05.27.10

We drove most of the way lost in the sounds of Mike Dunn and the Kings of New England, who is among, if not the "king" of roadtrip music. The conversations that found their way out were all of the laughing kind, and we wore our sunglasses like badges that said today's our day off. It was the kind of day that you mostly forget, but that reasserts itself in your memory every time you hear a certain song. Paper Candy now carries this memory for me.
At the time, I was not what most people would call a "happy" person. I'd recently recieved a letter from Capital that said, Please do not come back. You are a terrible student, and you embarass us. Whatever shape football had left me in was just about out the window, in fact, I'd later go home, look at the pictures of me from that trip, and think to myself...I need to get back in shape. I was the picture perfection of melodramatic, and was mostly in the business of getting drunk and railing at the world in one way or another.
The best thing I had going for me was a crappy job where I made no money, but one which introduced me to two of the best friends I'd ever have; a couple of knock your socks off handsome, strapping, tall, real manly men...Andrew and Michael. There was also the always interesting Rob, and white trash Jesse, and The Babe. we worked together pretty much every day, and it lead to a pretty interesting summer. We were all a bunch of borderline alchoholics who didn't know how to do much more than get shitfaced and cause problems somewhere.
But this wasn't that kind of a trip. I was driving, Andrew rode shotgun. We both wore silver aviators like we invented the look. Joel stretched out across the back with Booch. We drove the whole two and a half hours with the windows down and the radio up, lost in thoughts of jetskiing, an upcoming Damnwells concert, and the beers we'd be drinking soon.
We spent all day out on the lake. Doug and I took turns trying to see how close we could get to killing ourselves on the jetskis, and everbody else did their best to imitate us. We got drunk and sobered up probably three times each, then drove to Cleveland, saw the Damnwells for probably the last time in a few years, and left the place with bleeding eardrums, full hearts, and a Jameson drunk thanks to Ted being (as always) way too generous of a rock star.
It was a day to remember...and I hope I always will. Luckily, I've got Mike Dunn and the Kings of New England on my ipod to remind me anytime I forget. I'll remember puking out the side of the car on the way home, after making it to within ten minutes of our house, and Joel retelling the story as him looking back, seeing me leaning out the window and asking me:
"Did you just puke on my car?"
"No, I was just getting some air."
I promptly passed out. Booch, who was riding next to Joel at that point, turned to him and said, "I'm pretty sure he puked."
But I'll mostly remember Andrew turning to me at the concert, tapping his 24 oz PBR can against mine, and yelling over the music, "Thanks for inviting me, Buddy...this is a great time."
And it was.

We can never lose the things we live for. We may have to change their form at times, if we've made an error, but the purpose remains the same and the forms are ours to make.
-Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

