where two or three are gathered

One of my near and dear Kentinistas is moving to California to pursue heavy metal dreams. I don't remember exactly how we started talking but I was friends with one of his dorm neighbors and while I lost touch with them, he became part of my circle, became roommates with my friends, and there were countless nights of hanging out on my front porch eating vegan chili and laughing and talking about music and going to shows. When I moved and he got evicted we lost touch for years and reconnected via zuckerbook. 

He's one of the nicest people I've ever known and an incredible cook and when I say I want to hang out before he leaves I don't want to take advantage of that, but he shows up with homemade sweet potato gnocchi and in the meantime me and my roommate catch up on girl stuff that we don't want to bore him with saute up some vegetables with garlic, lemon juice and almonds and throw together a cobbler with the frozen fruit in the freezer that ends up being accidentally foodie since I'm almost out of oatmeal and have a stash of quinoa in the pantry.

We're older now, with less to prove, joking about how we've rediscovered our teenage music as we're listening to all manner of Chino Moreno projects while feasting and reminiscing and talking about what's been going on with us, plotting west coast trips to visit, the time evaporates, it's midnight and we part ways and my heart is warmed at how we've all ended up where we are. 

femina feminae

Friends of mine have been discussing TV shows I've hardly watched, parsing out these characters and their archetypes and varying degrees of exasperation with young women who are adorably klutzy and somewhat smart but in a way that's unintimidating and wear vintage dresses and have bangs and whatnot.

Half a life ago, I had large glasses and ugly bangs and flowery handmedowns from older ladies in the neighborhood and kind of looked like that girl from Welcome to the Dollhouse, and so I see these girls now and sometimes they're wearing what I hated wearing back then but it's ironic and twee now and wonder what is going on. One friend points out that it's Completely Different when the girl is hot instead of dweeby, in which case the ugly duckling always undergoes some major aesthetic transformation at the Big Party or the senior prom.

I think my general somewhat ruffled feathers come from the unbearable preciousness of being that my generation seems to think is something awesome and it's something that I've never related to, and the archetype of subcultural beauty that sometimes made me feel inadequate until I realized they were the ones who were being superficial. Between the suicide girls and the manic pixie archetypes, it seemed like there's not much room for the rest of us.

 The subculture for me once felt like a refuge, where conversations were struck up over band t-shirts and mutual affinity for similar things. Looking back that was unrealistic in its own way, and superficial in its own right, and I hung out with people who had great record collections but who were terrible people and there were the stunning scene queens who gave up pom-poms for tattoos and artsy haircuts who were always fawned over and talked trash about girls not as fashionable, but even in the smaller pyramids of pecking orders, I still found my crews and enclaves of kindred souls, especially since I moved back here and some of us grew up a little bit. 

 I now tend to eye-roll instead of feeling steamrolled by these images thrown at me, having become more comfortable with my own strangeness in a strange land.  The ones that stay seem to be the ones who are worth it, who don't mind my fanaticism and weird tastes and rants about all things, and this is still so strange.

I and I survive

It's HR's birthday today so I played a bunch of Bad Brains and realized there's a whole lot of overlap between the first tape and the Ric Ocasek-produced Rock for Light and that later output just isn't quite the same lightning-in-a-bottle swank. Anyways, the station library had quite a bit in the way of live bootlegs to flesh out two hours of the jazz-fusionists-turned-Rasta-hardcore-punkers, and I pretty much played every song on the iconic albums, skirting the solo records since I hadn't had the chance to see if they were good.

I saw him play at the punk bar up the street a few years ago but only stayed for three songs when it was clear that it was an off night for him. His struggles with mental illness have been well-documented and I knew this going in, and fended off drunk aging punks with claims that I was only here for the reggae, knowing that the last time he was this charismatic, I was probably a newborn.

Part of my love of this band stems from driving around Parmastan with hardcore kids, pogoing around someone's living room to these albums at 2am when everyone else was passed out except for formerly-straightedge-me and someone's drunk girlfriend, playing softball on summer afternoons with the Clevelandian punkers, wearing their t-shirt in DC and random people on the street wanting to be my friend in a land of J. Crew and politricksians, and how these records have gotten me through every hard time in my life. That combination of righteous fury, apocalyptic screeds, the frustration with the wrong and the focus on the right, the skepticism about human nature and the thirst for the divine. Not much music does that for me, but they do.

taffy-stuck and tongue-tied

I am trying my hardest to scrawl out lyrics that I like, things I could sing, things I could believe, things I wouldn't be embarrassed to say in front of anyone, and everything I write doesn't feel so far from all my stupid teenage poetry that probably would have sent me for counseling if anyone had seen it back in the day. I never liked the lyrics from previous bandmates' projects, which were mostly breakup songs and overly dramatic in a way that I just didn't get. I'm starting to wonder now if mine are all that much better and that's humbling.

