The only thing worse than a mutual breakup is waking up the next morning incredibly sick, with a body feeling ridden by polio it’s so inactive, and then doing chemistry homework before deciding to open up your not-blog to write about it. So here I am!
I’ve found a lot of my life revolves around relationships. I write about them a lot. Natural is about relationships, semi autobiographical. Some of my abstracter poetry is because I’m infatuated with someone, and now I’m single again. Another era come and gone, and now it’s May 22nd, 2017. I sit here on my couch and reflect. Not painfully, not with nostalgia. But fuck… four years have passed. So much has changed. It’s indescribable, the wealth of experiences I feel I now have. It’s incredible.
5/20/13 is when I kissed my first girlfriend and then had that echo as what would have been our anniversary. I was a sophomore in high school, and could hardly contain myself as I biked home on my beach cruiser (still in top notch condition, I’ll tell you that). I was so giddy to tell people. I was so excited. I would have been 15 years old.
Four years later. 5/20/17. My current girlfriend showed up to my work, and when I clocked out we had an hour and a half long talk, breaking up on mutual terms. Hell, she’s probably even reading this right now (and if you are, I would like you to unsubscribe, because reading any of this will just hurt no matter what).
Four years later. 19 now. Single again. Four years spent living in a strange place I didn’t grow up in. I used to be such a shy, unconfident little thing being strung along by whatever fate planned for me. I was going to be content with being the universe’s chew toy whenever bad things happened. No longer. Four years later, and I’ve discovered I’m a poet. I’m a writer. I’m confident. I have a job, I have a life, I have things I like doing and I do them. I’ve really grown up here, for not having been a Washington native.
Every car ride, every little thing I thought was too huge to surmount, and now it’s all at my feet. I couldn’t dream of driving myself to go get a coffee when I was 15. Now that’s an average day for me.
I must have ridden my bicycle past houses of soon to be girlfriends and friends and memorable places without even knowing it. I would never expect to fall in love with Olympia and the people there. Never would have thought I would have 4 girlfriends in 4 years, each meaning something entirely separate from the one before. Never would have thought I’d grow into this person I would have looked up to when I was younger. It’s wild to think that this has all happened. My life truly started when I moved here.
Folks, you have to wake up every day and be happy with who you are and what you’ve got. Are you feeling down whenever you wake up? That’s a shitty way to live. You need to wake up excited to see what the day brings, and to dread none of it. And if you do dread it, you change it. You be happy.
My life has the unpleasant orbit around relationships. And this is strange now that I’m bitching about it on an actual blog. WHAT ABOUT THE WRITING, JAKE? Fuck, I guess I can talk about what’s going on with that.
Lately? Not much. Writing about people in particular I’m interested in now that I’m single. Might get a tinder account just for the fuck of it. I’ve been listening to Battle Tapes recently and their stuff is really good to pull ideas from. The singer has a smooth, buttery voice that I have never seen challenged by another man, so there is that.
I’m trying to get back into using songs as jumping off points for writing stuff. With every note being one syllable each. I’ve found some interesting combinations with that, but have yet to find anything actually good to do with them.
Damn, it’s been a while! I’ve finished another notebook since my last journal! A moleskine I got for my birthday last year has been all completed. It’s amazing to close the pages on a year of my life. Kinda… interesting, considering everything that’s gone on. So with that notebook done, I can move on to another one. The black paper notebook! I have to write in it with a silver pen for anything to actually be legible so far, but it looks really cool. I think I posted a picture of it somewhere around here… (Metal on the Black).
And as far as that goes, it goes. Since I’m sick I’m starting to run out of words and my head is foggy, and I seriously think I have the flu. In May. The fuck is that about?
So here I am. Single, sick, Jake Thomas Shaw. Lot of life left to live in this place. It’s time to get out and find something to write about. I’m also running on extreme ego and extreme self-deprecation right now, so that ought to make for a fun poem.
As an aside, I would like to thank everyone who continues to tune in. And if you liked this little journal here, I’m even more thankful that you take time to read this stuff. This is a good soapbox, but I would never expect anyone to listen to me. Just about 190 of you are proving me wrong!
It’s expected that by the end of this month I will have had more views than I did all of 2016. This makes me so happy, and that cannot be understated.
You guys really are the best. And now, back to regularly scheduled programming…
Consume Reality! 