05.26.10

I actually came into this with something to say....now I'm just distracted by the Dierks Bentley song that just came on. My musical tastes are what they are...my own. If it's the kind of stuff you could hear anywhere from the radio to a dive bar...preferably both. If people are dancing to it, if it's by some teenaged chick, if people are head banging or "moshing", or if it could ever be performed live without a band...I'm not going to like it. And no, I dont speak ebonics, so that rules out an entire genre all together.
It's no secret that music is generally what defines me. If it's classic rock, country, indie, alt-country, americana....anything that falls into the catagories described above, I usually know the song on the radio. Music fuels me, comforts me, and distracts me. This mostly has to do with the lyrics. While there are certain songs that I just want to listen to because they rock, most of the songs I fall in love with hold some meaning to me lyrically. The general rule is the sadder the better.
Regardless, the joy of my favorites, of the hundres that fall into the list of songs I could listen to for the rest of my life, is they are time capsules. every song in my library holds some special connotation, a certain memory...the feelings that are associated with them. I realize that this isn't some special quality of mine. Everybody has songs that remind them of someone or something. I only fear sometimes, that I've wrapped way too much of myself up in music...movies and books too. I'm what happens when you start taking these things too seriously, and go through life emulating the extreme emotions captured in them. I often find myself reigning in my immediate reactions to things...when someone pisses me off, my first instinct is to be John Wayne: punch him in the face, say something totally awesome and tough...and walk away unpunished. Just like when things go poorly in my love life, I want to walk around some nameslly city on a snowy night with David Gray as my background music...complete romantic dramedy. This is an honest problem of mine...I could live in a fantasy world quite easily.
Which is why I've been a complete poetic sack today. While running, scrolling through songs on my ipod, I came across Sufjan Stevens' Illinois album, or more importantly, the song, Run! The predatory wasp of the pallidases is out to get us! Yes, it is really called that. Yes, I'm gonna shorten it to the Predatory Wasp for the rest of this writing. Aside from how amazing and perfect of a song it it, its a song that without fail, seems to be my own personal Delorian.
Five years ago, when I was still a young man, I lived with two best friends of mine, Doug and Sam, Sam's mostly loser/stoner cousin, Burgess, and a timid, mostly unnoticable, mostly silent kid named Jake. Jake was a good friend of mine, but ours was a strained relationship made up mostly of convenience. When I came home from BG, freshly flunked out, mostly burnt out, and almost entirely broke, it didnt take long for me to realize that everyone I knew was away at college. This was a good thing, I had lost a good 25 pounds of muscles, and needed to get all A's at Columbus State if I was ever going to get into Capital and back into football. At Cstate, I ran into Jake. We'd been friends of friends in ghigh school, and we started hanging out...because there was no one else to hang out with...and he had his own apartment. It was a chance to get away from parents...it was a chance to not get too depressed about my life in general. For that entire year and summer, Doug and I crashed at Jake's on the weekends, befriended his neighbors, and more or less, lived out of his place like it was our own. A year later, Doug was back at home freshely flunked out, and I was living it up at Capital., enjoying the perks of being a second year freshman surrounded by fresh out of high school chicks...but we kept hanging out with Jake. When I had proven I could stay in school and statarted looking to bracnch out from the dorms, Jake was a nautral choice for a roomate, both to help lower rent, and hell, we owed him a place to stay. We moved in, and it proved to be the end of the road for that friendhip. He was a little too quiet, way too timid, and way too shy to deal with the way Doug and I were mostly living those days...and after a year of being kept up til five by our partying, he decided it was time to move out. How and why Sam managed to live sober in our house without killing us is beyond me...he's just a really nice guy I guess.
But there was one great gift that Jake left behind: His music. Fora guy less exciting than cardboard boxes, he had good taste in music. I am still not entirely convinced that he actually liked the music, so much as he wanted people to know he liked it. I say this only because he bought each and every indie album on the market. Good or bad, he was game. He listened to some of the worst music ever...but made up for it with introductions to more artists than I can list on one page. One of the greatest was Sufjan Stevens. Jake told me about him quite casually, "Hey, I heard of this new guy. He's good...I guess." That was about the most excited he got for anything. Nonetheless, I gave it a listen and fell in love with the album Seven Swans.
Fast forward three years, Burgess had moved out, Sam was due to to be married soon, and I was in the middle of what can only be remembered as the most miserable, exciting, and interesting years of my life. I always did just enough to stay in school...worked out just enough to barely hold on to the muscle I gained for football...and went out to the bar as often as possible. Donericks was the main haunt, but every weekend Whipps would come down and we'd party our asses off wherever he took us. Although not Sufjan related, I will say, many of my best college memories involve Whipps taking me to some bar or some party which he was only vaguely invited to, where we would hit on chicks we didnt know, get blackout drunk, and get in the first fight we could find.
That winter was horribly depressing. Probably the lowest I've ever been. Football was looking like it was getting away...I could barely keep up with school because of how much I was drinking...and I was utterly let down by the most important person in my life at the time. Her not showing up when she was supposed to proved to be the biggest back breaker of all. The reason for this, is that I had spent most of the weeks before Christmas preparing for it. This is where Sujan comes in.
Doug picked up the album on a whim. We both liked Sufjan, and the new record was something new to listen to. This happened simultaneously with my sudden urge to clean my life up (not for the first or last time). Anyone who saw my apartment near the end, knows that the place was no epitome of cleanliness. Let me say, in all honesty, that the end result of that place compared to how it once was is like comparing the US to Mexico. The place was constantly covered in beer cans, smelled like cigarettes and pot, and the walls were mostly covered by bb gun pellet holes...because we thought it was a good idea to shoot guns in the house. It was obviously no place to impress a real girl...at least not one you'd want to hang out with for longer than a one night stand.
So we began cleaning. We fixed the furnature, refinished the tables, scrubbed top to bottom, repainted the place, and got ready for...I'm not really sure what. ..but I had a complete conviction that it was going to be just what I was needing. Sufjan played for most of this. We listened to it on the way to the bar, we listened to it stoned out of our minds, and we listened to it while we took turns playing xbox. The Predatory Wasp was the favorite...for obvious reasons (I shit you not, listen to it and try not to like it by the end). It became the song of the winter. I'm sure I was listening to it when I was still nursing the wounds from my epic Christmas Eve bar fight...a moment in my life that was as much damaging as it was cathartic...a great story in it's own right, but not where I'm going with this.
But I remember walking into our newly furnished apartment one day, out of the cold, into a warm living room with comfortable couches, in the first place I'd ever lived at on my own, with a group of friends that were closer than I had ever experienced up until that point in time, and really being hit by the feeling that I'm going to remember this. This moment, this time in my life, this place where I live. I'm going to remember it exactly like this. This is where the rest of my life will start.
I suppose it's mostly a bittersweet memory. All of those friendships have either drifted away or become strained by moving on with our lives. We're growing up...a little more every day...and it's terrifying, but its real. When I think back on all the great nights I spent in that apartment, all the poeple who came in and out of it, and all the drinks we shared together...I know that it's where most of my college memories will come from. The things that happened and were experienced there are the things that I will (or won't) be telling my kids about one day. It's where I fell apart after having my heart broken...and it's where my darling Genaveve showed up and stuck around to put it back together...even when I didn't really deserve it.
I suppose now, I wonder what will be theat next proverbial "place". If songs take us back to a person, a feeling, time or place, where am I going and what songs are going to be playing in the background? Twenty to twenty five years old has proven to be...EPIC. I sometimes feel like I've got too many stories, too many lessons, too many thoughts and feelings about it all to ever put it all into writing. I could write a book for every year of this last half decade. And god, look at the roller coaster I've gotten onto now.
I'm sure my late twenties will provide equal to far more experiences and life changing moments, people, and songs...but how great would it be to go back and live through all that again...even the bad stuff. That was LIVING...living the way I've figured out is all I know how to do. Balls out, open to punching out my boss, open to believing in fools' thoughts of true love, meant to be, and personal destiny. But I cant help wondering what's next. The job is too obvious of an answer...I want to know about me, my life, what and who I'm going to care about when I'm sitting in front of a computer fretting over the danger of turning 30. I'm different than I was at twenty...but not much. More experienced, more devoted, much tougher,...but more or less the same guy, just five years of slight maturing to level me out a bit. I know what want to be...I know what kind of guy I want to be...now I just want to live it.