What does come pouring out of my pen is heavy-handed and rambly, like the creative bastard child of Patti Smith and Bono, both of whom somehow make it work, though this is just too  accidentally pretentious. 

I don't know why this is such a struggle, because I know I'm not a total failure at writing, but something about the sharing process, the creative process, makes me choke. I took a creative writing class a couple years ago in an attempt to get writing and dropped out halfway through. I just couldn't come up with anything when I needed to that I felt confident enough about.

I know I am my own worst critic. I know he'll say that anything I do is fine because he's too shy to share his scribblings. I don't know why this is because I've blogged for 10 years and even have a piece that's been published, so what the heck? What's wrong with me? I used to wonder why it took so long for bands to put out records, or also how some come up with them in 6 months. It's taken us 6 months to even come up with a bunch of skeletal little parts that need to be worked into songs. I feel like I have all these embryos and no children.

scabbery

They said the pain was from some kind of infection, some kind of bacteria, when I get home I realize all my symptoms are those of tetanus booster aftermath, the lump under my arm, the soreness and the way my bone hurts.Googling one's diagnosis is generally a bad idea, though this time I wish I had. So I'm on some antibiotics, and they took some blood sample and my conclusions are less scary than they were even if I now feel like a grudging vaccination paranoiac because it really did freak me out how much it hurt. It's sore, but it's movable, nothing torn, I can still play guitar and do everything needing to be done, and spent last night curled up in blankets reading King Leopold's Ghost for class and marveling and the general creepery of humans.

I played music this morning.

 

this town is like death

It's like there's a little black cloud hanging over me the last couple weeks. I came home on Friday night and had some spiritual catharsis moments that were probably good for my soul but also exhausting, and midnight dinner with a friend and by that time I was so tired I ended up sleeping on the couch, curled up under a bedsheet and an afghan. I was lousy company, drinking tea, frustrated with living in a town where everyone worships sports and booze, wanting to go somewhere where this isn't the dominant culture and realizing that the only places like that are places like Al-Shabaab-controlled neighborhoods in Mogadishu.

I'm sorry I'm no fun. You should know by now that I can't be fun all the time. You think I'd want to play depressing music if I wasn't depressed and needed a way to release it? I wish I could escape the way everyone does. Maybe it'd be easier for awhile. But since I don't I take it head on all the time and it makes me tired.

I don't self-medicate the way everyone else seems to. I don't drink when I'm depressed, I've never done a drug stronger than caffeine which if anything heightens the sense of everything being not. I eschew parties of all kinds this weekend because they bum me out. No birthday celebration, no Super Bowl. Your friends already think I'm lame for not smoking weed or getting wasted. I think they're lame because that's all they do. It wouldn't bother me that much if it wasn't to such excess and if I wasn't treated like a narc for not partaking. That means more for you right? Who cares.

I go hiking in the woods to clear my head. I go to sleep early. I have late night phone conversations with friends who've lost more people than I have in more tragic ways and don't even know what to say.

 

I'm at the coffeeshop last night with one of the girls and we're giggling at the absurd conversations of art school kids in love, and she asks me if I'm seeing anyone and I say no, spilling that usual frustrated litany of brain drain and general incompatibility. I come home and realize that something in my arm is acting up, maybe it's the massage I gave someone where I skinned my elbows on a t-shirt, maybe it's the climbing up the side of a half-frozen riverbank, it hurts like hell and I feel weak and vulnerable and think about a future of getting old and being alone and how that feels like more of a reality.

I told someone once that I've never had my heart broken by someone, but I'm realizing that I'm wrong. Everything is breaking my heart. I could blame Cleveland but I think this could be anywhere.

re-ignition

Can we talk? There are things I need to say, there are things I need to tell you and things I need to say I'm sorry for. 

It was cold when I awoke this morning, shivering on my drive into the station, playing records and having a cathartic morning playing songs that have continually soundtracked all my interpersonal dilemmas.

And to my surprise we do. I have no expectations as to change because experience tells me it's unlikely.  I get anxious because I know the bitterness within me that would only grow if I waited longer, that it tends to dissipate when I see our common humanity. But the words pour out so much more gently, so much more thoroughly, all the things that are so wrong right now, all the things I can't live with and that you can't continue to live by. There are apologies for our respective thoughtlessness and lack of self-control. I say I need no excuses, no well-intentioned words, let's just start fresh from here.  a weight from my soul has been lifted because reconciliation is beautiful, because this is what my God gives us in spite of our constant failures, and this is what we need to give to others in spite of ourselves, in spite of what happens, not because it's fun or it'll happen the way we want, but because it is right.