More proof that the New York Times is better than your newspaper: the lead-in to their article on the winners of the stupid-huge lottery thing that just happened:
“What is $640 million divided by three? More math than jackpot winners in Illinois, Kansas and Maryland will ever have to do again.”
is:
“Life Wasted” by Pearl Jam
One of my main “recovery anthems” (and the only one released after I got sober), “Life Wasted” as well as the band Pearl Jam in general, have played a major role in defining who I am today and how I live. I once wrote this blog entry about how it has affected my life.
You’re always saying that there’s something wrong,
I’m starting to believe it was your plan all along.
Death came around, forced to hear its song,
and know tomorrow can’t be depended on.
I seen the home inside your head,
all locked doors and unmade beds,
open sores unattended.
Let me say just once that
I have faced it,
a life wasted.
I’m never going back again.
I escaped it,
a life wasted.
I’m never going back again.
Having tasted,
a life wasted,
I’m never going back again.
The world awaits just up the stairs.
Leave the pain for someone else.
Nothing back there for you to find,
or was it you, you left behind?
You’re always saying you’re too weak to be strong.
You’re harder on yourself than just about anyone…
Why swim the channel just to get this far?
Halfway there, why would you turn around?
Darkness comes in waves,
tell me, why invite it to stay?
You’re warm with negativity, yes, comfort is an energy,
but why let the sad song play?
I have faced it,… A life wasted,… I’m never going back again.
Oh I escaped it,… A life wasted,… I’m never going back again.
Having tasted,… A life wasted,… I’m never going back again.
Oh I erased it,… A life wasted,… I’m never going back again.
Those folks who I’ve known only in the post-sobriety portion of my life (which, at this point, is actually the majority of people I interact with daily) often have difficulty imagining me as troubled. This is not to suggest I live a perfect life or that I’m a paragon of emotional stability, but to all but a handful of my friends and relatives, it’s difficult to imagine me anything other than generally contented most of the time, in a way most people are not (nevermind my temper, which can be practically elemental under the right circumstances). This leads the folks who have known me nine years or less to occasionally comment doubtfully upon my past as a pillar of depression, substance addiction and general misanthropy. “I don’t believe it,” they say. “You’re just so not like that.”
And they’re right. I’m not. Not anymore. The lion’s share of my time, I spend marveling at how unoffensive existence is. Granted, I don’t exist on the improbably happy “pink cloud” of early recovery; my happiness is not super-human nor is it impervious to the ups-and-downs of the normal course of human life, but it is certainly a more even-keeled and consistent satisfaction than I witness in most of those around me. I don’t often think much about it, or question it. It’s just the way I’ve been since the moment I “put the plug in the jug”, as the old-timers in AA like to say.
Last night, for whatever reason, I had a moment. Just…a moment. That somehow clarified or confused my perceptions of happiness and sadness or whatever you want to call these dualities of human existence. I was working the overnight shift, for just one night, which is always an eclectic combination of emotions and sensations for me. Waking at dusk, just as the last of the day’s sun fades from view; dressing and primping myself as that evening’s prime-time television shows play in the background; driving to work as the other cars passing the other direction are heading home to their various comforts, and arriving to work as just about everyone else is leaving. These aren’t all depressing facets; some of them leave me feeling a kind of ownership of the world, like I’m sailing alone on a ship on a vast, empty ocean. A little bit sad, a little bit amazing, these moments before an overnight shift certainly make me feel different than usual, and perhaps a bit more receptive to epiphanies.
Last night, I left for work half an hour early. And not on purpose. By total accident. I didn’t realize it until I was halfway to work, and by then it was too late to turn back. But instead of going to work early, I opted to spend half an hour walking aimlessly through the Wal-Mart that is near where I work.
