Let's play a little game, eh?
This is a bit of a bizarre post. I’m not going to call it an update, since I’m not going to talk about anything that’s going on, externally. I want to commiserate internally, descriptively, and preferably have someone tell me that I’m not alone in this madness. If you’ve spoken to me lately, read any of my posts or possibly talked to my sister, you’ll know that I’ve developed an unhealthy obsession with Kill Hannah. I’m not sure if it’s the week I spent Myspacing with Jonnie, or the discovery of 2 new and utterly amazing songs on their myspace, or if it’s the recent concert going experiences, or perhaps the announcement of their December 22nd show, here in Chicago. Either way, something happened. Something clicked, I’d like to say.
as an external aside, let me mention, their announcement of a show in Philadelphia prompted me to message, which led to a repetitive communication, which then culminated in the announcement of a Chicago show. Do I think I had a hand in that? Not really, they do this every year. However, I’ve been responsible for weirder shit, so we may never know.
For better than a week now, KH is all I’ve listened to. New stuff, old stuff, unreleased stuff, all of it has been on repeat. Some of the songs I love, some I’m sick of. Some I don’t remember and they haunt me.
I can’t explain it, but it happens a lot. Something well, clicks! I hear a melody, {sorry, I’m not a lyric person. I appreciate lyrics, but I don’t go gaga over a song except for the melody. It could be a song about a duck, and that duck has a beach ball and that beach ball is having butt sex with a snail, if the melody is good, something happens to me.
My Allie and my Aimee will attest to this. They’ll tell you what happens, and it isn’t pretty. I get obsessed with a song, and I listen to it, over and over and over until everyone I know hates the fucking song. Really, I don’t care what they say. I don’t want to burn myself out on the song. I don’t want to go into a spurt where I won’t listen to it. I try to spread it out, but I can’t. I may throw a few other songs into the mix, just so I’m not sitting there, where ever I happen to be, hitting repeat like a lunatic, waiting for the song to finish just so I can hear it again, but I guarantee, I’m never more than 3 songs away.
If you try to play something else, I go ape shit. No, seriously ape shit. I start jumping around, shitting into my hands and flinging it at people until my song is back on. {Then I masturbate furiously and repeatedly while dangling from a tree by my foot, but that’s a whole other post.}
All things considered, these songs are ‘generally’ short lived. I’d say it’s a good two week panic attack over the song, but for those two weeks. Something happens.
That song, whether I’ve heard it before or not, takes me somewhere. Growing up in a musical family, this is common for us. Certain songs, certain bands, even entire genre’s take me back to my childhood, preteen years and occasionally infancy. I’m not talking about a song that invokes a memory. I’m talking about a song that strikes a chord so deeply it makes me want to cry. It’s a song that when it opens I get chills and it makes me have visions. I won’t bother you with the explanation of my visions, but I feel like I’m in a dream, like everything in my life makes sense but I’m touching it from the outside. I feel like I can see who I’m supposed to be and if the song ends I hurt. I’m stripped of the reality and thrust back into a world where everything is darker, grayer and dirtier than before.
The song brings a different lifestyle for me, it’s my life in a parallel universe, I don’t claim to have MPD’s but as a writer, I will admit to different persona’s. I know some of you have met some of them, however you can’t imagine who they are or just how many there happen to be.
If I had the chutzpah, I’d name all of them, but sufficed to say at the core, they are basically the same, only with different stimuli, and different opportunities and different surroundings that have created them. I hide in them when I’m insecure, and the more insecure the deeper I fall into that being. The songs I’m describing herein are the times I realize who those people are, when I let the veil between the reality and the fantasy becomes more smoke than silk and I can coherently feel what it’s like to be, without having to be.
I’m sure I sound conceited, but occasionally it’s exhausting being me. There’s a lot of time management, a lot of prioritizing, and for all the scheduling, for all the timing, planning, plotting and setting up, the lulls infuriate me. It’s the lulls that drive me into my writing. I’ve admitted to having written one book to everyone. Some of you who know me very well know there are 2. Would you believe it if I told you there are probably 100 novels, novellas and short stories out there that consumed me at some point? Would you believe that my escape has more to do with my disinterest in my own life than any magical muse that I may claim visits me?
