Fade To Black

I am reminded of that Mitre 10 ad where the guy looks dreamily into the camera and says “It’s spring, and a man’s thoughts turn to… hardware!” and holds up a leaf blower. That is what this is like. This is my first blog that I have used to avoid more productive and practical things that I should be doing. “When all else fails, this girl’s thoughts turn to… blogging!”

Yesterday was a 12 and a half hour day. They changed things around at my workplace and it made it more difficult, better for the place as far as team management goes, but it made you think that you were going to get the chop if you sneezed at the wrong time. (An impression I hear is common at this place, yet up until now I have never felt that.)

Another thing that I have been meaning to write about work is that it still feels foreign. At home or just about anywhere (even when I am being told what to do and have work and all that) I feel fine and creative. I have access to some sort of music and some sort of writing implement, I can sit down and I am not being watched. But at work I can’t do any of that. If I think of a song line there is nothing I can do about it, I have to try and remember it for four hours sometimes and that never works. I never really thought about what makes me feel at home and what I couldn’t live without and if I had I would never have guessed those things. That opportunity to be creative and free is a big one. But then it can sometimes work in reverse. Like when I am alone in the house, I think that I should be being creative because I am very alone and free and have lots of paper. But in true human style I write most of my stuff when I am in a challenging situation, like this song that I wrote with pencil on a table napkin on the hood of a car at a horse sale… great story, thoroughly average song.

I have completely forgotten what I was going to write next. Seriously I should write lists of things that I want to cover in my blog… I should have a whiteboard in my bedroom, and then I can scribble on it in the middle of the night… in long downward pointing lines, erasing all the previous half good stuff…

Ah hah! Remember what I was saying about people being off holidays and that I was going to do stuff? Well I did! And even then (shame) I hesitated for three unnecessary days. I felt terrible about that one. It was like my mother all over again. “If you want to do this, to get this done then you have to go out there and make it happen.” “For something that you say is your one life consuming dream and that you will have nothing stop you from achieving, even after you have been singing with this terrible voice for years… you certainly are chicken about asking this guy where the hell one would find a good singing teacher.”

But I found some. Three in fact. They were all female, which wasn’t my initial preference, and most of them only do groups (no, no, no, no) but there is a very good possibility it’s about to begin, maybe even the week after next. I will be finally having some good lessons so I can stop crapping on about my evil nasty sounding voice, and siiiiing!

I only just realised what song I am actually listening to it’s “Stoned” by Dido. Makes me sad. I played this song to one person who used to be my friend because I thought it perfectly encapsulated our relationship, and it still does. They are one of the things that I have been avoiding talking about on this blog. If this blog is a form of therapy, or a medium through which you will be able to almost completely know me then I think it’s almost important and vital that I do it. Which is weird, because I don’t really want to. This is coming out as one huge long stream of consciousness made worse by the way mind works and by the fact there are people in the internet café watching how fast I type and I really don’t want to just stop in the middle of anything.

There we go.

I never leant how to type, I tried, but I hade already developed my own method of doing things enough for it to be too hard to change.

Strangely, and I should make sure that I add this; I have been feeling rather content. There is just this peace. Very hard to describe, I was told by my mother that some distant relative of mine had said that I seemed that way, and I had tried to explain it then but I hadn’t felt it. Now I have I think that it has something to do with the fact that I have realised what I want to do with my life, or that I will, no matter what, follow my dreams.

(Blogging really makes you feel your own idiosyncrasies in your own writing, I think I must have said “and all that” and especially “I mean” about a million times so far)

(Those guy are still quietly remarking “Wow.” Every time I really get into typing a paragraph.)

But I think it was more of the peace of defeat within myself, I finally admitted, wholeheartedly that I want to be a performer, and no matter what I will try to do that and I wont be happy until I achieve that.

I could be in another world doing this and I wouldn’t know. The earth immediately surrounding this chair, computer and mp3 player could fall off and collapse into oblivion and I wouldn’t care. I’m having one of those I’m-living-my-own-movie moments. Amanda describes it best and- fuck it I am going to quit my phobic fan behaviour and post it here, because I know I am better than that and can be inspired without being brainless and fixated. You’ll love it. Sorry if it’s long, but it’s LONG and you need all of to understand it. It’s from “pump up the volume” Don’t anyone say that I don’t use my hyperlinking powers at all or not for the greater good, i.e. not getting in trouble for plagiarism.

