This is the tenth entry in my odd little side project, one hundred miles later. To figure out what the heck I’m doing, you can read the original entry.

one hundred miles later: appreciating brown

There’s more brown every day in places that used to be green the day before.
Eyes fall easy on brown. They rest there.

Brown fills in empty spaces. Look at any landscape and its foundation has undertones of brown. The earth breaths brown through gaps in the snow on warm winter days. Last year’s faded brown leaves are the history underneath spring greens. Summer’s leaves hold onto brown branches, branches that stay there and stay that same brown after the leaves turn and let go, year after year.

It’s no one’s favorite.

Currently listening to:

In a Matter of Speaking – Nouvelle Vague
Let Down – Radiodread
and the Gary Jules cover of Cat Steven’s “How can I tell you”, only because the Cat Power version, which is beautiful and I discovered on some diamond commercial, is only 30 seconds long specifically made for that commercial, so this was the next best thing.

em>This is the ninth entry in my odd little side project, one hundred miles later. To figure out what the heck I’m doing, you can read the original entry.

One hundred miles later – 45600: blinky
I like it when people take a long time to blink… slow, like what’s in their head is so good they’re savoring that moment of aloneness with it.

and I like being that slow blinking person.

You don’t usually notice it yourself, someone usually calls you out for being somewhere else other than where you are. But sometimes you catch yourself doing it and are almost embarrassed. In front of yourself. Silly.

And you know that thinking of it ten years from now will still make you smile.

Meanwhile I’m doing all this “being somewhere else”, and I’m stopped at a stop sign, waiting for it to turn green. It’s a stop sign, not a stop light. Those are red forever, Brigitte. Putting my mind back to the road now…

Currently listening to: a really odd mix of music, including:
Fleetwood Mac: Everywhere
Mindy Smith: One Moment More
Teddybears: Yours to Keep
Deathcab for Cutie: What Sarah Said
Cake: Where Would I Be?

This is the eighth entry in my odd little side project, one hundred miles later. To figure out what the heck I’m doing, you can read the original entry.

(Note: I realize these 100 miles blogs have turned into the place where I get all introspecty/abstracty and it feels good on my brain to do it so I’m going with it. I guess driving makes me that way. If nothing else this experiment is teaching me that.)

One Hundred Miles later: 45500: Storm Chaser

It’s hot and sticky and stagnant out and I am absolutely itching to be caught in 95 degree, smell-the pavement-rain. Right now.

I hope everyone has been caught in at least one summer rainstorm, been unable to be too cool for the kind of a primal joy that comes with it. It makes you a kid.

I am (of course) driving right now, like with all of these 100 miles blogs, and there’s storms to the south of me. I can see them and I know if I turned my car off on the side of this road I could hear them. The sun is shining into my car across my face but the sky is dark navy blue over there. My route home wont take me there and I’m disappointed to be heading the way that I am.

I want to go where all that energy is. I’m thinking of driving there, to the edge of it.

It’s the way the leaves blow around, wild, right before the first raindrops fall. Gravity seems unsure of itself.
And it’s impossible to be tired or pessimistic or anything but very aware of being alive, on that edge…
the air there is from somewhere else, freshly pushed down from somewhere up high that you’ve never been and will never be.
A reminder of being of being small.
I’ve written about the need to feel small before, I know. I guess I think it’s healthy to be reminded of that over and over.

Currently listening to:
Cinematic Orchestra- To Build a Home (on repeat, actually. It makes me want a piano).

This is the seventh entry in my odd little side project, one hundred miles later. To figure out what the heck I’m doing, you can read the original entry.

One hundred miles later: 45400 – Dull.

I’m not really thinking of anything right now. In a place lately where I feel excited yet frustrated on several different fronts, it feels good to find moments where I’m not dwelling on anything.

I’m following a very large man on a very old motorcycle. Old like tattered, not old like classic. His helmet is lime green, shiny and perfectly scratchless, reflecting the street lights and my headlights straight back at me. Dull, the bike reflects nothing.

The guy is the right age for a “mid-life crisis” but this doesn’t seem to be his motivation. He drives under the speed limit. His bike makes a cute plunky noise, unlike what a man in need of proving something would want. Taking off at a stoplight, he waits a good block before putting his feet back on the little footrest things (what are they called?) … instead he gingerly holds his feet out, half expecting to tip over? He’s wearing khakis.

