I used to seethe, stew, and marinate. If I was in a bad mood, I wanted to stay in a bad mood because, somehow, I would want to make it worth it. I figure that if something is bad enough to make me sour, I shouldn’t be easily taken out of that frame of mind. It’s the same with forgiveness. I’m slow to anger, but once I’m there, I’m extremely slow to forgive, for the exact same reason.

For years, I would listen to music to help me wallow in these emotions. It would cradle me, fuel me until the emotion burned out. Listening this way, with a surge of sentiment, would let me feel the notes, and I would savour every second, minute, and eventual hour of it.

Lately, though, I hear music differently. It inspires me. It moves me. It helps me out of an emotion, instead of into one. And it feels like this change is a reflection of how much my life is changing now, how I’m beginning to see the entire world around me in such a profoundly different way.

As if everything that’s past is prologue to this.

In ten minutes, the redness of the sky and the morning fog are gone. The day resumes.

Sometimes, living just means being at the right place at the right time.

“Is Petersburg really as you draw it?”

“I draw it as I see it”

—Onegin

When I woke up, it was just another day, and my room resumed its silence as I turned off my alarm in the darkness. When I got outside, it was just another morning, although the recent drop in temperature has frosted the grass and turned the pavement white.

When I got on the bus, the sky started with a plain, early-morning glow that seemed to stretch out in a tunnel towards my destination. As I traveled further east, the sky turned pink and red, and a perfectly vertical beam of cloudless light shot out from below the horizon, letting me know that the sun was waking up.

I watched the sun rise as the bus took me to work, watched the sky turn from grey to red to yellow to white. I saw the heavy morning fog snake through the trees of a forested green golf course, and saw it recede, as if the earth had chosen to display itself by lifting her downy veil.

There are days when I want to get off at every stop and take pictures of the graduating atmosphere. When the ride is a journey only experienced by bus.

Bus rides are always either really good or really bad.

They’re really good when I find a window seat. That’s when I can tune out completely, lose myself in my music, and become totally oblivious to anything going on around me. I get to watch everything pass by and drift in and out of my thoughts. It’s when I get the most thinking done during the day (even more than in the shower).

They’re really bad when I can’t find a seat and I’m left standing up. I keep my music low so that I can hear any announcements by the bus driver, or people trying to get by. I’m always on guard about where I should be moving or when a seat might become available. And music on a low volume isn’t really worth listening to.

One of the reasons why I haven’t bought a car is because I’d lose all my thinking time. Every day I can reflect for an hour going to work and an hour coming back when I’m on the bus. If I was in a car, I’d be too busy paying attention to the road, to bad drivers, to traffic lights, to pedestrians. I wouldn’t be able to think, and I’d probably write a lot less.

Some days, when I’m coming close to my stop, I wish that the bus would just keep going, just keep driving, and never stop. I’d ride it from morning to night, listening to my music, just enjoying the feeling of going somewhere and nowhere at the same time.

Thinking about nothing and everything.

There was this one time I was on the phone with John, when I walked through the basement hallway on Daly, past Jonathan’s drum kit, and paused at the frame of his door.

“You’re so megalomaniACal”, I told him.

“No, no, Jeff, it’s megalomaNIacal”, he curtly responded.

And I knew. And John knew. And I knew that John knew that I had simply thrown more fuel on the fire, I had somehow added to his limitless ego. I could see the smirk on his face through the phone, as if Anderson himself was there with one of his close ups in my brain.

When approaching anything new, as a human, aside from bias, there is always the danger of relating even the furthest idea to the self. Everything is subject to interpretation, of course, and I’ve always strongly believed in the importance of interpretation. However, when interpretation stretches too far, the entire learning process can become perverted, an understanding based on nothing.

An example: after the Nietzsche’s death, his sister secured the rights to his publications. She later married a leader of the german anti-Semitic movement, and made distorted publications of his works. The Nazi’s welcomed his ideas, eventually building a monument for him. Yet Nietzsche himself wrote about his strong opposition to racism, and his contrast with the German Nationalistic movement.

And such is how we, as humans, see ourselves in almost everything. I admit that at times I’m guilty of such a thing myself, when I see my life in the characters of movies, when I read my stories in other peoples books. So I start Thus Spoke Zarathustra with trepidation, with the hopeful awareness that I will be able to be open-minded in what I learn.

It’s ironic that Nietzsche had paresis when he wrote his book, and was most likely suffering from delusions of grandeur at the time, although how much it actually affected him is debatable.

Perhaps the best that one can do is to keep a work in mind as inspiration, and not as an influence.