Dirty Mind, Lonely Heart
I have a big heart, I just want people to see that.
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Queen of California Dissection
“Joni wrote “Blue” in a house by the sea. I gotta believe there’s another color waiting on me to set me free.”
You know when you hear a lyric that makes you go, “WHOA!”? It can completely level you with the idea behind it? That’s what that lyrics does to me. It offers so much subtlety, but leaves so much left on the table.
Joni Mitchell wrote the album Blue which went on to be a huge hit. The album has a lot to do with broken relationships and finding yourself through a bout of depression; hence the album title Blue. It had a passionate dejected feel to the entire album. Very somber, but powerful at the same time.
What I get from that lyric is two separate and independent ideas.
1) When John mentions “another color waiting for me”, it’s a play on meanings. Blue, being a color and emotion, is not what he wants to make him successful. Singing songs about troubled relationships or broken things doesn’t have to be his number one outlet towards success. I think he is saying, “I’m waiting on another emotion that I can real express in my music and writing that doesn’t have to be about the depressed, I-know-how-you-feel-unfortunately, songs.”
2) Joni, while writing that album, was alone. By her own choice, of course. She separated herself from distractions, found herself with her writing. That’s exactly what John has done this entire time while writing Born and Raised. There are so many similarities there that John has used with his own process of creating this record. He picked up his stuff, went out, saw the country, and apparently found the him that makes him comfortable finally.
It’s unbelievable the thoughts are can provoke with a single line. Damn talented people!
Thanks for listening (reading) my epiphany of the morning.
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If I Ever Get Around to Living
Happiness is a word for a feeling. Feelings are rarely understood in the moment and they are quickly forgotten and misremembered.
When we look back on times of our lives, we tend to glamorize them. I’m the King of Exaggeration, believe it. I build things up in my mind much more than what was probably the case. I look at all the good parts and put an asteriks beside them; the bad parts hurt too much to want to remember all the time, so I let those fall to the wayside. But life shouldn’t be that muddled, that watered down. I think life isn’t as complicated and as strenuous as we make it out to be. People are constantly searching for answers. What I’m figuring out now is that there are no answers, things just happen. The positive and the negative. The one constant in life is time. To see the colors of a rainbow, you’ve have to bare the storm, right? It happens, there isn’t much we can do about it. The universe isn’t compiled of a series of questions, it’s made up of people like you and I looking for a connection with another person. Love or friendship, whatever capacity. The greatest need that someone can have satisfied is being understood.
You can’t go out looking for that though. Either you’re not going to find it or you’re going to find the wrong thing. What you need to do is be complete with yourself. Plant a place inside you, a place to come home to. Be happy with where you’re at and with who you are. If you’re not satisfied, what can you really give someone? Because what you give someone, while in a relationship, is yourself. So if you’re not happy with yourself, you’re giving them something broken. That spells out the inevitable: it ain’t gonna work. You have to be good with you. Come to terms with where you’re at. Realize you’re fine alone. That will open up the gateway to focusing more on making other people happy. You’ll know you’re ready for a relationship when you’re perfectly happy being alone.
But that level of self-awareness is hard to understand. It’s absolutely achievable, but not easy, because as humans we never know our limits. We love to reach. But when is it enough just to be happy? When can you finally sit down and realize, “I’m good”. I’ve grown up with people around me saying, “Keep pushing yourself, Jordan!”, “Don’t settle!”. And in theory, I understand what they’re eluding to. But when can you look at yourself and realize, “Damn, I’m good”. NOT GOOD ENOUGH, but you’re good. Sometimes you have to look around, absorb all the beautiful things surrounding you, hit cruise and enjoy the sights.
The best part about being human is that there isn’t a correct way to do it. What sucks the most is living in a prison in your own bed, in your own mind and in your own life. Be yourself, even if that means being unsure or uneasy. Let someone else put you at ease. Even if you have that feeling of regret, just know what even if we could turn back, it’s very unlikely that we would end up where we started at before. In the past, I had always bent and reshaped myself to fit into a relationship. From now on, I’ll just be me and find someone that fits that.
I like listening to music alone and going to the movies alone. I like driving alone and shopping alone. It gives me time to think and set my mind free. When I see a dad with his daughter or a couple holding hands, I realize that even though I like being alone, I’m not keen on being lonely. I just need someone who won’t run away.
It’s about being in love, but not always having her right at my side. Kind of like, it’s always a downpour, and if it’s not, it’s just about to. But that doesn’t make it drab outside, it makes it feel safe inside, where it’s dry and the heat is blowing. That’s the jet fuel on a fire to a broken heart. It’s not about finding someone who’ll turn your rainy day into a sunny one, it’s about being with someone who will lay in bed listening to the rain hit the windows. Someone who will listen to you play guitar and attempt to sing just to make you feel talented. Someone who will bake chocolate chip cookies with you when the storms last longer than expected. It’s about finding someone who can make you forget that the storm is even going on outside.
It’s interesting, and feel free to test this idea: You can tell how much a guy cares about a girl by watching him while she speaks. His gaze, unwavering, just hanging on her every word. But the liars have screwed it up for everybody. Because the liars have made silence equal “yes”, and the liars have made, “I love you” turn into, “But do you?”. It’s more than just “a word”. It changes what she hears, what she has heard, what we are now and what we once were. One of the biggest mistakes you can make in a relationship is to confuse a real person with the image you’ve created in your mind.
Just be fucking honest about how you feel about people while you’re alive. Appreciate everything while you have it. You ever tell somebody that you never want to talk to them again in the most painfully explicit terms ever, only to turn around and check your texts every five minutes just to see if maybe she got the true message: the whole “Fuck off” thing was actually, “Try me again, but not for another five minutes”. The funny thing is nobody ever really knows how much anybody else is hurting. We could be standing next to somebody who is completely broken and we wouldn’t even know it.
All I can do is concentrate on keeping my heart and soul correct, then I can decorate around it. Maybe I don’t need the whole world to love me, ya know? Maybe I just need that one person.
