A night in the life

Loud punk rock with trebly ear-bleeding highs, turned as loud as possible to awaken tinnitus. Feel something - anything - even an incessant piercing ring. Love it because it's tangible, fucking measurable, as if entropy itself were the only thing a person can sink his teeth into. Romanticize solitude. Something is there. Nothing is actually something. It isn't creepy so much. Afraid of nothing. Not afraid of anything except nothing. Lonely and together. Lonely and alone. Remember unmemorable things and miss them. Create distance from things IN ORDER to miss them. Condemn sentiment. Search for fake love. Embrace malaise and mistake it for clarity. Look for answers. Confuse indigestion with the end of days. Mistake observations for epiphanies. Look for answers. Self-aware and self-obsessed. Justify narcissism with self-deprecation. Dwell. Examine and assess all pretenses. Check for leaks. Remain unfinished. Means over ends. Fixate on ends anyway. Look ahead. Look behind. Look around. Existential. Meaningful. Meaningless. Hatred of adverbs. Self loathing. Conceit. Fuck that guy. Better to do something - anything - than nothing. No, better to do nothing. Proactive. Steady deterioration. Inevitable and steady deterioration. Helpless. Angry. Suspicious. Awake. Interconnectivity. Words. Fuck words. Fuck thoughts. Flight. Run. Escape. Premonition. Love. Fake. Real. Cynicism. Dissapointed idealism. Holes in every theory. Leaks. Inconsistent. Unreliable. Trust no one. Dearth. Explain. Qualify. Add. Subtract. Subtract. Endings. Conclusions. Want. Need. Gameface. Why.

Morning. Capable. Until tomorrow night.

a momentous occasion

Today was crap. Utter crap. Long story, and I don't feel like telling it.

What's making everything OK is that I'm currently performing an exciting rite of passage, importing the entire "Too Fare to Care" album into Itunes to be transferred to my recently acquired ipod.

Feeling less mopey and more like a serial lady killer. Rawr.

places

I saw the Maritimes for the first time last month. I was so far east, I was in a new time zone. I saw new landscapes, new provinces, new people. There comes a time on almost every road trip/vacation when I develop a powerful sense of place, becoming particularly aware of my current surroundings. I know then that I am somewhere else. Everything is different, everything is new, and I fall into a transcendent "wow, I am totally HERE doing THIS" moment that fuels my future wanderlust. Strolling down Crystal Crescent Beach in Nova Scotia early one afternoon, I was overcome by precisely this feeling. I was so there.

I don't think place defines us, but I do think these moments do. My life comes together when I travel. I leave behind routine and just live, strip out all the obligations and daily minutiae and just experience life for its own sake. Some say that the mundane little everyday nuances that seem to weigh us down actually define our lives, that they comprise the majority of what existence really is. While I won't undermine the importance of appreciating the little things, I don't exactly agree. Because when the rote, mechanical actions fall away, and all that is left is people and places, that is the real deal. There are no distractions. When I travel, everyday concerns are (usually) part of the background instead of the foreground. I don't have to be anything, I don't have to be anywhere; I can just be. There are so few requirements, so few expecations; I can just hang out and exist. Means with no ends. It's hard for most people to even think that way.

But what each person does with this open-ended time is closest to who he/she really is. Furthermore, the people we think about when the smoke clears and there are no distractions are those we truly care about. When we are forced to define ourselves instead of being defined by our surroundings, we are - arguably - more ourselves than ever.

And that is why escapism is my reality.