Brand New Colony
If it's not I Will Follow You Into The Dark I don't want to hear it. I'm over your midlife crises bands of my youth. We all agreed you should have just leaned into The Postal Service. That could have aged well.
I've been told Franz Ferdinand also aged well. The band, obv. Not the dude that was assassinated.
Why are we all obsessed with dying kids in love? I agree the kid from The Suite Life grew up to be kind of hot...but can't we find something better to do with 20-something smoldering looks than make them pretend to be dying teens? What is the message to children? If you were just horribly life-threateningly ill, maybe, MAYBE, someone would truly see you and love you? Sometimes YA sucks.
I have recently rediscovered the fact that all the people I have become surrounded by want to be artists. They write scripts, books, songs and animate. I'm surrounded by beatniks!! This must be how Allen Ginsburg felt...if he had been less attractive and talented. I don't know, actually. All I know is that he looked like Harry Potter? Somehow an even sadder and more disheveled Harry Potter?
I don't know how it ended up this way. Surrounded by artists. Political activists and youths. Women. What happened to my lofty goals of being surrounded by garage rock and dick??! Even my cat is a girl!
I haven't been able to write.
So it's probably better that everyone I know is.
I have been telling myself for almost two months that I would teach myself Business Statistics. I have taught myself some. Not enough.
I have been going to work. School- sometimes...an internship that I enjoy....for the most part. I petitioned law-makers that weren't there. I started to take my medication again. Then I had to stop one because it was making me itchy. And if they were both making me itchy I could get sepsis and die. Although, with all my thoughts of death you would think I wouldn't fear it.
I fear the unknown. Death. The future. Your thoughts. If I could have a super power it would definitely be to know EVERYTHING. Who knows how that would help anything. Or how I could even function? That would be it, though. I've made my mind. To know yours.
I have also realized that I don't belong. In a petulant adolescent sense. I feel adrift. Uneasy. There was a time after I left that I yearned for Houston as my home. It was where all the people I knew loved me were. It was safe and familiar. People understood my jokes and conversations that started mid-thought. I knew where to eat and everything was paid for. The drugs were mostly free and plentiful. Then, slowly, Austin became my home. Maybe a way to escape? Bad relationships. With my parents. With Gilbert. People who were divesting of me every time I crossed the city line. Things became different. There were new friends. New people to remember. New people to take my place in conversation. New people, new relationships, new lessons learned, new rap sheets, new drugs. More alcohol on all shores. And through that vodka ocean I came to land on Austin. Which in a drunken stupor, clad in little more than day-glo underwear that was my Carnival armor, became my everything. A phone number slipped to a jerk who hit on everything that moved became my home. Through one very bad relationship I made several really good ones. An apartment of my own. Along the boardwalk. A dream. Hour long walks in the chill to an office downtown. Across the bridge in the deepest dark just before the sun rise. A climb from the New York-esque room without a kitchen we lived in over the campus Thai restaurant. A room I loved for the company it brought me. A room that was a step up from the roomier efficiency that I lived in alone, simply because I wasn't. Alone. No need to invite strangers from diners. No need to entertain travelers who saw me playing with poi in my parking lot. I invested all my home into a person. Then I moved that to a cat, and a flat by the water.
I moved about 9 months ago...to my sleepy hometown. A bubble of light pollution it's hard to sleep in. Still and lonely. There's regular pollution, too. There's better food here. The food I used to miss. A skyline that I longed for, that I long ago discovered was a collection of office buildings. I work among them now. So it's not so different from working blocks away from the bar district in Austin. Yet, it's not home. Neither is Austin now. If home is where the heart is, it's all inside a soft black cat who hisses at the world. It's a rental. When the term is up, I'll have to find a new place to live. A new thing to place my heart in. I've been musing on Chicago. LA. New York. Other small towns like mine.
Houston and Texas have such strong personalities. I think about this new life all the time. I wonder whether I'll blend into the identity of a new state better than I did here. It feels heavy to wait for things to die before I can leave again. Before I can try again to be whole.