"When a man is pushed, tormented, and defeated, he has a chance to learn something."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

05.24.10

Three years ago, I sat on the deck of my family's beach house on the Oregon coast, nursing a cup of coffee and a hangover, watching the ocean in the distance. Amid those rolling hills of endless green, I sat with a heavy heart and a conflicted soul. I was in my place, the land that in my youth transported me to magical worlds where the monsters and demons I came across could be battled by a stick-turned sword. My brother, cousin, and I ran untamed for hours on end through the woods behind the old beach house, and through the tidal pools that surround Proposal Rock, and our imaginations soared. As we entered the years of adolesence and young adulthood, it still remained a place of peace and safety for us, as we traded in our swords for beers around a campfire, still nestled safely in the shadow of the Rock.

My last trip was the end of an era for me, so to speak. I was twenty three, freshly flunked out of college for the second time in five years, and on the surface, had not a care in the world about it. Joel and I flew out and drove up to the coast with Chris, and within moments of arriving, had cracked open a fresh bottle of whiskey and were on our way to a five day party where we would move cautiously around our family and hid our hangovers, and at sundown, would buy ourselves a few cases of beer and head down to the beach for the night. I had been out of football for six months, and hadn't stepped foot in the weightroom more than once a week for that whole time, and it was beginning to show. Throw in a five nights a week of hard drinking schedule and a diet that consisted of mostly restaraunt food, and it's safe to say, I was at a low point in terms of athletic fitness.

Yet it was not my body that was hurting, although, it surely didnt help my overall state of being...no, it was my soul. I was heartbroken. I'd fallen in love, years before with a girl who, much like the others before her, was not there for me. Not physically, not spiritually, and I dont know why I never put a foot down. Christen was everything to me, and in retrospect, I find it hard to understand exactly why. When we are young and head over heels, we throw out terms like "soulmate" and "meant to be" very carelessly, for when we are young and head over heels, we believe the things we say to one another. But for whatever reason, I fell...and I fell hard. When she ran off to pursue her own dreams, I tagged along in spirit only, for I was not asked to follow...just wait. So I waited, and I hung on end for every blocked phone call and email, and stayed up nights trying to convince her to see that I was there waiting. I begged and I pleaded, and I have come to see that I broke myself in the process.

