Some of my favorite bands glamorize and glorify, but certainly don't gloss over, the pains and joys of street life, e.g. Gaslight Anthem, the Hold Steady, Bruce Springsteen (see especially The Wild, the Innocent, & the E-Street Shuffle and Born to Run). The thing is, all of these great stories, all of these legends of street-lit and bar-lit lanes, they don't happen anymore, and we've killed them. We've killed them with parents who lived them, desperate to protect their kids from the same things the did and experienced; we've killed them with cell phones, with texting, with Twitter and Facebook. If ever there was anything that could kill the romance (not the he-likes-her-she-likes-him-happily-ever-after romance, just the love and beauty that this life has to offer) we've certainly found it, championed it, lionized it. We don't talk in person; we call. We don't call; we text. We don't use words, for why words when "ttyl" and the equally horrendous typos will do? But here's the problem- life used to be an adventure, a dangerous one yes, but a beautiful one full of possibility, and as much as we like to say that all of these forms of messaging bring us closer together, they really drive us farther apart. People text across rooms, and true meaning is lost without the context given by body language, by eye conduct, by that real wink, that real nudge. It's getting harder and harder to start stories with, "There was this girl, obscured just a bit by the dim barlight and last remnants of the cigarette smoke looking at me across the bar, and in that look, all that she could possibly say to me that night was already said. Blue eyes. Damn."