cxxi

“It’s the end of the world as we know it…and I feel fine…”

-R.E.M.

            Time has gotten away from me. So I wrote this poem:

Apocalypse Now

It’s the night of the Rapture and, of course, I can’t sleep.

My head is weary but my heart is full of regret.

There is nothing like Armageddon to really put things into perspective.

My pillow only can register that each moment is now more precious than the last,

the doomsday clock slowly ticking down until

the inner monologues racing around my soul will finally screech to a halt.

Finally.

Forever.

How will it happen, tomorrow or never?

Will the world mouth a last gasp from tremoring cracks in its cement crust,

people cursing the time into which they were born,

material possessions grossly dissolving in front of tear-reddened eyes?

Or will there be a quiet sense of calm,

an assured, collective knowledge that there is something much greater than politics and cubicles, reality television and oil prices,

sighs of relief wafting to the heavens on the wings of millions of prayers?

Well, shit, I don’t know.

I’m not a theologian or a philosopher or even someone with a firm head on their shoulders.

I’m just 
an almost poet with an eighteen dollar notebook and a dull pencil,

a mediocre Catholic, Bible buried in the bottom of a cardboard box.

a barely sophomore who has no idea what to do for the next sixty years

          (barring any Second Coming of the Christ, of course.)

And all that I do know is,

if I somehow survive this small-pocketed weekend of Evangelical hysteria,

I’ll have a new motto:

Live every day like it’s the end of the world.

And I won’t worry about grades or girls or good-paying jobs,

because we don’t know the time or the hour and,

for all I know,

it’s coming up real soon.

So, bring it on.

cxx

“I’ve developed a new philosophy…”

-Charlie Brown

            I’m a big believer in not stressing.

            Let me just rephrase that: I’m a big believer in big believing. It’s my new philosophy.

            Almost every other day, it seems, I will announce to whoever I am eating lunch with or just to an empty dorm room that I, Brandon James Wainerdi, will now and forever, live by this, my brand new personal philosophy. But, without fail, the mantra quietly manages to fade away as the week passes and, eventually, I find myself lost, without even a slightly off-kilter, philosophic compass. Or, at least, lost until the next phrase that I read on the Internet or the newest witty saying I came up with in the shower takes its brief, glorious place in my life.

            Time, mantra-filled or not, has been passing quickly; the past few months going by with a rather alarming speed. So, for posterity’s sake, I’ve taken to write down some of my favorite philosophies of the past months, so that, when I am graying and wrinkled, I can look back and laugh at how foolish I was as an eighteen-year-old. Some of them (the admittedly “lame” ones) are my own creation and others were penned by rappers or fictional characters or authors or saviors. It’s a rather eclectic blend:

·      Just smile and smell good.

·      Nap often.

·      Preach the Gospel every day. If necessary use words.

·      Get busy living or get busy dying.

·      I’ll sleep when I’m dead.

·      Early to bed. At least, before midnight.

·      Bike at 4 AM. Hear the birds wake up and see the sun rise.

·      I’m a big believer in not stressing.

            If you can’t tell, my views on sleeping/not sleeping vary by the week, my overall life philosophy, overall life goal, consistently shifting and bending to the influences of the hour. But that’s my life.

            For this week, at least.

*****

            A Post Scriptum, or whatever: The biggest stress-reliever that I have had in my life, at least for this semester, is my radio show. It’s not often that someone gets the opportunity to rant and play music for two hours but I’ve been lucky enough to do just that and it has been wonderful. In between breaks, I’ve found myself writing more and more poetry, including:

Disc Jockey Love Anthem

How do I love you?

Let me count the mix CD’s.

I do not sing, my voice flounders at low octaves,

I do not dance, my body shuffles awkwardly on wood-panel floors,

I have no rhythm of my own to give.

But others, more talented and patient that I, have felt the same way,

of that I am positive.

Tracklist poetry.