Perhaps it was the unique mood created by the preparations for the overnight shift, but I was not at all emotionally stable when I walked into that Wal-Mart. Immediately inside the front door, there was a smell. You know what I mean. It doesn’t smell like anything you can put your finger on, like wet dog or cantaloupe, but instead, it just smells like your past, like a very specific day or time period or phase of your life that you can’t pinpoint or immediately recall but you know that it makes you feel a certain way and that you had never expected to smell it again and you’re amazed at the amount of feelings and sensations that it brings back. Well, that is what I encountered immediately upon entering the Wal-Mart; a smell that brought back acutely the absolute immensity of what sadness used to feel like for me. It was crippling. I hadn’t even been that happy as I walked into the Wal-Mart, but the difference between what I felt like now and what I had felt like in the days of sadness was tremendous. I quickly was able to discern what the smell was: stale cigarette smoke in a cheap motel room. Just what the smell had been doing in the Wal-Mart entryway was certainly a mystery, and it was gone just as quickly as it appeared, but it’s job was done. I was transported, and I would remain transported. For years, I’d remembered as an undeniable fact that at some point in my life, I’d been terribly sad, for a long time. But it had long since ceased to be a feeling I could remember. Sort of like a war story an old man has told so many times, he no longer remembers the memory, but only remembers past tellings of it. Now suddenly I felt it again, and not the memory of it, but it. Not twenty feet into the Wal-Mart, I was looking at merchandise on shelves not as the self-sufficient thirtysomething who loved historical novels and art museums, but the twenty-three year old who couldn’t roll out of bed without a snort of gin, who couldn’t muster up the energy to shave even after he’d been threatened with lost wages if he didn’t just shave once a week, who stunk and was getting stinkier, who was convinced that he didn’t deserve anyone’s love, and he was dying—slowly, methodically, painfully. The world felt shut off to him, and so now suddenly it felt shut off to me, too. These Ritz crackers in front of me—such a simple, unimportant item—I couldn’t afford them, and even if I could, they weren’t for me. They were for people who were fully of this world, fully in the world, full citizens. I felt like I stunk, like I was unshaven, like I had 5-day-old bender breath and onion armpits, like I was staggering even before I drank, like I was being looked at, watched, judged at every turn, unworthy of even the simplest of life’s luxuries, like bubble bath or RC Cola. I’d remembered plenty about this era of my life, many times over before, but this pure sensation of human uselessness and dismal despair had been shelved since the last time I truly felt it. After a minute or two, I managed to push it back out, put it back in the past where it belonged, but it was an intense few minutes, to put it mildly.
For the next twenty minutes, I roamed the Wal-Mart trying to piece together what had happened after I smelled the smell. Mostly, I was intrigued by the idea that purest happiness and utter despair seemed, for that moment, so close to one another. Like a thin veil of this material world separated them like a silk curtain. The curtain was pulled back, and while I remained in the same time and place, one extreme version of me became another, however briefly. And, I thought, now that I’d witnessed it, I could almost will it into happening again, if I chose, for whatever strange reason a person would choose such a thing. And to think that we must all be walking around, all the time, right beside that veil, able to peek around it or rip it down if we could just figure out how to. If you’re sad, just throw back the curtain and be happy. Or if you’ve been happy as a damn idiot for nine years and need a refresher course on what brought you here in the first place, move the veil aside, smell your bender breath, and be reminded.
Very soon (April 3rd) I’ll be celebrating my ninth sobriety anniversary. I’d been waiting until the day itself to figure out what I would write (if anything) on the day, but I think now that this entry will stand as my anniversary entry, because those few minutes in Wal-Mart after the smell made me realize that, more than anything, what I celebrate on that day is having traded sadness for happiness. Pure and simple. My happiness may not resemble most people’s. It doesn’t involve spouses or kids or houses (although Cheerio to you if yours does). My happiness is selfish and aloof and not the type of thing that you make movies about starring Channing Tatum or Reese Witherspoon. But, to the guy on the other side of that veil, looking at Ritz crackers like they were golden nuggets, it is everything he would have imagined, if he’d even dared.
Click here to see all previous entries on this list.
…and my 72nd favorite song of all-time is:
“Pepper” by Butthole Surfers
Really, who doesn’t like this song??? Although, with apologies to Tony Magni, I must say I’m not much of a fan of the rest of their music, but “Pepper” just makes me happy.
is:
“The Mariner’s Revenge Song” by The Decemberists
You might not think you like The Decemberists at first. And maybe you don’t. But they tell such vivid, unusual, captivating stories; if you can manage to pay attention to whole way through (and have dictionary.com open in a seperate window) I’m willing to wager you may be a convert.
