I'm Ready To Go Home

Back in high school I made music with my friends. It was conventional, it was fun, and it became the hinge upon which my life rested. We wrote music we loved to listen to and did enough to get out of town every weekend to play shows and eat at drive-thrus.

As time went on, our priorities changed as well as our taste in music. We disbanded. Almost all of these guys I am still friends with today and try to play with any chance I get, but I, of course, was the black sheep of the group. My love for music spread to unexplored terrain and I fell into a state of tranquility and lucidity. For the past three years, I have been gliding in this streamline of new sounds and ways to make normal things beautiful and ordinary things extraordinary.

I wanted to write again, but I told myself I wouldn't release anything unless it was absolutely perfect. Therefore, I have collected about thirty half-songs with nothing to show. I work on something a long time and I eventually get sick of what I hear and discard the song. It is frustrating to me when it happens and I begin to lose confidence.

I recently read a book that pinpoints this issue. It made me realize that I am afraid of failure, but failure is a part of success, and a part of being a writer. The book also made me realize that I write because it makes me happy and it is something I cannot live without doing. I would rather hear it all than to never hear it again. So I have decided to post a short song I made with some piano, guitars, and a collection of field recordings. It is not much, but I would like you to hear it. Because it isn't any fun to write if I can't share it with the world.

Morning and Night

Usually, every Tuesday my roommate will wake me up at 8 A.M. and I'll bring him to class. Even though we live across the street from campus his first class every day is a good twenty minute walk uphill. It's a mutual agreement; I save him the embarrassing flushed and sweaty out of breath look when he finally arrives to class and in turn I get to start my day with the sun. Lord knows, I'm still working on wake up discipline on days when I don't have any responsibilities until six in the evening. 

Today, I realized I am a morning person.

I like coffee best when I pair it with watching the sun beginning its illumination of the city. I'll sit with a bold cup of joe outside and share an awakening with the town.

I enjoy getting to put on a sweat band and doing some good old fashioned doctor recommended morning stretches. I tell myself I would run more often if I didn't live in the hill country, but I love this place.

I love reading my bible bright and early and getting to see God's vision for my day. It gives me optimism and allows me to use scripture as a filter for everything I will encounter that day.

It's a process. I start to feel everything come awake: physically, mentally, spiritually.

However, I also have known most of my life that I hold fast to the night owl state. I can't remember the last time I went to bed before midnight. There is something about the night hours that are mysterious and no matter where I am I always feel like I am in on something that no one else knows about. There is quite a strange community of graveyard shift workers and customers. I used to work in a coffee shop from 11PM-7AM and weird, unexplainable things would happen with customers. Not to mention the things I would do while on the job. Including "testing" the ice cream to make sure it is at optimal temperature, singing into the tail end of a broom like I'm Steven Tyler, and pushing a bunch of tables together and taking a siesta. I loved the hours, but hated the job.

At night I start to feel my creative juices flowing, and my roommate agrees. He is an artist that spends a lot of time working on projects for class. He doesn't start until the late hours but gets in the zone and just makes this crazy awesome stuff. I like to write late at night. Right at the point where I start to get tired I'll pull out my notebook and write about beautiful things I noticed that day. My half conscious state allows the writing to be more dreamy and imaginary. Although, sometimes I'll read it again in the morning and it makes no sense. I guess that's the point of creativity; it's all in the moment.

So I'm torn between an early bird and a night owl. To be honest, I don't really care about the classification, I just want to enjoy them both while I'm still in my twenties and have minimal responsibilities. Good morning. Goodnight.

A Few Things in Brief Words

I wanted to create this to work on my writing skills and share with whoever the little things in my life that make it so bright. Over the course of planning this website out, I realized it would be good to share with you a few of my favorite things so a little light can be shed on my personality. So without further adieu, here are a few things in brief words...

Music That Means Something

Music is the life vein of my soul. There are things it does to me that are intangible and unexplainable in the English language. Every part of it has a bit of something that excites my senses and makes me feel surrounded by love. The melodic guitar riffs sliding through the air around me. The rhythmic drum beats making my heart do unnatural pounds in my chest. The dreamy sound of a grand piano in a grand hall. It all collides together to form a fluid connection with my ears and my mind. I like a variety of styles of music, and I would like to talk about my favorite artists in every one of them, but the one I can say has drenched my "Most Played Playlist" has got to be the elusive and dreamy genre of post-rock/ambient. 

