Do you ever miss typewriters? I don't, really. My arms would be on fire with Repetitive Stress Injuries.
And finally, read this and laugh very, very hard. Then take a moment to marvel at how relationships work.
A bunch of us went to see Underworld last night. They're a British electronic music duet (formerly a trio) whose music is hard to pin down even within the proliferation of musical genre names (techno-core? grunge-punk? apocalyptic folk?). It tends to be fast-paced, with lots of heavy kick drum beats and bass lines. Unusually for good electronic music, many of their songs have vocals, which the vocalist performed live. The music has a certain feel to it that might be best described as "sensuous" or "slinky"--there's a sort of liquid flow to it. Have you ever seen clear water flowing just over a rock? maybe a centimeter or less? There's a perfection to it, as the water forms into smooth, shining tubular rivulets going over and around the rock, and while you can see some flow lines, every aspect of that water's shape is unmistakably part of the underlying whole. Underworld is the audio equivalent; there's a certain unity and one-ness to it, and it just washes over you.
Have a moment of clarity, it's good for you. The flashing lights and the pounding music, even through the earplugs, all the people, amount to a certain level of sensory overload that sends you back into your head. Especially with the earplugs, the music feels a little distant (except for the fact that the bass is palpably vibrating your torso), like you're looking out on the world from inside an insulated room of your own. Which, you remind yourself, you are.
The thoughts flashing through your mind are so fast and so many and typically so pointless that it's not worth the effort to slow down and record or share them, and in any case that would take something away, as if some essence of who we are isn't what we think but how we think it, the seemingly unrelated incidentals that crop up in the process of getting from point A to point B. But then again, maybe you just want to hide what you're thinking, for any number of reasons (they might even be good reasons). So take a moment in your insulated room, at a time when no one will bother you, when you know that no one will bother you because they're all immersed in the music just as you are, in your own way. Take a moment of perfect quiet with 120 decibels going through you.
You make your choices, you wrestle with the consequences. You don't usually think of the choices--you go by feel. But you need to think about choices as such, because not doing so has had fairly disastrous consequences in the past. So think about what you're feeling and discover the choices you're making and the things you're feeling right now. Why?
Oooh. There is time. Almost infinite time. As much time as you need. You have back tax forms, you have to find a job, but as for working out your issues...hah. No deadline, no rush, no pressure, and anyone who says different can sod off and wait. This is living, and living is not about cramming the most amount of stuff into the least amount of time. As if change ever worked that way anyway.
A day at a time, then maybe a week, maybe a month.
I'm coming back together somehow. Something that is me is emerging from chaos. Hard to say if it will be an improvement, since I still have my various problems, but hey. We can rebuild him, we have the technology, et cetera, et cetera. And there's the wonderful freedom of having time to be myself: in terms of what I want or what I thnk, I don't really know what I'll turn out to be. But it will be something ineffably me (presumably with a suitably large vocabulary attached--what a great word, "ineffably", with the added attraction of its antonym "effable" also being a word and meaning exactly what you'd think it would mean), probably eating lots of sushi and speaking parenthetically all the time, and hopefully speaking from the heart and fucking up with courage.
Meanwhile I will listen to Indigo Girls again, because this song makes me smile every time.