My heart burns like the red blank disc spinning in my laptop’s undergroove.

Here are volumes 1 through 4.

I’ll give you the rest tomorrow.

cxix

“If suffering brought wisdom, the dentist’s office would be full of luminous ideas.”

-Mason Cooley


            This is definitely not how I expected to be spending one of the first mornings of my much-needed spring break: lying on a quasi-operating table, having the rubber-gloved hands of some annoying stranger probe my mouth as she concurrently makes fun of my intruding gum line.

            “Have you been brushing and flossing regularly?” the dentist’s assistant asks me loudly.

            “Of course,” I oh-so-casually reply. Or, at least, as oh-so-casually as I can reply while my mouth is being forced open, suction tubes running the line of my bottom jaw.

            And that above exchange is the foremost reason why I absolutely hate going to the dentist’s office: it is the only place in the world where someone can catch me lying to their face. She can totally see, from her high-stooled perch, that my teeth aren’t pearly white and that my gums are incredibly sensitive. She knows that the garbled sentences coming out of my never-flossed mouth are just straight up lies, murmured only because I do not want to have a conversation with her. Which is completely true, mind you.

            But it’s too far late for that.

            “What school do you go to now?” she begins, asking for the fourth time this morning, “Oh yes, that’s right. My son almost went there but he went to community college instead for two years and then transferred out. We always joked that…”

           

            Her poor tries at an oft-rehearsed stand-up comedy routine are quickly tuned out, providing only a shrill soundtrack to the next half-hour, and I slowly stop paying attention to my surroundings.

            But after only a few minutes, her voice again returns to my consciousness: “But how have you been? How have your first few months of college been going?”

            She has thankfully stopped talking about her simply hilarious family anecdotes for a brief moment and, instead, turned the tables on me. Of course, I don’t answer, if not because I don’t care, but the main reason that I physically cannot. There is no possible way to respond to her, as whatever minty chemicals she’s currently shoving into my mouth have made sure of. But if I could, I’m sure it would go something like this:

            “My life is going just great, I can assure you, even up to this moment, as you scrape my teeth of food residue and pump my mouth full of banana-flavored fluoride. But, if we’re going to be honest here, I haven’t had much time to myself in the weeks leading up to break, to write or to think or to pray. Not because I’ve been studying, of course, but because of just all this damn stuff I need to do. And my life, whether it be academic or religious or social, is suffering because of it.

            “All of my friends have come back from school with all these party stories and hook-up trophies and relationship statuses and, in that regard, I have nothing to show. If anything, the only thing I have worth bragging about is my once-a-month “Brandon Time”, when I spend a Friday evening alone in my dorm watching a movie and eating ice cream without a shirt on, instead of going out to a party or to hang out with friends. It’s hardly the most enamoring college story, but it’s a college story nonetheless.

            “And now Freshman year is almost over. I can honestly say that I would have done absolutely nothing differently, besides study a little bit more. Wow, that’s a really refreshing personal realization. Thank you so much for listening to me and letting me get that all off of my chest.”

            I open my eyes (I guess they had been closed this entire time) and glance around my surroundings. She is still talking, blissfully unaware of whatever chat we, imaginarily, had:

            “…and he was singing the Beta fight song! Ninety-one years old and his mind is in better shape than mine! I can’t even remember what I had for lunch yesterday.”

            And, just like that, she stops without another word or a warning, adjusts the chair, hands me a bag with a new toothbrush, and tells me I can go. My tongue traces over the smooth ridges of my teeth as I half-grin to say good-bye, feeling a little more confident in both my life and my smile. Thirty minutes was all it took to restore the whiteness of my teeth and the “spring in my step”.

            Maybe the dentist’s office isn’t so bad, after all.

cxviii

“Baby it’s cold outside…”

-Jessica Simpson, Zooey Deschanel, Dean Martin

            I’ll be quite honest here: the list of things that I don’t like far surpasses the things I do. And one of the things that tops that very long, very detailed list (above, even, animals and surprises and mayonnaise) is cold weather.

