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
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
No comments:
Post a Comment