ypsilanti's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- the beautiful people when my sister was in her final year of high school she started taking these pills that messed around her metabolism. i don't know if it was for weight loss or for some other health reason that was unclear to me, but they effected her like any typical diet pill would. she was hyper and speed up, either drasticly buzzing, busy and happy or extremly moody, tired and upset. i was midway through my first year at the university, failing all my classes by keeping to a strict, systematic routine of waking up at 7am everyday, driving to campus, finding a parking spot just in time for my eight am psych class, walking past the dorms where my girlfriend lived, falling back asleep in her room until she was done with her classes, and then waking up and hanging out with her all night. it was like clockwork. in every way one of the best times of my life, ruined only by the fact that i, too, was a student at the college, and a great deal of time, money and pressure went into that slight complication.. regardless, i still lived at home, and i came upstairs from my basement room sometimes long enough to hear my sister talking to someone on the phone way too fast, or running around the house doing several dozen things at the same time. she was taking her pills for many months, so the exact timeline is kind of blurry. i'm realizing as i write this that i'm not certain if i was still at home and failing out of school or still at home and working full time at dunkin' donuts in a similar sleepwalking fashion... totally irrelevant. there was a day in spring when she was especially hyper and jumpy. really excited and happy, eyes as wide as they could be and jumping from left to right in the space of milliseconds. i was getting a bowl of cereal, standing in the kitchen as she was getting home from school.. "Today at school... at lunch, no, not school, but.. well, yeah, lunch at sc-- at lunch today.. hahah right, ok.. today at lunch i was talking to Mellisa, and i was like 'Oh my god!!! My heart is beating like... do you know that song by Marilyn Manson.. well.. my heart is going like..." she took her fist and beat it down violently on the kitchen counter in rhythm with her words, in the meter of the song she was describing for me.. "my heart feels like it's going.. THE.. BEAUTIFUL.. PEOPLE.. THE.. BEAUTIFUL.. PEOPLE.. (pound pound pound) hahahaha.." her maniacal laughter went on and on, half at the absurdity of what she was saying, and half at thin air. maybe all because she was jumpy and amphetemized, laughing at how wired she felt, or the ridiculous conclusions those feelings led her to. i remember at how at the time her hundred-words-in-twelve-seconds story elicited a slightly annoyed indifference from me. rolling my eyes and disregarding what she was saying immediately at the first mention of Marylin Manson. how could i have been such an idiot?? you think about the times in your life that you remember the most. the days where you wake up, and somehow there's a sucsession of invisible angels throwing sugar down in front of your feet before each step. this sort of sweet unseen highway goes wherever you might normally go, but for some reason, everything falls into place so nicely around you on this particular type of days. maybe you're walking to work and pass a garage sale, and the sun is high enough to have woken you up early enough to be up and out of the house with time to spare, and now the sun shines down directly on an old (working) typewritter, or record player or reel-to-reel, priced to move at $2.00, but for some reason, when you go to talk to the person selling it, the sun shines in your face and reflects off of your eyes just enough show them how intensely excited you are to have found such a cool and perfect little device, and they smile and say "oh, no one's going to buy that, just take it." sounds ridiculous and maybe kind of norman rockwellish, but think back somewhere in your warmest moments and tell me you can't remember something comparable. what about the day where you woke up super late, like astonishingly late into the afternoon.. and you started out feeling really bummed out, like you had wasted an entire day. not that you really had any plans, but it seems like such a dumb shame to wake up out of a dreamless sleep and realize you slept for 14 hours, through alarms and phone messages, and now you'll most certainly be awake long into the night, fucking up your sleep schedule and ruining everything for days. it seems like a well of frusturation, but almost immediately those unseen forces are screaming at you in the form of unbelivable lucky coincidences.. an unexpected phone call from someone who didn't expect you to be home in the middle of the afternoon, and couldn't really talk right now, was just planning on leaving a message, but