            That’s not to say that I am a huge fan of the heat, either; I can pretty much find a general complaint with whatever the temperature is outside. But what really gets to me is the sub-freezing temperatures and the biting winds and the slippery sidewalks.

            And, just my luck, that’s exactly the weather that we’ve been having in BIGCOLLEGETOWN this week.

            It’s not even the good kind of cold weather, where you get extended periods off of an icy school, for the sole reason to stay at home, avoid the outside world, and drink some hot cocoa. No, it’s been the “walk outside with three jackets on, go to all of your classes, have the gears of your bike freeze over twice, and then get sick” kind of cold weather.

            And so, my throat still hurting and my fever still semi-raging, I casually present what I have learned the past two-or-so weeks through this cold weather, or, keeping with tradition, as I would like to call it:

            Brandon Wainerdi’s One-Hundreth-and-Eighteenth Irrefutable Law of Life and Love in General: If the weather outside is below forty degrees, don’t even bother getting out of bed. It will only get worse because…:

                                                           

·      Addendum 118.1: There’s no manly way to tie a scarf: While I’m sure, buried in the hallows of Wikipedia or Youtube, there is some manner of a less, shall we say, feminine way to carry a scarf around your neck, I have yet to discover it. And, while the atrocious burgundy and beige knitted monstrosity may be the only thing standing between me and serious bout of lower-chin frostbite, I will definitely not be looking my best with it as an accessory.

·      Addendum 118.2: It’s incredibly difficult to lock/unlock your bike with big, puffy ski gloves: As I discovered huddled above my bike one frozen morning, you end up having to decide between the safety of your five-year-old bike and if you want to keep your five fingers.

·      Addendum 118.3: Beach Boys songs make everything worse: To be short: hearing “Surfin’ Safari” or “California Girls” while it is sleeting on your head is guaranteed to make you want to scream.

·      Addendum 118.4: I am, apparently, unrecognizable with a beanie on: This quasi-compliment was given to me numerous times throughout these past couple of weeks. Why is it a compliment? Because, for one, I hate my beanie, and two, that means I can officially be a master of disguise or a spy.

·      Addendum 118.5: Girls look deceptively cuter with their “winter gear” on: This really should be the first bullet because it is definitely the most upsetting. Let’s just say that with all that bundling up, the line between a “good-looking, in-shape” co-ed and a “bad-looking, out-of-shape” co-ed becomes seriously blurred. Gross.

·      Addendum 118.6: It takes exactly thirty-two seconds in the cold for my face to become all red and stiff: Self-explanatory. And painful.

·      Addendum 118.7: It is impossible to bike around campus without wanting to start crying: Comparatively, it is much much colder on a bicycle, with the wind blowing harder as you skim across the frozen-over roads. Every inch of your exposed body wants to scream. Sometimes it gets so bad that I just feel like crashing into a bush and then curling up into a ball, huddling pitifully for warmth.

            The weather forecast predicts that, this week, the temperatures are only going to drop more. So I'd like to make my own forecast: I am personally predicting that I won’t be getting out of bed. You know where to find me, then: buried under blankets and sheets, Beach Boys blaring, and my hideous scarf hanging above my dresser.

cxvii

“A kitten is chiefly remarkable for rushing about like mad at nothing whatever, and generally stopping before it gets there.”

-Agnes Repplier

            Thanks to a brief moment of clarity earlier this morning, I realized one of the irrevocable, impossible, irreversible truths of the universe: it impossible to run with a backpack on without looking like a complete idiot.

            Unfortunately, I’ve had to learn that the hard way. Since I only have twenty minutes in between my two earliest classes to get from one far end of campus to the absolute other, lugging my books always ends up as a sprint to the Harrington Education Center finish. And it never ends prettily.

