A good night

Band practice rocked tonight.  We came up with a new song, played through and worked out a newish song and rocked one of our older songs.  It was absolutely incredible.  I don’t know what it is about playing with those guys but things just seem to come together.  A good portion of our songs were written on the spot, in the band room, with one of us just starting out playing something neat or catchy and then everyone else jumping in and rocking out.  The new song that we birthed tonight began with me just messing around with a funky drumbeat.  G looked over at me and said, “Keep playing that.”  I did and within a few minutes we were finishing up playing through the song in its entirety.  Fun doesn’t even touch how great that was.  I had forgotten how amazing it is to just let yourself go in the music you are playing.  Tonight, hitting those drums as hard as I could, I let go of all of the little bits of heavy darkness pulling down on my brain and it was perfect.  Jamming out with my buds was exactly what I needed.

So, in summary:

New Song: Check

Polished Newish Song: Check

Mental Enema: Check

Dreads and Friends

I’ve got good friends.  I don’t just mean cool people to hang out with and make dumb poop jokes with.  I mean I have really good friends.  People that challenge me, hold me accountable, are exciting and full of life, share my interests, accept me for me and are just plain awesome.  Tonight, my two best friends sat and dreaded my hair for around 3 hours total even though I, like a kid with an attention span like a chipmunk, had dreads put in last year and cut them off only a month later.  Even though I need dreads put back in because I was too hasty and impatient and distracted, my friends are still incredible enough to take time out of their schedules (busy with papers of the senior sort, papers of the history sort, and general school stress to deal with) to rat my smelly hair.  I’ve known for quite awhile that I’m a lucky person for having these people in my life but there are instances that remind me just how lucky I am.  For a very long time I didn’t really value friendship much.  I sort of saw it as something of a filler to fit nicely in between significant other time but I’ve realized slowly that friends, the good kind, like my friends, are something to be valued and treasured.  They are the people that are going to be with you when times suck and you just need to drown your sorrows in a basket of Applebee’s buffalo wings and they are the ones that are going to be sitting with you on a Tuesday night, running a pet comb through your hair in a way that most people would cringe at.  I am lucky and I know it.   B and K, if you are reading this, I love you both.  You’re both good shit.

The art of never being satisfied

I realized something about myself.  And when I did that, I realized something else.  First realization first.  It occured to me yesterday that I always have to have something big and exciting on the horizon.  Whether it’s thinking about working for Greenpeace, planning on the dreadlocks that will soon be cushioning my head (my thanks to you K-trizzle) or joining the peace corps for a few years, I always need something.  A large part of me thinks that without these large events I won’t have anything to pull me through today.  And maybe that’s true.  I don’t enjoy the present, not fully anyway.  I goof around and joke and laugh but I wonder if I would still do those things if I didn’t have a more exciting tomorrow simmering on the backburner.  Could I be comfortable with just today?  Can I enjoy the thoughts of tomorrow and love the life of today?

The second bit that came to me was the fact that I love having realizations.  Like this one.  And the one just a few lines up from this one.  Perhaps it’s because I like to have an excuse for past actions.  Maybe I like to imagine myself as a very introspective (is that a word and if so, is it the correct one?) person, someone totally in-tune with himself and his feelings, constantly making discoveries about his innerworkings but maybe it’s just because I’m a little late in the game.  People say that hindsight is 20/20 and I wonder if these realizations could be a result of simple reflection on past actions.  No matter what it is, I don’t want to have any more of these realizations past occurence.  For once, I’d like to know exactly what I might do, why I would do it that way and then make the smart choice from there.  Also, I would like a pet unicorn, a few rides on a rainbow and to join the x-men.