I Can See For Miles and Miles

Ah, what a strange, dynamic world I live in. My ruminations on these things probably aren't worth much, but... I am nothing if not a writer. So, I'll tell you my b.s. opinions and you'll tell me yours, and together we'll drink 7-7s into the sunset. Or something like that.

So, I brought in my "burnt CD wallet" (a CD wallet containing only burnt CDs) from my home/car into work a week or so ago. This gives us a myriad of listening options at work, and those who know me know I can make one helluva mix tape, so there's some really good stuff on disc being played in my office.

The problem - more than I remembered, a vast majority of discs in the collection are mixes I either made for a particular ex-girlfriend, or are mixes made to reflect my mood at the time our relationship began to fail and spiraled down into the depressing, hurtful, and sometimes hateful thing it became.

So my artist's tears drip down in my heart as the blood machine works, and yes, yes I am so sick. But Marah still makes me smile wistfully, Blue Merle makes me think of the Columbus Zoo and driving around Ohio, and Over The Rhine still makes my heart flutter. Through it all, so much music is the soundtrack to my life, it'd take a hundred discs a year to explain it all.

Gatsby's American Dream say it well: thinking that I can make this right, in fact I know I've got to make this right... I'm done fucking around with the guilt engine.

Or the D.B.T.'s, who mean it when they say "This Highway's Mean" - because sometimes it is. Sometimes we can't be "Bothered." Sometimes the glass is only "1/2 Full." Sometimes life leaves you "High and Dry" - - and you wonder if you'll ever feel the way those songs make you remember feeling.

Some days, when the girl you like won't call, and you wonder if she ever will, you really do with you'd be done fucking around with the guilt engine. 'Cause that fucker runs overtime, all the time, until the wheels come loose and you're dead. All the rhetoric in the world can't save your ass when the big hand comes to take us all away.

And whether or not God is up there and listening at all (and like Billy Corgan, I really wonder if he is), that doesn't matter to me right now. What I want is to feel the way I want to feel, and someone else holds that key, and she won't open the lock. I wander around in my existential conundrum, but wandering and wondering gets us nowhere. Cliffs surround, walls close in.

Change comes slowly, quickly, never and not at all and all at once.

It just doesn't add up. And that's why math is dead to me now.