Lyrics: Untitled Verse.

Written from inside a dark place.

I never thought that I would see you in dreams
But every time I do it's like I'm fiendin' it seems
'Cause yo, you're like a vision that I witness
Mindin' my business and all of a sudden I miss you with a quickness

Yo I can't explain it, 'cause one second I'm fine
It's wreckin' my mind, I end up recollectin' the time
When I stole a kiss and then captured your heart
I mastered the art of love but now I'm back at the start

Ground zero, starin' at your picture at night
Thinkin' bout you even when I'm grippin' a mic
It's surprising 'cause I thought that I was over you boo
Instead my soul is tellin' me to get closer to you

But hold up, I don't know how you feel about this tragedy
I hope your strategy's to rapidly come back to me
And that'll be the fantasy occupyin' my brain
Until then, sing a melody and quiet my pain

Escape.

I've been feeling restless and needing to do things lately, which is somewhat foreign to me 'cause I'm usually more of a homebody. So it's weird, but over the past few weeks I've just been wanting to get away somehow.

[via]

With the advent of my three-day weekends (due to working 4 10-hour shifts at the hospital), I'm starting to actively look for things I can get into, especially in the Kansas City area. Someone dear to me once said that I'd missed out on too much of what cities had to offer, most likely because I didn't look hard enough (or just didn't want to look). It was true; I'd only really stuck to the things I knew I liked to do and unfortunately wasn't very adventurous or spontaneous. Obviously this led to plenty of missed opportunities, experiences and memories. This makes me sad, because I like to think that I would've learned from those experiences.

So I'm trying to be more proactive. I'm saying "Yes, okay, let's go!" more often. I've lined up the next couple of weekends, with an out-of-town bachelor party for a close friend and then a 2-day float trip with lots of acquaintances (I'm basically the "new guy" hanging out with a members of a close crew). I'm looking to see what else I can do here in the metro area over the next couple of months. I don't want to waste any more time, nor have any more regrets about not having done something. The experiences will definitely be worth the effort.

It's the weekend, PM readers. Time to escape.

The Experimental Soundtrack Of My Childhood.

I remember messing around on my parents' Yamaha organ waaay back in the day, playing the preset percussion rhythms (tango, rumba, etc.) and creating random chord arrangements from the synthesized instruments (harpsichord, flute, etc.) when I got bored with actual practice. I'd tap out simple melodies and harmonies for an hour or so, trying to coordinate those with booming bassline accompaniment on the pedals below.

More often than not, the resulting "music" sounded like the dissonant experimental soundtrack for some avant-garde abstract art exhibit, but sometimes it actually sounded kinda good (to my 7-year-old ears, anyway). I wish I'd had some convenient way to record my compositions, but if I concentrate hard enough on a quiet afternoon, I can still hear snippets of my childhood spontaneity coursing through my memory.

[via]

Nowadays you can have your own home studio in the bedroom for just a small pile of cash. I've been thinking about doing this for some years now; I'd love to create some funky spacey electronic stuff and unleash it to the Internet like a thousand music blog geeks before me. However, current finances are being directed to other, more important places at the moment. This I don't mind at all, but every now and then I still cue up YouTube videos of people just making beats/music on their own home equipment -- and I damn near salivate. Like the name of this blog, there are always melodies and rhythms percolating in my head. I want to be able to record them for posterity, and perhaps even let you listen to them someday.

This post is dedicated to my old childhood Yamaha organ. Hope you're still making music, wherever you are :D

We go way back

On Hair Clips, Chaos & Memories.

Photos from the past month are up on Flickr.

My room is trashed. Yesterday I wrote on Twitter: "I think RadioShack, Linens N Things and my campus library had a wild drunken #threesome in my room and left me to clean up after their mess." Looking at it from my vantage point at my desk, it seems even worse than it did then. The mess flows haphazardly from the bed (which is surprisingly made) down onto the floor, cascades up onto my desk, end table, bookshelf and has somehow found its way into my closet.

I don't usually leave my room in this sad state. Ever.

