8,733 days on earth – Seattle, Washington.

Very few musicians do I care what their lyrics say.  One band that I’ve felt a certain emotional kinship to is Woods of Ypres.  Their lyrics are incredibly vulnerable and melodramatic to a point of cringiness.

“They say that time heals all wounds, well this is a good way to spend that time, what better way to distract yourself from sadness than to fully obligate your crisis to the point where it becomes about survival, making it a total mindfuck about the fact that it’s allowing you to erase your memory and deprogram yourself and rebuild somewhere in the abyss.”

I took that particular lyric to heart on two different occassions, for near the same reasons.  First was to go to Japan and Spain – a beautiful and meaningful time that I cut short to chase a relationship that wasn’t healthy.  On April 20th, 2017, shortly after coming back to Fargo from Madrid, I bought a campervan and it was dead on arrival.  Too many issues and problems that I didn’t have the will or ability to fix.  I stuck around for a year and ended up having a car collision in which my car was totalled.  It was my second near death experience that year, the one previous being when I was in Spain and was close to being splattered on a trip between Barcelona and Seville when the handlebar of my bicycle snapped clean off and I tumbled a few yards from an interstate exit as a car tried to overtake me and not be held up by the bicyclist turtling along.

It’s a tricky business, heartbreak.  Each time is the worst mental sickness which lasts for months, coming in waves.  But overcoming those waves have brought even greater lessons and sheer will to undertake things that may not have been undertaken otherwise.  Contentedness does not make for drastic actions.

It’s been a hard concept to grasp that for most of my childhood, there were pressures to enter into relationships – the pinnacle of a 14 year old boy is to have sex with a pretty girl, that’s what all the boys tell eachother.  I’d argue that not many of those 14 year old boys were doing that, not for a few years yet.  It took a lot of work for me to be able to connect on that level, but I’m thankful that I was able to.  I don’t care to do it again for some time, but at least I have the capacity for it, if only for a short period of time.  But all that time without much for relationships during my teen years, I’m pretty thankful for.  I think it taught me that I’m pretty good at being alone, and I’m looking forward to the times that I can do just that for a long while to come.

My time wandering through Canada, to hearken back to the lyric posted above, worked like a charm.  I’m enjoying life again.  I’m working again, which is incredibly strange after taking those months away from it.  I can’t say I missed everything about working, but there are a few minor parts that are worthwhile – seeing the same people every day and building those relationships, establishing routine and monotony; being able to tame and live with it.  And the company I’m working for may be the most psychologically well-off place I’ve found.  There’s a certian flavor that comes with any sort of work, and kitchen work in particular seems to have a bias for somewhat toxic behavior, which can be nice for masochistic people.  But on the other end of the spectrum is overly cushy and kind, which has it’s own discomfort to it, but maybe that’s what it entails to be a barista for a certain unnamed coffee company.