The Sea

Last night:
I fell asleep after 1 a.m. I cranked out work until midnight. Not good. I swam around in the music like I was colliding with atoms. This search might take some time: the shedding of my belief system and exposing new ideas for how to live.

One thing I know: I'm not a fan of the Alternate Side. That kind of music no longer holds an allure for me. Other things have fallen by the wayside too. I would rather listen to "Crash"by Dave Matthews Band than crashing noise.

Change is the order of the day. I would rather listen to vocalists or see a folk band perform in a coffeehouse. Keeping ordinary time is a thing of beauty. Living your life out of synch with the world can be frightening indeed. Finding common ground with others is the way to recover successfully. Always maintain a positive spirit. You can recover. You can have a life equal to the kind of life you want to live.

I choose not to go back in time. Some of us cannot move away from the past even though it has ended. I imagine a woman who dresses in a previous decade or pines for her party days sitting alone at her kitchen table dancing on the edge of a knife.

Do you see how it is? I seek to surround myself with beautiful things: to hear good music to dress in style to do good works. It is a life ethic. You will not recover if you live with a poverty of spirit. So you choose life.

Noise is not life-whether in your head or your iPod-noise takes you away from your center. That is the way I see it. I would like to obtain a quote about music that I can use in JM to express its passionate core.

You see for five days I've been struggling with this tug-of-war: how much of yourself do you let go of and what happens when you have to make a wholesale life change like a sea change? Swimming towards the horizon towards a new day you strive to accept that you will quake and shake leaving that other world behind.

The decision to forsake the Alternate Side wasn't hard. Embracing the replacement was easy: a life outside of the limelight lived in a quiet routine of ordinary days dressed in foolproof outfits.

As a young person I thought my life was about the music. It defined me along with the clothes I wore and the friends I kept. How did I give that up? The universe forced my hand. God had a plan for my life that I only realized when I was 35: to be in service to others.

Does it sound like I'm making a judgment? I understand a lot of people flirt with the alternative life even today. They listen to strange music and get off on being weird and dying their hair green and wearing combat boots. That is their prerogative and I wouldn't take it away from them. Most of those people live in Billyburg now. I wonder who among us 1980s folk chose to go down the road I have: to abandon their love of the weird.

In some ways it's all a marketing ploy to sell products: manic panic hair dye and piercings are industries too. How could a person profess to be creative if she's merely following what everybody else is doing? In a roomful of pierced noses you're hardly original.

Also: you might think I'm being critical of that way of life and that's OK. I realize there's no glory in living smack in the middle when acting strange is adored and glorified. Am I telling you that the middle is where I want to be? Well yes. Not on the fringe or the margin or the right or the far left though I will always be progressive in my politics. Funny how championing the underdog is looked down upon in certain circles.

In the 1980s: I knew a woman who wore a button that proclaimed Be different. Act normal. A counterpoint to that decade's dysfunctional decorum. The words on that pin are as relevant now as they were circa 1985. The Bowling for Soup song about 1985 says it all.

Today I'm bowling for normalcy.