On 23

It's weird. I told myself a couple of years ago that I had fucked up somewhere if I was still in college at 23. Mostly it was just a motivational tool to work past my mid-college malaise and finish roughly on time. I'm reluctant to say that I failed to make good on my promise given that I'm graduating in May. I was terrified of being one of the myriad people I knew around this town that were in college for the sake of being in college. For the sake of not knowing what to do and, having rich parents, deciding to stay in college forever. Now I'm just thinking about the mountain of debt, that's the scary thing. Moving away is easy enough, but that's going to kill me. I constantly wonder when all of those student loans will be paid off and am terrified that I'll have to start desperately selling off my record collection, piece by piece.

Last night Kelly broached the fact that 2009 would be a year of positive change and I agreed with her. Logically, it makes sense that 2009 will be full of changes. I will graduate, I will go somewhere else, I will become an adult and hopefully not fail too miserably. Years alternate between being productive and constructive (odd years) and being unproductive and aimless (even years). Last year was incredibly productive, or if not productive, full of change and personal growth. This year I spent most of my time trying to destroy that. But there were good things. There was starting a band to counter the bad parts and playing and recording music is easily the thing that makes me the happiest in the world, that's what I learned this year. It's just so easy and (despite recording the last couple of songs for the record and the last show we paid, both of which were incredibly painful and antithetical to the whole concept I set out for making music) I feel really, truly, genuinely happy when I am partaking in it. Despite my novice abilities as a guitarist and songwriter, I feel that I've grown substantially over the past ten months. That feels good. The rest of the year, not so much.

Going to Harbour Lights always exposes the general meaningless of everything and I always feel better after leaving. Usually, Harbour entails Randy and I talking about weighty issues for hours over giant beers and then, yeah, I leave and I feel better about everything. I want to live their. They have the best jukebox in town for my money, and last night it played the first 3/4 of Bee Thousand and that made my night.

I'm trying to think of resolutions.
All of them involve control.
I want more of that, I hate the elements that make this very hard to maintain.
I want big, sweeping orchestral swells.

I want to be married, for some reason. I want that problem of flaky companionship to be solved and I seem to think that would make things easier. Going alone is terrifying, a little bit, as you don't have someone there to reassure you that everything is going to be OK. Instead, alone, it's like relying on yourself when you know you are an unreliable narrator. There's a finality to 23, something that seems to say "you've passed the point of no return." Where it's disorienting and you just have to splash water on your face, suck it up, and move on. Los Angeles? Portland? New York? Optionsworkwiveskidshousescarssexlovedivorcejobsremarriagemorekidsdeath. I don't know. I say that a lot, "I don't know," almost to the point where it has replaced "Uh" and "Um" in my vocabulary. I don't know and I can't decide if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but I assume it has to be a good thing. Surely it is, maybe there's some excitement to the not knowing, but it would be nice to know.

I think about finding a magic lamp all the time. I think about what my three wishes would be and they're almost always the same. I've thought about this a lot, and I have consolidated them to the point where they are fool proof. None of that genie trickery, my wishes would be too specific.

Anyway, my house is a mess. I put all of the delinquent books that I've been stepping on when I get out of bed on their appropriate shelves but my floor is still littered with little pieces of paper, receipts, and clothes. Clothes everywhere, even though I have many hangers. The living room is a disaster, and the painting fell off the wall again and I need to figure out how to make sure it doesn't fall off again because I'm afraid the canvas will fall on a mic stand and if there were a giant hole in it I would cry. I want to make all of the mail crates full of CDs just disappear, I'm sick of looking at them. I don't know why I don't clean, cleaning and organizing always makes me feel better but instead I just look at the mess and it makes me feel like shit, and that I'm powerless to do anything about it and that makes no sense. It would make sense of me to use the mornings I've been having recently to do housework. To fix the back door that leads into my room, the one I had to break down the other day which I didn't need to break down because one of the other doors was unlocked. I make poor decisions sometimes, especially when things go wrong. I don't know what I'm waiting for. And I spelled receipts wrong because the "I before E except after C" rule has so many exceptions.

How am I ever going to read all of these books? I am such a slow reader, I never will. It's a really horribly overwrought image, but I wonder how many words are in all of these books on the shelf to my left right now. Millions. I imagine what they would look like piled up on my floor and if they would be comfortable to lay on like a pile of clothes or strangely unnatural like a pile of leaves. I hate metaphors and images like that, I don't know why I wrote that. Dave Eggers kind of writes like that but I like when he does it. "You Shall Know Our Velocity!" is really good, I've been reading it for something like a month and it's taking me forever because I want to savor it, or I did before the Hand's interruption, which I think is kind of brilliant because it cast doubt on the rest of the book and now I kind of just want it to end. But for a while there, it really got me going. The events moved so quickly, from one cool thing to another strangely beautiful thing. I need to read more. I want to write a novel. I want to write with out affect. I want to write sentences that make my head feel like it is full of sand in a good way, where the body feels like a sandbag and the spine tingles. I get this a lot when I read good poems. Here's a line from a John K Samson poem, this illustrates what I'm talking about:
"
Say you wake up one morning without a body.
You miss your hands like a dead friend.
You play their favourite songs, mourn all their potential,
what they held. Make a Missing poster for your heart
with a description and a photo and your phone number.
Find your ribcage full of topsoil in a garden down the street.
Transplanted yellow flowers peeking out."

You know, that feeling of heaviness when someone utilizes the English language in a way that you haven't see nit utilized before to create images and meaning. I like that. I am obsessed with this one Parenthetical Girls song right now, the last song on the new album, I keep hitting repeat and I want to play it over and over until I get sick of it.

I know.
I am wrong.
I am sorry.