I shot my baby

I've been getting flashes of lyrics again after mostly finishing preliminary work on one called "All to Sea" back at the beginning of May. The stuff that's coming up as of late is a lot different than other songs I've written or ideas I've gotten, and it's even snuck into "All to Sea" as well; a song that started out as a restless plea for a change of pace has become something far more sinister and fractured. Suddenly, Brian Wilson's sun-dappled beaches are becoming Neil Young's "Down By the River," a song about hope and frustration that he wrote in the grips of a 105-degree fever and still carries that sense of immediacy and desperation. Sooner or later I'm bound to even out a little and write a few more Macca pop songs, but in the meantime:

All to Sea

So you flew in by Miami BOAC
I didn't get to sleep last night
I kept dreaming of the coast
And that treble in the sand

The black floor frightens
Seas of legs to the clouds
I've got a salt heart
It just sits on the road

Roadsigns on (to California)
No more pictures (of California)
God

I need something to look at, waves to drown
I didn't get to sleep last night
Drove into the river
Shot my tires, floated up

Onwards to Mecca
Eyes up, hands out

Down to the river
All to sea

Searchlights out (on the water)
Towers of fire (on the water)
Desire

Up to the first chorus is what I wrote in Psychology 323, and that's more or less the first mindset. After that, minus the last chorus, is what I wrote on a sunny afternoon in a café downtown by the courthouse, feeling kind of out of sorts. It's been smoothed out a little since.

Vitamins

It's been four weeks on the new job, so I feel pretty safe in saying that it's the best one I've ever had. Admittedly, I've only had three others, and two of them were concurrent, so perhaps I'm not quite sure what a good job is. Maybe the paid stat holidays off are just going to my head. I mean seriously, I get paid to not come to work? It could be the cute evening nurse that I enjoy talking to or the free gym/yoga access. Hell, it might even be the newfound, corrupting power over others that I can only assume is eating away at my soul as I slowly fester into a deplorable husk of the man I once was. Whatever it is, I actually look forward to the 45 minute drive to work every morning, to working with convicted sex offenders for eight hours per day and to the hour-long drive home. It's challenging, interesting and I'm constantly learning; it's a multidisciplinary team so there's always something new. For the first time in a long time, I'm taking something from a job besides a paycheque.

Other things are going as well as can be expected. There's money for a few nice things and time for leisure. A few shoes, some albums, a little bit of yardwork. There have been movies and a few other good times. Tuesday night, Ashley and I hung out with the guys out at Hipster Twister for a little while before I got home in time to get a decent night's sleep before my eye surgery. This was to place a plastic valve in my eye to permanently drain fluid and keep the pressure down. Judging from my one day checkup, things are looking up, and a future without five different medications per day might one day be mine.

Maple Sugar is still going, though I missed last Saturday's deadline by a day and Phil's decided to just run the reviews next week. I'll get two more to him by deadline on Saturday night and see if he'll run a double update just to help me catch up with new releases. I've got ways. There's talk of me being involved with the label that The Red Hot Daggers - my friends Eric, Taylor and Eric - might start, which would be pretty fun. I'm not counting on anything just yet, but if it happens, it'd be a blast with those guys; the only problem would be getting any actual work done instead of just messing around all the time.

All in all, life is actually going pretty well for me at the moment; it feels so blatantly and annoyingly self-congratulatory to say it, but what else is there? Good job, my own car, good health, good friends, good times. Whoa, fuck. When did things get so good, and when did I become such a dick about it?