It’s been a helluva weekend. I think I’ve made good with someone I’ve been wanting to for a very long time.
If you’re not already listening to the song “Flytrap” by Solar Fields, do that right now as you’re reading this journal. It’s amazing what an ambient electronic artist can do when scoring an action game like Mirror’s Edge.
I am in Tacoma, housesitting again.
These environments have spiked this month, as I haven’t had a gig like this since April and suddenly I’ve got two back to back. This is a lot of time for me to think.
So this house I am looking after is very 70’s. Split level with a middle floor in the center of the staircase. Labyrinthine. Steam setting for the shower. Huge windows. With this song playing I can understand what solace is and what it does mean to be alone to think. Meditative, nearly. This is a writing environment, so as I write, I suppose it’d be a good thing to document how that process is going.
This time to write I’ve sat down in front of a rather large TV, to put on youtube the song. Then I’ve got my notebook out and I’m restarting the track after it gets to the 4 minute mark to replay the slower melodic bits.
This can carry me for quite a while until I get distracted.
It’s now 12:04am on July 14th, and I started this journal 8 hours ago.
Summer depression is here.
I’d felt it creeping up but didn’t think it was close to striking. Apparently, it’s a very Washington thing to be depressed when there’s clouds out here. Some kind of harm in not seeing the sun for protracted periods of time. I get that in the summer when things slow down. I begin to yearn for people and places that are, for all intents and purposes, dead. And I can’t perform necromancy. Rather, I can, but it comes with risk.
For once I’m in a stable spot. Funds accruing. My quality of life is increasing as I understand how to use what I have to do things I like to do. This website is a great example. This journal is just a soapbox, but it is argueably the most popular part of my site. Not the poetry or photography, this journal is what’s looked at most.
Might as well soap.
Basically, I have the opportunity to open myself up to someone who is a wildcard. Someone that’s stuck in my head and has found a way to get into my head every damn day. This person might have an inclination that this is something I’m fighting with, mostly because I can’t stop bitching about it to everyone close to me who already knows the story. I almost want to say the name here out loud, let it be a part of Radio Reality City like she has always been without even knowing it. I’ll use my favorite alias.
Summer depression makes me yearn for that autumn again, an autumn in which I have taken 11 separate cracks at capturing in a poem. I could try again in a journal here. It was just after my first big breakup. I was 17. I was housesitting and threw out a message on facebook seeing if anyone wanted to talk. This person, Eleanor, did.
What I didn’t know is what she would show me. I was so shy before and she pulled me out of my shell massively. She broke it and infused in me this strange sort of confidence that permeates around me quite strongly. She said she loved me. I said I loved her. We believed each other, as far as I know. It’s weird how 4 months can just tear someone’s soul to shreds like that.
We had some kind of romance and some kind of impact, but I still don’t know what I mean to her after all this. Most likely a footnote. But to me, she is a regret I harbor deep within the fibers of my being.
That regret has killed at least one major relationship of mine.
Now, single, free, stable, somehow I still yearn for something possibly volatile. I yearn for that autumn of 2014 I can never capture.
This is summer depression Jake, welcome to the fucking races.
So I’m all broody and my poem about this place I’m housesitting at sits nearly finished in my notebook downstairs. I can’t fucking wait to get out of this house for any reason, simply because I am a prick to myself and I get myself started about thoughts long dead again. Always relationship stuff.
I regret the loss of every relationship I’ve ever had. Not the confrontational break up, but the relationship. The people. The places. The connections severed forever and never to be certainly bound the same way to myself. This most recent break up in May has me fucked with the thoughts nowadays. I hope this is enlightening, because I don’t show this side of myself well except for in my poetry. In the confrontations, you’re supposed to be stoic and put up a guise that you’ll be fine. This is never what happens, in reality, and that’s what we’re all about here at Radio Reality City.
We become scarred by the excision of the people that were once so prominent in our lives. I love them all as they were still, to this day. It’s a potency that is only matched and never exceeded, at least I think. No perfect relationship, only perfect relationships.
Going to Bellingham, having her over for Christmas, going to plays, spending the night in Olympia, Ruston Way, Redondo Beach … never again to happen in the ways that they did.
What of those people, then? What memories made? Are we all destined to be forever chasing the high of those first nights where we discover who we really are? Tied in dangerous associations to the concrete and music and people around us when we remember those neon lights in the stormy skies?
It makes a person wonder what the meaning of it all is. I’m not on this planet to deal with car trouble or to work or to go to school. These things are means to the end. End. What end?
7/15/17, 11:27 PM:
Last night I was out in Olympia on an impromptu trip with someone I haven’t spoken to in years, afraid of what she might say. My ex. The big one. The one that’s had me thinking and constructing memories in her wake. I never imagined there would be a reunification, a friendly one, that would be so much fun and end okay.
The wildcard. The one that stuck in my head so strongly and I got to see her again, and she’s doing well. It’s fantastic to see, honestly. No jealousy, no expectations, or implications out of me. It just was. It was like closure with a possibility of continuing. Friends again? Who the fuck knows. I’m just shell shocked from being out in Olympia until 2am, being there with her, given the context and all the self-inflicted tension and build up, in my current stability, in my capability to in less than 24 hours establish contact with one of the most powerful entities in my life and then get together. It was pretty great. 10/10 I would do it again.
It makes me wonder how many opportunities I’ve missed out on my not vocalizing. I mean, I post a lot on my site here with all the vaguery in my poetry, but at the end of the day that isn’t as blunt as saying “hey, want to get together?”. It’s crazy what can happen.
A year ago did I think I’d be here? Not even anywhere in particular, just this situation, these current events of mine. Did I think I’d be here? Hell no. The exact opposite, if anything, is what I expected.
7/16/17: It’s been a helluva weekend. I think I’ve made good with someone I’ve been wanting to for a very long time.
Sometimes you just need to jump into it.
What’s next? (27th Revision since 7/13/17)
Consume Reality! 