Born In The USA/ Loving the Unknown

Hmmmmm. Hi everyone I love alot. I just posted this on Myspace so don't bother reading it there too. But it felt important to me. And I cried a tear or two whilst writing it, so I thought it might belong here too.

Saw a movie last night that wasn't so great. I mean it seemed just TOO realistic and kind of a copycat thing of Rushmore or something. But in it, a song from the soundtrack sang about "He Loves the Unknown" and it made me remember alot about things about myself and my own story thus far. Getting married takes away about 80 percent of the "unknown" that I used to love to throw myself into. I was actually addicted to the "unknown" which could mean anything from a road trip with hardly any plan or moving to a new city where I knew nobody to walking into a broken down bar in a new place and sitting down all by myself or riding a Greyhound anywhere I could. As a twenty four year old girl, it was always interesting, and far more than interesting, amazing and inspiring. Some of the most amazing miraculous connections and circumstances happened through my giving in to wherever the wind would take me. I miss it. I miss it quite greatly actually. I was so addicted that it became easier to move to a brand new place filled with people I did not know yet than it was to stay and become more real with my friendships. Staying here, in this particular town of Nevada City, has been one of the hardest things I've committed to inthe last few years. (besides music and being married;)) Sometimes, turning 32 and a half and yet being friends with some of the most young-at-heart AND the barely out of high-schoolers in town makes one forget all the times and the memories one has been a part of because I feel like I too am just 22 in the midst of it all. But really, I have crammed so many things, probably TOO many things, under my decade-older-than-that skin.

So last night I thought about doing something again like in those days. Like driving up to a forest in the middle of the night with friends and dancing around under the stars. Like dancing on road trips at gas stations, in the middle of back highways when all our cars were stopped for road construction, like walking into an old sailor style bar and turning my favorite song on the jukebox and knowing every new person's name by the time I walk outta there. Like riding my bike home from art parties at three in the morning in a city and stopping into some other party where I know noone just for the hell of it. Like time being non-existent. Like waking up whenever, staying up til whenever, having little responsiblity and a world of possibility. God I do miss that. There is this chip on my shoulder (and I am sure it is three times as heavy on other shoulders) that, as we grow older we have to DO something, that I have to BE something special, something successful, something worthwhile. That I should have had kids by now, or own a new car or house, all these petty petty thoughts of what one thinks OTHERS judge them for, that come with rolling into one's 30s. A strange societal pressure to BE something specifically understood and stamped with approval. But since I was a mere teenager, I already knew age was backwards, time was backwards, and this was all a dream. That age did not matter, but that chip that grows on one's shoulder sure does matter. Whether you can defy the scrupulous nature of the eyes of society or not, THAT matters. And if you can, then you can be a nobody with a no good job your whole life, and as long as you can go home and make a beautiful dinner and play your songs and sleep peaceful and love your neighbor and find the world you live in more beautiful than ever, then truly, nothing else matters. In fact, it seems that certain kinds of success actually TAKE those things away. That "growing up" as it were, actually can EXTRACT those things from one's life.

It's everything I want to do. To be like Maude. To be like me. To not feel like I must OWN a house or a car. And I am doing my best. But lately I find myself actually complacent from the inside out. Except it's not with my true love, or my little rented house, or my cat kids, or my dear friends. It's with all the old stuff I did when I was bored. It seems more exciting for me to be at home reading up on something or making a new song than it does to go to a nightclub or to a party or to a bar. I just feel like once upon a time I had something to prove OUT there, in the world. Or perhaps something to find. And now, I have either proved it, or found it. Maybe this is part of settling down. Or maybe, instead, all those cities and clubs and populations of cool kids that once seemed so big to my hopeful heart have finally shrunk and shrunk and shrunk down into nothing, and what is left is my own heart and my own mind. And I have that anywhere. So my home is comfort. My backyard is so pretty. The pine trees of this town are inspiring. And in turn, I practically hate leaving to go to San Francisco. There just seems hardly any point in fighting the traffic and the back alleys and the construction and the thick skinned coolness.

So, in honor of all things remembered, I just made a dumb playlist for my Ipod called "songs for the record". OK, it's not really so dumb. It's actually terribly exciting. Because I decided to go through all my songs and pick ANY SONGS THAT INVOKE THE TANGIBLE MEMORY AND SPIRIT OF A FORMER TIME IN MY LIFE. And I have definitely had some cheesy 80's and 90's times. So, Third Eye Blind is in the mix. Dave Matthews is in the mix. Toto is in the mix. Tom Petty is MOST DEFINITELY in the mix. Concrete Blonde is in the mix. Thompson Twins, Yaz, Madonna, Joni Mitchell, Enya, Cyndi Lauper, Don Henley, 2Pac, are in the house. The cool thing is - is that any particular song, like Crowded House "Don't Dream It's Over" (playing right now), paints the picture of a time of my life when I may have had an entirely different agenda and been a somewhat different person altogether. I can almost smell the old moment, through the music. It's odd. The two things that bring back the oldness for me the most are A-Music- and B-Scents.

That's that. I will spend today finding somewhere brand new to visit that I have never been to. It might as well be The Willow, on Highway 49. I hear they have shuffleboard. So I will spend today finding something old in something new and some other things old that long live in my heart.

Thank God for the freedom. We really could have it bad for reals, somewhere else. But we are pretty damn free around this place. It's quite a privelege and a blessing, you see.

Thank God for the good ol US of A.