“instead, for reasons unkown, i took a walk down memory lane and treated myself to a movie in bed. movies in bed are great. laptops are awesome. this is rare, i don't usually allow myself to spend two hours that could be spent on sleep or making more beautiful album artwork on a movie. but i'm glad i watched this movie. i fucking missed this movie. i bought this movie on an impulse buy from amazon.com about two weeks ago, because it came into my head, and it was cheap. then it arrived and it sat there on my stove for a while, knowing it wouldn't be watched.

pump up the volume. it was like the breakfast club for the nineties. i was liminal.i didn't belong anywhere, i was right on the threshold. not really belonging to the eightie sor the nineties. my older brother and sisters were in the car when we came back from the breakfast club when i was about 9. i remember i was still timgling from seeing judd nelson's fist raise into the air as the credits rolled and the sun went down on the triumph of the teenage spirit. i remember resolving to be a cool teenager. i was so jealous of my older siblings, they got to live this. they were IN high school, that mysitcal world of detentions and smoking corners and heavy bookbags.

but once pump up the volume came out, i barley related as if i was watching my own generation on that screen - which technically, i was. it was 1990, i was 14, and i felt like the entire world understood something i didn't, that everybody was in on the joke but me. however, i had my fantasy, and i held onto my fantasy when i saw movies like this. somehwere, i kept telling myself, somewhere THERE IS A PLACE where teenagers riot in high school parking lots because a pirate radio DJ plays sonic youth and leonard cohen and muses about existence. just like i'd believed at 9 that there was some mythical high school where five kids from different socio-economic backgrounds and cliques could show up for a saturday detention and smoke pot and forgive each other. i spent most of high school fantasising that college would finally prove to be the PLACE since high school was definitely Not the PLACE where these incredible things happened. lo and behold, i was totally fucking stunned when college turned out to feel exactly the same. i felt like i was in high school except everybody slept over. it's taken me years to sort through this shit, and i'm not even close. pump up the volume. i had almost forgotten how fucking great it was. it propelled my straight back to high school and all of a sudden, there i was, in the bathroom applying black eyeliner, calculating exactly which route to take to english so i would pass by andrew thompson's locker. feeling inherently fucking confused, with absolutely no way out. feeling like i understood everything totally clearly while simultaneously feeling i had no idea why things anything was happening.

i pressed pause half-way through the movie, in a daze, and went to the bathroom stuck in high school. i couldn't believe i had my own apartment. it was like i was on acid. i was just looking around going "how on earth did i get here?" i felt like i had to be up at 7:30 so i could eat cereal, put on tights and skirts and combat boots and walk to school in the freezing cold, smoking ginseng cigarettes on the way with my walkman blasting strangeways here we come on one side and meat is murder on the other and flipping the tape over and over and over again, morrissey's providing the soundtrack for a life that i could find tolerable when the music was loud enough and every step i took and every tree i saw and every passing suburban car was just a planted perfect prop while the credits rolled by. walking to school with the music blasting was always opening credits. i never did closing credits. not that i remember. in-between classes, headphones on, volume dial jammed, my fellow students were perfectly-cast extras walking through the hall for those establishing scenes where the director is trying to set a mood for a Cool High School movie. What happened? What happened to John Hughes? Do the kids of this generation, the ones who are 16, do they really, really see Mean Girls and relate? Do they leave the theater wanting to run home and throw all their sports pendants and strings of pearls and soccer trophies in the mircowave?

Happy Harry Hard-On is my new personal hero. I don't need reality. That's my new answer. So Be It. I bought my rebellion at the blockbuster mall just like everybody else but at least it makes my stomach stir. i cry at weddings.

i stand at the kitchen sink, filling a glass with water, and i look to my left and see a bottle of dish soap. i'm still can't shake it. i can't believe i OWN this bottle of dish soap. i can't believe it's MINE. i can barely turn around becaue i know what's in the rest of my apartment and i know i'll be completely overwhelmed. a COUCH? where did these things COME FROM? who the hell am i to OWN a couch and a bottle of dishsoap? i mean, i OWN it, i'm not just using it because it's there. I OWN it the way I own my clock and my towels and my books and my dictionary. it's mine forever. if the house caught fire and i fled in my boxers and t-shirt and stood out on the street, the sympathetic passers-by would shake their heads. I'm So Sorry, they would say. I Know What It Feels Like To Lose Everything. No, I would say, clutching my small bottle of fluorescent orange Dawn, I still have this. It's mine forever and nobody can take it away from me, ever.