I don’t like to write; however when I’m struck by something I can’t get out. I run and it chases and I’m eventually driven almost to madness the tingle in my nose from tears that threaten to careen down my face before I give in. I fight my ass off to not feel this way. I don’t want to be consumed!!! But I am. I’m consumed and tortured by things. Sometimes it’s an image, a phrase or an idea that I can’t place, but more often than not, it a goddamn song and usually just a fragment of that fucking song, something random that usually only I hear.
In this case, call it what you will, I heard a song I haven’t heard in a year and it was because I was looking to download RINGTONES. About six months ago I made a KH CD and left a few songs off. Wouldn’t you know, the current obsession is one of the songs I didn’t bother with? Now, I can’t get enough of it.
http://www.sendspace.com/file/ombaxp
There is something in there that haunts me, drags me into a gritty fantasy of hard linoleum floors and smeared eyeliner, florescent lights casting blue hazes instead of peachy home lamps. I see industrial bathroom fixtures and elevators with gates and kissing so hard you bite someone. My fantasy smells nice, but it’s a dark nice, cold, clean soapy and just the faintest hint of body odor and bleach. It’s slightly painful, cold and I see rips in clothes that were already ripped to begin with. Everything is just a little battered and nobody is beautiful. My fantasy is heroin chic, with messy hair that’s not only out of place, but mis-cut and there is no honest sensibility. It’s the song for the scene of overdosing, the song for moment someone realizes they are so incredibly fucked up, so lost from their own demons they smash their fist into a mirror and can’t tell they’re bleeding. There’s a begging quality to it, a soul ache that can’t be filled no matter what.
I guess, for most people, that’s not a very cheerful fantasy, but if you’ve ever sat through a Chicago Gray winter, miserable, aching for someone, it makes perfect sense. There’s a level of desolation that I’m feeling and it’s more real right now than any Mississippi sunset. Sorry, there’s no Faith Hill in this feeling. It’s simple and it’s cold and it’s just about the most attractive thing I’ve ever seen.
{Another aside: I’m a little skewed. I don’t think Kate Moss ever looked better than she did with a mirror in her lap. Just me, I have a vision, go with it.}
I think it’s the lost soul I’m hurting for. The complete abandonment of everything warm and comforting. I hear this song and I want to cry. But more than that I want to freeze. I want to see my breath in the air and be dressed almost inappropriately, in a coat that isn’t warm enough and shoes that don’t suit the snow. I don’t want to be snuggled in the heat of my bed, or lying on a couch. I want to be in an alley, doing ANYTHING that I’m not supposed to be doing. I want to make the biggest mistake I can think of. Overdose on a drug I don’t even do, pass out and have my stomach pumped. I want to have unprotected sex with some random stranger just because he’s so fucking pretty I can’t control myself and when he kisses me I realize I can’t breath, not because he’s covering my mouth but because in my heart I know it will never get any better than this and I just want to die rather than live with the fucking mediocrity that everything will become from here on out. I want to consume grams of cocaine off the hipbones of someone who doesn’t give a shit about me, but likes the way I fuck. I want to swerve into oncoming traffic in a sleet storm to see what the lights look like when they hit the water on my windshield. I want to be a junkie, I want to be totally out of my mind, laughing at other people’s pain cause I’m so fucking caught up in my own life their concerns and comments are the buzzing of gnats compared to the screaming in my head of my conscience and my addictions. Men, drugs, sex and MUSIC. I want to be lost in a concert, screaming out lyrics to a song I can’t live without. I want the music to be so loud everything looks fuzzy. I want to sound to overwhelm my other senses until I can taste the metallic sting of guitar strings and woody sweat of drumsticks. I want to be so fucking confused I think I’m dying, and finally from there on out be fucking alive.
That’s how this song makes me feel. I want to do something, everything, anything that is only done, only optional when you know and understand that if you do this, it’s the last thing you are ever going to do.
If you understand this at all, after reading it. If you have anything similar, I'd LOVE to hear it.