So Much To Say...

I don't know where to begin herding these swimming uncontrollable thoughts. Its been a day to remember. I'll remember today as the day I was home and also traveling through something I don't know anymore. The fantasy world I yearned for, and ached for all fall while I was in the far north lamenting on decisions and circumstances, couldn't be less of a reality. My family is great, my home is warm, my car runs great, and the speakers play Nick Drake clearly as I accelerate and brake through life around the lost city of Tacoma searching for fragments of a life I left behind, searching, surging, through the kicked up mist of transported people and the defrosted fog from my steady silent breathing.

The windshield wipers click back and forth and my feelings are marked by how bitten my fingernails are, like waterlines on the side a lake. Its been said that things change, I suppose they do, but maybe we're the ones who do. Its also been said that things stay the same, and maybe its everything else that only seems to. Both could be said about myself. I've always chewed my fingernails, ever since I was a boy, thats the same, and I do it without thinking usually if I'm driving or stressed out or thinking too hard, and when life is just to full of goodness I usually wake up one day and they are back to normal. Thats when I know that life is how it should be.

But now I look down at them, my poor fingernails, and they are just about gone, they are the ones that end up carrying the full burden of my heaviest of thoughts. Thoughts of an entire day spent driving around Tacoma alone, driving through old neighborhoods, weaving in and out of the endless consumers heading back to the stores to get what they really wanted or to change what they were given. I ended up buying nothing but coffee, endless coffee, and a gyro from my favorite desperate respite the Magical Sandwich Makers on 6th Ave, and thinking about all the cigarettes I used to smoke, wanting one, so badly, but holding off somehow. I looked for the few friends left in this town and realized, like college, the world I left behind had been swept along in the endless tide of time, and yet on the surface looked frighteningly like nothing had changed at all. Nothing can really describe the feeling of being home and also being just as alone as when I was in Alaska. People are gone for the holidays, people are working, people are simply being people and neither my presence or lack there of will change that. The loneliness feels just the same here as there.

I've always been lonely, its a horrible feeling, just wanting to be where you want to be and are wanted also. I've had moments where I didn't feel that way, but like sunrises on sundays these feelings of completeness always bring a shadow of melancholy knowing it will all start over and again.

It certainly makes things difficult, I just want something easy right now. I just want a sentiment out of an Eagles song, I want a peaceful, easy feeling. Instead I have rain, and cold, and dark, and so incredibly post Christmas Northwest cliche mindset. If you don't get it, move here, you will.

And Dammit I want my friends back. I want to call them, and hang out with them, and meet up with them and go shopping with them, and drink coffee with them, and lose to pool against them, and experience things with them, and just feel like for one fucking moment I am a normal person. I don't want to be normal, I just want to feel like it for a moment so that I know where I stand, because after one and a half years in the most unexplainable and completely unreal worlds I have changed so much inside that I don't know what the hell I'm supposed to be feeling anymore.

I know that I have this moment, with this computer, and this cup of coffee, and these thoughts and you the reader, and I have these suburbanite high schoolers swirling around me in this coffee shop with their words silent as the song "Shiver" drowns out their socializing in my headphones as they are preparing for future uber-plastique Nordstrom lives.

Whenever I come back to the Northwest I remember Nirvana, Pearl Jam, DeathCab For Cutie and Modest Mouse songs, this place, this area does things to you. I'm so used to battling the elements in Alaska, elements that can take a finger or a toe, elements that you plan for, I'm so used to those that I'm not really sure how to defend myself against the subtle mental battle moves of a this place against my mind, so subtle that the constant insignificant drizzle and just cold enough temperature here just plays with you.

But I'm meeting a friend soon, hopefully, and that should change things, a late encounter with the past, always makes for a new outlook. I have an old unopened pack of cigarettes from a long time ago that I used to keep in my car for emergencies, and now its in my flannel shirt pocket, and I'm not going to smoke them, but just keep them there to remind of me of when I did.

And the unstoppable time moves on, soon enough I will be back in the trenches in Alaska, back in a way of life that seems so completely ludicrous until you come back to contiguous America and see how ludicrous life can really be.

And if at all possible, go see the Mysterious Case of Benjamin Button, but do not listen to Nick Drake afterward, the introspection that will result may produce similar feelings of deep deep melancholy as were represented in this utterly depressing and pointless blog post.

Good night chaps.