500 Words A Day - Day 3

As I sit here listening to Matchbox 20’s CD “Yourself Or Someone Like You” I am reminded how music can transport us places without us even knowing it. This CD reminds me of being in my house on Lewis Dr. in Flagstaff back in 1997/1998. I don’t know exactly when this album came out, but I know that I listened the HELL out of it during the time period when I broke up with one long-term girlfriend and was just beginning a relationship with another girl.

Just hearing the song “3 AM” takes me back to sitting on my bed with the “new” girl, listening to the music channels on the satellite receiver in my bedroom. It seemed like every morning at 3 AM they would play that song. It became almost a running joke. We were in the part of the relationship where everything was new and all we did was stay up all night talking. You hear that mom and dad? Talking. Just talking. Maybe making out a little bit, but mostly talking. Those are such good memories. Back when life was fun. Or maybe it just seemed like it was fun because I didn’t have much else to base fun on.

That takes me to the music I listen to today and I wonder if I am ever going to look fondly on the time I am living and think, “Those were some good times.” I don’t think these are necessarily bad times to be perfectly honest. There are some things I would definitely change, but I don’t sit around miserable or anything. What gets me is I do know that I have had WAY better times in my life. I hate to sit around and pine for my youth, especially since in hindsight I pretty much wasted it all on being wasted.

Perhaps that’s what youth is for.

I heard a song today at work that had lyrics along the lines of “sometimes you need to leave to understand what home feels like.” Good God that is brilliant. There’s a part of me that hopes I made that up and I just think I heard it today (I’ve been up since 4AM, and the mind does play some serious games when you’re working on 5 hours sleep), but I’m 99.9% positive I just heard that in a song and I am not as brilliant as I want to be.

The world is actually pretty lucky I’m not as brilliant as I want to be. You’d all be in serious trouble if I were. There literally wouldn’t be enough light to shine on anyone but me. Fortunately for everyone I am a total underachiever.

So, back to my topic, which was how that lyric makes me think about home and how it relates to music. I have several distinct periods of my life where I either loved them or hated them. 1996, for instance, sucked ass except for 2 weeks in the beginning of the year and about 6 random days between June and August when I decided to move back to Flagstaff and go back to school instead of live someplace I hated with people I didn’t particularly like at that time in my life (we’ve since come to the realization that as long as we don’t live together we get along famously). I didn’t actually know how much it sucked, though, until I got into 1997 and realized it was way better.

So I guess leaving the “home” of 1996 and living in 1997 was my cue to see how shitty 1996 was. Man, I really hope that 2011 isn’t much worse. I’d hate to leave the home of this year to find out the grass isn’t any greener in 2011.

Oh, and I’ve moved more than 20 times since I turned 18 and I am perfectly aware that the grass is NEVER greener someplace else . . . but sometimes it sure is nice to play on a different home field, you know?

B!