Thursday, October 28, 2010

The great expanse

Here comes a post by one morose motherfucker. Feel free to eject now if you'd rather avoid that sort of thing.
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Sometimes, things change slowly. One bit of the riverbank is washed away, one snowflake shifts out of position. Slowly, over weeks, months, and years, things change. Sometimes, they never stop changing, and you only notice years later that the course of the river is different. But sometimes, the small changes add up, and the whole thing comes crashing down, altering everything in its path. The river overflows its banks, the snow comes down in an avalanche, and nothing can stop the rushing tide of change.

Sometimes, this happens in life. The rushing change may or may not be in our direct control, but sometimes they happen. I suppose the inevitability of change happening, of life happening, means that we have to be prepared when it happens.

After the flood, the landscape is different. Places that you used to know, paths you walked daily and thoughtlessly, are forever different, and some are unrecognizable. Things that you thought would always be there vanish in an instant, never to come back. The only certainty left is that you're not certain of anything any more.

I'm standing in the middle of a receding flood now. The reality of everything is still sinking in, even though the waters are still flowing. I'm not sure where to go or what to do when they're gone. There's a whole new expanse to explore. I'm human. I should want to go and explore, meet and experience. I don't though. Not yet. I want to find those old paths I used to walk, those places I loved, and stay there. I know that they're gone, washed away by the rushing waters, but my feet and my heart still look for them, because they can't do otherwise.

In time, I may convince them to stop, to finally accept, and go in search of new paths and new places. But, they tell me, we might find what we're looking for. So I'll let them look. Because part of me wants to believe that they may be right. So while I know that someday I'll stop looking, that day isn't here now. For now, I stand in this ruined place, waiting for the waters to recede, part of me clinging to a futile hope, knowing and embracing that even if I find those paths, it will take untold effort to clear and walk them again. The rest of me knows that the place I knew is gone, and that I can't stay here.

But all of me knows that during those weeks, months, and years that the river was carrying its bank away bit by bit, I sat. And watched it. And did nothing to stop it.

Saturday, October 16, 2010

Captive Audiences, and the Things They Read

That thing I was working on? That thing that contributed to me assessing myself as "physically and emotionally shattered"? That thing? Yeah, that thing wrapped up last week. There was much rejoicing. The rejoicing looked and sounded very much like sleep.

Since I haven't had much time or energy to do anything since my last post, here goes a bunch of random thoughts. You, dear reader, get to deal with it. Ah, the power of the writer over his captive audience. You are captive, right? Not going anywhere?

Singing solos be hard. I'm still working on convincing myself that yeah, I really do know my part, and I should damn well sing it right, cuz nobody else is going to. I think it'll all work out in the end. Also, high E flats can go die. Everything should be at least an octave lower than that.

Which reminds me, why are there so few baritone or bass rock singers? Hell, outside of classical or theater, there just aren't that many. The only bands I can think of with singers in my range are Type O Negative, Crash Test Dummies, Stone Temple Pilots, and Great Big Sea. Everyone else is a tenor. I can't sing along with that. I need to start my own band, or at least figure out how to play guitar and start transposing stuff down a few keys.

I finally got around to listening to Arcade Fire. I should've done this before. I also started re-listening to Great Big Sea and Counting Crows. Now I remember why they're two of my favorite bands. August and Everything After was also one of my very first CDs ever.

Chasing Amy is still a really good movie, but it shouldn't be. Back then, Kevin Smith would just set up a camera, put an actor in front of it, and have said actor rattle off this long soliloquy that no actual person would ever really say. Yet, once they get into the actual relationship between Holden and Alyssa, those soliloquies somehow manage to totally work. It's still a really good portrait of how humans being human will consistently manage to take something beautiful, and only figure out what they did wrong after they've already broken it. Silent Bob's speech is still one of the best scenes in anything, ever.

It's amazing how you can have so much stuff, think for years that you need it all to be complete somehow, and suddenly realize how little of it is really worth having. I guess the trick is to remember that when you see something new and shiny that you think you want to take home with you.