Love.
I love everything about this.
42.
If there’s any time in your life you can get away with doing something crazy, it’s now. No family, no responsibilities, the bills and debt haven’t quite accumulated, your body hasn’t failed you yet.. so don’t take the internship just because. Don’t be some corporate ass’s bitch. Drop it all and go on a road trip, go backpacking, get your nose pierced or follow that band across America. Seriously. This is the only moment in your life you can get away with that shit. Move to Paris. Stop following the bandwagon because that’s what you’re going to be doing for the rest of your life, and don’t you want to create something you can always look back on, some facsimile of hope at which you can smile and think, “There. See? I was young once. I was bold.” So do it. Stop listening to the counselors and suits and CEOs with dead eyes. Just do it. Do it before it’s too late. Do it now, or you’ll never know what it tastes like.
You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won’t tell you that he loves you, but he loves you. And you feel like you’ve done something terrible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled yourself a grave in the dirt, and you’re tired. You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and you’re trying not to tell him that you love him, and you’re trying to choke down the feeling, and you’re trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you’ve discovered something you didn’t even have a name for.
—Richard Siken
41.
One of those days where you’re so cold your bones shake with it even though it’s 70 degrees. Because it’s not about the weather, you know? Or the outside world. Or the people around you. You become this shadow of yourself and sink and sink and sink, until you become a flicker, a pinpoint, but something worse than a pinpoint because point denotes a destination, a fantastical retreat. No. This is something worse. This is loss. This is disappearance and the threat of never returning.
So this is a song about a couple of people in a car, and it’s kind of hot in the car, though it’s cold outside. And the reason it’s hot in the car is the seething temperature of their hatred and the sort of, like, you know, it’s one of those situations where you really - let’s say you’re in this car. You have probably at some point, the odds are pretty good you’ve been in this car at some point, right? And at one point or another you look over at the speedometer and it says 75; you’re riding shotgun and you think, you do this sort of quick calculation, and you don’t really know; you’re not a physicist, you know, much less a criminal investigator or anything like that. You’re just a person in a car that you wish you weren’t in, but you think ‘If I pop the door and drop and roll, and I tuck my elbows in, between here and the bushes at the shoulder, what’s the damage I sustain?’ and you picture your lifeless, unconscious body rolling down the beautiful hill, and you see yourself as though in a Japanese film and think ‘But the - you know, I might make it, and maybe I will look up and I will see the last bit of the car speeding away from me and I will count that as a victory.’ This song is about people who have chosen whatever the opposite of victory is.
—John Darnielle introducing Family Happiness @ the Wexner Center 2011-04-11 (via valerie2776)
(via skepticalorangutan)
40.
Misery is art.
