The Soldier Turned, Then Looked Away

If ever there was a metaphor, it would be yesterday.

Actually Spoken During the Course of My Evening

"Where else am I gonna see that many shirtless guys without
having to pay a cover charge or listening to I Will Survive?"

Seducing The Laundry

I read Dorothy to keep her alive. I listen to the sound of my band's dissapearing. I skulk and moan, I stay up late. I worry about my mothers battles, but I try not to let it show.

       I laugh at the Christmas lights I remember from December.

I check the email, I read of one-legged cats in boots and of windmills waiting to be charged. I fast forward through the technique looking for the reactions, I close my eyes and pretend it's you.

I bring smiles to strangers, I make children laugh.

           I lie awake
           I lie awake
           I lie awake.

Er... Thank You, Santa

Looks like my Christmas shopping is done, yo.

White Bread, Stan... White Bread

Tonight while attempting to dodge the morass of network TV and utterly ignoring anything constructive I could have been doing, I found myself watching the better part of a behind the scenes video about a band that had an opening slot on a recent tour with Blink-182.

It was pretty much what you'd expect -- footage of backstage mayhem, drunken debachery, hanging out with guitar techs and rigging crews, sleeping in the van, puking behind the stage, generally cavorting and having a good time just to keep yourself from going crazy from the night to night repeditiveness of a national tour -- but somehow it always gets to me.

You get close to things. You feel the air rush over you as it drives by you headed the other way. It's a strange thing to miss the wind. A strange thing to covet that kind of turbulence.

And yeah, I realize the video footage was carefully edited to make it look like it was all fun and booze and laughter and whatever -- but it's not like I haven't been there. Working the stages, hanging with the bands. Being there for the kind of moments that freeze like snapshots in your mind, become truly inside jokes for only the select few that were there to see it...

          You can't possibly understand just how much I miss it sometimes.

But still - of all the people to make you wonder about your choices, of all the bands to help hock up your regrets hairball...

       Blink?

Poles

You get to a place where you feel like everything exists in a bubble. Everything is kind of cordoned off, set up like a soundstage to give the distinct impression of an environment without actually being one at all. You sit there, hearing the music, seeing the lights, but you're not really a part of it. A spectator seat to a closed party. Everything happening as it would if you weren't there; seemingly nothing changing because you are.

Is this why it seems like I prefer text-based enclosures? Is that why I'm drawn to colored rooms, myspaces, and evil incobots? Is it that ..even with the anonymity, there has to be some sort of intellectual connection? No matter how pointless or lame it may end up being, the transactions are paid with words, with forethought, with some part of yourself?

       Is it because even when you don't say anything, you still have to speak?

And yet, even with all that, it's still somehow hollow. It's like you can sense the plasticwrap on the furniture, see the pretense and shadows all around. Even if the excitement is in the way that you have to work to make it seem real, there's never any escaping the fact that it's not.

       Caught between polarities, I drove into the night.

Unfortunatley, now that I'm here, it seems like I've ended up right back where I started from.

The system starts to play some techo-hyped up cover of one of my favorite Depeche Mode songs, and a girl that looks like someone I used to know starts to spin slowly -- one hand on brass, the other on her hip. She's got this look on her face, this way of smiling without being happy, of staring at people without really looking at them.

       There's so much to say,
       ...but it's like there's no one to say it to, you know?

I spend some more time trying to guess who the artist doing the song is, taking down my drink in absent sips. Then I leave a tip for the waitress, walk out the door, and go back home.

Nós Teremos Sempre Dezembro

Open the wrong book. Read the wrong inscription. Know that it was a different time and place, but fall into the well anyways. Again and again the past comes back, pulling you scylla and charybdis away from your path.

         I'm trying.
         I'm trying to make it right.


                   ...But it's hard sometimes.