Ten years ago tonight, I threw the CDs away and that was that.

"I mourn little Kurt. Once beautiful, then pathetic, lost and heroically stupid boy," said Pete Townsend once upon a time, and that's far kinder than I find myself capable of being. I've tried all day to no avail to muster some spark of kindness, of compassion, and it hasn't come. His trainwreck wife. His twitching finger, insuring he's more the rock star than Perry Farrell or Axl Rose would ever be. His fatherless daughter. And stupid me, for buying into it at all.

Wallowing in the bummer-nostalgia hearing that goddamn Vaselines song always seems to inflict, I tripped the morning away in my own rawk wayback machine and, having put some dates, girlfriends, and events in order in my head realized a much finer, more joyous anniversary is soon at hand.

Teenager of the Year, the record so good it could even shut Camden Joy up for at least a little while, turns 10 on 24 May 04.

And it wasn't even a year ago that Xtop hipped me to the acrostic final verses of SPEEDY MARIE, as great a love song as there ever was. Ten years later and I'm still picking it apart, figuring things out, still as in love with it as I was the day it came out. That following weekend, I packed up a dorm room, stopping every ten minutes or so to replay a track, suckerpunched by a nuance or phrase, swaying and hardwiring it all into my head.

So raise your fist from inside of your gnarled sweaters, cry into your beer and nod off in loving memory of Cobain's Sarcoma. Hate yourself and want to die all over again for the first time.

Over here we swoon to songs about spaceships and girls that are like movie cameras. Ten years ago, I figured out that feeling bad never feels as good as feeling good, no matter how hard you try and tell yourself otherwise.

God save Francis Bean. God save Jean Marie Walsh.