There is a parallel life to the one I live now.
Songs take me back to my childhood and now i strive to go back to those hazy memories.
Lonestar lake, Austin City Limits, beer and pizza.
God i miss those days.
So now i'm trying to find that feeling in everyday life.
Nanci Griffiths takes me back to those summer evenings,
Tracy Chapman, Paul Simon, Mary Chapin Carpenter.
I can feel it in an old train whistle, or a frosty January night.
So now i look for someone who will go with me on this journey back to the past of a different life.
I get glimpses every once and a while.
Melancholy and wistfulness fill my body and I am transported to a parallel time, one that I cannot reach now
No matter how hard I try to get back to those days,
Or replicate them now.

“Of course he couldn’t forget! No creator can forget! If the blast-off’s successful you’re hooked, and once you’re hooked you’re inside the work as well as outside it, it’s part of you, you’re welded to it, you’re enslaved, and that’s why it’s such bloody hell when things go adrift. But no matter how much the mess and distortion make you want to despair, you can’t abandon the work because you’re chained to the bloody thing, it’s absolutely woven into your soul and you know you can never rest until you’ve brought truth out of all the distortion and beauty out of all the mess – but it’s agony, agony, agony – while simultaneously being the most wonderful and rewarding experience in the world – and that’s the creative process which so few people understand. It involves an indestructible sort of fidelity, an insane sort of hope, and indescribable sort of … well, it’s love, isn’t it? There’s no other word for it. You love the work and you suffer with it and always – always – you’re slaving away against all the odds to made everything come right… Every step I take – every bit of clay I ever touch – they’re all there in the final work. If they hadn’t happened, then this” – she gestured to the sculpture – “wouldn’t exist. In fact they had to happen for the work to emerge as it is. So in the end every major disaster, every tiny error, every wrong turning, every fragment of discarded clay, all the blood, sweat and tears – everything has meaning. I give it meaning. I reuse, reshape, recast all that goes wrong so that in the end nothing is wasted and nothing is without significance and nothing ceases to be precious to me.”

We have adopted Christianity....

The very simplicity and nakedness of man’s life in the primitive ages imply the advantage, at least, that they left him still but a sojourner in nature. When he was refreshed with food and sleep, he contemplated his journey again. He dwelt, as it were, in a tent in this world, and was either threading the valleys, or crossing the plains, or climbing the mountaintops.
But lo! Men have become tools of their tools. The man who independently plucked the fruits when he was hungry is become a farmer; and he who stood under a tree for shelter, a housekeeper. We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven. We have adopted Christianity merely as an improved method of agri-culture. We have build for this world a family mansion, and for the next a family tomb. The best works of art are the expression of man’s struggle to free himself from this condition.

p 51, Walden

Essences

I've been feeling a bit stifled. I forget sometimes that my personality is a valid one. My views are valid, respectable. My laugh is respectable. My personality is legitimate, no more second guessing. So I remember Lawrence Kansas.

When i need to remember myself i think of hazy lit streets late at night.
I think of harmonicas, banjos and saxophones
When I need to remember myself I hear a train whistle.
I feel a wicker basket and bisqueware
I smell rainy streets and hear thunderclaps
I wear Birkenstocks, smell weed, cigarettes.
Drink espresso and eat guacamole.
Concerts, white sundresses.....
KU basketball and
Nickel Creek and
Norah Jones and
South Park.
The essence of who I am.
For when I need to remember.