I am absolutely exhausted right now. I started today (Friday) in a great mood, and for the large part remained in it the entire day. After all the raving I did about Frou Frou a couple entries ago, a day or 2 ago I grabbed the only album I know them to have at the moment, Details. Tonight, I went to Athens to fetch some furniture and odds and ends, and seeing how exhausting loading all that was, the drive home seemed like the perfect time to give it a first all-the-way-through listen and just take a slow, relaxing, thoughtful drive.

And that's where this becomes a long story.

Sometimes, when I listen to an album, (quite often when it is one I thoroughly enjoy from start to finish,) there is one song that seems to make all the others look like crap. This always diminishes with further listening, as they all seem to show their wonderous sides, but often one just leaps out as the immediate stand out favorite track on the disc. The sixth track, Only Got One, is a perfect example.

This is especially impressive as I was already quite taken with the first track on the disc. I recommend purchasing the album highly, but if you must, at least P2P that track.

It was while listening to it that I made what is in retrospect an incredibly easy and helpful decision. But to explain that situation even to myself required about 30 minutes of driving and weeks of thought. I don't quite know why I'm doing so publicly, but I'll lay out that process here, because I will want to look back on this mental state later. I know myself well enough to know that.

Part of the reason I had been in sort of a disassociated mental break for a couple weeks (see the prior entry mentioning frou frou for the initial snap) was due to my constant analysis of my past, my current state, and what I want for the future. After seeing Garden State, something weird happened in me, because it frankly dealt head on with a lot of things that were going on with me, and though I loved the movie, the somewhat ambiguous ending killed me.

So, anyway. It was only recently that I'd been coming out of this sort of out of body experience, and only through several weeks of trying to mull over the point made by the movie and then left essentially unresolved. I had made no more progress than the movie.

Earlier in the day, I had had a couple very nice conversations with Leslie - they weren't fawning goo-goo or any particularly notable kind, just a match up of fairly good moods, I think, and they made me really happy. Since there was little else to do on the hourlong trip back from Athens, I was thinking about a lot of stuff and listening to this new album.

And this song hits me, as I've described. I knew it with "Animals" by BT, and I knew it with this one. There's a part of this song like 45 seconds in where, I don't know how to describe it, the "notes" hit by the singer's voice, they exactly matched this tune I heard a random guy playing on a guitar on a city sidewalk 3000 miles, 7 and a half years, and seemingly a hundred different mes ago. And it sent me shooting back to a day when I felt exactly like today, the exact same kind of happy mood, and realized I'd even had the same kind of conversations with the woman I was gonzo over at the time.

This got me to thinking in a different vein, somewhat. The relationship I was in at that time seemed absolutely untenable. It was great in the present time - I don't use the phrase "gonzo over" lightly, but in the long term there seemed to be an enormous number of obstacles. In the end, there turned out to be.

And this experience, among other things, has turned me into an obsessive analyzer. I'm not picky about the shallow things many people are when it comes to a relationship, but I'm also a lot more serious about my romantic selections than most people my age. I am only in the market for something long term - flings seem a complete waste of my time and emotional involvement. This has caused me no end of thought and consternation on even the slightest compatibility issues with various women. I mean it when I say I'm not in the market for something I can't see ending in marriage and a life together. This is not to say I'm in any huge rush to get married, or even settle down, simply that I am wary of anything that provides obvious blockage to that eventually happening. I have an entire post I've worked on off and on for a month about what I want in my love life, as I've been considering the issue.

But, this is not that post. The short version is, there is a very well defined kind of relationship I'm looking for, and I'm willing to do a tremendous amount of thinking and work to get there.

So, I analyze things, and furrow my brow about things, and miss out on a lot of life, because I'm looking for how to connect the present to a happily ever after that may or may not exist. I make myself miserable with a longing to see that path so clearly, and that can't make the time easy for those around me. I'm a compulsive fixer, and when solutions elude me, I devote more and more time and frustration to them.

However, I wouldn't do this if I wasn't quite serious about eventually ending up there. So, I'm at odds with myself, which should come as a surprise to no one who is still actually reading this.

While listening to this song and marveling at how it sent me back in an impossibly unconnected way, I got some sort of interesting jolt of insight from myself in the past, insane as that seems.

My twenty-third birthday is in less than a month. And fifteen year old Patrick had an interesting thought about this, now that I had such a rare and bizarre connection to him.

"What are you so worried about?"

And then he pointed to a number of people around him who were 25, and I remembered them. And I had that kind of moment of understanding, usually from such a simple concept, that for overanalytical people like myself yanks you back from whatever disassociated state you may have been in and simultaneously slaps you across the face for being so stupid. And you burst out laughing. Then, now that you're in on the gag, the moment shows you a highlight reel of all the bad things that have happened due to your stupidity.

Now bear in mind, worried is a bad term there. It's not a losing sleep or fingernail biting scenario. It's more like, "Why are you even bothering your head with this shit?"

I said it was simple. Why was I, indeed?

And in that exact instant, I decided, fuck it. I'm not worrying about this crap til then. I'm going to live for a bit, and see how that goes, and if I can't see the path, I'm going to have fun ambling about in the dark, and trust that I'll either get there, or it will be okay to pick up the pursuit again in a couple years. There are so many things I trust myself to fix or pull together without any kind of plan. I think due to my own insecurity about my love life, that it has been one thing that I always felt I needed to look ahead for trouble in. But honestly, even looking as I am right now at myself at 25, that's still very young.

If I had to start my romantic life from the ground up then, it would not be the end of the world, and simple and everyday as that statement may be to many people, it was a bit of a revelation for me.

I can afford to take til then to not waste my time on overly specific hopes, and simply live day to day.

Again, I'm not so obsessive to have lost sleep over this kind of debate, but I seldom do just one thing. I think a lot. When you're cooking dinner you can't be writing or playing video games. And my brain is of a type that considers cooking dinner and only cooking dinner a waste of computrons, and my brain cells are dying at a constant rate. So, while I stir the Rice-a-Roni, I think. While I drive to the store to get the Rice-a-Roni, I think. While I toodle around the store, having figured out the quickest route to get all the things I needed during the walk from my car to the store, I think. You get the idea. For the past couple weeks this has entirely consumed my idle thinking time, because I'm also firmly committed to the notion that doing whatever you want without considering the future will leave you with memories of fleeting experiences and ultimately nothing. I've known that is not me for a very long time. But, there are shades of grey, and I can't neglect this part of life and think that it won't completely ruin the next part, the one I'm so focused on. The regrets of what I didn't do today while pondering tomorrow may ruin even the best tomorrow.

So, til the day I turn 25, fuck it.

As I said rather cryptically in a prior entry, I have many reminders.

I have things that give me hope.

But for now, fuck 'em. Not forever, and I have now put in digital concrete when I will pick them up again. But for now, screw it. I'm once again (finally) taking sir James of tatooine's several-year-old advice, and pissing off a balcony. Metaphorically speaking, of course, but if I'm at your apartment, and you keep feeding me beer, who knows. Because if not now, when.

After 2 weeks of making me mentally cave in, and bringing me to actual sissy-if-you-wanna-be-a-macho-jerk tears, Frou Frou hath redeemed themselves by somehow spurring this.

And the original post (and song) ring true.

there is indeed some beauty in the breakdown.

[i told you it was a long story]