And I can't find peace in any success because I don't want you to think you had a part in it. I'm afraid if I fail you'll share no blame for that. This uncomfortable stasis may be the permanent place I lay my heart to rest.
I've been told Franz Ferdinand also aged well. The band, obv. Not the dude that was assassinated.
Why are we all obsessed with dying kids in love? I agree the kid from The Suite Life grew up to be kind of hot...but can't we find something better to do with 20-something smoldering looks than make them pretend to be dying teens? What is the message to children? If you were just horribly life-threateningly ill, maybe, MAYBE, someone would truly see you and love you? Sometimes YA sucks.
I have recently rediscovered the fact that all the people I have become surrounded by want to be artists. They write scripts, books, songs and animate. I'm surrounded by beatniks!! This must be how Allen Ginsburg felt...if he had been less attractive and talented. I don't know, actually. All I know is that he looked like Harry Potter? Somehow an even sadder and more disheveled Harry Potter?
I don't know how it ended up this way. Surrounded by artists. Political activists and youths. Women. What happened to my lofty goals of being surrounded by garage rock and dick??! Even my cat is a girl!
I haven't been able to write.
So it's probably better that everyone I know is.
I have been telling myself for almost two months that I would teach myself Business Statistics. I have taught myself some. Not enough.
I have been going to work. School- sometimes...an internship that I enjoy....for the most part. I petitioned law-makers that weren't there. I started to take my medication again. Then I had to stop one because it was making me itchy. And if they were both making me itchy I could get sepsis and die. Although, with all my thoughts of death you would think I wouldn't fear it.
I fear the unknown. Death. The future. Your thoughts. If I could have a super power it would definitely be to know EVERYTHING. Who knows how that would help anything. Or how I could even function? That would be it, though. I've made my mind. To know yours.
I have also realized that I don't belong. In a petulant adolescent sense. I feel adrift. Uneasy. There was a time after I left that I yearned for Houston as my home. It was where all the people I knew loved me were. It was safe and familiar. People understood my jokes and conversations that started mid-thought. I knew where to eat and everything was paid for. The drugs were mostly free and plentiful. Then, slowly, Austin became my home. Maybe a way to escape? Bad relationships. With my parents. With Gilbert. People who were divesting of me every time I crossed the city line. Things became different. There were new friends. New people to remember. New people to take my place in conversation. New people, new relationships, new lessons learned, new rap sheets, new drugs. More alcohol on all shores. And through that vodka ocean I came to land on Austin. Which in a drunken stupor, clad in little more than day-glo underwear that was my Carnival armor, became my everything. A phone number slipped to a jerk who hit on everything that moved became my home. Through one very bad relationship I made several really good ones. An apartment of my own. Along the boardwalk. A dream. Hour long walks in the chill to an office downtown. Across the bridge in the deepest dark just before the sun rise. A climb from the New York-esque room without a kitchen we lived in over the campus Thai restaurant. A room I loved for the company it brought me. A room that was a step up from the roomier efficiency that I lived in alone, simply because I wasn't. Alone. No need to invite strangers from diners. No need to entertain travelers who saw me playing with poi in my parking lot. I invested all my home into a person. Then I moved that to a cat, and a flat by the water.
I moved about 9 months ago...to my sleepy hometown. A bubble of light pollution it's hard to sleep in. Still and lonely. There's regular pollution, too. There's better food here. The food I used to miss. A skyline that I longed for, that I long ago discovered was a collection of office buildings. I work among them now. So it's not so different from working blocks away from the bar district in Austin. Yet, it's not home. Neither is Austin now. If home is where the heart is, it's all inside a soft black cat who hisses at the world. It's a rental. When the term is up, I'll have to find a new place to live. A new thing to place my heart in. I've been musing on Chicago. LA. New York. Other small towns like mine.
Houston and Texas have such strong personalities. I think about this new life all the time. I wonder whether I'll blend into the identity of a new state better than I did here. It feels heavy to wait for things to die before I can leave again. Before I can try again to be whole.
And I can't find peace in any success because I don't want you to think you had a part in it. I'm afraid if I fail you'll share no blame for that. This uncomfortable stasis may be the permanent place I lay my heart to rest.
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