Summer Mood

It's the first week of June now, and the days are getting extremely long here in the flatlands. Most nights it doesn't get totally dark until 10 PM. Some days, when the sun cuts through the air just right, I get that same feeling that I had when I first moved here. A feeling of infinite possibility, new beginnings, and just a touch of the familiar, like vestiges of long-forgotten childhood memories. This deja vu is generally fleeting.

Returning from a leave of absence;

It's now been ten whole months since I moved to Indiana. I still don't have any friends here, and the closest thing I have to a friend is the guy who owns the comic book store that I frequent, or maybe the cute girl with the amazing hazel eyes that sells me cigarettes and Red Bull most days. I still smoke cigarettes, but I'm pretty much over getting high or drunk. Isn't that something? That used to be my life, practically. But I don't even enjoy it anymore. Maybe it's because getting inebriated by yourself is pretty lame.

I'm a licensed driver, I'm about to make my third payment on my new car, and I work over 40 hours a week. I pay all of my bills on time. I hang out with my nieces a lot, and it's amazing to see the people they're developing into.

Other than that, I've recorded a new CD with 12 tracks on it, I've painted a lot of pictures that aren't so great, and I've started collecting comic books. That's my new obsession. I'm not big on your average superhero comics, other than Batman because Batman rules. I mainly collect horror comics, although I recently picked up the first ten issues of a Beavis and Butt-head comic book that came out in the 90s. My collection is pretty bizarre, actually. But I love it.

Whoops. New laptop's battery is low. I started this post to explain that I haven't been posting because of a lack of a computer of my own. Now I have one! So long.

This post is garbage. Gotta love stream-of-consciousness.

I'll try to keep this short.

I recently made the realization that even if I life to the age of 92, I have lived a quarter of my life already. This has been a strange thing to come to grips with and it's changing me, even if I'm not really sure how just yet. Emotionally I've been pretty much all over the place in the last month, observing the turmoil in my friends' lives and the rest of the world as if from afar. Everything I say when I talk to people feels hollow these days. Maybe it is. Suddenly I feel as if a new perspective on life has been thrust upon me when I wasn't looking, and the enormity of it all, the millions of choices that we can make, is just bearing down on me.

And yet, I am still me. I still play music. I've started painting a lot lately too. I still talk to my friends, I still drink beer, and I still laugh. My heart still falls for the same old tricks. But some parts of me, I simply don't recognize.

It's hard to explain what's going on in my head. I would love to have someone here that I could talk to about all this, instead of making it a three paragraph stoned monologue on the Internet.