We drove up (which felt bad, almost everyone else biked) to the back of a warehouse in Charlottesville, Virginia called Community Bikes. The door to the warehouse was closing, but we were able to peek into the tangled workshop while a three person no-name band warmed up for their first unofficial, unpaid gig. John Bylander--man of the hour--meanwhile fired up the grill to roast veggie burgers and corn. He was heading off to Art School, and we came to mourn his leaving as much as to celebrate.

As the sun began drowning off in the distance behind the UVA medical center, people arrived to lean against or sit on top of the concrete berms piled up next to the railroad tracks. The pink and purple glowing ebb twinkled off the beer bottles and cell phones of all the twenty-ish somethings: aspiring musicians, artists, film makers, poets, activists. Standing around in their faded t-shirts and feeling the tightening grip of a tilting economy, they smoked cigarettes slowly, shyly waiting for the band to get started.

In the tea-colored murk the lead guitarist finally struck a chord, as one small blinding work light attached to the drum kit illuminated his silhouette. The post-punk complaint began a kind of Wagnerian climb up up up into an unresolved chord progression that snarled with complexity into a cloud of joyful wrath, whereupon the lead guitarist started to thrash his head ritually back and forth in an eternal kow-tow to the drums. The female second guitarist fiddled with her nylon chords and often turned a little away from the others as if seeking out a perfect post-apocalyptic accompaniment with the rusty scratch of the trains that passed by.

The band was brilliant, and we were feeling in their bleak futuristic relish the uncertainty of our own future -- would John come back to Charlottesville eventually or would he go on to another career in another city?

The sadness and magic we felt in the stable darkness left no need for older forms of speeches. It was a moment that seemed to have been called forth by an invisible directorial hand--a moment where not just a band, not just John's friends, but the freight trains, the sunset, and the dusty red Virginia clay all called out their goodbye.