Still Figurin' Out Who I Think I Am

This one's about the wind.

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"On one of our visits, the weather turns bad/weird. Tell us where we are and what kind of weather messed with our excursion."

Good morning! I went to bed kinda early last night, which means I also woke up earlier than I anticipated...like, 3am early. I was thirsty so I went to get a glass of water and had a serious case of the wobbles...these old joints don't like walking after a few hours of sleep, combined with the Ambien haze. All that's really good for is simulating a drunken stupor, which can be briefly amusing if you're not trying to get liquids down your gullet.

I know it rained pretty good last night; right before I laid down I had part of a smoke and had to close the window because the rain was blowing in almost sideways. I didn't wanna drown my cigarette, and when it rains like that it hits the metal good in the frame and patters loud like handfuls of pebbles bouncing off a tin roof that's a foot over your head. The pinging can almost go through you.

I tried to go back to sleep, which in theory sounded like a good plan, but something happens when you get up in the middle of the night while on controlled substances designed to improve your sleep style...you can't force your eyelids to open, but it's damn near impossible to actually fall back asleep. It's almost painful, and maybe you drift off a little for an hour or so of awkward napping, and then you're not sure if what you just dreamt actually happened or not. That's something else that could maybe be amusing, except it's not...that's where I usually start sleeptalking (and when you take something like Ambien, you're well aware of this phenomenon), or worse...my body tends to physically react to what I'm dreaming, and that's where I start kicking or flailing my arms or whatever. I'm a bitch to sleep with sometimes. I'll probably decline the invitation to spend a night in the arms of a woman again, even if/when I recover my ability to charm one convincingly enough to get to that stage in the evening's faux-relationship commencement.

But even more so than that, or the racing thoughts that can chokingly occur when your whole body wants nothing but sleep except your brain, was the wind whipping around. If I'm not careful when I close the window, there's a tiny gap where the frame doesn't seal...and when the wind really gets going it sounds like a Civil War band leading the troops into town before they burn it down. The pitch of the air moving is high like a flute, but the wind itself hits the building like the guys who do nothing but march and bang a drum strapped to their chests. Again, something that could be amusing, when it's not terrifying that Downtown Cortland could maybe be under siege by dudes in funny hats and band-geek threads with muskets.

It's incredible that I manage to even sleep at all sometimes, let alone nights when that becomes an issue.

Maybe somewhere in Ireland, I don't remember specifically...but that's where we are. When U2 was writing mediocre soundtrack songs and trying to save the world from AIDS, Glen Hansard and The Frames were writing U2 songs for a generation of kids who missed out on U2's "Joshua Tree" era. Songs that rocked and were also emotionally stimulating...everything U2 stopped doing once Bono joined Madonna and Spam as one-word household names.

It was there that I decided we needed to do something to memorialize this trip in a way that went beyond what we were writing about. We needed a monument.

"I built a monument to every word that's passed between us...
The roof is cracked and the walls are falling
As all those bitter words flow back into the sea."
Lyrics.  

**Bonus fun fact: Before iTunes, Fitzcarraldo   was hard to come by in the US and seemed to exist here only in legend. My boy DMFM got me into them, and had mentioned he was looking for this but hadn't seen a physical copy locally (this was back when Buffalo still had a few solid indie record shops). And it had a rudimentary drawing of a boat on the cover. It's probably their strongest album, top-to-bottom, so buy it.

Waiting for the post office to open, and hopefully stop raining again, so I can send out a couple little cards to some members of "The Snail Mail Forum" . Been meaning to do it for awhile. And nothing fancy...the card itself is kinda corny-lookin', but I couldn't find any decent Cortland-themed postcards and I wanted to shop local, so I wound up at Mullen Office Outfitters   and they were really nice. They've been in business here for decades, and sometimes you can still see the owner at his desk in the front window. It's a nice setting. Sure, I could've probably saved a buck or two by getting some crappy Hallmark cards from CVS, but it's important to support local businesses like this one. Anyway, there's maybe like 12-14 cards going out today, all over the world...I lost count as soon as I screwed up the first envelope with my terrible handwriting, but who cares about that? It's a really cool thing Elle - on hiatus has going on in the WDC community with this, and I'm happy I'm just a tiny little member of it.

It's a struggle sometimes (for me), but here's an important lesson about keeping your personal drama off Facebook  . I mentioned Buck 65 a few entries back, and I'm a fan of his work...had a few of his cd's, heard there was a divorce involved, knew he was writing a book but didn't recall he was hosting a radio show too, and his posts are usually very thoughtful and informative. That last reason is kinda why it's sad to air stuff like your divorce and your feelings on social media. I get it; I know artists are human and I'm not alone in having posted mini-freakouts in the past and I've really tried to cut down on them. But maybe it helps some people work through whatever it is they're struggling with. What sucks is that people suffer at all.

Meanwhile, let's wrap up on a happy note that can potentially help us in our search for reason and philosophy   in a confusing and oftentimes messed-up world.

And boom, I'm done here. It's 9am. What the hell am I gonna do with the rest of my day? Peace, when all's been said and done the time will come, and GOODNIGHT NOW!!