I Know You Plan Out Everything That You Want To Say

Sometimes a song is not a song. There are moments when a song is just an absolutely pitch-perfect accompaniment for a moment in your life. I fucking hate that, because it usually happens at the most shitty times, and you’ll know it’s happened when you hear the writer change forms before your ears. She changes from some Canadian chick strumming on an electric guitar while screaming into a fuzzy microphone and becomes your own personal heckler, sticking her words in between your ribs where life has just finished sucker-punching and kicking you for the last half-hour. And right now, I find myself coughing up bloody cords and mic cables.

I know I over think life, and I over plan my every action, plotting out each possible permutation for conversations and meetings. Of course, you know what they say about prizefighters and plans, right? Yeah, well fuck them. (And I know I’m not 150 words into this and I’ve already put money in the swear jar 3 times, but I don’t fucking care.) Plans are a manifestation of hope. We need hope. Why does a team down by 10 points with 5 minutes to go try for an onside kick? Because they have hope, hope that the next five minutes will play out in a way that no one expects and that they might still pull out a victory. See, hope is uncertainty, or rather the unknown, and without it we’re just fucked. Uncertainty disappears when we surrender our hope and give in, accepting our defeat. And yeah, okay, uncertainty gives some people the willies sometimes, but it (just like the willies) is a part of the human condition.

But I’m forgetting my point. We make plans because we don’t know what is going to happen, but we hold out hope that it might turn out the way we want, or that the ending might turn out to be something better than we could have imagined. Usually that turns out to be bullshit, and we fail, we hurt, and we die. Well, we’ll always hurt and die, I guess. That’s part of the human condition, and there’s no uncertainty there. Jesus, if anyone is still reading this, I suggest you take a break and think happy thoughts before continuing.

Still there? Okay.

So, yeah, I make plans, and when those plans turn to shit I tend to take it pretty hard. And in case you couldn’t tell, I am all twisted up over a woman. Shitty thing is though, I really shouldn’t be, and I know it. But, I guess I get too attached to my plans, and I forget that they all depend upon hope, uncertainty, and the unknown. And that’s where they fall apart. I usually try to write around 500 words, but I’m all out at 475. So much for my fucking plans.

What Do We Get For Our Trouble and Pain?

Perspective is a difficult thing. Many a budding artist hits her first major snag when it comes to accurately portraying perspective, and so it often is for writers. Sometimes it is a bit easier than it seems, however.

For instance, I thought my Saturday was pretty lousy. I woke up, I cleaned my apartment, and I took a shower in increasingly cold water. I drove to an asian restaurant, drove back home to get my wallet, and went back to the restaurant to order take out. I played Halo 2 with my brother and a friend of ours while I did my laundry. They left, and I ended up spending seven hours washing clothes. I went home, found someone parked in my spot (thanks, OU home game traffic, for fucking with my life again). I found out she had locked her keys in the car. She taught me how to use clothes hangers to break into a car (quick tip: don’t use plastic ones). Sounds like a pretty average day, overall. Perhaps a disappointing way for a young man to spend a Saturday.

Funny thing is, just a few blocks away another young man was coming to terms with some serious emotional problems. It didn’t turn out well. This young man was pretty smart, and pretty well educated. He was smart enough to build a working bomb, and for whatever reason, he chose Saturday evening to take a walk to campus, where he sat down on a bench a couple of blocks away from 80,000 other people and blew himself up. I’ll never understand what made him set out on that course of action, or the final thoughts in his mind before he flashed out of existence, or if what we all think happened is actually what happened.

Yesterday afternoon I walked north on campus, past the bench where a young life came to a violent end two days previously. There was no crater, no visible damage to the surrounding flora, and no way to tell that a bomb had been set off less than 48 hours ago. A brand new bench sat on the ground, secured to brand new concrete, but everyone walking past knew just what was there and what it meant. As I passed by I was eyeballs deep in my own little world. Still, I could not help but cast my view to the new bench, the fresh concrete, and, as I finally passed by, the pained expression on the face of a young woman walking in the other direction. The sadness in her eyes stood out in stark contrast to her pink sorority shirt and bouncy blond hair, and it reminded me how similar we are sometimes. She might have a different reaction than I, or a thousand others passing by that bench do, but the reality and closeness of violence and death provoked a reaction from her, as they do from us all.

I don’t know what it all means, except that no matter how hard we try to be, we’re never truly alone, but we always will be. And that spending a Saturday doing laundry sucks until you compare it with something that really does suck.