It's probably because I haven't really "settled in" quite yet. I mean, I physically moved here at the end of last month, but when you share your room with a 3-year-old, her stuff ends up quickly and completely kicking your stuff's ass. In addition to piles of pastel-colored clothes, my bedroom was overrun with Veronica's Eric Carle books, balloons, Hello Kitty hair clips, and a crazy assortment of toys and various knick-knacks that she happened to bring in from other parts of the house.

It is no secret that I am unabashedly anti-knick-knack.

So I tried to fight it at first, and fight it hard. I systematically re-arranged my closet to accommodate two wardrobes and designated a proper drawer for the crayons. I stacked up library books and notepads according to size and slyly rotated toys in and out of use. I thought I was being clever, but I thought wrong. It was too much. Turns out that I'm not very good at winning battles of attrition when the theater of war was confined to my bedroom. Socks and gloves appeared in random places. There was a never-ending hunt for scrunchies and barrettes:

1. ME: "Well, where did you put it last?"
2. VERONICA: "I don't know."
3. Repeat every hour or so.

But here's the thing: It was actually kind of refreshing to let go, to revel in the chaos of happy disorganization. Strangely, the near-constant mess was a way to connect with Veronica, to remember what being a child was like, to be care-free about things that really didn't matter that much. So I learned to accept the mess and even enjoy it a little. Because in light of the precious limited time we had together, the mess didn't matter that much at all. In fact, it became a symbol of her visit and the joy it brought me.

Veronica is traveling with my sister and her baby today, so she couldn't take all of her things with her due to luggage constraints. My bedroom is still filled with knick-knacks, toys, books and clothes -- and I know I'll find a hair clip before long. But I have been slow to clean up my room. I know I'll have to soon for practicality's sake, but it can wait for a couple of days.

Just ... not yet.

Revisitation.

As an adult, I have often known that peculiar legacy time brings to the traveler: the longing to seek out a place a second time, to find deliberately what we stumbled on once before, to recapture the feeling of discovery. Sometimes we search out again even a place that was not remarkable in itself -- we look for it simply because we remember it. If we do find it, of course, everything is different. The rough-hewn door is still there, but it’s much smaller; the day is cloudy instead of brilliant; it’s spring instead of autumn; we’re alone instead of with three friends. Or worse, with three friends instead of alone.

- Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian

It's amazing how some writers can perfectly express a feeling. This passage (taken from a novel I'm currently reading about Dracula, no less) does this to a tee, at least for me. Kostova refers to the sense of rediscovering a long-ago-visited place. As a fellow traveler frequently afflicted by wanderlust, I can completely relate to what she's written. I'm sure everyone has experienced this feeling as well, whether it's going back to your old grade school or visiting the bookstore where you and a significant other first met. You want to try to match the emotions and experiences you've kept locked in your memory, to refresh them, and to give them new meaning. Because perhaps you've been feeling melancholy, or you want something old and safe to hold on to as you tread uncharted territory in your life.

But upon arriving, you find that things aren't quite the same. The school looks dated; the strong, comforting steel of the playground equipment in your memory has been replaced by bright plastic monstrosities. The swingset used to be over here. The bookstore strangely doesn't hold the same allure in real life as it did in your mind. The wrong music is playing overhead, and it wasn't this bright before. So it pushes you the tiniest bit off-balance, and your memories become slightly discolored.

And at the same time, you have changed. You've grown older, hopefully wiser, definitely more cynical. You realize that everything changes with the passage of enough time, and absolutely nothing stays the same forever. The best thing you can do is take those new memories and filter them through the sentiment of the old.

Maybe it's the shorter days and cooler, cloudier weather, but lately I've been feeling more introspective than usual. I've been attempting, with mixed results, to instill an sense of stillness and calm in my life in reaction to the whirlwind that has been 2009 so far. The traveling I have been doing the past few weeks wasn't to distant physical spaces, but to memories and experiences in my mind of when life was simpler. I know things have changed; I have changed. And I'm not trying to "go back to how it once was" because that, in the grand scheme of things, is impossible. But there's the next best thing. And that's to go forward in the best way possible, with a sense of purpose, awareness and gratitude that past memories have served well to guide me thus far.