            I suppose I must be a funny sight to see to the hundreds of casual, sunglassed observers that I race by: my two-year-old backpack swinging from side-to-side in an awkward half-pendulum around my body. It definitely also doesn’t help that I haven’t actually exercised since the beginning of the school year, my face red from both the cold and, more than likely, just sheer exhaustion. And, invariably, I arrive to Economics with a guaranteed half-a-minute left before class starts, wheezing, drawing the attention of the two-hundred other people already in their desks, as I make my way to the very front of the class. It’s a great way to start the day, to be sure.

            My mother called me this evening, begging me to switch my class to another day set, effectively forcing me to admit defeat to the scheduling gods. But I will not let my backpack and my schedule determine how I live my life, no matter how often my backpack causes my shirt to ride up my back (very often) and no matter how tired the 1.3 mile trek makes me (very very tired.)

            Luckily, my long-suffering bike is now fixed. So this week is looking up already.

cxvi

“Knowing is not enough…you must apply. Willing is not enough…you must do.”

-Bruce Lee

            Today I am tired. Weird.

            It’s weird because, normally, I am bounded with energy, staying up until the tiniest cracks of dawn. Normally I find myself spastically dancing with my reflection, barefoot on cold linoleum tile floors. Normally my contacts dry from my eyes being awake for so long, soaking in all that is around me and barely blinking from the vigorousness of the day.

            And so, with the first day of a strict new course schedule, of me racing across the campus, avoiding puddles and stares, of me never having laughed so hard or felt so tired, almost officially under my belt, my energy has disappeared. When I threw my blue-jeaned self onto my familiar narrow bed an hour ago, I wasn’t expecting to not be able to have gotten up since. But inactivity has its merits; my fingers have been hitting the wearing letters of my laptop’s keyboard with increasing speed and a list of WILLSANDWONTS appearing on my monitor, to start off the new school year right. So:

            What I will do this semester:

I will study. Sometimes.

I will go to bed earlier.

I will actually exercise.

I will memorize the entirety of the “Forever” rap.

I will organize my iTunes Library.

I will actually pay attention in (most of) my classes.

I will finish the books I have started.

            What I won’t do this semester:

I won’t cry anymore while I read George W. Bush’s memoirs.

I won’t wear any clothes, as is appropriate.

I won’t swear.

I won’t forget my headphones in other people’s cars.

I won’t download discographies of one-hit-wonder bands.

I won’t write haikus.

I won’t pretend I understand football.

            But for tonight, there will be no more running or dancing, my contacts in their chemical case. So there is now time to sleep.

            I will.

cxv

"A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet."

-Orson Welles

            It’s not very healthy to be nostalgic.

            But, health be damned, because that’s exactly what I’ve been the past week or so, pouring over old yearbooks and the photos that are falling off of my wall. Most of my friends have already gone back to their respective colleges, forcing me to spend my days either focusing on the past or sitting cross-legged in front of my laptop, watching the "classic" movies that I have only pretended to see before.

            There was still snow residue on the ground today, the weather too cold and dreary for me to be putting my pants on, let alone for me to go outside, which is exactly what my little brother wanted me to do. I had to try and argue with him the importance of staying in and culturing oneself with the untarnishable, perfectineveryway Netflix queue. He quickly saw the value and recommended Paranormal Activity.

            I can’t normally bring myself to watch horror movies and today would, again, be no exception to that rule.  I already have way too much stuff in my life that I am worried about, that I am scared of, for me to be frightened by a man in a mask jumping out and spraying blood all over the 13” LCD screen of my MacBook.  And, whether it is the future or relationships or grades or doing laundry, movies have always been the best way for me to forget, for at least an hour-and-a-half.