let's meet up after work, getting off at midnight, but oh, that's probably too late, it might even be one by the time we count the drawers out, ok, maybe we could.. some other night..oh? but.. , are you sure that's not too late?? oh, you did? ha! at 4 in the afternoon? hahaha.. uh, ok, excellent, i'll call as soon as i get off.. bye.. if you could gauge the twinkle and the slight smiley hesitation in the way this person said "bye", and if you feel half as smiley or excited about them, then it's no real surprise that when you hang the phone up there are too many stars in your eyes to adequately fit, so they start to spill out all over the room. as if this weren't enough, all the songs that you're singing to yourself in reaction to even talking on the phone with this wonderful object of your affection, they start coming on the radio as if it was dialed directly into your heart. you go into the shower singing "Head On" by the Jesus And Mary Chain.. when you're drying off, the Pixie's version from "Trompe Le Monde" comes on the local college chanel. it was always the superior version anyway. you wouldn't even fucking believe it but the dj is some kind of genius and he's playing songs that are almost scientifically proven to make you fall in love in an excited and just-nervous-enough way.. the Jam, Prince, New Order, Unrest, that fucking "I'll stop the world and melt with you" song.. god it's too much!!! you gotta get out of the house while it's still daylight. maybe on foot, maybe on a bike, it doesn't matter. everyone you've wanted to see for the past little bit is miraculously walking directly towards you. and there's arrows of light being shot through every space that seemed at first like it was empty.. beautiful images and sounds occur non-stop, and not always simple or easy ones.. everything is really happening in a way so real but so impossibly right.. there are railroad tracks and shooting stars, people sneaking into swimming pools together and leaving just in time to run by dumpsters full of perfectly good daisies and slightly withered violets just in time to get home for that phone call that it seemed like you had spent your whole life getting ready for. call me melodramatic, but i can clearly remember days like these silently disintigrating into nights and then mumbling back into mornings in the most beautiful, inconceivable ways. these important times, sometimes forgotten as they're happening, or not realized as brilliance until much later.. anyone who believes themselves to be alive has had some sort of unstoppable times like these. for me, these times saw me wide eyed and hyper and obnoxiously jumpy, screaming songs at the top of my lungs with all my friends. songs by superchunk or the velvet underground or cap'n jazz or joy division or the van pelt. would i be the type of fool who would discount my sister's amazing times solely as the side-effect of her diet pills, or decide that what's making her so happy and crawling out of her skin doesn't count, or that the unstoppable beating of her heart isn't as important if it's beating to Marylin Manson instead of Joy Division? Ridiculous. a lot of time is spent trying to validate our experiences. a constant state of holding our lives up to a light to see if they count, usually against the lives of others, or against the accomplishments of people we've never met and never will. sometimes this backwards idea is applied in reverse, where we (almost subconsiously) make our own experiences more important or grandiose by looking down on someone else's. such a run-around. as if we're being kept track of by anyone but ourselves. as if our times and feelings are so indescribably unique and pristine that it would waste our time to try to relate them to anyone who doesn't fit or exceed some isolated vision of similar pristine perfection. again, this may seem somewhat melodramatic and extreme, but think about the amount of hesitation and second-guessing that happens in our lives everyday. and then think about how it sort of melts away on the days when your heart beats in time with your favorite song, and the beat of the heart that you feel against your back as the night crashes into the sunrise. think about every moment you've felt like you were made of electricity and fire and buildings and perfect photographs and violets and amazing cars from the 1950's. think about everytime you've felt so good you just didn't care, and see how that holds up to the light. or realize that it is the light. or should be. ******* listen to: new outkast. secret stars. souls of mischief "'93 til infinity". piss karaoke. neil young. minutemen. thin lizzy. ted leo. le tigre. van pelt. native nod. belle and sebastian "tigermilk" (about one half genius). joan of arc. liz's wireless internet pager sounding in my dreams. 2:17am - 12.21.00 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
||||||
|
||||||