Monday, December 8, 2008

Day 211

i went to the tea house to read and chill. the old brick building is on a street corner downtown and looks heavy and content- like a distant relative on the couch after christmas dinner; familiar but fresh. i don't know if that's legal punctuation but those ideas needed to stick together.

from inside of the big windows, i admire the front bay and fireplace. no gig today. christmas music fills the atmosphere and i wonder to myself if people really like these classics as much as they seem to say they do. to be honest, i've noticed seasonal songs see a decrease for myself in overall pleasantry each year and bring less fulfillment of a 'christmas spirit', whatever that means, once the tunes have been played for more than two weeks. i remember the tiny, singing shoney bear tree ornament. i did like that music from his plush stomach.

i feel fortunate to know and have a good relationship with the owners of the tea house. today they bring coffee to where i've got bob dylan's chronicles on the table. an internal monologue starts to flow and i scorn the awareness of crafted words that i always fear will never be recovered. 'i pour cream and watch it chase its silky tails into the murk, tripping and rolling over its creamy momentum until all wisps have mysteriously pulled any straggling color beneath the dark surface. then, with a flick of the spoon, the heavy white expands up and i, like an eye in the cosmos, watch the smokey explosion of the liquid mushroom cloud in my cup.'

at the age of twenty-one, i'm sure some friends from high school have company cell phones or starched, tie-requiring internships. others probably work at grocery stores. most are writing papers and studying and taking big tests to sum up their last few months. a semester has vicariously flown by. i'm sitting in canada and describing what it looks like to prepare coffee and reading books about the music that's inspired me to play in this very building and also making a different attempt at faith while wondering what 'moving mountains' really means. maybe that's a little imbalanced, but maybe it isn't. maybe craig kelley was right in that documentary last week when he talked about breaking into the life you're alive in instead of viewing it as an escape from the one you didn't. maybe this is my internship- except with no human boss and a beard instead of a tie. and this blog.

i'm seeing that it's kind of hard to be an individual in the picture of our crew's relationship to the rest of this small town. we have a cool group of foreigners/non-locals in a good location. this isn't a bad thing at all but there's definitely less individuality in overall greater community consideration. that's probably a good thing.

still, that isn't easy for me. it's becoming more natural to be comfortable and attentive in this bigger picture but i know myself and have to take time to wander on my own. sometimes for a season. sometimes for an afternoon. sometimes for a few moments to stir words into coffee and sometimes by trying to remember these thoughts with scribbles in the back leaves of a national bestseller.

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