what's happened has happened, what's coming is already on it's way...

i don't know why now more than ever, but lately i've been having really strong reactions to music. i tried listening to cat power and i swear i was on the train in florence wearing my mom's blue coat with my ipod on trying to decipher the exact differences between the trees there and here, confused and anxious about the person who introduced me to cd but who i didn't like anymore because there was someone else who i couldn't stop thinking about. joanna newsom makes it winter and nighttime and vermont. i had listened to that album every time i drove when i was home last january. the strongest, probably because it was the most recent, was last week when i put on sera cahoone, who i listened to for the entire month of august. i actually had to turn it off and ended up pacing around the living room for a few minutes for my stomach to settle.
i'm thinking this happens because of how i've come to listen to music. i can never just listen to a variety of things depending on my mood, it has to be one or two or three specific albums at a time that, when they're on, i know how to think. i get so accustom to having them on that i don't have to think about them anymore and that's when they become part of the memory and feeling of that specific time period. they become ingrained in the portion of that moment that is just intuitive. so everything thought or felt at that time is affected by that music because the music is what's helping the thinking in the first place. and maybe that's the strongest part of memories anyway, the parts that you weren't meaning to formulate or feel or even know were happening.
in the past i've had to condition myself to not feel a certain way about music that i've done this with. it took me years to start listening again to my favorite natalie merchant album that got me through my parents divorce. years before i could put it on and not be sobbing on the floor of my empty bedroom on the day we moved out of my house. i wonder what it's going to be like in a few months when i put on mirah, or oneida, or oakley hall's second album only (i can't listen to the third right now, it's too seattle). it will be weird to feel then some unidentifiable feeling that i'm having right now even though right now it doesn't seem weird at all. because right now is actually the only time that this exact feeling that i don't know i'm having makes sense.


because i want this project to be a lot about my sketchbook, i thought it would be a good idea to go through my old sketchbooks and pick out a few gems to post. above is something i started last fall in a sketchbook, then typed, then emailed, now edited and posted. its sort of amazing how many little ideas come from just writing or drawing in a little book. sitting on the floor of my living room this morning going through a year and a half's worth of my own brain's blabber made me feel really weird, sort of like the music thing. it felt so strange to involuntarily recall where i was sitting and what i was doing and how i was feeling. and i found it way too difficult to pick and chose because how do you edit memories? so, in chronological order, i scanned a lot. i just had to.