... a world that's changing so quickly around us. I was in a darkened arena taking in the OLP concert, singing my heart out hoping to be heard, and became quiet when I realized that the world around me had sped past into a new decade. No longer were lighters the homage of choice, but the blue lights of cell phones pierced the darkness as Raine cried out the lyrics from songs both old and new. And I wasn't the kid... I was the guy watching the kids. The new music, fresh with synthesizers and calling to the trends of tomorrow, seemed just a touch beyond my reach... present, but just beyond my passionate embrace. I smiled, I took it in, but it was all different to me... the people, the music, the sensation I felt when miming the lyrics of 4am and Naveed. Hoping desperately to be heard. Why? I'm still wondering that myself...
It also dawned on me that I'm actually getting up and leaving home for 4 weeks. Sure, 4 weeks isn't that long. But it's a lifetime. A lifetime and a day away from my love, away from what has become home, to a city I don't know beyond trips to the houses of my relatives and summer concerts during Stampede, to a foreign prairie city of snow and wind and rain that I left behind for a world of new adventure. I left it all behind, but I held on desperately to myself. And in many ways, I'm still there. Still 20, running away from everything prairie, everything Alberta, listening to my late nineties rock, and thinking about lyrics to songs that have defined my life. I used to think in lyrics, in song, in the minds of those closest to me. It seems like now I'm so inside my head that I forget that the world is moving on while I'm being left behind. My passion is still stuck in 2001, and five years have past and left me trailing, whispering lyrics to myself, as I first heard of Coldplay orJohn Mayer and believed wholeheartedly that the bands I loved would stay the same forever. Maybe it is the same... just a different station is playing. But where did the passion go? It seemed that everything was important, everything was life or death... and all my music and all my lyrics said it too.
On a possibly related (but likely, completely UNrelated) topic, I think about Diogenes of Sinope a lot. I think about him, bearing a torch through the light of day as he look for an honest man. Once, while digging through a pile of bones, he told Alexander the Great that he was looking for the bones of Alexander's father, but was unable to tell them from the bones of a slave. Ashes to ashes...
I must be singing from the other side of the wall... hearing everything in front of me yet I can barely feel it fall... just a night that others will forget in the eve... my love, is there anywhere, anyplace safe... until again.
No comments:
Post a Comment