You have GOT to click on the first one, then click on it again after it re-loads, to see the full-page version. I crapped my pants when I took it. Notice the mourner at left.
is:
“A Comet Appears” by The Shins
What a song:
One hand on this wily comet,
take a drink just to give me some weight.
Some uber-man I’d make…I’m barely a vapor.
They shone a chlorine light on
a host of individual sins.
Let’s carve my aging face off: fetch us a knife,
start with my eyes,
down so the lines form a grimacing smile.
Close your eyes to corral a virtue.
Is this fooling anyone else?
Never worked so long and hard
to cement a failure.
We can blow on our thumbs and posture
but the lonely are such delicate things
the wind from a wasp could blow them
into the sea with stones on their feet
lost to the light and the loving we need.
Still to come
(the worst part and you know it)
there is a numbness in your heart and it’s growing.
With burnt sage and a forest of bygones,
I click my heels, get the devils in line.
A list of things I could lay the blame on
might give me a way out.
But with each turn it stays front and center,
like a dart stuck square in your eye.
Every post you can hitch your faith on
is a pie in the sky,
chock full of lies,
a tool we devise
to make sinking stones fly.
And still to come (the worst part and you know it)
there is a numbness in your heart and it’s growing.
Click here to read about this list, or click here to see all previous entries.
…and my 75th favorite song of all-time is:
“Twin Peaks Theme” by Angelo Badalamenti
“Twin Peaks” the television show set the tone for and pretty much defined my summer of 2011. I spent much of the summer secretly thinking I was dying of breast cancer (really) and in a funk (to put it mildly) that essentially ruined my favorite season. In the midst of this, I discovered “Twin Peaks” was streaming on Netflix, and spent a good portion of most nights in my darkened living room, swaddled in blankets, watching this decidedly morose, twisted town work through it’s existential issues. Central to the tone of the show and the summer was the music of Angelo Badalamente. Not just this opening number, but the whole tenor of the show would not be the same without the creeping, synth-goth-classical ponderous score. I even went so far as to order the soundtrack CD off Amazon (it is still, somehow, in print) and listened to it on repeat everywhere I went (which did not help my omigod-I’m-dying dpression). Below you’ll find the opening title sequence of the show, and below that, a video I made last summer of a free concert in the park, with the Theme playing over the images. I find it one of my more interesting juxtaposition videos.
There is a small locked box under my bed
where I keep pieces of women:
strands of light thin hair
found on my black sweater’s shoulders,
fingernail clippings given me in Spanish class,
jewelry left on bedside tables,
garments given me to wash,
scribbled, halfthought notes,
dropped, crevice-forgotten lipgloss
or eyeliner pencils,
things kept carefully pristine.
These things are all kept safely guarded
in a small locked box under my bed
visited occasionally in moments
when I’m especially lonely
or times when I feel as though
the things that go unfulfilled in life
are the most true.
Lying on my bed (with the light doing so-and-so)
I may occasionally rise,
hunker down on my knees,
and there nestled among other private old things,
they rest,
waiting for my wild
hungry eyes.
is:
“Lemonworld” by The National
The National’s lyricist Matt Berninger writes some of the most interesting lyrics out there. Nonsense or genius? You be the judge.
Recently, when I was making the blog entry “Remember Me as a Time of Day“, I was going through old home movies, trying to figure out which ones to use for the blog entry. I was especially taken by a movie made by myself and two of my best friends from high school, Brock and Jeremy (both of whom, despite the miracle nature of the internet, I have no contact with) called “The Adventures of Kiteman”. It is horribly made (we only had an old VHS camcorder and our only method of editing was rewinding the tape and beginning filming where we wanted the cut to be, resulting in some pretty unintentional hilarity), but despite it’s enormous flaws (and the fact that it’s only a third completed) I find some moments of true genius in it. So I figured I’d upload it all to the internet. Unfortunately, I don’t have a convenient way to digitize the VHS, so what you have here is the tape filmed off a tube television onto my digitial camera (I was even a tad too lazy to hook my VCR up to my flat screen). “Kiteman”s run time is around 18 minutes, and YouTube’s time limit is 15 minutes, so I had to split the movie into two parts.
