"All My Friends Are Moving On" or "Poop. Fart."

[Seil]

I've spent the night with my dad talking about moments. About
Natalie Merchant. Go listen to any song on "Ophelia." But we also talked about

1) The music playing during the most memorable moment of your life

2) (Fuck proper punctuation) The vacation you were on or the moment of great epiphany where you had a great time while deciding to rethink your life

3) (whoo brackets!) who was with you in your first adventure?

Who was with you when you got your first appartment? Your clasmates tips fuck you iPod classmates from college or the coworkers in whose cubicles you ranted in for years?

4) where are you now and is it different from where you wanted to be?

And is/would that be better?

[Amake]

This is kind of an exciting line of questioning.

1. The most memorable moment of my life so far is hard to discern, there's maybe 500 moments competing for the top spot, but practically none of them have music anyway. The most memorable moment with music was probably the first time I played FF6 and heard The Awakening. Seriously guys that song is so good. I'd like it to play at the most memorable moment I'm going to have which would hopefully be my wedding, if we're thinking ahead.

2. I rethink my life on approximately a monthly basis and it's usually a great time, but maybe the greatest and purest epiphany I had was when I was sixteen and read Generation X for the first time and knew what book I wanted to write. (One where three buddies sit together in a surrealistic place and tell stories to each other. It might have been called derivative.)

3. (What brackets?) I was all alone when I decided to fuck the modern world and go live in a tropical rainforest. On reflection, that was shortly after the second time I read Generation X. All I had was the ghost of my imaginary friend who'd died, and a couple of acquaintances I met on the way, as I made it south from Chicago on a budget of 300 dollars.

3½. I got my first apartment when I was home. The landlord came over with papers and I signed them while running a fever that made me dizzy when I stood up. Mom was there. The apartment I was moving to was five minutes away on foot and I had found it by asking the landlord if they had any available apartments. So exciting.

4. I'm in a place of such financial security I can write what I want when I want. Which is just how I wanted it. I had expected something more like an institution though. With pretty young doctors probing my mind for science. And, you know, the textbook might call it unethical but damnit she's just trying to make a connection with her patient and if they fire her she'll just go rogue and break me out and we'll live on the run but at least I'll be with the one person I trust

Ahem. Anyway, the one thing that'd be better for everyone would be if I had a girlfriend I'm pretty sure.

[Overcast]

1) Cover Me by Mae I do believe. Oddly corny band to have at the particular moment, but it was the major lashing out I had at the end of my first relationship. Lot of anger and kicking and that just happened to be on the shuffle.

2) I have had a lot of minor regrets by being in the service, but the hardest point was when I had a temp period away working primarily with civilians. It was the first time in years since I had any personal control over my life and how I lived it, being completely separated from the military structure. It dawned on me exactly how unhappy I really was, but reminding me what being happy was like, and cemented that no matter what it would cost me I wanted to be free.

3) One of my best friends Kathleen was with me when I had decided as a teen that I wanted to experience the act of vandalism in an artistic fashion. I remember having her along because she was kinda a punk and a much better artist than me, and we wandered about looking for something to wreck we wouldn't feel so guilty about and that no one would really miss. We hit an abandoned house, a couple junked cars, and her old elementary school. Was something of a blast with a couple petty crimes we felt so stupid giddy about.

4) Long long ago I used to have a great deal of ambition. It is that ambition people kinda force you to have when you are growing up smart and everyone figures with that brainpower you can do anything, and thus you should do something great. They train kids like that nowadays, talking them up about how life may be crap now but in the future they will be the ones in charge of all the idiots that surround them. I had ambitions to do some great thing, without a whole lot of clarity as to what. I mostly wanted to help people though.

Over the years that has worn down, my initial trip into the military in order to get the money for my dreams has weighed heavily on my psyche. I don't feel the drive anymore to be anything worth remembering, I just want to be happy.

In a way this is a good thing, a lot of my friends have yet to really stop school or things like that, though a fair amount have fallen short of their own expectations. Of them all I'm the most content about it, most willing to live in my own obscurity without really contributing that great expectation. And I think I help them come to terms with the fact we are not really responsible to give the world anything, and that more important is that we are happy with who we are and what we do.

We get that far, and we'll have little to fear from life.