            And so I would have to argue that a full Netflix queue is one of the purest forms of beauty on this earth, letting my afternoons be filled with, consecutively, The Shawshank Redemption, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Pulp Fiction. Over the past few months, though, I have found myself becoming less and less involved with the characters and the plot of films and more and more focused on the technical side, on what I can find wrong with the film. It’s not a very good trait to have. And so, if you combine heavy bouts of nostalgia and a developing movie snobbery, along with the (apparently) extraordinarily egotistical persona that I put off, I’m slowly becoming a person that’s not so much fun to be around.

            Excellent.

cxiv

“A world in white gets underway/

I want to be with you/

Be with you night and day/

Nothing changes on New Year's Day.”

-Bono, humanitarian and Certified Badass

            I’m really not a big fan of these society-mandated “NEWYEARSRESOLUTIONS,” if only for the fact that I can’t seem to stick to them for more than two months after their hurried initiation. Attribute it to my two-year-old attention span or my consistent belief that I am already perfect and need to change nothing about myself if you must, but making secret little promises to work out or make better grades has never really appealed to me.

            I guess I’m just very comfortable with my life as it already is: collecting over-priced comic books, making inappropriate jokes, eating unhealthy quantities of equally unhealthy food. I could have relatively easily predicted my life at the end of last year’s bitterly cold December, with me still obsessed with Star Wars, still singing to the steering wheel along with the radio, and still writing crammed little pieces of poetry into crammed little notebooks.

            This all being said, there are a few things that I would like to accomplish in the next twelve months. And so I would like to introduce:

            Brandon Wainerdi’s One-Hundreth-and-Fourteenth Irrefutable Law of Life and Love in General: A new year can inspire both hope in the future, and disappointment in the past. Unless you are me, in which case you just are excited to be alive, and don’t even believe in the Gregorian calendar. That being said, this next “year” I swear I will:

                                                                       

·      1. Figure out where I stand politically: I assume that I am conservative, if only for the fact that I grew up that way. But I need to figure out why I believe what I do, having not paid enough (or any) attention in Government class (apologies to my wonderful teacher.) I hope to all that is holy that I’m not liberal.

·      2. Write a book: Why the hell not?

·      3. Continue to play with toys: I have copied this resolution from a scrap of paragraph in my writing journal. This really means that I will be “buying toys in mint condition and never opening them, storing them in my closet back home where they will slowly collect dust in a sad state of semi-existence.”

·      4. Actually learning how to play guitar and harmonica: No more of this basic chord crap. Now that I know how to relatively play these instruments, I might as well get good at it.

·      5. Read more: I still haven’t finished the book that I started on the first day of the semester. As a self-proclaimed “avid reader”, I really don’t do any reading at all. My latest discovery is historical memoirs, so hopefully that both helps me boost my daily literary patterns, and helps me figure out 1.

·      6. Stop cursing: Nah...fuck it.

·      7. Stop drinking so much Mountain Dew: More generally, eating healthier because, let’s be honest, relying on Easy-Mac, Oreos, and Gatorade as my three main sources of sustenance won’t be doing miracles for my physique in the long run.

            This year I am most thankful for both the friends I have made in BIGCOLLEGETOWN and the friends that I have held onto and gotten even closer to here back home. Every year, I find myself looking back and realizing how much I’ve matured and grown as a person, which I can only attribute to the influence of those around me. And, whether other people can tell or not, I have been improving in leaps and bounds throughout the past few years. But I can mature only up to a point: everything past acting like a ten-year-old is no fun at all.

            So now let’s take this 365 days of white to see if my inner ten-year-old let’s me actually finish these seven NEWYEARSRESOLUTIONS.

cxiii

“Patience is the ability to count down before you blast off.”

-Website that popped up when I typed in “Counting Down Quotes” on Google

            It is 12:15, the first fifteen minutes of the last month of the year and I am counting down to the end of the school week, to the end of finals and the long semester, to the end of 2010.

            I am counting down to the end of the year, and looking very much forward to the beginning of the next one.

cxii

“The easiest thing to do on earth is not write.”

