12:02-12:22
The road to advanced jazz harmony is paved with honey-roasted peanuts.
He felt his pupils dilate and his head spin, wondering if his whole day would feel just like this. So far, a few hours in, there are no signs that it will cease. He downs a bottle of water, a breakfast sandwich, vitamins C and B12, and a free medium coffee. And waits. Lazy enough to start working on anything after noon. Stop kicking yourself. He writes this on a notecard and thumbtacks it onto some free space on the wall in front of him. When he sits at his desk he will see this and hopefully it might remind him that to feel guilty about every commitment dropped or lapsed would be a detriment. For instance, he made some goals about becoming a better guitarist. Someone who knows an awful lot of music theory and can conjure up a solo in any particular key. This requires daily dosage and he can't get anger with himself if he skips a day. This is like the exercise routine he planned to engage in for the term. Roommates and friends drinking pre workout and post work out protein shakes to build solid muscle. He is interested in a more natural pursuit of fitness, although he doesn't practice what he preaches. An irony here, he attempted a health kick, bought salad and carrots and bananas and a water bottle and vitamins and croutons and apples but got sick not 4 days after beginning. Something cruel here. He wants to believe that if his body is happy his mind becomes happy. He wants to believe whatever evils stir around in his skull can be tamed. If not, he is doomed. If not, he is doomed to become a cog in a great wheel of indifferent faces. All traveling in circles, a daily repetition, until replaced by someone younger and more agile, until he too is crippled by time and destroyed by the machinery. He thinks eating more spinach might reduce these thoughts. They find release in poetic expression, but he has never been good at poetry or much of anything artistic. Dust plays his guitar more than he does. His girlfriend, I mean ex-girlfriend, used to get so mad at him for being so paralyzed and inactive in the face of so many possibilities. Now he gets mad at himself because she is dead to him. He wonders numbly if it's better to be paranoid his ex is sleeping with his friends, or from her perspective, that he is sleeping with absolute strangers. Blonde ones at that. His sense of humor gets him in trouble sometimes but he doesn't change his ways. Often, he feels like a bad impersonation of himself. Like an undertrained actor portraying a well-known character and butchering every other line. No one believes the actor is anyone but the actor when seeing the movie. He can safely say he took command of his life enough to stop smoking cigarettes. They are bad for you. Bad for the singing voice he dreams about one day having. A beautiful singing voice. Beautiful in its darkness and proximity to pure emotional screaming. He wants simply to make his voice sound a little bit better so he can sing tighter harmonies, and eventually, if he ever becomes the artist he wishes to be, write his own important songs. Songs that jab at the hearts of the wicked and cheap. Songs that make honest love birds feel. Songs that make cold nights warmer and also warm nights colder. Happy and sad songs. A whole spectrum of emotion. There are these dreams that he has. He tilts his head to the left a bit and zones out, seeing himself becoming this person. Then reality comes back to focus and he turns on the television.
---later----
"whoah buddy, how bout some lights or somethin'?"
