A Brief Moment Of Sudden And Total Clarity Followed By A Feeling Of Being Even More Lost Than Before

I want to start screaming and then run down the hallway of my dorm, breaking everything in sight, throwing a tantrum that would rival that of a toddler.

I want to unleash the animal instincts that I've been holding in for the past 18 years, on all fours, disproving Darwin, disapproving of society.

I want everyone to know that yes, I can hear them, and I want to be reassured that they can hear me.

I want to run towards everything, all at once, and to not have it run away. All at once and only once.

4:45 Musings -OR- Blog Of Ages

Okay, congratulations, Mike. You have officially been kicked out of a band.

I've always been the person doing the kicking, to be kicked out is definitely a surprise. I mean, I guess when I did it, I handled it a bit more professionally, but I guess we can't win them all, can we? So, here we go, back into the endless void of bandlessness.

I'm sure you, reader (let's call the reader Brooks from here on, as I assume he's the only person reading this. So, from here on out, when I say Brooks, I mean the only person reading this, and when I say Mike, I mean the only person writing this. Capiche?), know how it feels to be lost in a sea of instrumentalists, but with no one to do anything with.

I'm done with it. Let's start working together after spring break. Oh, and if there's a reader here who ISN'T Brooks, speak up!

Okay, onto other issues. Here's a short story I wrote:

Leaving

My head wheels about with each town that flutters past the windows of the battering ram that I try my best to call a car. Between every town, I count the thousands of highway lines that divide up our cities and towns and homes, always losing count when I realize I'm supposed to be driving and not calculating just how lonely and isolated every city in America is. In my efforts to keep busy, I always end up guessing the lives of other drivers and deciding on their motives which have propelled all of them to the exact same highway, experiencing the same forsaken places.

The jittery, almost frightened girl on my right is driving up to visit her parents, she is driving in her green sedan, which is her favorite color, but she's so uncomfortable in her own skin that it doesn't matter what color she drapes over herself. The bottle of pills she's trying to pour into her mouth remind her that there are still sun-soaked fields to lay in, even if today's sky is grey, with searing cracks that rip the clouds aside just enough to let some people enjoy heat in what is supposed to be spring. I will never see her again. Such is how the highway works.

Off to my right are beggars pleading for my time and money. A McDonalds' sign demands that I surrender my values and devour a Big Mac immediately. A Holiday Inn advertisement believes that if I let down my arms and spend a night on one of their rock-solid cots, I will experience something more than just an expensive night's sleep. I'm so exhausted from driving that it's almost welcome.

The field full of farms off to my right begins to give form to a town. Concrete is poured down onto the grass, laying waste to the vacant lots. Housing developments wrench themselves from the ground, standing awkwardly, like crooked, misaligned teeth against the huge plains behind them. Soon, businesses hoping to capitalize on these behemoths slap themselves together wherever they feel it's the most profitable to do so. It isn't long before skyscrapers in hopes of reaching the fingers of God have transformed the approaching woodland into a metropolis, and now I am being begged to take part in their travesty.

One, two, three, four, five highway lines pass before a red-faced, sneering man nearly crashes into me as he and his girlfriend race to the movies. Their tires are melting across the highway as they change across three lanes at once, nearly missing their exit, but not before I could get a glimpse of the happy couple. They fought before they left over nothing; she egged him on, just for her own entertainment. Who needs a movie when you have that? She's a tall, dark woman who seemed as displeased with her date as he was with everything in the world around him. He's bigger than she was in all regards; an athletic, pale man whose neck was almost nonexistent behind his huge head. As they speed across their exit ramp, I smirk at the road sign: "Oakland, Exit 2B, ¾ Mile." I love when they name towns after the trees that they uprooted to make the way for the stores.

As Oakland approaches, the skyscrapers recede; they're replaced by something I could never smirk at. Churches with black eyes and bruises line the highway, as though God might finally shed light on their small, broken community if they build more shrines to him. Children play in the streets, cautiously and carefully avoiding broken glass. What's happening at home? I haven't talked to my mother since I left; she knew where I would be going, but I only had a vague idea of where I was headed. In fact, I wasn't entirely convinced I would end up anywhere. I could see where I was and I could sort of remember where I had been, but the world around me was being constructed as I entered into it, transferring highways at random, looking headfirst into what's supposed to be the greatest country. So far, nothing was particularly impressive, nothing was especially exciting. It was exactly what life had always been like, just moved further away from where people knew me by name and said hi to me. Who needs them anyway, though? I'd meet new people, or something.