-William Goldman

            A self-realization: I write about not writing, too often. I’ll scroll through the digital trove of poems and paragraphs, finding snippets of snarky complaining about writer’s block in most every corner. It happens.

            Hypothetically, an entire month can go by before I can motivate myself to write a quick sentence or even jot down a quick midnight thought. I can go for weeks at a time, letting my thoughts build up and up and up and up and up until finally they disappear in a sort of neural anti-climax, where I will be left with narrow nothings to fill the white digi-space.

            Sort of like this.

cxi

“For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere...”

-Yoda

I am a director. Or, at least, I like to think of me as a director, small time in the corner of my dorm room, splicing together low definition cuts with cheap software.

I’ve been technically making movies since I was four years old, roughly moving the plastic limbs of my stormtroopers, jerkily stopping the camera to create a strange illusion of motion.  And as I would attach thin threads of floss to heavy starships (to make them fly on film), I discovered very early in my life that there is something graceful about being “behind the scenes,” that there is nothing more frustrating or humbling than sitting at a computer, trying to edit down a sequence of scenes to utter exactness.

You lose track of all time as you try to breathe life and believability into frames of digital captures. I’ve learned about patience and humility from these quiet hours, slowly mastering the art of OCD-fueled cutting, editing, perfecting.

When other kids were growing up, they idolized quarterbacks and goalies, hung up posters of Patrick Ewing (I think) and Troy Aikman in their rooms, living vicariously through their hard-court buzzer-beaters, their game-winning touchdown passes. But I was that one weird little kid, who enjoyed the bonus features at the end of the movies, who read every single “Making Of” book that the small public library had to offer, who wanted to someday be like George Lucas or Steven Spielberg or Peter Jackson, my idols.

            And today one of my idols died: Irvin Kershner, director of, not only my favorite Star Wars movie, but easily my favorite film of all time: The Empire Strikes Back. This was the movie, with its snow battles and duels, that ignited my love for storytelling, my love for creating new somethings. (And it even happened on the very day I was about to mail him a replica clapboard from to autograph, which will now sit in front of me forever, unsigned, acting as a motivator for my future: my future writing, my future directing, my future being.)

            I had the honor of hearing him giving a talk a few years ago, hearing him gently remembering how he created the latex puppets and steaming vents, hearing him making the audience laugh and reminiscence with him, taking them on one final journey back down the film strip.

He was speaking about the importance of inquisitiveness to a child, another four-year-old stop-motion-God-in-the-making when he said:

"Good. You keep asking those questions. Don't ever think that something isn't important enough to ask your dad about, son. That's how you learn. That's how we all learn. Maybe your dad won't have all the answers, but those questions you can figure out together."

            So today I will watch his movie as a bittersweet homage , mouthing the words to every memorized line with a pathetically teary grin, answering some of these questions with him, and sending him off to the all-surrounding, all-binding Force with some style.

cx

“Yeah, Mom, I just got back home. I’m unpacking now.”

-Anonymous Handsome Devil

            It’s weird that I consider this poorly-lit, falling-apart, too-cold room to be my “home” now. 

            And now I am back, sideways-squatting in this narrow bed, getting used to it again after sleeping in my old, wide, beautiful bed back in Dallas for half of a week. And I can't shut my body down for the night because of the beating mechanics of my heart and the wiry conflicts and emotions swirling around in the deep whatevers of my brain. And all I can really do is let the noise of the almost-broken air-conditioner to waft over me, and let me sleep.

            I miss my home. My other home.

cix

“A day without a nap is like a cupcake without frosting.” 

-Terri Guillemets


            Napping has officially taken over my life. Feeling “rested” is my daily quest, brought on by the consistently recurring cycle of goingtobedlate and wakingupwaytooearly. My countable afternoons are being wasted and slowly disappearing with the change of the wall calendar; entire evenings disappear because of a poorly-placed three-hour “four o’clock rest”, sleeping through my phone alarm, sleeping through the day around me.

