Talkin' 'Bout My (nameless) Generation

Friend: You’re from Generation X, right?
Me: No, that’s my older sister’s generation. My generation… my generation has no name.
Friend: That is an excellent song title. You should write that song.
Me: Heh. I’ve been thinking about it for a while – it is, isn’t it?
Friend: Yes. And you are going to write it.
Me: …I am?
Friend: Yes. Tonight.
Me: …Okay.

I didn’t finish the song in one night; I started writing concepts in a bookstore café, and when I picked up my guitar that night the chords felt right, and the notes came easy, and the melody and harmony just clicked, which it never has before, but the lyrics were absolute shit, and I knew it as I was writing them, and didn’t let it bother me because I needed the songwriting practice, musically speaking. I’ve begun again this night, sans guitar (though I believe a guitar would help, I’ve no desire to wake my family, as it is currently two o’clock in the morning), and it’s… better. It’s a rough draft, instead of, well, shit.

Here’s what I’d written ahead of time; I’m typing it up here to get me past the block I’m on right now.

I’m supposed to be writing a song, My Generation Has No Name. I’ve thought about that concept so many times, it’s strange to be thinking the actual… song. And… it’s true, you know. Our generation is undefined, the unknown value that could shape the equation and, consequently, the world. Heh. We’ve got rap, and synth-pop, and death/metal/gore/scream (etc)-core, and a bit of rock, even. We’ve got a pretty strong Indie crowd. We’ve got punks, and grinning cynics, and too many of us have come onto the scene pre-destined, defined to our last little trait – our personality as good as owned by the media. When will culture start charging by the soul?

Destiny in our control / when will you begin to charge us / by the soul? (Idea tho’)
These frozen clocks all look the same
my generation has no name

CONCEPTS
culture (moves on)
potential (infinite)
implied in the name [of the song] is a certain formlessness; we are allowing the world to shape us, while our voices become hollow(s) to echo, despite their boundless range – our generation has no name.

Aha, I can be as patriotic as I damn well want to be, and that includes toward my generation. I do believe in potential, and I do believe that every generation gets a chance to change the world, and we are wasting ours.

Discovery, and a journey with no destination is still a journey worth making.

Well, I started writing something full of self-pity, and anguish or angst, and this torn, hurt, lost feeling that’s been growing inside of me, like a little jagged sword-blade, slowly ripping the hole wider, little by little as the months pass. That’s a better description than listing the reasons and environmental stress, like the first post did. Why I’m here… well, it matters, but that’s not what it’s about, really. It’s about getting out, or at least living with the world I’m in.

The fact is… mostly, I want to leave. I want to take my guitar, my laptop, and my cat, and just go… away. Somewhere. I can’t – I have no car, no money (at least, not enough to get away), little momentum – just the urge to go. But there I am again, complaining. Basically, today I sang a song for a friend, and he seemed to like it, and he showed me a bunch of cool stuff on the guitar and now I’ve got even more to do to take my mind off of all this crap, so… yeah.

I wrote this walking to see a friend, when I stopped to have a drink at Starbucks: “The impossible things we see by the side of the road – ghosts of fallen leaves, shadows left on the pavement, like a footprint; bubbles rising from the solid ground beneath a puddle; your smile, on a bit of jagged glass, there and gone like a sunbeam’s flash;”

Later I made it into a song.

Impossible things
found by the roadside (wayside?)
starlight, trapped in frost,
all crystal, distant,
cold as the fire that sparked it,
bright as a hole in the sky,
impossible, oh, impossible things
glass, soft as a candle,
shifting in the winds
like a sea of cattails,
singing beneath the streetlights,
oh, impossible, oh—
and a smile in your eyes,
brighter than sun and star and hellfire,
like the rhythm in your voice,
oh, those long days
impossible,
impossible things
we find on our journeys,
impossible things
the gems in the coal mine,
rainclouds in the desert,
oh, impossible—
the songs you sing,
the broken wing of a soaring bird
oh, oh, oh…
impossible things, found by the wayside
impossible, ohhh… impossible

I dunno. Maybe it’s crap. I kinda like it, though, and if I can find a good guitar part, I’ll try and make it a song worth singing.

