daddy's gonna pay for your crashed car

This two-minute-long segment is part four of a six-part short documentary I discovered through my incessant fangirl Googling this evening. 

For a few days now, I’ve been riding the warm and happy residual wave from seeing BRMC this past weekend in Columbus with my family. I remember my sister and I buying their first CD a few months after it came out in 2001. I was in ninth grade. And I remember recording songs from the album onto mixed tapes and listening to them on random drives with Shannon, sitting in parking lots eating ice cream cones, crying about boys with chipped teeth and electric guitars or arguing about something small and stupid and familial. We turned our dad onto them, and then I turned my best friends onto them, and then my first boyfriends eventually followed suit, and somehow this past weekend all of that came back around full circle, twelve years after the crackly audio cassettes and white hot teenage angst.

It makes me feel a tad long in the tooth to admit that the last time I saw them perform  was in 2005. I was a junior in high school with a ton of paste in my hair and a shitty, melodramatic online diary. And now my head is sprinkled with little gray hairs and I take great stock in my complete set of nonstick cookware and adequate health insurance coverage. I have traded in some dreams to snuggle comfortably beneath a stiff security blanket because I don’t know what else to do. I worry about food I just bought going bad in my refrigerator while I’m away at work without any time at all, and I worry about entering into my thirties lonely and angry, just like an indignant adolescent who doesn’t know how to fucking stop it.

Even so, I guess, I still have my passions. I still have my love of music like this, dark and gritty and cool and soothing. I still seek out, if only just to observe, any kind of work  that forces us to open ourselves up, and, sometimes with sobering difficulty, accept what is too real.

I feel a little challenged after watching this particular bit in the documentary because Peter talks about the kind of fear that keeps all of us from feeling some necessary discomfort in life. I know he is talking about the nerve required in making music and living in such a manner to do it, and I know that I feel that too, deep down, but it’s more than just that. It’s about more than just taking charge of your more creative aspirations, quitting your day job, biting the bullet, manning up — all of that.  

There’s a more general fear out there, I think, of taking on ANY discomfort at all — that which is wholly honest and brings us into the reality we desire. It’s the discomfort that needs beaten out of us and dealt with head on, guns blazing. So, I guess I still have that task, but I try to live my life in a way that allows any pain that’s coming to flow freely and without distraction. I try, and even still there’s some static.

At the end of this note, which has about a million misplaced thoughts in it, what I really want to say is that I’m trying to figure out how to house both my inspirations and my work (whatever form it takes) in a format that is purposeful and honest for me at this time in my life. I’m not only trying to think of how to do this but where. Which means I may or may not specifically abandon this totally random blog I’ve kept for five years because I really don’t have any idea what it is anymore but a vortex for my iPhone photos and something I am too afraid to leave behind for fear of erasing my college years or something. Lately though, I’ve just wanted clarity anywhere I can get it. So, hopefully in the months to come I can present some new venture, or at least an old venture of sorts, revisited and more thoughtfully repackaged. In the meantime, though, I will listen to great music and let my mind wander without interruption as it does. And so should you.