            Today I woke up at 1:51, the afternoon sky shining feebly into my blinds, my entire day (and a certain astronomy class) gone forever. And it was raining. At least, I think it was raining. From my bed it took me a good two minutes to mentally register the quiet crashing sounds outside my window as a thunderstorm, the rhythmic percussions slowly drawing me back and back and back to sleep.

            And so my eyes were and are lullabied shut into another nap cycle. Not that this is a problem: tonight wouldn’t have been productive, anyway.

cviii

“The back of yo’ head is ridiculous.”

-MadTV

            I’m becoming too distracted, during class or during conversation or, here, during mass, as I can only pay attention to the back of people’s heads, figuring out whole life stories from only the way certain strands of hair are pulled together or the number of bobby pins stuck on the sides, or the overuse of gel and other statue-ing products.

            I’ve become sort of an expert, I guess.

cvii

“Remember what Bilbo used to say: ‘It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.’”

-John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, from the mouth of F. Baggins

            I am driving around in the leather backseat of a new friend’s pick-up truck, driving on the midnight road in a slow circle of repetition, of a constant search for just something better than what we are doing right now. We do this for hours, stopping only for short pit stops at parties or dancehalls or houses that we think will be better than what we are doing right now.

            It is only later that night, lying in my bed as the sun comes up, unable to close my eyes on the truck and the costumes and the adrenaline, that I realize that we could have just pulled over on the side of the quiet highway, carefully piled out onto the light-glistened street, and had the best night of our lives.

cvi

“Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.”

-Mark Twain


It is 2:28 in the morning. And I have yet to start studying for my two tests tomorrow.

            There is no time to write tonight, except for half-awake scribbles on notecards and bullet-points, the day hours slowly creeping behind my chair.

cv

“A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.”

-Edmond de Goncourt

            I’m running out of these poetic fillers from my past, these cloggers of space with discordant, inapplicable nonsense. And, while I want to promise that this will be the last, this ten-month-old ode to a dusty violin (spoiler alert…), it will not be.

Old Friend

She looked just like she did three years ago,

Just like the day when you put her away

from your mind and went onto “better things.”

The day the music stopped.

Her red blushing skin still curves its way around

your fingered memories of ten years.

The only thing different is her voice:

discordant,

out-of-tune and

out-of-place.

It’s strangely satisfying, though, knowing that

your absence in her life affected her

some how.

And so with a sigh, you'll just close the

case, leaving the violin glistening in the dark mustiness,

and the music echoing between walls of

plastic and faux-leather.

civ

“True country music is honesty, sincerity, and real life to the hilt.”

-Garth Brooks

“Country music has always been the best shrink that 15 bucks can buy.”

-Dierks Bentley

            Ever since I have started college, I’ve made it a point to listen to more and more country music, shuffling 278 shadily-obtained Nashville-recorded songs into my daily playlist, trying to learn the new culture that I have been thrust into through the music of four basic chords and a Southern twang.

            I’m a classic rock guy, letting my days before this defined by The Beatles or The Eagles or The Who or The Commodores, by guitar solos and impossible-to-understand lyrics. So this is new.

            I’ve been slowly trying to ease myself into this, wearing the only two plaid shirts that I own on a fairly-regular basis, letting myself grow used to the heartbreak and comedy and slow polkas of these new artists, trying to put myself in their inspired position, trying to find something in common with the surrounding, boot-wearin’ student body.

            I was surprised by the relatability coming from the words streaming out of my dinged-up iPod, the lyrics giving new heartbreak to old wounds, transposing whatever mostly-imagined problems I have had in the past into a chorus or bass riff.

            And amid the bustle of the still-newness of the crowds around me, my hands jammed into my new jean pockets, sometimes the songs remind me of the past. It is terrible and sad and, again, mostly-imagined. But I just can’t stop listening and singing along.