My My Blue Thunder

Went to Guitar Center with Sterling yesterday to buy a slide, since the lead line I wrote for one of Monica's songs requires one, and I haven't had one since I threw my guitar on top of my old glass slide freshman year and shattered it. Got what I needed, but now I want a Telecaster something fierce.

I saw Joe and Chrissy last night at the Love is All show at the Ottobar. They were drunk again; somehow, whenever I see Joe drunk, we end up punching each other. Hopefully the world will find it amusing to see two skinny hipster-looking dudes pretending to take each other down. Joe finally explained to me, partially, what he and Chrissy's "complicated relationship" consisted of; it is, in fact, quite complicated psychologically, and their business so I won't delineate it here. I thought his explanation was quite incredible (in the "unbelievable" sense), to be honest. It reminded me of my own phase of fascination with eccentric, wild-living girls--which lasted for probably all of two or three months in 11th grade. I'm always interested and excited to meet new and strange people, but in general I've little to no desire to become really mixed up with and attached to them. Maybe it's because I've seen several of my best friends throughout the years get entangled in such relationships, which have nearly always ended poorly after a longer or shorter time. Peace of mind is what I'm looking for--or so I seem to have convinced myself.

Joe said something about having an attraction to people who've come from really fucked up histories (and from what he described, he's known one or two); I can relate to some degree, but the humanity has always interested me more than the tragedy. This is probably something I should talk to Jess about, but my impulse is usually to excavate the human being from the messy circumstances, whereas people like Joe seem to be more preoccupied with "getting into other people's heads" and staying there. Writers. But for all I know, Joe's way of connecting with people is the more sympathetic one, since it lets people go on living on their own terms, undisturbed. I don't know if I'm just naive about trying to find commonality with people who have completely different stories and aspirations from mine, or for assuming that does anyone any good.

But even then, it's a matter of give and take. As in, a lot of the time I give up because it takes too much to relate. I see that people are really involved in being what they are--cool, clever, whatever--things I consider the outer facade of personality they consider the core. Then I decide our priorities are different and they won't buy what I'm selling--something even I can't convincingly describe, most of the time--and back out, leaving them to their devices before I'm drawn too far in.

I feel like I'm confusing myself by writing about these things--the little issues blur with the big ones and I'm less sure any of it makes sense the more I talk about it. And sometimes I do wish I bought into the myth of human beings and could get really thrilled by all their peculiarities like some people do; sometimes I do want to view people as somehow magical and be dazzled into writing stories or songs about them and following their trail (of wreckage, sometimes) with total abandonment. I used to do that, once upon a time--used to invent ideas and characters out of people and fall in love with them. But sometime a few years ago I lost all capacity to do that--most likely through having gotten myself burned thusly one too many times.

Actually, that's not completely true: I still get pretty excited by people, once in a long while, but I no longer equate "interesting" with "will make me happy by being in my life."

[Later: had a long discussion with (sober) Joe which gave me improved understanding of his perspective. Still quite incredible though...have to question some of my assumptions.]

Anyway. That's Thing 1. Thing 2 is that Melissa is now definitely coming to visit this weekend and crashing in my living room. I've already mentioned I don't know how she feels about me--surely, under normal circumstances, you don't take the train all the way from the Philadelphia suburbs to Baltimore just to see one guy and a bunch of local bands nobody outside this city cares about?

And what shall I say to her? I have some rather convoluted thoughts in regard to that, but the more I think about it, the more presumptuous it seems to talk about them too seriously right now. Later, maybe. Always later.