Dear Jeffrey Foucault,
I went to your show tonight. I've had a cold for three days, but I doped myself up on cold meds to come listen to you sing and play guitar. I took a shower and washed my hair so I could be fit for the company of other humans. I took off my drawstring pants and men's undershirt and put on...jeans and another men's undershirt, but with a shirt over it, of course, because I'm 28 now instead of 19.

I put aside the book that's been driving me mad about things you probably don't know/care about. I decided not to be stressed for the evening about the fact that school starts in two weeks and I have so much to do and--oh shit--I have to start convincing people I'm smart on a daily basis again.

You were so lovely! With your stubble and your regular-guy jeans and your blue flannel tucked up in - belt buckle holding it all in. You were drinking red wine and singing country songs - or are they folk? What does iTunes say? You quoted Humphrey Bogart. You talked about your small town in Wisconsin and playing with your nieces and how your mother wants you to be "a crooner." I think you like women. Like, as people. Or at least your songs do.

You mentioned Otis Redding. The only covers you played were Tom Waits and old Bruce Springsteen. I approved.

You made fun of yourself for carrying a yoga ball around in your car because you popped something in your back. Was the injury potato farm related? Do you actually have anything to do with potato farms? Or is that just some random connection I picked up from listening to my friend Heidi babble on her live journal? I bet you don't even know what live journal is. In your free time, you read biographies about past US presidents. Or that's what you said.

You called out the guy sitting at the table across from me because you played tennis together in high school. Tennis? Really? It made me feel warm and miss my friends from forever who play country songs and other people fangirl them at their shows.

I wanted to tell you that your music makes me feel homesick in the best possible way. That it helped me get through my first winter in a city after years and years of beach town California after all the small town Vermont. But the homesick in your songs for me is only partially for the country (like rural, not the genre) and mostly for the feeling of loving people a fuckton, for sharing history. You bottle longing, and with me that's pretty much the highest compliment you can get.

I like that you write love songs that are hopeful (if often also bittersweet), instead of always sad. I like that you include prosaic details about life and make them magic, and strange allusions to history (like the kind they put in books). I like that you write song lyrics with the phrase "the grammar of our bodies."

I'm ambivalent about legal marriage since in most states in this country I couldn't marry a girl and I don't know if I'll ever have children (It's so much to contemplate - and only happens in my imagination when I have a different life and different ambitions, less insomnia and a partner who I actually could trust to do half the work). But when you sing that one song - with the bit about having a hundred babies and a clawfoot tub - I get confused.

But I didn't tell you any of these things, because I was sleepy and you were doing your own merch after the show, but I already have all of your albums, so. I sat at a small table on the left side of the club with my new friend C - who I think might be the kind of person I feel homesick for in the future once we're both wherever we end up next. I drank a tall glass of water and a short glass of whiskey, and I sighed in the dark.

Then I went home and talked to my mom on the phone and snuggled my cat.

P.S. When we were walking back to the El train, C shoved me with her shoulder and laughed and said, "Lucia, are you sure you don't need to take a pregnancy test now? You were like five feet away from him. Your ovaries could have..." She didn't elaborate.

But I wouldn't tell you that, because I have a feeling it would make you uncomfortable, even though it's funny as hell to us.