No Lies, Just Love

Thanks to Filter Magazine and the magic of Twitter, I was able to catch Monsters of Folk last Thursday in Santa Barbara. For those who don’t know, Monsters of Folk is the supergroup consisting of M. Ward (She & Him), Jim James (My Morning Jacket), Conor Oberst (Bright Eyes) and Mike Mogis (Bright Eyes; also produced and performed in a lot of Saddle Creek releases).

I was undecided about going at first. I hadn’t given Monsters of Folk a proper listen, and it was free, so would it really matter if I missed it? But I couldn’t pass up a chance to see Jim James. (He was really fucking badass, by the way.) Plus, 16 year old me would have been really upset if I didn’t see ~*Conor*~. With midterms leaving me severely sleep-stricken since Sunday, it was a miracle I stayed awake for the drive. Unfortunately, I didn’t stay awake for much else. It doesn’t matter who I’m there to see; if I’m in a seat, I’ll doze off. It happened with Stars, Cold War Kids, Devendra Banhart, and Radiohead. Monsters of Folk was no exception. Usually, I snap out of it after two or three songs. This time, I wasn’t awake for a full song until about an hour or so into the set. I would be lucid for the beginning; I’d knock out in the middle and wake up about 30 seconds before the applause.

It wasn’t until Conor Oberst started playing “Hit the Switch” that I slipped out of my slumber. As soon as I heard that shaky voice, all these wistful feelings came rushing back. Bright Eyes was a defining band for me. The immediacy in his words spoke to my innermost teenage angst. His music appealed to me the way Elliott Smith’s sad strumming does when I’m feeling down. I was a tortured soul with a broken heart without ever being in a relationship. I quoted him in my writing. I doodled his lyrics in my notebooks. Seeing him tear away at his guitar made me giddy. Suddenly, I had this schoolgirl crush on him, and I’d, like, totally die if he carried my books.

Since Thursday, I’ve been shamelessly listening to Bright Eyes—more for nostalgia than heartache though.

As I hide behind these books I read, while scribbling my poetry, like art could save a wretch like me, with some ideal ideology that no one can hope to achieve.

And I am never real; it is just a sketch of me.

Restart

I started this blog hoping I would begin writing again, but somewhere along the way, writing became less of an outlet and more of a job and a set of expectations. Ideas mulled in my head until they molded. School, work and sleep took up more time than I had anticipated. I realized I don’t want to just give my reader(s) [Hi Liz!] some cursory log of my day. I want to be able to look back and appreciate everything I’ve written. I’m not saying I’m going to start writing bleak short stories and take up chain smoking, but I’d like my posts to be coherent and polished, even if I’m only complaining about the douche bag who sits in front of me in my editing class.(That’s for another day.)

So here it is—my official internet promise to start writing at least weekly.

Starting…NOW!

Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won't know for twenty years. And you may never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say there is no fate, but there is: it's what you create. And even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are only here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but it doesn't really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope that something good will come along. Something to make you feel connected, something to make you feel whole, something to make you feel loved. And the truth is I feel so angry, and the truth is I feel so fucking sad, and the truth is I've felt so fucking hurt for so fucking long and for just as long I've been pretending I'm OK, just to get along, just for, I don't know why, maybe because no one wants to hear about my misery, because they have their own. Well, fuck everybody. Amen.

--Synecdoche, New York

Here's the link just in case the video doesn't load.

Words are not enough.

It kills me that people can't master basic punctuation.