New Morning

Bob Dylan sings it out loud with some religious propensity.  I'm sitting in it, and it just ain't so glamorous.  I'm tired, but won't complain fervently.  The question is an easy one.  How do I find myself sitting here today.  I have crisp and what I think are accurate memories of distinct and prosaic occurrences from 15 years ago.  Sure, I was a teenager, but I"ve got the same memories from other parts of my life too.  Lately my mind has been cycling through them again in infinite detail.  Too much detail, I'd say.  I don't need to remember the glare of the sun when I walked down to the river across the street from the house I lived in as a kid.  Surely smells are always strong reminders. And some sights.  It's funny, because I've always had an inclination toward expectation, and the item I seek, when found, invariably varies as I develop a relationship with it (attaining it being one part of the relationship).  More often lately I've not attempted to reintroduce my older expectation into my new relationship even when the thing is not as good as the saliva producing idea of the thing.  That's because, I know, it is always more complicated once you actually obtain something you've been longing for.  And, over time, it will be more rewarding to distinguish the actual lived experience from the not-actual mind-only experience of expectation.  That's why I'll stick to the facts, if you will pardon the expression, in my life a little more.  That's also why it is good to stay sober.  Because, when I'm sober, I don't lie to myself as much about where I sit or how fucking fantastic things are.

There's a grounding, a basic flattening, and it is so much more stable than before.  The highs are creeping back in, in a good way, although I don't want to be stuck in a memory, it is nice to daydream and let my mind go into it a little bit, to develop the memory if you will, or rediscover it.  At times, I'm certain we remember absolutely everything but can only recall part of it.  If you think about that, well, there's real incentive to be ale to recall what you've got. One thing is that most of my memories now are sober memories, of when I was sober that is, not just sober in a distinctly boring sense, because I don't crisply remember all of the times when I was drinking--in detail like I do with other memories, that is.  Maybe people don't want to remember everything, I don't know.  I'm not everyone though, and have to remember that too, or, hmm, get rid of the notion that I should comport to what I think everyone is, whatever they actually are.  Staying sober is a sure step in the right direction toward comporting my world with the actual world, though I'm aware that there's just too much information in the world to suck in.

Music makes sense out of experience like this too.  In some sense, music is compressed experience.  To the degree that it is, and to the extent that we can talk about music on a time based continuum, the end points (at least the ones we'd have to recognize to talk about it with some cohesion) would be something like "all the way present, or reflecting no time compression" and "compressed a lot" however funny those might seem.

Thus, some very good music is made at all levels.  Some music may take you along without any compression of time, and seem a bit boring at first, and then, just as you sink into the tempo, it switches to a much faster time compression.  It symbolizes more highly an event or occurrence or mindset or what have you.  Good music often mixes it up like this.  Neil Young brings you "right there" in a very present and intimate way, and then backs all the way out to produce something chaotic.

The point is that we all feel something and that we're always, as in constantly, trying to express shit, no matter how it comes out (i.e. even if it seems highly superficial and even if it is highly superficial). That is, we're trying to deal with the compression of the world around us into our much smaller but still highly impressive minds.  And I think our minds work in mixed up way like music, with extensions of time delayed and then sped up, and so here we are, again, this morning.  We certainly wouldn't be here without memory.  Well, we would, but I wouldn't.  And my memory is better now that I'm sober.  I hope.