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| i hate being older. it's true. i wish it wasn't. growth, yes, yes, terrific. little seed swallowed up by the world, carrion asshole birds with crooked beaks and squawking the bleakest songs, vulturous periods dotting the skies. i don't know what i'm trying to say, but the fact that i'm trying to say it is proof enough.
like franz said, "I. Am. Not. Content."
not with christ. did i say with christ? could use a hug and set of wings about now.
Lord, love it,
jimmy
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| I'm probably wrong about everything, but I'd like to talk for a minute, no judgments cast, just gimme a momentary listen, if that's all right with you. My life as late has gotten weird, really. In the sense that my notion of how to live life somehow dissipated, nebulous and hazy. But it still lingers around. And when I get to read something lovely, some old poem I'd forgotten about, not some hard-hitting Nobel Prize winning thing necessarily, though those can be lovely too, just something sincere and with great power, right after reading the haze settles like fairy dust, and it glows and reshapes what I'm seeing into a real reality. It's not that it sugarcoats the universe or whitewashes over the wickedness of everything. It's more like it just let's it be the way it is, finally, like maybe it eats off a corrosive layer for a moment, or, even better, startles reality awake so it can take a good, long look at itself and laugh, a real delighted belly chuckle.
Not because everything's great, mind you. It isn't. Certainly not. But because it will be.
All the stories are true, the narrative arc is true, true is even true. Little songs keep moving me, and they're not even new songs, but I'm grateful for them. The stuff I love about them:
Dave Bazan's godawful doubletracking on "Criticism as Inspiration" on the Made in Mexico edition of The Only Reason I Feel Secure and I'm still, after almost ten years, I go on boohooing like Jason Keary watching The Notebook every time I hear it.
Joanna Newsom flubbing the piano and the melody and the lyrics on this bootleg of "Peach, Plum, Pear" I stumbled upon, man she plays harder and with more lovely intensity than anyone.
Jeff Mangum screeching off key in "Little Birds," still to this day hands-down the scariest song I've ever heard. I can barely even listen to it.
Lord, don't even get me started on Pavement. I'll just stick with this, my favorite most joyously stupid perfect couplet of all time: "Do you remember/ in December?"
That Sufjan bootleg where he either backs away from the mic or everything just gets turned down, right when he says, "I made a lot of mistakes."
Or or even when on all the old Industrial Noise Band songs we're cackling the whole way through, just laughing full belly so loud it hurts, it's the most lovely sound i've ever heard recorded, Mason and Hunter and Baskin laughing, it really truly is.
Sentimental! Yes, very! It's almost time for Christmas, too! I'm in a sentimental mood! I'm still yammering on about the same damn things I always have, and maybe it's a testament to them that as I grow (and I am growing, according to the Promise) they do too. Or I grow more into them.
Look at that. I sound kind of happy.
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| Where am I again? Omaha? Really?
The thing is, I woke up from a nap and saw this awful, bleak countryside outside blurring across the van windows, and I said to Len, "Damn, that looks like the cover of that Springsteen album Nebraska."
"Well," he said, "that makes a lot of sense."
So I'm hopped up on cold medicine and coffee, and I've been reading detective novels and Stephen Mitchell doing Pablo Neruda. I don't know, I'm just floating in a cough syrup haze right now. Got to hang out with Clay in Portland, Chad and Sara and Lawrence and Allen in Utah, probably some other people in other places, I'm really sleepy, I think I'm gonna go now.
love you guys,
jimmy
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|  | Currently Watching
Black Sheep
By Chris Farley, David Spade, Christine Ebersole, Gary Busy, Toby Scott Ganger
see related |
Here's an old Paste blog I never posted, sometime around late April. Weird, reading back on it:
" I’ve received some criticism about this blogging business, that I should maybe calm down a little, that my enthusiasm is uncool. Or even “pretentious,” which is a little adjective internet people like to hurl around like the deathnail boulder in a Biblical stoning. Honestly I don’t have time for such nonsense. I’m too busy running around like a maniac, trying to enjoy everything. I barely even have time to write about it in this blog. And what of it? This music. It’s only art, really. And that’s not even all that much. What matters about music and the touring and all is just the people you meet, the conversations you have, all my friends I’ve made, whom I love. The art? It’s just a thing, Ozymandias-style, it’s already passing away. But my friends mean something. The actual living of the life. That means something. The books are just ink and paper in an endless library, the music bits of data floating on the internet.
So death to cynics, etc. Enthusiasm does die out after awhile. Who can keep it up? I’ll go running around from one falling star to the next until I go pop, like one of my favorite doomed heroes, someone (unlike Ben Gibbard, according to that bizarre piece he wrote for you guys) I don’t idealize or idolize, haven’t idolized since I was a junior in high school. What are heroes for but to let you down, to teach you that there aren’t any real heroes? Just big failure people who, when you catch them at their occasional best, are trying hard. "
Yep.
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| Wow, so that last post was a bit testy. Sorry. I've been off tour for nearly three weeks now, and I feel about 86% human again. Good to know we'll be leaving once more on Wednesday. At least this time it's for a manageable few weeks, thanks be to Big Jesus.
So what have I been doing in my time off? The same thing I always do: watch a shitload of movies and read everything I can get my hands on. A really great Hungarian movie called Kontroll pretty much took over my three-to-five a.m. insomnia shifts for a few days, always necessitating a post-viewing sunrise excursion to Krystal. You know, the one at the Exxon off the Gluckstadt exit where you can get those delicious bite-sized heart attacks twenty-four hours a day. Even more importantly, I spent some quality time with my mom and dad and brother, and Bob in New Orleans and all my Oxford bros.
At Jitin's house (Chinatown), rocking the hookah and that weirdo Midlake remix, talking Arkham Asylum and how much we still love that part in All the Pretty Horses (you know, the line about the stars? It's on page thirty-two I think! I've posted it like five times because it's so beautiful!), I realized I was pretty happy. To top it all off, I got to touch ol' Bethan's pregnant belly and feel her baby John Bonham beating on the gut, and it rained so hard cars were floating down the Memphis backstreets. And I'll get to church one more time, have a beer with Drew Compton, grab a few tacos with J.Peeps and I'm out again.
We'll see, I guess. Gonna be optimistic, gonna pray, gonna read some more Brideshead Revisited and Dark Victory before I pass my copy off to the good staff of Square Books, and then it's the road. And then home (both of them), and then the road. Then Christmas. Weird.
Gotta have faith, and so much more love,
Jimmy
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