Thursday, January 23, 2014

RIYL: Coheed and Cambria, The Dear Hunter, Brand New

I...
This one time in college, I said that my musical guilty pleasure was SmashMouth.  But what I didn't tell you was that I also really liked My Chemical Romance.  I hope I never told anyone in high school I liked My Chemical Romance.  That would have been embarrassing.  But I did (hopefully) in secret.

I am always telling Julia that I'm not looking forward to the teenage years but that is not true.

Do you guyz remember feelings?  Like, real feelings?  The God awful intensity "of a real live emotional teenager?"  Now that I read THE ATLANTIC, THE NEW YORKER, and TRANSCENDENT SPECULATION ON THE APPARENT DELIBERATENESS IN THE FATE OF THE INDIVIDUAL, I really don't have the feelings I used to have.

Much like the books on my shelf remind me what I have read, my records remind me what I have felt.  And so I drink whiskey and I listen to My Chemical Romance and I remember the way I felt in the mornings when I watched MTV2 or Fuse before I rode a recumbant bicycle I found rusting away on the beach to the bus stop, which was one bus stop away from one of my besties who would then let me share one of her iPod ear buds to listen to The Unicorns or Le Tigre.  Or I drink rum and listen to The Thermals and remember how I felt when I lived in Austin and listened exclusively to pop-punk with my 30 something besty with one testy and told some strange girl who asked me to dance to fuck off cuz I was putting Shellac on the juke box.  And/or when I drink gin and listen to Dan Deacon I remember the way I felt when besty and I sang "Free Fallin'" at Karaoke in San Francisco and got so many phone numbers from so many honeys.

This is derivative of the feelings I mentioned in my last post.  But the way I drink is derivative of the way I drank.

Monday, January 20, 2014

Having a son is going to be metal.

I base my feelings on nothing but feelings.

I don't really know what it takes to raise a successful human being.  I am a human being that is relatively comfortable but I am not successful and I hate my job enough to think that the comfort is not worth it.  I agree that "the male child... must separate himself from the original, indispensable, nurturing mother and venture forth into a way of experiencing himself that is not her and that he cannot learn from her either by example or by instruction...  a boy must learn to be different from her without this difference deteriorating into either antagonism or fear."  Is it wrong to think that it would be easier to raise a girl who could just learn to be like her mother?

I do not want my son to be like me, but I do want to like my son.  I worry that if I like my son, then that means that he is like me, which means that he is fundamentally fearful and antagonistic.  At this particular moment in my life, the last thing I want is for my son to follow in his old man's foot steps.  So let him deviate.

I saw my father work grave yard shifts, own a bar, and go back to college and graduate Sigma Cum Laude by the time I was a junior in college. But, I think that was too late.  I saw my father hate everything about his life for too long and now I think that I have to hate mine to be a grown up.

So in a little less than two years I will be getting out of the army, pursuing a masters, and getting a job that I actually like.  So maybe my son won't have to deviate too much.  Maybe he will see me struggle and disagree with my choices.  But he will see that I have made choices that have made me happy.  He will not come to the conclusion that being a grown up means sacrificing dreams for comfort.  Let him deviate!  Let him deviate just so long as he is being himself.  So long as he isn't doing it to not be me.