I think he bought the motorcycle simply because he wanted one. I think he found a bargain of a motorcycle and treated himself to his choice of brand new helmets… and his choice was lime green. I like him for that.

Currently listening to:

Jack Johnson – Constellations
Snow Patrol – Firelight
Hot Chip – So glad to see you

This is the fifth entry in my odd little side project, one hundred miles later. To figure out what the heck I’m doing, you can read the original entry.

one hundred miles later: 45300 – random thoughts on lyrics and poets

I’m driving at night and listening to music…hearing the lyrics for the first time in a song I’ve heard probably fifty times. They’re beautiful.

Tangent: Song lyrics are widely less respected as “art” than so-called “real poetry” (but what the definition of that “real poetry” is, I have no clue.) Even this real poetry gets lost in the shuffle of all the creative ways we express ourselves as a society. Comparing them all, there’s relatively few full-time paying jobs on any level for poets. Not that money is the reason for creating any art, but it does show where a society’s respect is and is not. So maybe all of the frustrated, born-poets have all migrated to lyric writing.

Anyway, now I’m in a mindset of looking at lyrics separately from the music. Often they’re something more simple and direct than any other writing we’re used to. That’s refreshing.

And like poetry, lyrics take advantage of the sound the spoken words make leaving our mouths. The soft or sharpness of a word, the shape of our lips forming them, the way they linger into the next word or end distinctly … spoken words have personalities. Think of some basics: Love. Home. Cry. Kill. Wish. Forever. Hold. Soft. Free.

In the next few days I’m going to put a new little link on the sidebar with some of my favorite lyrics as I find them… and please send me any of your favorite lyrics if you have them, I’ll check them out and maybe add them to the list.

This is the fifth entry in my odd little side project, one hundred miles later. To figure out what the heck I’m doing, you can read the original entry.

one hundred miles later: 45200 – huh.

This one found me on the way home from the airport. I just got back from my first trip to New York. I’d never assume to have an accurate impression of a place after 4 days, but I was thinking about the parts that surprised me.
New York has a way of making your socks dirty, inside your shoes. Your shoes will look normal but then inside there your socks are getting gray. Odd.

Less personal? Hardly. The size of the city and the crowds only make good conversations better; genuine connections with people feel like you’ve just found a treasure.

The ocean, the history, and the tiny gardens and parks stuffed into every spare space make the city seem so much warmer and wiser than I’d expected.

I only took 3 pictures in New York. For some reason I love this part of Central Park. The little remote control boats you can rent, the city looking down and the park behind… it has a nice feeling.

Currently listening to:

Feist/The Postal Service – Mushaboom

Interpol – Pda

Sun Kil Moon – Carry me Ohio

This is the fourth entry in my odd little side project, one hundred miles later. To figure out what the heck I’m doing, you can read the original entry.
On this 100 miles, I was on my way home . I wrote a blog which now feels a little mellow dramatic, but, true to the experiment, I’m posting it because it’s what I was thinking of and wrote down at the time.

100 miles later: 45100 – letting go of getting back

It’s a generalization that after people get hurt a certain number of times or to a certain degree, then they become bitter… pessimistic that they’ll never really be happy.

The explanation is that you can only give so much and then you have nothing left. You’re empty. And it’s not your fault- you’re broken. The blame lies with whoever broke you.

So how does someone like Mother Teresa give her heart away over and over and over again? How did she give to thousands of people who took as much as she could give and gave nothing back? They failed to win the fight. They died. Or sometimes they took what she was offering and just didn’t look back.

What makes that situation, and someone like her, different from our own heartbreaks? This at least proves that the emotional element of the human heart isn’t some gas tank that can be pumped dry. But, we say, it’s different because she was not expecting anything back.

Right.

The problem comes when we try to take what we gave back. We feel entitled to reclaim something that at one time we had put into a moment, a person, plans.

We get obsessed with what we gave, and exactly how much we lost. But what we gave… it stays where we put it. It’s not lost. It’s still there, right where we left it. It’s always been there. The other person doesn’t have it either. It took two.

To let go of that feeling of unquality, entitlement… what a relief. It’s almost exhilarating to be able to revel in those moments that pushed the boundaries, both on the upside and the down, without the painful twinge of being the “loser” in the situation.

It’s pushing against the four walls of what you knew you could feel.

It’s opening your eyes wider in the dark, instead of covering them.

It’s a taste of something intoxicatingly good.

It’s breathing all the way in, even though the air is cold, sharp.