It Won't Be So Hard

Spring returns to Baltimore. Spring's always a fickle mistress, especially in March, or even in February this year, what with the bizarre weather patterns. In those times, it always seems to be a weekly, on-again-off-again thing. The early spring will lull you to sleep with warm sheets and abandon you to awaken in a freezing bed, because you'd turned off the heat for the night, not thinking you would need it later.

It always comes back, though, surely as the Earth turns. Time grants certainty to certain things; unfortunately, they never seem to be the ones I actually care about. Though I'll admit that winter was getting a little old after a while. Soon I'll be putting all my jackets and the nice black sweater in the closet for the next couple of seasons and getting irritated at all my long pants again.

Spring sunlight has a different quality to it than the winter's. Maybe it's because the air, being less arid, mellows its harshness, compared to the winter's. Either way, today is t-shirt and sneakers (they still haven't fallen apart after nearly 2 years, I'm amazed) for me, and lounging on the grass for many others that I've seen.

The days grow longer, but my daydreams grow fewer. Had a conversation with Maura last night: with the end of the semester so close at hand, what's there left to hope for? So much for Symposium House and its kamikaze of hedonism; I was never a part of that, and anyway the story's over. I think I found myself in a similar state of mind at this point last year; except, I guess, I'm less desperate this year, no longer expecting the passage of time to make, much less break, any promises. I've got a lot of hope and optimism, but can't find anything to hang it all on.

I've been thinking about determinism. At a time when taking control of your life in every way seems to be all the rage, I'm starting to question exactly how much you can change about what you do, and even what you are. Starting to seem to me that our lives are not so much a matter of free will directing a sequence of events; seems more like we're building ourselves up like little clockwork machines, fine-tuning to the best of our ability--which may not even be that comprehensive--but, at the end of the day, all one can really do is point oneself in a certain direction, hit the "Start" button, and hope for the best. And maybe the path you take from there, no matter how complex, can be predicted by deducing consequences from the principles of action/reaction and habituality, like that old school video game where cockroaches always turn right when they hit an obstacle, and it only takes a certain amount of insight before nothing is shocking, nothing is surprising or unexpected anymore, and even the most unlikely tragic ends are self-evident from day one if one knows where and how to look.

Perhaps "the ego is not master in its own house," as the good Dr. Gold once quipped; but maybe it's more than that. Maybe we're all spectators, not only to each other and the world at large, but to ourselves, and maybe the mightiest exertion of free will one can manage is to contradict oneself. I'm not presently in the mood to do that, but maybe one day I will be.

Maybe it's just a matter of not listening to the same songs over and over again. Speaking of which, it's been drone-metal week for me: pretty much nothing except both Jesu albums and one EP that I have, and all the Boris stuff (I finally found the long version of "A Bao A Qu," which made me happy). I'd forgotten what a wall of guitars can do if subtly applied. Maybe it's time I revisited the fuzz pedals and feedback. That, and some Burial and Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works 85-92, but that's not news to anyone.

My first song that I made in Live is almost done; I wonder if I should register a Myspace page to upload it. Can't hurt, can it?

Where do we go from here? Question of a lifetime, and likely to only have a concrete answer at its end, I suppose.