion since my friend Lindsay Robertson played me the song “The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton” half my life ago. Lindsay, who has the best taste of any person I’ve ever met, recommended I start my Mountain Goats journey by listening to their at-the-time new album, Tallahassee. (Like me, Lindsay grew up in Florida.)
Within a few weeks, I’d memorized every song on Tallahassee. John Darnielle, the band’s front man, is, as music critic Sasha Frere-Jones put it, “America’s best non-hip-hop lyricist.” On Tallahassee, he presents love as I was then experiencing it: “Our love is like the border between Greece and Albania,” he sings in “International Small Arms Traffic Blues.” In another song, he sings of a relationship “like a Louisiana graveyard / Where nothing stays buried.”
As I got older, the Mountain Goats grew with me. Their songs were with me when my kids were born (“I saw his little face contract as his eyes met light”), and they were with me as I spiraled out of control with grief (“I am an airplane tumbling wing over wing / Try to listen to my instruments / They don’t say anything”). Sometimes, I need art to encourage me, as the Mountain Goats famously do in the chorus of “This Year,” with Darnielle shouting, “I am going to make it through this year if it kills me.” Other times, I only need art to accompany me.
The Mountain Goats have shaped the way I think and listen so profoundly that I don’t know who I would be without them, only that I wouldn’t be me. I don’t want to overstate it, but there are moments in Mountain Goats songs that are almost scriptural to me, in the sense that they give me a guide to the life I want to live and the person I wish to be when I grow up. Consider, for instance, this couplet: “You were a presence full of light upon this Earth / And I am a witness to your life and to its worth. “ That’s a calling to me—to present more light, and to better witness the light in others.
I give the Mountain Goats five stars.
THE QWERTY KEYBOARD
ON MOST ENGLISH-LANGUAGE KEYBOARDS, the three rows of letter keys are not arranged alphabetically or by frequency of use. Indeed, the