2AM Traffic

I feel shitty today. Problems that I'm hoping to get past. A day to grab a blanket and watch The Wizard of Oz on the couch. And I've done that, so now there's the evening and night to pass. I'm meeting Kat at the diner at 7. We haven't hung out in forever.

Friendships aren't what they used to be. They change when you get older. You don't make friends as often, and the friendships you have are harder to take for granted. Andrea isn't simply my girlfriend; she's my best friend. I tell her everything, far more than I tell others, which even so must not seem like much at times. I don't feel as intensely as I used to. Sometimes I'm downright shocked at how zen I've become when I compare it to the agonizing phone calls and tears and cigarettes and shitty poetry and awful words that linger from five or six years ago. I don't meditate. I don't pray unless it's for other people. Sometimes I think about what's holding me together, and it's always the same answer: beauty, truth, art. You're born into the world, there's art, and then you pass away. That's my life philosophy.

I spent the last year and a half wondering if I'd ever make something again. Lately I have been. It's taken commitment (and not working a day job). I have words again. I have MUSIC again, really, for the first time since high school. And as much as it drives me crazy to carry around ideas in my head, I'm endlessly grateful that ideas are coming again, and that they're hanging around. When I lie in bed and stare out into space for an hour and feel myself completely absorbed in what a character is thinking and why they're acting the way they are and what they want me to say about them when I bring them to life, it's unlike anything I've ever felt before. I think to myself, "This is it. This is what it feels like to be a writer. I've been going about it in the wrong way all along." I've rediscovered the part of myself that is filled with life at 3:30 in the morning, with that outside-nature feeling, and I've been trying to fit it to my whole self like tailored clothing.

Maybe I do feel as intensely as I used to. Maybe I'm exactly the same in my chest compared to when I was 22. I'm just making different decisions, lending a greater amount of thought to where that energy flows. I've hurt people and I need to be more careful. Maybe in that respect I'll always be the same, for the rest of my life, and it will be up to me to keep making decisions to get to that next point where the words appear on the page and the chords change into each other and I'm still in love.

I'm working on the death philosophy.