So I’m still here. There’s still roads I haven’t walked, there’s still trees I haven’t climbed, still trails to hike and paths to take and songs to sing and stories to write and so, so many things to discover. I’m tired of going nowhere. Maybe I’m not looking at this the right way. I can whine and cry about still being in this town, this state, this ugly little nowhere and this house all I want, but there’s so much that I haven’t done, it seems useless to just complain. I think I’ll start taking new roads, when I’m not working. Not really Going Somewhere doesn’t mean I have to be going nowhere.

A strange and shitty night.

Blood on my mouthpiece, still straining to hit those low notes, usually it’s the high notes that get me but that hasn’t been the case lately, and the lower register is really tough to reach. I’m sick of mellophone, which Microsoft Word corrects as “cellophane,” amusingly enough, and it’s only been two or three weeks now. Three days would be too long. I haven’t played horn in long enough, that’s the problem. I need to get back to caring, back to pouring my soul into the brass. Or at least forcing out a few tunes a night. I’m angry, though, angry and hurt and apathetic and I don’t know where to turn now.

This is a shitty blog post, I am fully aware. I’m in a shitty mood. I’m feeling like a shitty artist, with no vision, and I want to seek meaning but I forgot how to seek. And my hair is shitty, because I haven’t had a chance to wash it in about three days, possibly more. And my eyes are shitty, as usual, except that lately contacts keep falling out of them, and my nails are broken and jagged, and my lips are chapped and split and broken (thus the blood on my mouthpiece) despite the balm I put on them, which is gross and made with honey, and I just want life to be over.

Today, or this evening, I guess, it was well after sunset when I left the library, I took the roundabout way home, and when I passed by the highway there was a man doing something, sending up a huge fountain of yellow-orange sparks, wicked bright all over, and they cast his face into relief, even twenty feet away at the bottom of the bank, maybe further, I could see. And there was a huge white spotlight shining at the scene, it nearly blinded me. I watched the sparks for a while and then a car came, and I shook myself loose and kept walking.

Before that, turning onto that roundabout road, I saw a possum going to cross the road, but I came too close for comfort, and it bolted in the other direction, past the bank sign, into the woods. I say bolted, but it was really more of a rolling lumber.

And now I will go to sleep and hope that nightmares don’t haunt me too long.

Focus, Allegories, Subconscious rulings.

I should be working on studying for the English exam—the one exam that you really can’t study for, at all, besides general preparation and looking at terms. And the terms won’t even really help you unless you can apply them. So I really should be studying for History (Spanish isn’t even worth studying for, at this point. I will get a two, and I am resigned to that fact and have moved on with the intent of passing the two classes I actually care about) right now. Especially since I left the house a few hours ago, walked to work, worked for a few hours, and then had dinner with a friend, and now am procrastinating by starting up a blog entry… and I only have two hours of library time left… and the exams are Thursday and Friday, respectively…

But instead, I find myself fascinated by the way in which these exams have completely overrun my consciousness. Seriously! And that got me started thinking about how my consciousness is in general often overrun by some obsession or other, and that I really am driven by my subconscious. These exams right here? I have been revolving around them for the past month. Everything I hear, after the initial processing, is processed in terms of English Literature and Composition, and then related to European History. And it is driving me crazy. We’re playing Peter and the Wolf, and I found myself noticing that the composer’s name is Russian, which made me pause and check the date at the bottom of the page, which was 1937, which made me start thinking about what the Deeper Meaning of the song could be. And I came up with this whole extended metaphor (which there is a term for that I don’t remember, and should) about how it Must Be! That the Wolf is Germany, and the Duck is Austria, and Peter is Russia, and the Hunters are Britain and America and probably France, and I don’t know who the Bird is, but now that I think of it, probably either Italy or the Underground, which means that whichever it is, the Cat would be the other one. (On further contemplation, I decided that the Bird was France, and the Cat was the Underground throughout Europe, or possibly Italy.) The Grandfather is probably the League of Nations, or possibly… the Grandfather is… well, let’s see here. The Bolsheviks had had to make some embarrassing concessions to get out of WWI, and the peace was never easy between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. So possibly the Grandfather is Lenin, and Peter is Russia under Stalin. Or the Grandfather is that original ‘alliance’ between the Soviets and the Nazis.

