rubberneck whiplash

as it’s still happening that i’m way more inspired lately by things i am not specifically skilled in (i.e. music), i give you more music.

“Via Chicago” is one of my favorite songs of all time. when i try to put my favorite songs out to people, i’m often hesitant because it’s true that many of those nearest my heart are not upbeat. they aren’t necessarily gut-wrenchingly sad, but they are acutely bittersweet. maybe i am just too sensitive about being perceived as sad, which i am not. a little too reflective for my own good perhaps, but that shouldn’t be misconstrued as pitiful. i mostly like being that way now that i’ve grown into it a little more neatly.

Jeff Tweedy gets labeled a dick more often than I like to believe that he actually behaves like one. If his songwriting and widely-known perfectionist tendencies are any indication, the guy is a kindred spirit to many of us whether we like to believe it or not—at least many of us to whom, I for one, feel the most endeared. The greatest complication that comes with being expressively gifted is that the things in your life that are the most delicate are the things that are expressed, usually with greater clarity than they are actually dealt with as they occur, creating an whole other compounded set of personal problems. I do believe that if this is the kind of person you are, it is easier to create something about loss than it is to communicate through it with the people who are sharing that loss. I don’t know why that is. Some people are wired that way, some while also finding ways over time to re-wire themselves around the mental brick walls that make them better artists than partners, parents, children, siblings, and friends. No wonder so many are addicts. The coping mechanism is the same; a reflex often considered a handicap.

I say this, too, because more than being drawn to “sad” music I am drawn to music by artists who seem bereft of emotional fulfillment of one kind or another. They are failed lovers or the failed. They are looking for a place that doesn’t exist, knowing that it doesn’t exist, and obsessed with continuing to search for it. Their aloofness moves like wind through their voices. As the subjects of interviews they can be shy and guarded, misinterpreted as cagey and disengaged. Maybe I am just a champion of the underdog.

I heard this interview with Ryan Adams done right around the time that his latest album Ashes & Fire was released this past fall and it was interesting to hear him talk openly about the public’s perception of him which, in the not so distant past, has been unfavorable at best. I had heard these things, one story in particular from a close friend who witnessed him walk offstage from a show in Birmingham, Alabama when he didn’t like the crowd. I stick by him in spite of that because, A) I don’t personally know him but have been guided through periods of my life in part by his music and B) I have spent time at concerts in Birmingham, Alabama and those crowds can host a bevy of disorderlies; young, spoiled, drunk, disrespectful wankers wearing Costa Del Mar sunglasses on the rear crown of their melons, upside-down University of South Carolina visors (because they say “cocks”), and gnarly leather flip-flops. Who wouldn’t walk offstage? Nobody wants to do a show for people who don’t really want to see you. It is the worst thing ever next to being the kid whose parent forgot to pick you up at school, respectful to that scale of “worse things ever.” When you’re already sensitive and prone to difficulties communicating, a concrete parking lot full of dickslaps can really set you off.

I am not bereft of emotional fulfillment. Any feeling indicative of such can eventually be re-routed to my own way of thinking or allowing things to happen to me that are within my control to put the brakes on, which doesn’t mean that the knowing always fixes it. I take it out on other people, on myself, and often on the work that I’m doing. I think that’s probably about as natural as any bodily function. Everything that goes in has to come back out again, and it’s not always pretty. Or maybe the result is magnificent and the process of producing it is damaging—a less than pleasing metaphor if you are still thinking about bodily functions, but effective nonetheless. I still think I’d rather be a sad jerk than have a needle sticking out of my arm, but maybe it’s just a matter of taste.

i didn’t mean to say so much, really. i actually just meant to post this video and then ended up avoiding my real work. sorry to make you an accomplice in my indolence.

28 December 2011 ·