The Opposite of A.D.D.

I spent about six hours one evening this week reading Jens Lekman's online diary backwards from July of 2011 to the early days of 2004 when he started it; following links, listening to music he posted, and so on. I came to a couple of conclusions:

1) He is the "real deal" and has not simply gotten lucky or tripped and fell into a thematic goldmine

2) He is cursed with emotional instability, which always feels like something the world does to you but is actually a personality trait. The results are generally binomial - you get better or you get worse. Staying the same is the equivalent of walking an increasingly flimsy tightrope.

3) Because of #2, I am nervous as hell that his next album could be great, horrible, or anywhere in between.

I admire music that is unique, and he has shown several enviable qualities that few other artists have achieved:

1) Not only is he funny, but the humor improves the songs without lowering their replay value like other "funny" music, most of which is simply gimmicky.

2) He succeeds with sampling other music and turns great music into new music that is often equally great

3) His songs are often both overstated (the arrangements) and understated (subtlety in the lyrics) at the same time.

4) Many of his songs are sublimely ironic and are therefore something like modern poetry.

5) If you only listened to a song or two, you might make the mistake that he is a clumsy lyricist. With enough exposure it becomes clear that what he really is, is a brilliant lyricist who writes songs perfectly suited for a charmingly imperfect baroque singer who just happens to be himself. (See just about any of his songs; for instance, from "A Postcard to Nina": "Your father is mailing me all the time/ He says he just wants to say hi/ I send back 'out of office' auto-replies")

I skipped his show in Omaha in 2008 for $2 long island iced teas at The Underground, the dirtiest bar in town. I don't know that I have words to place that decision into any sense of order except to the degree that it, itself vividly testifies to the order of my own sorry existence in 2008.

The Day I Surprised Myself

I always liked the part in American Beauty where Lester says, "It's a great thing when you realize you still have the ability to surprise yourself." For many years, I would remember that quote and ruminate on it and determine that I had never done much to surprise myself. I wasn't hard on myself about it. I just assumed it wasn't my personality. I thought myself careful and steady and I thought someone would have to at least be less wistful as a requirement to be surprising, most of all to themselves.

I surprised myself when I went to Europe. That place is painted with such overwhelming and uniformly romantic brushstrokes as a place that young people from the United States visit to grow or "discover themselves" or whatever. Wonky. Anyway, that is something like the experience I had there. It doesn't embarrass me. For a very long time, I shied away from stereotypical actions and behaviors for no good reason except as some sort of rebellious reflex. But, that is just so exceedingly silly. What really matters is that our experiences are genuine and are our own. Whether others have shared similar experiences does not matter. So, let that be a lesson if you are a young person - you should not align your thoughts or actions by any particular expectations of the world. You should simply align yourself to your own expectations.

The last few days I have been preoccupied with thinking about the summer of 2008. It does not come naturally to us to remember our mindset some time in the past. We cannot recreate the blindness that is the future. But there were days that summer where I was looking at apartments because there were just three of us living at the house and rent and utilities were expensive split three ways. It felt, I guess, like it was finally time to move on, and I am guessing that my idea of moving on was to change as little as possible. I'm not sure that's the same thing as the "path of least resistance" but maybe some people's actions simply construct an unwitting pattern where relative stasis helps to ensure comfort or happiness?

I nurtured a big ball of angst about moving out of Omaha all that previous winter and spring and when summer rolled around I was proud that I had come to the conclusion that everything I needed was in Omaha. Moving somewhere else would not magically bring exciting people or opportunities to myself; I would have to change myself to find those things, here or otherwise. And I did and do love Omaha and my single overwhelming emotion towards it then and now is affection. So sometime in late July of 2008 I was going to move into an apartment and stay healthy running or biking and going to the gym and working as a Product Manager at Avantas because of course all these things were a simple destiny.

On January 1st I flew to Chicago and from Chicago I flew overnight to Stockholm and in the early hours of the new day I sat in the international terminal at Stockholm - Arlanda International and looked out the window into the strange dark of the Scandinavian morning. It was 5:30 am and it wouldn't start to get light out until nine or so, by which time I would have taken the hour-long flight to Helsinki and wandered around the Helsinki airport and taken a bus to the downtown train station. But sitting there in the international terminal, I had my first meditation on how that moment was such a product of my ability to surprise myself and nothing else and I think that one of my initial reactions was, "what the hell have I done?", but of course that was simply a reflex that I had constructed unwittingly from all my wistful years of stasis.

I had been traveling for about a full twenty-four hours when I got off the train in Mikkeli and got into a car and rode the ten minutes through a quiet snowfall to my dorm and I was up most of the night, impossibly isolated and all I wanted to do was talk and in the absence of the chance, I went for a nighttime walk with Bon Iver. I think it just took the moment in the airport for me to internalize impossibility into what it really was, which was reality. I did many amazing things the next five months, but they all felt immediate and real and indeed it was the return to Omaha and a pattern like the one I had previously known that felt unreal.

There's a part in the song "Rocky Dennis' Farewell Song" by Jens Lekman where he says:

"I could sit and watch my life go by
Or I could take a tiny chance, 'cause
Someday I'll be stuck in some museum"

And I think that I have taken one step that I had to take and now I need to learn to become that person always, because I am living in Omaha and staying healthy biking and going to the gym and working as a Product Manager at Avantas, which is not a criticism, just an observation.

The Pulse

My personality and my choices have brought to life a strange, long pulse that dances me interminably between the strangest of extremes - ones I have learned to control so readily, once they appear to me. The bipolar axis between joy and despair, urgency and boredom, optimism and purposelessness. I suspect my mental and emotional stabilizers are too loose, allow me too much freedom. I stand my joys in front of myself so eagerly to indulge. I am no longer afraid of running out; I want it all now.

Let's just talk about at least one up and I will leave the downs to worry about myself:

On my recent trip to Colorado, after the second consecutive long, strenuous day of hiking, we settled into our camp and I crossed a narrow stream with my iPod. I had gone to great lengths to compile a playlist meant to listen to in the dark and alone in the wilderness. (If you're wondering: something like a miasma of ambient and minimal music (Fennesz, Boards of Canada, Animal Collective's "Campfire Songs", snips of Eno) with a handful of delicate melodic numbers (Will Oldham, early Grizzly Bear).) I was exhausted, certainly too exhausted to be hungry, though I was depleted mightily. The ground was a little spongy under my feet, or perhaps my feet were simply spongy things now. The rocks and trees of the forest acted out of turn; I sensed something light, a web of presence beyond randomness. My brain caught this anthropomorphism and checked it out of existence and then went back into sugar-starved remission. Perhaps I simply sensed order and perhaps we are evolved to feel awe at that. I walked up a slope, down a slope, looked back up. I caught sight of trees that begged me with gestalt identities, wandered through breeches of enormous split boulders. The trees and rocks stood patient for me to look into and look through. And I, too, I knew then and now, am re-learning patience in moments such as this; the world, I sometimes forget, must stand always waiting, but I have a choice. I have not had a drug-induced psychedelic experience in a very long time, but my heart seeks out their specters in strange moments of respite, my brain away or asleep. What does this mean? Why are these things as they are?

I am always trying to answer the question of what I want my life to be. I often have some model of the world built to satisfy questions like that and it often burns down in moments like this. I search through the rubble and feel remorse towards the match.