As existentialism wraps itself around my brain, biting and injecting lethal venom into my axons and neurons, the schism between the clouds separated further, prying light onto the treeless forest of Oakland. Children squint in the awesome power of its rays. A small, elderly couple miraculously caught up with my foot, and I have never been more amazed by any people before. They were on their fifth honeymoon together, and have never been more in love than they are right now in this exact moment. And who could blame them? They were proud. Proud just to be alive. Proud just to be thinking and feeling and keeping all of their senses and their beliefs as their own. They relish every moment they have together, they have never experienced anything more sweet than the smell of oxygen in their lungs, no sound more beautiful than a heart pounding away under a ribcage, and no sight more amazing than the sun gripping the dawn and letting them stay awake for another day. They don't fear death, they fear wasting what they have left.

That is their secret.

One, two, three, four, five million highway lines separate Oakland and my home. I never should have left what I had.

Hm. Not as good as I remembered it being. <3later, Brooks

An open letter to that band you like:

Your music is derivative of every old band I can think of and you do nothing but meander over tired, reprocessed themes until they become so trite and banal that Jimmy Page will probably start rolling in his grave as soon as he's dead.

Everytime I see your band name on myspace or wherever, I cringe both out of fear of your success and just bitter, bitter denial that people really accept you at such a high level. I constantly find myself wracking my brain for a reason to your success and the only thing I can think of is that your music is safe.

Safety.

Safety is something people like. They like to feel as though they are being held and stroked, as opposed to shaken. Your bland blend of tasteless corporate bullshit rock is constantly playing out of any speaker that you can grip and people eat it up like it's some new sound that is going to redefine the world.

And don't tell me you aren't interested in redefining music, because I can tell based off of your music that you're not. The rehashing of 70's chord progressions with misplaced modifiers and even more poorly placed metaphors that don't stand for anything puts so many words in my mouth that I have to bite my tongue to hold them in.

If you want to see fury, you shoud look at this unrolled piece of flypaper sticking out of my mouth. You'll see every word I've wanted to scream at you over the past couple of years as your rise to stardom has continued, and they will all buzz futilely as they attempt to escape from the deadly trap that I set to stop myself from committing verbal murder.

And as I mull through this series of hateful, hateful thoughts over and over again in my mind. I ask myself, what about my band? Oh right, I don't have one and I don't have any music and I just can't stand the fact that someone is going out there and having fun playing lame music and I'm sitting at home at my laptop, trying to tear them down for it.

I still hold everything that I said to be true, I just wish I could match your incomprehensable noise with my own someday, and show you how I think music should be done and try my hand at changing the world.

The Benefits Of Thinking Economically

Sometimes, this feels so self-indulgent.

By sometimes, I mean all the time. Blogs are fucking ridiculous and I'm sure every blogger has written at least one blog about why blogs suck, so here's high hopes that this one won't turn out that way.

I have a lot to complain about, but not enough sadism to actually put people through the gauntlet of me talking about it. I like to think I'm merciful. Or sometimes, even nice.

I went out on Saturday. I woke up at 8:30 am (3 hours after I had gone to sleep), took a shower, ate some waffles, and drove over to Dia's house. From there, we figured out the directions from her house to the coastline and left. I drove for 2 hours before we reached Salisbury, where my grandfather lived, died, and is currently buried. We drove over to the old house to check on it and I found myself a little choked up seeing it as it was.

I've been visiting the house since I was born; this was the first time I was there without any of my parents and it was the first time I had seen all of the things that used to be neatly packed away; they were all spread out waiting to be sold or thrown out. It was a little unsettling to find bottles of gin and whiskey in the house; I should've figured out that if the man lives by himself, far away from his family, he's going to be drinking a lot.

All of the beds had been removed. Thrown away. They weren't needed anymore, no one was living there. My mother's old stuffed animals that I used to play with when I went over there had been thrown away. Old knick-knacks had been brought off of their shelves and put onto tables to be sorted through. It was really just weird to see his house utterly dismantled from the inside out, letting my childhood memories come out from the woodwork.

The moment I looked in each room, everything I had ever done inside of it came back to me. The first time I saw ET when I was 4 or 5 and I cried at the end ( it was also the first time I was ever ashamed of crying and told my mom that my I was just tired). The first christmas that I can still remember, when I was 6, when I got a beanie baby and it was my all-time favorite toy ever. The time I brought my guitar with me and broke a string and spent the rest of the weekend sulking that I didn't bring extras. The time I fell asleep on his couch for nearly the entirety of Easter weekend, which was the last time that I would see him.

He would always tell me to get my haircut and I would always laugh at him for making such a request. He would tell me that he liked me and I could tell that he meant it in a way that most grandparents probably wouldn't say to their children; we disagreed on a lot of things, but we never let the other know and we got along really great, even though I hardly ever spoke to him. When he died, my hair was shorter than it had been in years. He never saw.

After combing through the dusty records, I locked the house up. It was probably the last time I will ever see the inside of it. I'll finish the journey later, as it is 5:30 in the morning.

I promise the second half is much funnier and much less depressing. I'm just exhausted and can only recall bittersweet memories and feelings of unfulfilment