A birthday IS going to come

When I discovered Jason Mraz and started doing more about it than listening to one song on repeat, he had a website designed in the manner of his second studio album MR. A-Z. One section on the site was titled "Journal," and that's where I discovered my first blog.

I loved his writing. I loved seeing in his head other than the songs I'd started to memorize and sing in the solitude of my bedroom. It made him a person, these puns about Kevin Federline--Mr Please Make Fun of Me--and memories of launching grasshoppers on firecrackers with his brother. He was a real, regular guy.

And then they updated his website, and all the journal entries were lost.

I hated it. I was devistated. But shortly thereafter discovered a wonderful thing.

He'd made an actual blog.

He'd created a blogspot account and was still sharing insights into his lyrical head.

Determined not to lose out again, I started reading the blog with intensity, saving each post into a Word document so if the unthinkable happened again, I wouldn't have a void.

So I kept them.

Not all of them, sadly, high school became more hands-on than junior high and I steadily got out of the habit of regularly checking the blog, and if I did, it was usually during class while procrastinating writing an analysis on a book I hadn't read.

After he ended things with TP he deleted all the posts.

Four years of posts. Gone and replaced with this.

But I've got just about two years of them, and I'm sure if I dug the internet enough, I'd find them somehow.

But it's been a while since I've read his stuff. He still writes now, but it's few and far between and they don't often offer such an extended look into his phsyee. So today, for his birthday, I'm going to post one of them. On my blog. Because one guess as to what lead me to start it.

Happy Birthday Mraz.

Thursday, October 2, 2008

A change IS going to come

Last year Bob Dylan compiled a song list for Starbucks’ Artist Choice Series. In addition to offering up a keen selection of country, blues, and jazz, he also supplied notes and commentary as to why he held the songs in such regard. BUT, the best part was the forward.

He wrote, "When I was asked to put together this collection of songs, I wasn't sure what to do. So I just grabbed a bunch of things I was into recently. Some people have favorite songs, but I've got songs of the minute -- songs that I'm listening to right now. And if you ask me about one of those songs a year from now, I might not even remember who did it, but at the moment it's everything to me.”

I bring this up as today’s lesson: Nothing is final. One day you’re high. The next day you’re low. You might have a funky, expressive, or awful haircut today, but soon it will grow into something else, something new and random. Maybe you grew up liking pop music and boy bands, but now you like a specific mash up of Electronic & Classical. You might decide you don’t want to smoke cigarettes anymore; that it’s just not who you are. Maybe you were a staunch republican but now have curiosities about the well-spoken and well-organized Democratic Nominee. Perhaps you were madly in love last week, but woke up today feeling comfort in solitude, without a desire to be held.

Everything is fine. Not finAL.

We tend to instantly identify with “things.” And we believe in so much, when in fact, a belief isn't known to be true. It's a hope for the truth. We hold grudges because of what someone said when we were young. We store hurtful words and replay them in our minds until we think it to be true. And some of us believe a TV commercial and think we need a faster computer, a smarter phone, a stronger pill, a more relaxed-fit jean, etc. We think that certain things, thoughts, or actions make us who we are and sometimes we become addicted to those thoughts or behaviors and then become too afraid to let them go.

I write and post a lot therefore many people assume I have every self-published word memorized or that I live these shared thoughts constantly. This is not the case. My brain doesn’t reference myself very well actually, and I’m sure I contradict myself every other day in one way or another. One day I feel like I have all the wisdom of the world and the next day my soul wears thin and I stutter just ordering ice cream.

And everything is fine.

Because I trust in the ever-changing climate of the heart. (At least, today I feel that way.) I think it is necessary to have many experiences for the sake of feeling something; for the sake of being challenged, and for the sake of being expressive, to offer something to someone else, to learn what we are capable of. These meanderings, rants, and blogs for instance, provide a great deal of comfort just sharing it, even though i put a part of myself on the line to be criticized or considered an ass.
Oh well, Courage is triumph of the soul is guess. and an Ass can still be of great service.

So Remember, You have the right to change your mind.

About anything.

Anytime.

This is not the ending.

P.S. – No doesn’t mean forever. It simply means, “Not right now.”

And on the topic of Not right now, whatever happened to you in the past is not happening now.

You will be safe behind your honest decisions and mood swings.

I promise.

-mraz
Berlin

Posted by mraz at 6:37 AM 103 comments

Part 1

It's not often I go to the library, but when he asked if I'd like to go study I decided there was no harm in saying yes. Studying is difficult, and if you're not stalling with music or a trail of humorous pictures on the internet, you just might find yourself stalling by staring at that girl you're with, realizing maybe she's something more than what you thought, and why hadn't you noticed it before?

I waited on one side of the door, sensing him just beyond the wood, trying to find ways to still my beating heart. But that's a task harder than studying when you've just watched him come back with your frappuccinos in hand, only to have a wayward book enthusiast stumble against him, and life moves in freeze-frame as the drinks bump and fall, your whipped cream sloping on his dark-wash jeans and dolloping on the floor followed by the bursting of one drink's lid and a free-fall of blood and it dawns on you something's amiss as the world speeds back up, your heart in your ears, everything suddenly sounding like Darth Vader breathing down your neck in triple time. The film over your ears is punctured by a scream you connect with his vocal tones and it hits you that you're watching grueling murder, the kind you find in comic books and bath salts, and instinct tells you run.

I kept my right hand pressed against the door, inches from the door knob, questioning anyone who ever designed a room without a peephole, hearing him paw at the wood in a frantic forgotten way as a clatter resonates from upstairs. Fight or flight doesn't offer much by way of cognitive choices when faced with the glassy eyes of the middle-aged man who gnawed out your soon-to-be-boyfriend's jugular. Perhaps it would have registered more clearly had I versed myself in first-person shooter games or high speed sports like racquetball. Nonetheless, I moved and went for the closest enclosed space I could find, and while it was an empty conference room, there was no rain check to be had and no backdoor to exit through. I was stuck in a twisted conundrum of starving now or starving later, the only altered implication being whether I died due to starving or starved due to dying.