come with me
in a car
to the beach
dip our feet
in the sand
feel tired
drive back
again
------
come with me
in a car
to the park
watch the dogs
run around
lie back
on the grass
again
------
come with me
in a car
to the show
feel small
in the crowd
say goodbye
let go
again
I've had lots of nice experiences. Lots of great trips to the beach, metaphorical and literal. The Pinery is great. Ontario is pretty nice. I remember being a kid and being totally zonked at the end of a day at the beach.
I've been carving out time for analogous experiences as an adult, and it's been really nice. I can't tell if I'm just stupid lucky for having the resources to carve out this kind of time... or whether I've somehow stumbled into a slower pace of life not from a shower of resources (which I definitely feel I have) but from more random chance occurrences and a sequence of encounters with sympathetic ideas… and that others could join me in this pace, even if they don’t have a cushy job. But I've often found myself alone, which makes it very different. I think the dull tone kind of reflects this difference.
Pleasure sometimes (often?) feels like this weird cycle between ecstasy and nostalgia and boredom. The ecstasy of new or newly rediscovered experiences. The nostalgia of looking back on similar experiences, or on recent pleasures, sometimes with a lens of wanting to go back to how things were, or even of thinking that you were happier just a moment ago when the sun was filtering through the trees in a slightly more pleasant way. The boredom of being aware of this cycle and aware that experiences will fade, that you can’t go back, that sometimes for some warped reason nothing feels truly worth doing because it’s all just pleasure and pain, pleasure and pain.
And then ecstasy again when you realize none of this bullshit overthinking matters, because you can have new experiences or the same experiences or nothing at all can be happening and somehow it can feel like the most enjoyable moment you've ever experienced. The cycle repeats itself and what the fuck else do you expect out of life.
The dog verse is about what I feel I genuinely enjoy. Simple non-exhilarating experiences, that for me, tend not to suffer as much from that cyclical of pleasure nostalgia boredom. Mostly just even keel ecstasy, most of the time. I can reliably fuck off to the park, sit under a tree, and soon enough I will find myself thinking “yup this is pretty nice ain’t it”.
The show verse is about not being happy with that reliable flavour of pleasure because boredom nostalgia fake internet lives and so on etcetera. About how I often think i’ll like going to concerts; i often think i’ll be rapt in some new flavour of ecstasy from some new experiences; that previously i’ve just failed to enjoy them and I can do better; but then in reality it’s actually annoyingly hard for me to find novel experiences that i enjoy. Going back to the “same old” experiences i like often yields new forms of the same old pleasure, even if they’re not novel in the traditional sense of the word. the river I step in is not the river i stand in. and so on.
The show verse maybe also about the death of things. About the end, or rather the gradual change that you only see later in the rear view, of a relationship that’s not working, or wasn't working in some form and has shifted into something that is different but good but still feels like a death of sorts. I have tried to be someone that likes going to the shows. And i recognize that i only "am" someone in the sense that i construct an identity from the sum of my past experiences and arbitrary and inaccurate future projections, so fuck it I should be able to do and be anything and anyone. But increasingly i see that it is no simple matter to try to do something or be something that is not aligned with where you should gravitate. And that where you perhaps yearn to gravitate isn’t always (or maybe, often is not) where it will be easiest for you to find peace and self acceptance. And the latter is perhaps where you should gravitate. And that gravity and orbits shift subtly over time.
You might not orbit each other in the same way, but you'll always be in the same solar system.