Skip to main content

Long time, dear friend

Under present influence of Nick Drake and late night flourishes in the office, I am spurred to the keyboard, dusting off some thoughts to keep current. So many days have passed since I have visited myself here, even though the thoughts are always swirling. From one day to the next, in this atmospheric mood always changing, who knows what happens from here. Does clarity come after thinking for so long that it comes around the bend? Who knows? The Riverman perhaps, as Nick Drake would sing.
The present influence reminds me of any series of modern troubadours that somehow carry the banner in a modern world of the rambling musical storyteller - Bob Dylan, on to Robbie Robertson and Paul Weller and the same Nick Drake, many others in between that slip my mind in the moment. It is part of the tradition that wandering unleashes us into ourselves, as we let those slippery moments become the experience, like comfort, like rain. It just happens so, naturally.
Back to me. Of thoughts of love and life, things to do, people to be, places to go, all the same and different imperceptibly. Poetic and common, nothing much beyond tomorrow, which is nothing better than today. We'll remember it better than it was, expect it better than it should be, and sub-consciously make ourselves believe it will always be the same. Sad it comes, atmospheric as this Nick Drake song, that we shall find ourselves transported to a different place, so much closer to the same self we have always carried unbeknownst. Maybe we didn't realize it at the time, but the words will drone on and on anon. "If he tells me all he knows...about the way his river flows...I don't suppose...it's meant for me...oh, how they come and go..." Work continues until it is complete.
-Listening to Nick Drake's "Riverman" while pausing on a Monday night, 10:30pm, from office work

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Little Bit of Proust

Somehow I started to read Proust. The blame goes to Alain de Botton , a writer whose witticisms deconstruct modern thinking and make intellectualism seem but a trifle and a whim. He wrote a book in 1997 called "How Proust Can Change Your Life" which distills the enigmatic French novelist into a self-help dispenser of pithy ideas. How clever I found Mr. de Botton to be when I dipped my toe into the vagaries of Proust; I picked up volume one of "In Search of Lost Time" and instantly fell into the deep end. What author dares to run sentences onward into the stratosphere that sometimes seemingly mellows behind the stars of a bright night, but never so much as an introspective person that wretches for the meaning of a simple thought, sometimes stumbling, but always emerging strongly as that same night in starry sky, almost an homage back to Van Gogh, whose rich paintings greatly represented the mood of a generation - and generations often afford a few mis-steps in l...

Try Something New: 750 Words

If there is anything universally redeeming about writing, it is the ability to delve into the inner thoughts of one's own psyche and come back with perspective on feelings, motivations, and desires. In this way, journaling as the specific form of writing that provides this redemption can be a worthwhile pursuit. One might suppose that the internet world would offer various tools to make journaling simple, easy, and relatively painless, but that has not always been the case - until now. I came across this from Lifehacker, who was promoting the site back in March: 750words. The site is run by a former Amazon product manager who has an interest in journaling for the creative process and data visualization. Mash those things together, and you have an interesting site that is built around the premise that creative juices get flowing by consistently writing 3 pages worth of stuff on a daily basis, which translates to roughly 750 words. Logging in by using your Google or Facebook use...

Netscape, We Hardly Knew Ye...

In 1995, I started using email. In my first college days, my friend Virge anointed me with a playful email handle - toddity. She never told me that your email address was somewhat permanent, and I spent the rest of my university days with an username that amused most who got a message from good, old Eudora. At that time, I used Netscape as my web browser. Fast forward almost 15 years. I moved on first to Internet Explorer (Microsoft had a monopolistic hand in it), and then to Firefox from which I am penning this blog entry. Somewhere along the way, Netscape was acquired by AOL and sent down the river on a slow obsolescence. Until next week, when Netscape will end up on the scrap heap with Prodigy, Compuserve, and Excite@Home. How much the internet has changed. I can wax poetically on blogs and social networks, but I can also remember messageboards, usenets, IM, forums, web 1.0, HTML, and the world wide web when www. was a foreign concept. The concept is still the same - connec...