Around the Sun: Absorbed

DIARY

Solipsistic post ahead.

I've spent most of the time here waxing emotional about the election, but I've actually been blessed with a week-and-a-half of chemicals and hormones.

Every eight or so months, some combination of circumstance and sleep deprivation launches me into a mood. It's easier to feel than describe, but it's a sort of exhausted, urgent, relentless energy... a relentless stripping away of the intertia that seems all the more embedded in life the older I get. It's a need to know and sense and prove because... WHAT ELSE?

The consequences of stopping, or even slowing down are terrifying.

The election, of course, was a key component this time; that's obvious.

After the election, I didn't have much time to be reflective or depressed... part of the reason I've stuck you with my gut reactions lately. I was busy at once preparing for Gothic Funk #1. A welcome relief. It took up the whole rest of the week. On Saturday, I woke up from the party, and felt depressed and irritable. I spent the rest of the weekend laying around and complaining about everything under the sun and making myself a nuisence to Jessica.

On Monday I returned to work, and on the way home, I stopped at Virgin and bought the new R.E.M. album; Around the Sun.

I'm very particular about my music, which isn't to say knowledgable. My Big Three bands are The Smashing Pumpkins, Tori Amos, and R.E.M., which I "discovered" in 1994, 1996, and 1996, respectively... for whatever reasons I've associated their sounds with my earliest memories, so listening to them gives the sensation of listening to myself in a very distilled and objective way.

Of course, I'd consumed the bulk of their music in a few years, and have been forced to wait sometimes years at a time for more. So whenever R.E.M. releases an album, (their last, Reveal, was released in early 2001, when I moved to Humboldt Park...) it's very significant to me.

That said, I wait for these things and absorb them. Rushing the moment seems to defeat it. On Monday, the album had already been released for several weeks. I got home, cleaned and tooled around my apartment awhile, then put on the album as I went to bed.

I experienced the song I Wanted to be Wrong exactly the same as I experienced the Pumpkins' Hummer over a decade ago... I'd drifted into a light sleep, then briefly woke up to chords so pliant they melted into each other and words that ached and trembled with sincerity. I lay awake through that song, shivering, and then fell back to sleep.

So R.E.M. kicked off last week, which was very different and sweet to me.

On Tuesday, I had a feeling all day of being filled with love, and so I fixed a Romanian catfish dinner for Sam and Jessica. Skyler came over, and we all watched the Gilmore Girls, then drove out to the North Shore suburbs to see the Northern Lights. We caught them briefly, on the lagoon at Northwestern in fierce winds amidst spray and black waves. Granted, we're far south, and the city lights interfered. The aurora was visible as a rippling streak of gray across the eastern sky.

On Wednesday, we had a scav hunt meeting. On Thursday, I started writing YGB. I stayed up all night. On Friday, Jessica and I were both exhausted, so we didn't go out chasing crowds and parties. Saturday, however, we visited Amber and Phil in Blue Island, and talked about participating in Phil's Forgotten Realms campaign. And Sunday, Jess and I watched a missed episode of Gilmore Girls (the secret society initiation gave me ideas... hmmmmm...) and registered for our wedding at JC Penny, shopping until 7 PM. We watched the end of Austin Powers. We watched Donny Darko, which I enjoyed.

That was last week, and maybe my long-winded introduction and laundry list description is insufficient to convey the sensation of walking through honeyed-air that stuck with me the whole week... it's the same feeling I felt the week the Occlusion Group was created, of visiting Lisa in Traverse City in early 2003 before walking 35 miles in Flint, of visiting Sam in the UP late the summer before, of leaving and returning to Jessica in 2000, spending summer days with her and Mark and Sean in Chicago before we left for Kansas then Romania... of the Cenci, of ringing in the Y2K at the Crawfords, of the Skriker, of driving in Flint after Christmas 1998, of coming home for the holidays after my first quarter at college, and of taking one last long nightwalk with Paul the week before I left for Chicago. September. 1997. That night we walked along Corunna, down to Chuckie Cheese, then back up to the pass over I-75. In the Miller Rd. McDonalds, a janitor was dancing with his mop in the 3 AM haze.

I live for weeks like that.

I'll keep praying, in hopes for another soon.

~ Connor