high school is never over. it just morphs into something more subtle. i had an experience last week in new york which proves this. i've been a curious fan of bright eyes for about a year, ever since i discovered the fever and mirrors record. naturally, since conor oberst (the singer and basically the band itself) represents adolescent pain better than anyone in the universe, i developed a class A adolescent crush on him. i don't get these anymore. i miss them. i prefer sleeping alone nowadays. i barely think about love. i have plenty. i haven't had a boyfriend in so long i've forgotten what it's like. honestly. i have these vague memories of romancing and cuddling and planning and fucking and calling and the whole nine yards and it seems like a blurry fiction, something that i just wouldn't do nowadays, because....well, why would i? i'm happy. i'm rarely lonely. i have close friends and people i can talk to, i don't feel isolated. i certainly don't miss the heartbreak and the drama. but old conor pulled it out of me. he literally screams that you Must Develop a High School Crush on him. so i hauled my ass down to new york because i wanted to pass his locker. now, any girl (or boy, i suppose) knows that this locker-passing technique is ridiculous. if the person doesn't have any interest in you, they are not going to give a fuck if you walk by their locker five to six times a day for an entire school year. if anything, they'll be irritated. andrew thompson probably was. so, in Rock Land, when you're in a band that's Making It you can have your manager call their promoter or/and manager friends to get tickets and passes for shows. Sometimes they can, sometimes they can't. my manager is a Good Manager. he almost always can. so i emailed him and got a ticket and a pass for the bright eyes show in jersey city, and there i was all of a sudden, sitting in a seat in a theater with my coat on my lap and my journal in my hands. to my left was the cooler-hair guiter player from the yeah yeah yeahs, and to my right were conor oberts parents. now, i don't know what kind of cruel and surreal trick god was playing on me by doing this. i can only imagine. while talking to mr and mrs oberst i find of course that (could it be any other way?) they were the sweetest, kindest smiling rock parents you could imagine. so proud of their son, just beaming. conor was drinking coca-colas on the stage and giving a decent performance, but he seemed bored. maybe he's always like that.

my few words exchanged with him backstage before the show were trite and forgettable. he remembered me as the drunk girl who streaked onto his stage glastonbury and we joked. he was nice but not interested in talking to me. his tour manager was not so nice, however, and sort of gave me that full-body scan and sneer and told me that they'd had a great tour and that he didn't want me fucking up the show. what? i said. no, no, no. i am not a crazy person, please believe me. i thought that glastonbury was like las vegas...what happens at glastonbury stays in glastonbury....? apparently not. my one attempt at crazy rock star behavior had been met with steely witch-burning rancor. i looked the guy straight in the eye. please, sir, don't worry. i am not going to ruin your rock show. i am a sane person. i don't do crazy things. in fact, i am a grave disappointment to all the fans out there who want me to be a lunatic. i'm really not. he was half-satisfied, but that feeling shot through me again....what was it? what was it? oh, i remember. it was That High School feeling. i've been so surrounded by people who like me lately that i've forgotten how it feels to walk down a hall of people who all stare at you as if you're a freak and a loser. which is exactly how i felt after the show, surrounded by pretty girls with quilted dresses, stylish shoes with the weird heels in the middle of the foot (i don't GET those at ALL) long hair and bangs. i bet i would like every one of these people, i said to myself, if i could be alone in a room with them, they play music, we have a lot of things in common SMACK why do you feel so out of place? are these people really looking at you so strangely? or are you just telescoping yourself back into tenth grade? i'm inclined to think that after the conor-rejection and the you-dirty-whore treatment from the tour manager that it was the latter. i had a nice talk with mr yeah yeah yeah and i had a nice talk with ms feist, the opener. it struck me that i had invited myself into somebody else's party and why on earth should i expect them to be kind to me? would i be kind to them if they showed up in my backstage after a dresden dolls show? of course. but were they being unkind? what was i expecting, the PLACE? the magical PLACE where bottles are clinking and everyone is everyone's friend in Rock Love and our cups runneth over and music and love bring us all together and it's All Good? this doesn't exist either. i learned this lesson over the summer at the rock fesitvals, where the magazines were pumping the public with stories of the Rock and Roll Life while backstage was usually a bunch of cold and tired musicians standing in line for catering, trying not to offend one another. maybe i just wasn't invited to the right trailers. maybe i don't really want to go anyway. maybe i think too much and they can smell it on me.

pump up the volume made me want to blog. it's the practical equivalent of having a pirate radio station, but quieter. but that's all i'm doing, vomiting out my head periodically like this.”

Ha. Irony. A Dresden Dolls song just came around in shuffle mode. The Dresden Dolls covering “Life On Mars” by David Bowie.

“Jesus Christ” by Brand New, “The Barber’s Unhappiness” by the Matches, “Iris” by The Goo Goo Dolls, “Stoned” by Dido, “Halleluiah” by Leonard Cohen, some others I will recount later… These songs are just magical to me. They transport you to such a beautiful place so completely and consistently that being directly addressed whilst listening to them is like being slapped in the face while having a pleasant dream.

The above Amanda blog except is, in my opinion, one of the single most profound things she has said. That and “On Not Taking Home A Stranger”. And on that note it think this blog will be drawing to a close. A good finish, something to mediate on, eh?

☆Anika☆