Post-rock is a style of music that is typically instrumental, leaving out a vocalist or any sort of formatted lyrics, and has a repeating, trance-like structure. Now, before I continue I would like to say that not all post-rock bands adhere to this, and not all of the bands I name consider themselves post-rock. This is just a blanket term to encompass as much of my iTunes library as possible. I actually prefer the term "ambient" instead, because some artists use a form of recording and sampling called "field recording" which includes sounds you here in the world captured and transposed onto an audio track. The thing that attracts me to this sound is that the music is written in a way for the listener to get lost in. I don't have to be worried about what someone's lyrics are telling me to think. I can just let the instrumentation and vibrancy of the music speak for itself and I can maintain my own thoughts in my head. The music acts as a score to my daydream. The soundtrack, if you will, to my inner story book. Most people view it as "study music" but believe me, it is so much more than that. Here are a few bands and albums from those bands that I would recommend:

Now Playing: Helios - Eingya

Post Rock/Ambient

Sigur Ros - Takk...

The Album Leaf - In A Safe Place

Carinthia - All My Fountains Are In You

Unwed Sailor - The Marionette and The Music Box

Windsor Airlift - Ocean City Park & Beneath the Crystal Waves

Port Blue - The Airship

Other

Manchester Orchestra - Mean Everything to Nothing

Lydia - Illuminate

Bright Eyes - Cassadaga

Right Away, Great Captain! - The Bitter End

Sleeping at Last - The Yearbook Collection

Road Trips

Sometimes those days roll around where you are sitting at the edge of your restless seat waiting for a new adventure. The anxious feeling of being complacent or stagnant has been eating at you and you just want to stand up on your desk and yell, "GET ME OUT OF HERE!" When those words echo off the walls and reverberate back to you there should be two words that you hear loud and clear: Road Trip. A spontaneous road trip is a past time of mine, and has always been the go to decision for me and my best friends. I remember one night around midnight me and a friend were talking in the kitchen and had been discussing the trivial issues of hometown blues. It was a good conversation, but it needed a new backdrop. We looked to each other and at the same time spoke in unison: "the beach". We dashed to the car and headed for the crystal coast. We didn't have any swim suits or towels or anything except for the wild desire to feel the wind push our steps back as we traversed the sandy shore. Another strange decision we made was to stand on the balls of our feet near the tide wash and yell for Leviathan, the biblical sea monster. He was either sleeping, or just didn't feel like responding, so we packed up and headed home. We laughed about our misadventure until we rolled into the driveway at 3 A.M. You must understand, the destination is meant to be very fun, but the car ride itself is a memory in itself. I have had some of my best conversations with my friends on random road trips. With the road as the visual, our words are heard louder than ever. I have also discovered that a road trip is one of the best prescriptions for too many thoughts in my brain. My first year of college, there were countless nights that I would be sleepless and my mind would be running wild and I knew I had to get out. I would hop in my car and drive north. That's another story for another time, but to get the point across I really find this spontaneous form of traveling soothing and medicinal. Let's go on one sometime, you and I.

Books

Books are the ever elusive form of entertainment that is in a constant tug-of-war in most people's lives. Prior to high school, I remember reading all of the time. It was the days before cell phones and internet at home and reality television. On weekends and after school I would either hang out with my pal Mitch and explore the cracks and crevasses of our neighborhood or I would fortify myself on the couch with a full bag of Oreos, a tall glass of 2% milk, and a lengthy adventure book. Something I noticed at this age and I still believe to this day is that I can buy a seven dollar book and read it for hours or days or weeks and it is fulfilling. Those scenes in the book are embedded in my mind and best of all those images and details are created by me. Books are like a catalyst for my imagination. I have noticed that I like to read more heroic and large setting books because of the good vs. evil aspect as well as having a vast geographic structure to dream up. Now, once high school started and required reading became boring and mundane my reading world turned upside down. I personally blame this all on my freshmen English class when we were assigned to read Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. Upon hearing about this in class I thought, "Hey, I read A Christmas Carol and enjoyed it so this Dickens guy must be the real deal." I quickly discovered that the title was deceptive and about one chapter in I went to the nearest Blockbuster and rented the movie which in itself was a bore to watch. This new found "short cut" to reading was my downfall. All throughout high school I would opt to watch the movie over reading the books and when they didn't make movies for those books I would make the decision to find a friend who read it and get the scoop on every detail. It was a dark time that I look back on and shake my head. I missed my books dearly and when college happened I vowed to get right back into my book worm state as soon as possible. I actually went back and read the books that were assigned and liked some of them. I recently dusted off my old collection and mounted them in my bookshelf. I must say they make my room look a little more child-like.

