The Artist's Misaligned Priorities

The delirium has passed and been replaced with mismanaged idealism and a hope for a career as something I'll have to try hard at. Now that clearer and, dare I say, prettier heads prevail in the land of Ego and Id the combination of vanity and desire snuggle close once more and beg me to pursue the course ended with a red couch and addiction. Once a month these feelings surface and I never act on them. I never book a show, restring my guitar, write a new song or even consider taking a chance. This breaks my heart. Once a month my heart is broken. The mistakes recorded replay and it always strikes me that that part of me might only be on life-support but still has big lungs. Rembrandt reclining. Graham grousing. Folds folding. Jim jittering.

Friendshiftlessly

Without surprise, maybe, I've become accustomed to the fact that those people I once counted as my best friends are now, in fact, more like acquaintances. They are people you call when you're in town to catch up or drunkenly text at 3 a.m. when your girlfriend is sleeping and doesn't want to be bothered. These are not the people you hang out with because they live in other cities. These are not the people you talk to because they dislike talking on the telephone. These are not the people you email or Facebook message because you feel that that is an even sadder transmission of emotion. These are the people, however, that you have in your wedding party. Why? Because no one else has even come that close to making you feel loved in that way before or since and you need their acceptance of your marriage whether they like it or not. No nostalgia monster here... just a final realization that my circle of friends needs to grow outside of those who once loved me fervently in the hopes that I can get around to learning to love again.

Instinctaphobiac

And just around the bend form this particular stretch of mediocre highway is the happy open ground of brilliant success. And where is the light? Where is the light? Show the ocean to be where it is! Blend all of your realities into one phantasmagorical lust-fest. Give me the heartache, the joy, the unrelenting sting of failure's breath. Give life to heavy emotions. Employ whatever potions must be used to give weight to experience. I am an un-illuminated iron-barred vessel to hold the soul in. Seek we the cracks. Hold hands and slip through. Hold hands and transcend.

Juxtapomorphosis

The time traveler set his heels down again, this time in the Bay Area, attracting what may amount to some modicum of success. His feet dirtied by thousands of miles wandered, mostly in aimless circles and always with an antipathy toward the ideals of his forebears; namely the idea of settlement, offspring, creationism and keeping one's imbibing at a minimum. The coolness of ice in a glass not withstanding, some of the former parental partialities have crept into his frontal bit of gray matter. Is it aging, or merely a hormonal imbalance of some sort that leads the structurally disinclined to roots? The wanderer blames time, blames the inevitability and desperation of approaching death, despite its surprising distance from the present. I think it might be all of those chemicals in our drinking water and wonder how to go about contacting the EPA. Industrial waste is causing maturity.

Corporatocratization

Today the Federal Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled in favor of Comcast in a suit against their restriction of bandwidth for specific websites in breach of a widely-held belief among internet users of "net neutrality". The NY Times reported that the Appellate Court found that the FCC had no legal recourse to restrict internet provider's own restrictions of their networks. Users of BitTorrent sites, YouTube and Hulu can expect slower download times in their future and, once the Comcast takeover of NBC is complete, the inevitable slowing of content downloaded from competing network's websites. The real bitch of it is that such an action on the part of Comcast would be completely within the scope of the legal precedent set by the Appellate Court's ruling. Net Neutrality takes a nose-dive. Next stop, paying more for a "high-download" account! Go fuck yourself, Comcast.

Sophistique

Recently there has been a preponderance of evidence heaped at my door that clearly shows that I am, in fact, nowhere near as young as I once was. This may come as a shock to some, but I am god-damned near to 30 years old. Despite this fact, until recently, I viewed myself in the same physical light as when I was 20. This was a period in my life when I was running five miles a day, a vegetarian, a teetotaler and a non-smoker. I somehow did not notice the gravity of time having rendered my lovely figure into something more becoming a 45-year-old man. I think I may be developing bitch-tits and my love handles have become more like love overhangs. My lack of physical prowess has become most evident in the way my lungs handle stairs these days. When I was younger, taking the stairs when the escalator was out of service on the T back home was no big deal; a minor inconvenience at worst. These days, I find myself trudging up the stairs in the SF underground like an octogenarian on a treadmill. The worst part is that I recently gave up smoking for the fifth time in my life and no longer have their carcinogenic toxins to blame for my muscular fallibilities. I would that I had some other thing to blame than myself and the increasingly sedentary lifestyle I've become accustomed to, which is why I am blaming my aging and not laziness. I suppose this reflection has helped me clarify some things to myself but probably has given no sort of edification to anyone reading this. But there are 75-year-old marathoners and someone's got to get something out of this ambling passage and it might as well be me.