I Love My Feelings of Displacement

Lou Reed said once that "music is what bothered me, what interested me." Like the things that we want, the things we're good at, the things we crave, are at some point also a little bad for us. A little of an obsession. A love affair of self-loathing.

Lou Reed would be the perfect person to point this out, naturally.

Two days ago I sat on my bed, right in the middle of it, with my knees drawn up, holding them to my chest, feeling a weird sense of emotional nostalgia. This is what I did in high school, in college...I was listening to my iPod, because sometimes listening to music that way feels like it's being whispered to me...

Some songs should only be reverently whispered instead of yelled into stadiums, I've decided.

I'm not sure what brought me to this point, staring at my journal, the one I really write in that no one ever reads (and, I destroy the pages more than I keep them), the pen next to it, my head full of things all the time, obsessed, and I wasn't able to do anything.

By the time Jeff's lips parted and he took a breath to sing into my ear, I resigned myself to be uninspired and still.

Yesterday I read a 600 page book. This is not helping.

My point is that in all this 'quiet time' I've had recently I'm not only totally aware of how completely bored I am when every single second of my attention isn't filled (working is especially helpful when there's something to do...oh! a job!) but the things that push through my head are louder and louder when I'm not being distracted. There isn't a second of my waking day when I'm not composing, dictating, narrating, proseing...words are what bother me.

In my head they are tangible objects and I can touch them, throw them, kill them, eat them, create them, paint them, hide them...they tuck around me and give me invincibility.

I was just asked in an interview, "What would you do if you could do anything?"

I answered, "Be an editor for Rolling Stone." I thought I was being funny, but she took me pretty seriously and wrote it down. I felt a little guilty for not saying something appropriate like "Data-entry and project management," but she said anything...