Now Reading: The Return of the King - J.R.R. Tolkien

The Weather Channel

One of the most confusing and entertaining obsessions I have had has been my love relationship with The Weather Channel. In the rare occasions that I turn on the television, I immediately flip to the ol' TWC to see what's going on weather wise with the lower 48. It's almost like a soap opera when I'm out running errands wondering if the cold front moving in from Canada is going to sneak up on the big bully that is Summer in Texas and finally kick his can out to the gulf where warm weather belongs. It's not just about the great state of Texas either. I want my updates on the rain in Spokane and if it's falling mainly on the plain or just slightly to the right. I have my own names for all of the hurricanes that attack the eastern seaboard and gulf coast that are a LOT more devastating sounding than what the National Weather Service is providing. I would just like to see Jim Cantore standing on a pier at Ocean City, MD saying he just witness the eye of Hurricane Zeus pass over him and hears rumors of  Hurricane Goliath and Tropical Storm Saruman coming in later next week. I also like the fact that you can catch a live airing of the shows during the day and witness some good old fashioned bloopers and goof-ups first hand. Last week, I heard a meteorologist say she wished it was raining men. Classic! Shows I would recommend watching:

Local on the 8s

Wake Up With Al

Films

There is some sort of rush that goes through my body whenever me and a couple of my friends get tickets to see a midnight premiere at the cinema. No matter what the movie may be, it is always a big event. It would be crude and juvenile to say that if you haven't been to a Harry Potter midnight showing then you haven't lived, but I suppose the only people who would scald me about that remark would be people who missed the magical midnight hour the past ten years. The audience walking in dressed in full Hogwarts apparel, the flushed few people who are at the theatre early hurrying to read the end of the book before the movie begins, and of course the man in the trench coat selling gobs of hamburgers he bought at the Wendy's across the street. Everyone gets so into it and this is all before the movie even begins. A nerdy community forms between fellow movie goers. It occurred to me recently how exciting and riveting movies can be. One of my favorite feelings is whenever a movie ends and I am walking down the stairs and I feel inside myself a connection to a character in the story. I'll usually tend to pick up some of his mannerisms for the remainder of the day and have to remind myself that I am not Jason Bourne or The Maverick or that I don't have super spider powers. It's that connection that draws me closer to this medium of art. I must admit that I have fallen victim to the silent study killer known as Netflix. My queue is constantly being updated and depleted similar to the stock markets ups and downs. Last semester, I think I watched one movie a day instead of going out so I could try to save money. Luckily, I found a friend who was in the same boat and we agreed to keep each other company as we watched and discussed our recent film obsessions. I have grown fond of a few movie genres over the past few years and the outcome is much to my surprise. I took a class last semester that was a study on the visuals in films. The professor showed mostly clips from films in the early days and I would usually go home and watch them in their entirety. I instantly noticed the in the comedies that all of the jokes were so innocent yet still absolutely hilarious. Guys like Cary Grant and Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor were just so quick witted and it was that wonderful wit that drove the comedic timing in so perfectly. I started watching black and white movies, which before then were never appealing to me even if they were so good that they won an Oscar. I was starting to get an idea of the era that all of these movies were made in, and the comedy was still golden to me. It is that same innocent humor that draws me to animated films. Films like Fivel Goes West, The Rescuers, and Finding Nemo. Wonderful, imaginative films that still frequent my television screen. I still remember the way I felt when those images first hit the screen. My mind raced with colors and sounds that still strike that nostalgic vein to this day. Animated movies still hold a special place in people's hearts because it reminds them of simpler times. I still know a lot of people that go back and watch their favorite films from those days. Now, Disney is releasing their older movies back into theaters because of how successful they have always been and how they know they still make some people laugh or shed a tear even after all these years. Films have a way of entering a heart through the eyes and ears and grab hold of you so tight.

Go watch:

The Pagemaster

The Great Mouse Detective

Castle in the Sky

Spirited Away

Singing in the Rain

Charade (or any Cary Grant movie)

The Odd Couple

I hope you enjoyed the dirt on these little tidbits about me. I'm excited to start writing more. Seaport Tides is a place far from stress and worldly struggles and promises hope in the form of a nice patio restaurant overlooking the beach as the sun sets. Welcome.