And everything is like that right now. What is it, I wonder, that makes my mind so easily aligned with a single concept, or a certain set of ideas?

Normally, with a topic such as this, I would take a walk, and articulate it fully in my mind before presenting whatever I’d found to a close friend, and we would joke and discuss by turns, and then I would turn all that over in my head, and take a long walk or something to articulate that, and then write it up here. But instead, I wound up punching in with my friend to unload a bunch of hardware at work, and then we talked about money and power and freedom, and how those three are related, inter-dependent, opposed concepts. And although it was an excellent conversation! I have no long blog post, because alas! My mind is focused on European History and English Composition. And perhaps I could free it to talk of the subconscious mind, for a time, but maybe not, and I need the focus, as detrimental to others’ perception of me as it is.

So anyway, there you have it. With enough stretch, anything becomes a metaphor for anything else. This is what it’s like being in my brain, where I can break literally anything into symbolism, and if this really is a book someone’s writing, they seriously need to let up on the symbolism. Who do you think you are, James Joyce?

Another day of untried freedom

So this morning I woke up and, as though my body had somehow sensed the urgency in the air, fell back asleep. Oh, how I love days off from school. The air is clean, the sky is pure, even in the clouds and patched fog, the ground is covered with enough snow deep and sparkling to get lost in; I have boots, I have a skin thick enough to hide me from the wind, I have a day with nothing in it yet. It is a feeling like no other, not quite endowed with the straight freedom feeling that comes of actually skipping school, but with many of the possibilities. Maybe it’s the lack of risk that changes it, I don’t know. I mean, yes, I could be called into work—that’s one of the things you don’t get with skipping—but also, I could take the dog down to the park and romp! I could spend two hours playing horn! I could watch Into the Wild! I could… could do pretty much anything. I probably won’t, besides playing horn, and/or guitar for as long a time as my chops and fingertips, respectively, can take. This will be after the music now wears off (it’s Radio Nowhere right now, New Year’s Day before that) and my fingers start itching worse than they are now. In the meantime, I write.

Yesterday, we got a new president. There are quite a few people freaking out, doomsayers, and the occasional orgasm of rhetoric. Personally, I couldn’t—well, I could probably care less if I tried. But I spent the year leading up to the election trying to figure out what the big deal was, and alternately trying to figure out which of the two evils was worse, because they’re both pretty damn bad. And at some point, it became not McCain vs. Obama, but the party who believed in Saint Wizard McSuperpants versus the party who believed in His Evilness the Doom-bringer. And that made me sick. It was absolutely insane, and at some point I was wondering exactly where the hell everybody’s sanity went? I mean, you guys aren’t all crazy! I wanted to take several people by the shoulders and shake them until they resembled my friends and family again. My dad was one of the worst, telling me over and over on the way to school how Obama was pretty bad, pretty bad, pretty awful, he did this and he believes that and he’ll do this and that and this, and one friend from US History was the other, going on and on and on about how wonderful this guy was, never with any reasons or back-up, only constant speeches about how damn awesome he was. Fortunately, two people I knew seemed to retain some sanity, and my friends on complete opposite sides helped me out—my friend the vegan, who wanted to vote for Ralph Nader, and my friend the vegetarian-hater, who wants to take over the country and remake it in the model of ancient Rome.

If I had to do the thing over again, well, I’d probably just say fuck it all and leave. Or I’d cast a blank ballot. But anyway, Obama’s in office, the country is torn between wildly celebrating and committing suicide, and I’m inclined to tell them the whole thing is absolutely ridiculous. He’s just another politician. When has a Harvard or Yale graduate in office done our country any good? What we really need is a revolution, but then I’m just a schizophrenic on a laptop on my day off from school spouting nonsense. Anyway, enough with the political gibberish. Long story much shorter, I have a day to do stuff, and do stuff I will!

On to the waiting horn.