Turns out I made a post with this song last February. Another loop around.
Well, here's the song anyway.
and the next one:
Ernie's been with me this year. Today I looked at what will probably be my apartment a month from now. I've only lived in a place by myself, that I picked and cared about, for about 6 months of my adult life. I was 19, and had a very strange half year living by myself in a little square house on the outskirts of Milledgeville, Georgia. A lovely little place. I push-mowed the lawn, trimmed the hedges, met the neighbors. Made dinner, did homework, wrote music. Didn't have internet except what I could skim from my neighbor from one spot on the stairs. Had a dream about a web site called "I Love Sitting on Chairs dot com," told my friend Erik about it, and at his behest I made it, using CSS for all the styling, thereby stumbling one step farther down that rabbit hole. I lived around the corner from the first group of friends who'd live in the same big old house; stupidly in love with half a dozen women who probably loved me back but I couldn't move so they didn't either; and so, so pent up and hurt and wishing I felt like I had any sense of what to do with myself. Ignoring the mirrors; terrorized by a vision of a witch tearing back the sunny shower curtain and stabbing me through the heart with long fingernails; playing Earthbound on a 14-inch purple CRT sitting on a floor cushion. I had sex for the first time; she missed her period immediately, despite there being no way; turned out she just had such low body fat that she stopped menstruating, but that was two weeks of misery that stretched into a year of confusion and then another 4 years of happy cohabitation. Receding into myself, getting darker and weirder and howling out songs in the middle of the night. Still, wanting to be happy. Feeling the deep breaths of contentment between tight-lung grips of despair.
So now, technically able to afford it, I'm going to rent my own apartment. A lovely, spacious place. I feel excited to "be an adult" again, and terrified of failure, of not being able to keep up the charade of productivity. Resentful that I still can't invite friends over to see it. Feeling like the total reset of my life that began a year ago is entering a new phase.
I'll take a picture with Ernie when it's real.