Booze and Nostaliga

I made a CD of some random songs I’ve got, with the intention that I’d listen to them while I sat on my porch. In my mind, the night is warm and quiet, my radio is pressed against the screen window and the cold beer feels good against my hand.

So far, it’s been too cold or wet to really do anything on my porch outside of checking mail. So I’m listening to this CD inside, on my computer.

Right now, one of the songs is "Babylon", by David Gray. It’s one of those songs that got overplayed to death about a year or two ago. But it’s one of the songs that I recall from when I first moved to Chicago. Everytime I hear this song, I think of a particular winter night where I was working late at my first real job. I was pulling an all-nighter, and there were maybe two other people at the office with me. I was off in my own little area, snow was falling down hard outside the window, it was around two or three in the morning and I had this song perpetually looping in the background.

Everytime I hear this song, I think of gradual progress, of being young and naive. I think of solving problems through persistence and obsessiveness, rather than experience and planning. I think of the relationship I was involved in at the time, and I think of distance and longing. I think of loneliness and being far from home.

This is not to say that this song actually contains all these elements. What’s more accurate is that I held all these feelings inside of me and, when I heard the song, I turned around and imbued the lyrics with those qualities and memories.

To be blunt, I’m not sure where I’m going with this. I’ve been drinking a bit and I’m feeling a little of everything that I’ve mentioned above. I feel nostalgia, in both its painful and comforting forms. I feel distant from everyone else in the world, but I also feel the safe vantage point from which I can observe and record.

I’m thinking about tonight, and about how I’m home on a Friday evening. Most other people my age are probably out and about, dancing and flirting in bars, zipping around the city, hooking up, moving from one place to the next. Anymore, when the week ends… I want quiet and motionlessness. I’d say this is a sure sign of me getting old, but I’ve always been like this, even when I was in college. It’s not like I want to hide from the world all the time… but more often than not it feels like a necessary recharging.

Ah. And here we are in the post where, after a few minutes away from the computer… I’m re-reading everything and wondering if I should just dismiss it all as drunken rambling and delete. :)