I am a staunch advocate of the power of a man's passionate heart. It is the consequence of being a die hard romantic. I grew up idolizing men of film and literature who crossed continents and battled their way through man and myth alike to find their way to their one true love. I put Christen up on that pedestal, and I will not go so far to say that she did not deserve it, for there was a time, early on, that I believe I was right to believe in her. When that time ended, I know not for sure, but I should have realized it years before I did. Because in my heartbreak, I made a home for my soul and planned to stay there indefinitely. That is no way for a man to live. It lead to nights of binge drinking and a slew of ruined relationships with girls who deserved far more than I was ever willing to give them. I would slink home most mornings hung over and feeling as if I was the lowest kind of man on earth...and would hide it in a belief that that's what men did. I told myself that men drank and fought and slept around as much as possible, and indeed, that is a belief that falls in line with the majority of guys my age. It took a gorgeous, wild hearted girl with twice the tenacity I ever thought I could handle to show me the error of my ways...and even then, I fought against it, and tried to stay in my den of misery.

But that is another story entirely. This story goes back to that cup of coffee and quiet self analyzation on the deck. Minutes before, my grandmother had burst into my room and told me in her tough, sarcastic way, straight up:
"Aaron, get up. It's 9 o'clock and you need to get out of bed and get a move on."
I rolled out of bed and started to put my shirt on, but she did not relent.
"You look like you've put on weight. You know, you can party and drink all you want, but your grandfather did it and still managed to make it to work every morning at 4am. So if you want to live this way, learn how to do it responsibly."
I laughed, "Grandma, it's 9am. I dont ever work before noon, this is still early for me."
"Well snap out of it. You're putting on weight. I can see it in your face. You need to stop drinking so much, and get on with things."
Plain and simple. No one had really approached me yet about that fact. My parents had expressed interest and worry on what I was going to do now that I was out of school for at least a year, if not the forseeable future, and I made little secret about my hard partying lifestyle. But for the most part, they had remained quiet about it, and I dont fault them at all for it. My parents have always let all their kids find their way through life without much prodding or pushing, and I imagine they were simply waiting to see what I would come up with next. But not Grandma. She raised three boys and still continues to do what she can to run the rest of us, and she was not about to let me sleep and drink my way through my days.

Not another word was said about it, and there didnt need to be. Whether she really meant to or not, she had planted a seed. It brought on a rush of feelings. I felt alone and abandoned. What sort of a hero could I be when the person I wanted to save gave me no inclination that I was requested to do so? I had become an incomplete person for no other reason than I told myself that I was. All I really wanted to do was be a writer...but I couldnt write. I had been sitting in front of empty notebooks and blank computer screens for months. To write well, you need passion, and I had always thought that a depressed, alchohol induced writer was the way to be...then why couldnt I write? My roomate, Doug, and I had finished our masterpiece screenplay Saturday Night, and had submitted it to lukewarm if not disinterested reviews. There went that dream. I had a novel idea, but perhaps I realized even then that it was too much based upon my own life, and I couldnt come up with an ending because I had no idea how my own situation was going to end. I was stuck in a rut, spinning my wheels in epic proportions.

So I sat out on that deck and battled with myself throughout the morning. The trip was by no means ruined, and in truth, I did very little at that time to start making any grand changes. It ended up being one of my most memorable 4th of Julys, as I revelled in the grandness of the land where I spent my youth, we shared beers and stories, and I began what would be a long road of spiritual healing. I can say without certainty that it was then that I took my first steps back towards finding myself and what it was that my heart desired. By the end of that trip, I was certain of one thing: I needed love in my life, and I was going to do what it took to get it back. I did not yet realize, however, that the enormous, delicious love I was to find was in another place entirely...but that's, like I said, another story.

Today, when I walked out the door to my place, I looked out at the ocean in a place I never imagined, in my wildest dreams, that I would make my home. It may be a temporary home and place, but it is my place...and I know that securely. The road I have travelled in these past years has been wrought with surprises and enormous changes of direction, yet, I can trace the first steps back to my return home from that trip to Oregon. When I got back, I resolved to lose weight, get back in shape, and cut back on my drinking. I managed the first two, and the third has slowly followed. I put myself back in the arena and field of adventure with my brief venture into firefighting, and have since finally found the challenge I have hungered for all my life.

It is an invigorating feeling. While there are still a multitude of wants and needs in my immediate life, I can say that I am finally where I want to be. I've finally found myself again.