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February 27, 2008
Seems Like Summer
I can't get used to the fact that it's 75 degrees here today... I think it is starting to hit me that I live in Los Angeles.
I've been here for six months now, and I think the trauma of such a big transition is finally beginning to clear, and I am a little more aware that I am in existence today. I can't tell you how beautiful the sky is. When it is sunny here, it is incredibly bright. The sun shines, and the ocean turns dark blue... the trees turn bright green shining with gold, and the flowers turn purple and pink and red and orange and everything is somehow glorified.
Everyone wears sunglasses here. I may be the only person in LA who does not wear sunglasses all the time. I just can't do it... If I am having a conversation and I can't see someone's eyes, it kind of drives me a little crazy inside. I think I rely so much on reading people by their eyes, and when I can't see them, I don't know how to relate.
I have no idea what to do with my life. I haven't been able to write music for so long, and it is making me overwhelmingly frustrated.
Posted by darby on 05:17 PM | Comments (8)
February 14, 2008
Devastation.. And It's All My Fault
My hard drive crashed. All of the music I have written over the past two years was on it. I hadn't backed it up. I don't know why. I honestly had never thought about it. Now it is completely gone. Hundreds of new songs, pieces of songs, things I wanted to remember. Gone.
For the past two and a half years, (before I moved to LA,) I spent literally hours a day playing my piano in that front room of my house. Everything was recorded. Songs that Nathan and I had written together. The Casting Out songs when they were just tiny fragments. Songs the kids had written. It is making me sick to think about, so I have to stop. I have to stop.
Posted by darby on 05:44 PM | Comments (7)
February 13, 2008
Foggy Day
It's completely foggy here today. Usually the sun brings such color into my view which distracts me somewhat, but not today.
It's kind of weird to me how the greens and browns of the tree-leaves and their respective trunks looked so vibrant yesterday, and today they are dull. I guess when the sky is blue (and it is so blue out here) it makes such a beautiful backdrop for everything else.
I have to leave in a minute to volunteer at Lyric's school. I go to this place, completely mis-named the "Quiet Center." It's the group of metal picnic tables at the far end of the huge blacktop area where the kids have recess. There is a big shed filled with craft supplies: yarn, popsicle sticks, stickers, paper, markers and glue... and there are board games and legos and sidewalk chalk. And I am there to hand out the supplies. The bell rings, signaling that it's recess time, and I brace myself. Within seconds, it is like being surrounded by a horde of starving pirrahnas.. they descend upon me, they grab and gobble up all the supplies quickly --while shouting and demanding all at the same time-- and then leave me a shred of the volunteer I once was.
When the bell rings, the kids have to run back up to class, and I am left in the war-torn aftermath of glue-puddles with popsicle sticks floating in them, a million lego pieces scattered and under the tables, dried up capless markers, crayon remains, and knotted up yarn and scraps of cut up paper blowing in the Santa Ana winds.
It is my job to make sure the kids leave right away when the bell rings and get back to class. One afternoon, the bell rang and everyone listened to me and left...except this one little pint-sized Gilbert Gottfried-lookin' kid. I said, "Hey, little buddy, it's time to go up to class now or you'll get in trouble."
The kid looked at me and said, "But first I need you to cut me some more yarn!"
I said, "I can't do that, because it wouldn't be fair to all of those other kids who wanted yarn after the bell rang. So, bye-bye! See you tomorrow! Hurry to class, bud!"
He didn't move, "But I NEED YOU TO CUT ME THE YARN!!!" he yelled.
I said, "Well, you see, I can't do that now. You have to get back to class.."
He cut me off. He put his hands over his ears and screamed, "STOP TALKING TO ME AND JUST CUT ME THE YARN!!"
I was so shocked by the blatant disrespect of this kid, that I stood there gaping for a minute. I didn't know whether to laugh or start crying. "Ohhhhhhhhhhh, little buddy, you can't talk to me that way." I was so mad, but I was talking in a too-sweet voice, and so unfortunately I'm pretty sure it ended up sounding very creepy.
He looked up at me and said, "I'm sorry." I was really proud of him for saying he was sorry, (but mostly, I just wanted him to leave me alone) so I cut him a piece of yarn and sent him on his way. If that would have been one of my children talking to me that way, there's no way they would have seen yarn for at least a week. But I figured, I'm just a volunteer. I signed up to pass out gluesticks and pipecleaners. I can't turn this kid around in a day. Poor little guy.
Now it's actually 11 pm (I've been trying to finish this all afternoon.) Jason and his film school friends (who are some of the kindest people I have met--anywhere) are in the other room watching The Exorcist for an assignment. I cannot look at it. But I keep hearing screams and weird gutteral gurglings through the wall. I went outside because I was going to try to throw something at the window they are all sitting next to, so I could scare the crap out of them. They are all funny people, so it would have been a real hoot, I tell ya. But because of the way our house is built, I couldn't reach the window...
Going to bed now...
Posted by darby on 05:36 PM | Comments (7)
February 03, 2008
It's Not Pretty
I am really hoping to discipline myself to write more often, but it seems like when I need to write the most, I am unable to break out from inside myself.
Shaking inside and can hardly write. The sun is shimmering on the blue sea, and a fleet of dorsal fins emerge and disappear beneath the smooth ripples. Tiny hummingbirds, emerald and glossy with pink-fuschia underbellies flit by the window, and then perch on small, frail branches. They look too miniature to be true and real: otherworldly, almost...maybe animated.
The sky is azure but for a grey sea fog that settles over the green tops of the mountains, and I am empty inside. Shame, shame for being empty while enveloped in such beauty. My eyes see today, but inside nothing can reach me in the vast, cold wasteland of hopelessness and lifelong despair.
This gnawing emptiness hungers inside constantly, and no matter how I try, I cannot seem to fill it. I have tried to drink myself into a peaceful state, eat myself into a place of comfort, distract myself with whatever I can find. It all just puts off the inevitable return to the great descent into myself. I feel as though I am not a person inside, but a place...a lonely, empty place...barren and bereft...interminably doomed to a constant and endless fatality of soul, spirit, and mind.
I try to comfort myself with music, but it is nothing...nothing of worth. I cannot get to the writing-expressing. The creator in me is locked in a vacuum, a void; bound and gagged and silenced and unable to be found. Nevertheless, out of desperation I sit at the piano and watch my fingers move like digits on an automaton; striking predetermined notes and chords of a song I despise and yet cannot stop playing. It is a false song, a default, and it is bitter in it's shallow and hollow meaninglessness to me.
Keep writing and perhaps I will vomit out enough of this nothingness that settles inside me and will not allow me to find the truth. Peace, peace, peace to the starvation inside that calls out to anyone. Locking eyes with strangers, searching for something which has no name. No definition.
Years and years and years have woven themselves into a lifetime of this familiar sorrow. A thick and heavy blanket of a downcast and despairing state of being. I feel a oneness with the sorrow and torment; it has been grafted into the fibers of my existence. Can I be separate from this pain? Is it even worthwhile to try? To continue every moment to pull myself to a place of functioning and apparent normalcy when in reality I am inevitably sinking further down. I am imprisoned alone in isolation inside myself.
When you talk to me, you will not hear this. When you see me, you will not see this. I am not at my lowest. I have been in a much lower and darker place, and I have survived. And everything will be alright. Everything will be alright. Everything will be alright.
Posted by darby on 12:19 PM | Comments (7)