Let's begin with an excuse. Let's follow it with a rambling. There aren't many days I feel like I have an experience worth blogging. Thus, not much blogging. This is one of those days.
I'm not working anymore, at least not in the nine to five sense. I wake up early, respond to some emails, leave others for later so that I have a small sense of guilt nibbling me through the rest of the day, make breakfast and coffee. I have laundry to do. I need to buy half and half. (If you don't know me, you're asleep or onto something else by now. You won't check this blog again.) This morning I read a friend's blog that sent me reeling into a sentimental musical journey and an hour of downloading old music. Ned's Atomic Dustbin churns up sobs inside me.
This is what unemployment allows you to do with your days. Aimless meanderings of the mind. What I'm really doing is waiting for the dog to wake up and whine to go outside. What I'm not doing is revising a story.
So I read this blog and remember Ned's Atomic Dustbin. I have to download that song. That song which I don't know its name or can't hum its tune, but it tickles a sentiment and I have to have it because it was important to me way back when. And because of the Internet and Acquisition and the age of instant gratification (and its converse insant frustration), I've got Green Cell Grey in iTunes and its playing before I've finished reading my friend's blog entry.
It's not a sad song, not on the surface. But it's making me regret something, wish I was somewhere else. I get up and do the dishes instead. The last time I heard that song, listened to that album I was twenty-four or so. I was in the car of my boyfriend at the time, a blue Honda Civic with all the floormats pulled out and a damp, moldy smell. He'd been on tour with a friend's band, a hardcore band, one of those long trips in a hollowed out van. He'd left his window cracked open while he was gone and came back to a car full of water. Maybe I was sitting on a towel. Maybe the seat had dried by then. Maybe I thought he was stupid for going, even worse for not rolling up his window. We were parked by the van he toured with, waiting for someone to come out of a dark, cedar-shingled ranch in the suburbs of NJ. We could hear the highway not far off. He told me they'd listened to Ned's Atomic Dustbin almost the whole time they were gone. I'm sure he was the one driving through the night, staying awake when nobody else could. He was responsible like that. But he was also in love with those road trips, the excitement of being in a band. I was feeling older than him, not so impressed by the things he marveled at.
As I scrubbed a drip of egg yolk from the underside of a plate, I wondered what I was regretting, longing for. I realized how wrapped up my life had been in music then. All the CDs filed in little white boxes and shelved now. Music that I don't listen to anymore. I listen to other songs, but I don't need them. I don't have a group of friends around the songs, the bands, the shows. I recently asked a friend what song in high school could make him cry. I was joking, thinking about songs I listened to in solitude, songs I played when I drove alone, songs that made me want to drive around alone late at night. I was thinking of angst and all the other things we think are sad and important as teenagers, silly things. Like Memories from the play Cats. And now I'm thinking of so many other songs and bands.
I can go on. I can talk about how I broke up with the guy with the Honda Civic to date another guy, a two+ year mistake. I can go further back, which is what Ned's Atomic Dustbin made me think of. Standing in a club in Asbury Park with Mike and Eric and Jen, manufactured smoke and nobody on the dance floor and Jesus Jones blaring. It goes on, but even I'm bored now.
The dog's staring at me. Now you know why I refrain from blogging more often.
