your hand in mine

The one thing that I love about the band Explosions in the Sky is their simplicity. So many bands infringe their
views on the listener, manipulates them to feel the emotion of the song.
While you can claim that music can be interpreted numerous ways depending on the listener
I somewhat disagree. With most music, you are at the mercy of the musician-the lyrics and delivery all deliberately
are meant to incite a particular reaction. Explosions in the Sky-they just are so pure and honest.
No lyrics, no flagrant frontrunner, no calculated image.
They just play and allow the listener to explore their own personal
journey through emotions, images, and dip into their cavern of memory.

los angeles i'm yours

this city suits my temperment right now.

Originally from my perch up north, I had regarded L.A. as representative of all I hate about American culture- materialism, vapidity, ignorance, and the agenda-seeking. But I don't know if it's a result of assimilation or perhaps my own personal transformation but I admit I've been seduced by this city. Although there are times I long for the wide open spaces and lush landscapes of Northern California, I've grown accoustomed to this concrete jungle. I understand this place now-I know how to navigate it. Because unlike the sleepy lethargic North of my childhood- this city is charged with happening. Movies are created and filmed here- our sports teams draw eyes from all over the country. Trends, deals, and movements begin here. Los Angeles is a boisterious, rude, manipulative bitch and I, against all my pretenses, have grown to love her.

That being said, being surrounded by creative people make me long for the spotlight. I miss performing. I miss being able to express myself in such a raw, primal form. Selfishly I miss the attention, the validation, the praise. I'm not foolish enough to try and make singing my primary source of finances- as much as I love it, I don't have the drive for it. Call it lazy, call it pragmatism but there are some visceral pleasures that I cannot live or forgo (a.k.a. delicious food and wine). I guess what I really want is once a month or every couple of weeks to go to some smoky dive bar and sing a jazz and blues set to a group of strangers. That to me, would be a little piece of heaven.

If there's one thing I've learned about people, it's not what you do or say that affects how people see you. It's how you make them feel.

teenage memories are made in cars

You. I miss you. Most of the times I forget you're gone. My mind plays tricks on me-it's as if you have been placed in the "Friends Who I've Lost Touch With/Are Out of the State" file and until the urge to speak with you arises...I get slapped in the face with it all over again. It's like the Kubler Ross model, this twisted, neverending cycle that I consistently find myself in. I force myself to replay our last interactions over again, try to remember the tenor of your voice, the subtle physical idiosyncracies like the way your eyes crinkled into tiny slits when you were laughing. Pictures have preserved your physical likeness but I wonder if without them...would the way you looked gradually fade from my memory? Pictures certainly couldn't capture the way you smelled. I remember panicking when the shirt your mother gave me eventually lost its telltale scent.



It hurts the most when I see you in my dreams. Being not a practicer of lucid dreaming, my dreams, when I have them ARE reality for me when I'm in them. Mostly we just sit and talk like we used to, sometimes while sitting in your old Jeep. Some of the best conversations I had in my life, I had in that car with you, sometimes stoned, sometimes listening to Death Cab for Cutie or Led Zeppelin, and almost always looking over Grizzly Peak.

I just wonder sometimes what you would have become, the person who you would have grown into. Strangely I feel lightyears away from the person I was but simultaneously the core, the nugget of who I am remains the same. I just feel like there was so much for you to discover, so much more experiences to be had. Truthfully, sometimes I am envious of the devout with their creature comforts of prayer, "God's plan", and heaven. Rationally and logically, you are gone from this earth, nonexistent, not lingering in some manmade dimension that rewards good deeds and punishes the bad. But it's hard to disparage humans from longing for wish fulfillment, the hope that we are special and that the end of our earthly lives is not the end of our journey, I guess.

