a western breeze

since writing last time, i've given a presentation on my research (that i thought went pretty well), went to a concert that was as good as concerts can be, made $120 playing poker, did homework, and hung out with friends and roommates. it's been busy, but it's been good. i don't know what's wrong with me lately, but i feel like in the last couple months i've become somewhat uninteresting, like i don't have anything to tell the world, like i used to, like i want to. perhaps this is the problem with writers at some point in their lives no matter what. or perhaps i've gotten to the point that i can't remember what i've said and what i haven't, leaving me to wonder again whether i need to say it again. i'm guessing that's more true than the other because my normal view of saying interesting things is pretty open.

i've gotten to the point where i haven't just forgotten what i've said here on this blog, i've started to forget experiences to some extent. that's really the main reason for this writing space - to help me remember things. if nothing else, that's what much writing is good for. writing in a place like this is to bring something into collective memory.

i say this because i've now seen enough concerts that i can't remember all of them, when i went, what was important about them, that sort of thing - at least without special stimulus. i remember certain parts, but i don't remember much of the mogwai concert i went to, except that i loved their music when they weren't experimenting with distortion. i remember phish, except the main things i remember were how strange it was how many drugs were being use, how people all danced the same even though they all wanted to be different (they wanted to be different together), and how the bassist was so out of it that when they were jamming once and the guitarist wanted to get the bassist's attention to move on to the next section, the bassist didn't get the message for over 10 (extra) minutes. maybe these distillations are important somehow, but often they are so inconsequential (maybe irrelevant is a better word here) that i don't know why it is that's what i took away.

really, i think that experiences are one of the most important things that someone can be collecting as they are younger (and can keep collecting as they get older). as my mom told me, many young people can't be as good of writers as older people (in terms of being interesting and captivating) because they haven't had as many experiences to write about, things that people want to share. i'm not entirely sure this is a fair characterization, and if it is, it should certainly say what people should be doing when they are young, and what teachers of writing should be doing (help people have experiences rather than work on their writing style).

one of the memories of my younger days that i'm most remembering right now involves construction projects. now that my brother builds houses, i have a different perspective on why kids shouldn't mess around with work sites (in terms of what we did there), but i also think it was one of the closest things we had to wild experiences in our small town area (no big woods or mountains nearby to explore): we had work sites - we played tag there - we threw rocks, we climbed on rafters, and jumped from the exterior wall over the excavated "moat" to ground on the other side, we broke boards while imagining them to be something more spectacular (i'm pretty sure we never broke anything that was still large enough to be useful - hope that's true). but we had time away from the house, exploring a more wild place than our back yard, and without that, we only had these places and experiences while on my grandparents' farms. i think it might be important - who knows. i wonder now whether we would have found some place like this wherever we had grown up, a place to be somewhat wild.

i think my brother found a lot of profundity in this song a year ago. i have listened to it and liked it many times before, but only tonight did i ever get the feeling that this was the right song for this time. for right now. and then bright eyes - some of the older songs actually. i think it has something to do with my mourning for warmth. i like autumn very much, but i mourn when it gets cold. i don't know what i'm looking for, but i've found a lot of longing - sometimes.

untied by the one am radio

there's nothing to hold us down
we'll cut the strings
we'll kiss the ground goodbye
we'll catch up a western breeze
that eddies us up past the trees to sky

let the line slip free
the ballast is your memory
let it drop to the ground
we'll always be around

mother to her baby said
we're never lost
we're never dead
we fly

our thoughts get spun like silken threads
cast down below from our hands like sighs

let the line slip free
the ballast is your memory
let it drop to the ground
we'll always be around

i told you baby
once i said
we never die
we simply get untied