The names on the opening credits are clearly not our names, they are our “stage names”. Also, caution to those offended by strong language. PSS, thanks to both my parents for turning in star performances here!
Click here to see all previous entries.
…and my 77th favorite song of all-time is:
“In this Light and on This Evening” by Editors
Editors–a British band who have previously gone by the name The Pride and Snowfield—were, for a split second in 2007, the really-hip band of the moment on the indie scene, although their keyboard and reverb-heavy neo-goth approach made them unique on the scene. However, just about all their newfound rabid fanbase deserted them upon the release of their sophomore album (actually their third album, but their second major release) In This Light and on This Evening, which was extremely different from their debut; words from “experimental” to “heavy-handed” have been used to describe the album. So it should come as no surprise that I love the album more than anything else they’ve done. Especially the title track, which is dense, dark and drenched in sadness, in stark contrast to the two lines that make up all of it’s lyrics, in intense repition: “I swear to God, I heard the Earth inhale moments before it spat it’s rain down on me. I swear to God, in this light and on this evening, London’s become the most beautiful thing I’ve seen.” But please, wait for the ending; there is a major pop that will clip your toenails.
As most, if not all, of my readers know, I am a major practitioner of writing to people. Like, the old school way, with paper and pen and sending it through the mail. I write to a good many people on a regular basis. This correspondence often takes many forms: from simple “keeping in touch” to pure goofiness to artistic musings. I usually write on postcards, but I have been known to also write full-fledged letters.
I tell you all this now because the following blog entry is a letter that I just finished writing to someone, and one of my personal rules had always been that my personal correspondence and my public posting would always remain seperate, but once I got done with the letter, I realized it was more of a blog entry on paper than a letter. Also, a few of you may have got/ may soon get an earlier version of this letter or a smaller version on a postcard, as the ideas and words were forming and coalescing into a longer-form letter. I just wanted to write this disclaimer so that none of you who recieve this correspondence think I’m somehow cheating. 99% of the time, you are recieving completely original, one-of-a-kind writing samples from me.
For the sake of the blog, I have titled this letter “Sleepwalking”:
Sleepwalking
Dear ___________,
Sometimes I wish I sleepwalked. It just seems to me like a good way for your body to take a long awaited break from your mind. My mind often takes breaks from my body, but never vice-versa.
Certainly, sometimes the body is steering the mind—while enjoying a great slice of pizza, laying helpless during a blowjob, fear-stricken when you hear someone in the hallway. But steering the mind is a far cry from taking a break from the mind—no more than steering a car is taking a walk.
I’d like to think that my body has a secret life. A life kept secret from and seperate from my mind, with it’s own desires, it’s own needs, it’s own dreams, that are somehow never made known to me in my waking life. Two me’s, two versions of me, quietly warring and making peace countless times without ever really knowing it, their shadow battle quietly fading into nothing with the advent of my dust.
I like to picture my body, divorced from my mind, wandering my dark apartment, picking up knick-knacks and cushions and turning them over in my calm hands. Without the burden of memory, my precious objects will have less meaning, or more. Feel the heft of that bookcase, run your hands over the smoothness of that table, the warmth of the apples in the basket.
–Seth
is:
“Why Don’t We Do It In the Road?” by The Beatles
What is not to like about Paul McCartney singing increasingly raucous repitions of two simple lines to clap-happy 12 bar blues?
Philadelphia, PA
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Buffalo, NY
“Dream is Collapsing” by Hans Zimmer
That’s right. Hans Zimmer composes classical music for Hollywood movies, otherwise known as the film’s “score”, and this particular song is the centerpiece of the amazing movie “Inception”. Now, I’ve been a “movie buff” for a long time, and have often been wowed by scores, but Zimmer’s “Inception” score was the first one that followed me over into my music-listening life. His score made me think about the ways all music is connected: how rock and roll is, essentially, the same thing as Mozart. Listen to “Dream is Collapsing” and tell me you don’t have some similar thoughts:
Notes From the Fire 