It will be good to go home. Go back to the familiar. It will be nice to have some solitude, to get away from my life down here. I'm feeling restless again...

you can use my skin to bury secrets in

I never get sick of that moment. When you feel it hit you, when everything bleeds away into the surrounding noise and you are just there. The slight burn in your throat, the blurring of your senses, and the dangerous knowledge that whatever trangression you were about to committ could have the slightest of excuses. Yes I am still living the collegiate dream despite college ending almost a year ago.

For so long when I was in college, partying was something I tried to hide from you, a mistress that no matter how hard I tried left her scent on my clothes and my eyes glazed and somewhere far away. Lord knows I wanted the freedom to stay out late, have long lingering conversations over jungle juice, enjoy the brief glorious victory of a drinking game won, but your persistent insistence and my obligation to our relationship cut those nights short as I stumbled home meekly to your bed. Love was the tradeoff for those lost nights but I never quite let you get the best of me. You wanted to control me and I refused, you wanted something stationary and solid when I am flighty and difficult to trap.
But no matter, that chapter of my life has closed now.

The more I learn the more I realize how little I know. Is that what scares people from reading/school/expanding their horizons? Certainly the limits of knowledge are frightening and seemingly unsurmountable. Sometimes I think we consume ourselves so fully with the petty trivalities of our lives, particularly sex and love, that when it comes to other matters, we relent for the easiest way, the less mentally taxing. Not for me thank you.
I love a challenge.


Contradicting myself now, I've been thinking about something you said the other day.
"You just want to be loved", you said it as if it was a bad thing. No I am not some affection-starved animal hungering for validation of my existence. You phrased it wrong. You should have said, I just want to love. As much as people can frustrate and exasperate, I always search for the good, the lovable in people. I can't let apathy creep into my entire worldview, although it's fun sometimes to try on for size.

That's enough for tonight. It's windy and blustery outside. Time for wine, a book, then bed.

with your feet on the air and your head on the ground

It was one of the most perfect pairings of music with film I had seen in a while. A man and woman from their perch on a skyscraper watching the buildings fall down amongst them, their gilded corporate cage crashing down and liberating them from the oppressive expectations of a society that they both rejected. What I remember most though was the music, the piercing guttural cry over soft guitar finally punctured by the strong drums-an explosion of sound to mirror the explosion seen on screen. The rush of anarchy that causes them to look at each other wondering "What's next?"

When I think about a perfect song, the song that completely encapsulates everything I have been thinking, feeling, wanting the past couple of years- "Where is My Mind" by The Pixies takes the cake.

"Try this trick and spin it"-if you look at the lyrics realistically, "Where is My Mind" is about a hallucinatory drug trip. Yet in my opinion, the nonsensical lyrics only add to the liberating power of the song. The song refuses characterization or prettiness-it doesn't rhyme or follow typical narrative structure. It just exists, disorienting and twisting and turning around itself which interestingly somewhat accomplishes the similar effect of drug trip.

The song is just brimming with tension and release. The softness of the "ooohhh" countered with the juxtaposing base guitar...the pregnant pauses between the first hit of the drum. The rush that I feel when the hesitation relents into the pounding drum and guitar, to me that's what music...what life is supposed to make you feel. It makes you pause, makes you focus on the present. The release the music brings is mainly the release of the problems of the past and the worries for the future. When you find a song that allows you to feel like that, it's one of the few times that you are ever truly free. You are the music while the music lasts so to speak.

Freud wrote at length about this concept called the death instinct-basically his thought was that all living matter desired to return to a nonliving state. Although this could be somewhat of an explanation for human depression and addiction to destructive substances like drugs and alcohol, I propose a counter theory. Human beings desire such substances and activities like drugs, sex, and rock and roll because it compels you to live in the moment. When you're high or having sex or listening to an intense song you are entirely there, entirely existing in the present. I can't stop listening to this song because it gives me that little moment, the moment when any pressures or worries crash and burn like the buildings in "Fight Club". My state of existence is singing along with crazy Frank Black and pounding along with the irrespressible drums.

Way in the water see it swimming...

"Laura - I want to see you again. No games. Let me know if I'm wasting my time."