lo-fi love song

It's always a pleasure when my cousins come up, especially the one my sister's age who works in IT for an evil tween clothing company and has to work a 12-hour shift tomorrow for 9/11, which is also his birthday, though he's not the most social of people by any means. Just in case, you know, terrorists try to bring down the glittery pink site of Tweenage Western Decadent Strumpetry Bieberland, or something.

The conversation gets spirited as the wine flows freely though we don't delve into politics this time, which is probably good. My teenage cousins discuss their favorite bands earnestly in a way I remember doing, getting mad at the kids in school who like the one song they heard on the radio and saying that's the best band ever. I remember when it mattered so much, and now it doesn't. I don't say much because I'm losing touch with the pulse of the youth, and soon I'll be like their teachers that they make fun of for wanting to be in touch with POPULAR CULTURE.

My dad is tired from working all day and ends up sleeping on the couch in the other room, but I go back to get my laundry and we end up hanging out, playing guitar, listening to music. He's been going through his hundreds of cassette tapes recorded with friends on a double-tape deck with a microphone hanging from the ceiling and found one that had songs he wrote for my mom, twenty years into their marriage, played on three chords on the amp we got when I first decided I really liked making noise.

His voice is wavering, the words simple, the sentiments deep, the uncomplicated thoughts of first impressions and insecurities of questions of himself and God, the guitar swirling with the flange, fading out as he runs out of words. I ask him if he's ever played this for her and he says no and for some reason this moment moves me in a way I can't explain.

I drive home through the dark streets, considering trying to catch the last half of Studio-A-Rama but by then Scrawl will be done and the night is beautiful and for some reason 80's thrash on the radio sounds like the best thing ever, so I drive with the windows down, the greasy rain on my shoulders, my hair wild, missing late night drives of spilling words, knowing that there just isn't time or words to say what's there.

five years later

I'm getting together with a friend of mine tomorrow night for dinner that I haven't seen since I moved out of Kent in '06 and am trying to figure out how to squeeze the greatest amount of rockingness onto one mix CD.

We were part of the same crew of various quirky types who hung out together, spent our work-study money on tickets to shows, slacked around in various dorm rooms and apartments watching movies, playing videogames, listening to way too much music. I wasted a lot of time with real losers just because we liked the same bands but he was one of the few people who was just a really nice and decent person which is why I'm even bothering to reconnect to ramble about loud guitars, and life in general.

I re-read some of my writing from when I was there and I thought I knew everything and had this total attitude and I really thought I had way more of the answers, and was way more angry about really pointless things like this band that totally sucks or that lame group of hipsters or how stupid that professor is.

I was so immersed in subculture that I couldn't always see beyond it and thankfully I left the college town, ended up in Cleveland around people that weren't like me and places that I never thought I'd be and it's humbled me a lot, and while I still have a big mouth, it's not quite as ridiculous as it used to be. I'm more willing to admit when I'm wrong and hopefully I listen more instead of just waiting to speak.

I'm sure I'll look back at what I've just written a few years from now and wonder what the hell I was thinking but hopefully not as much as then.

not much daylight to save...

It still feels like it gets dark early, making dinner and drinking green tea with an old friend from way back who looks like she could be my twin, as we attempt Thai food greatness and ponder earthquakes and the male species and laugh at the absurdity of life.

She teaches music in a small inner city school where some of the kids I used to work with go, and the ones who were struggling the most, who lost their dad to suicide after he beat their mom up so bad he thought he killed her, are her best kids, and they're doing really well and her best students on violin.

I got another phone call from an old friend, but that time in life was so long ago, and I don't know what he wants or even really who he is anymore. We started growing apart awhile ago, when I found myself distrusting his friends for reasons that I couldn't explain but could confirm when a month later one of them shot someone over a heroin deal gone bad.

The last time we talked I was on probation due to my poor judgment in artistic misadventures and he had a few warrants out from several different states for various hippie kid offenses, and I was already overwhelmed with the domestic drama and life in general and never did call him back. It's weird to hang out with someone one-on-one when all of your interactions were in the context of a large interconnected group including siblings and now in-laws almost a decade ago and now I'm much more skittish about a lot of things.

So no, I just don't know, and I don't want to go out anywhere for someone's birthday, and I'll leave my phone on vibrate and listen to soothing sounds of harp music composed a thousand years ago and chants for masses at the end of the first millennium, thinking about how close the end of the world always seems to be, and rework my dud of a lino block into something beautiful.

I find that I don't feel the need for constant companionship, that I am content in punctuated solitude, satisfied by the presence of the divine, finding meaning in ancient truths and timeless words, continually making and remaking art.

I can't process the massive amount of suffering from power-mad despots and tsunamis that stretch from one end of the Pacific to another. My life is finally resembling something like calmness compared to the chaos of last year and the year before, but things can change so quickly. One of my dear friends from my Kent days, with whom I giggled in haiku class and hung out with at parties where we drank tea instead of alcohol and danced to Queen is in Japan right now. I'm so glad she's ok.

I keep on living, knowing that there is so much I just don't understand, and that as hard I try, I'll never be able to wrap my head around it completely... I wonder why I try.