my volvo, my white '94 volvo station wagon - the last vestige of my childhood - is gone. ive been driving that car since i was fifteen years old...eight years. and of course it was my mom's before that...
i loved that stupid car with my radiohead sticker on it...that car was everything - all my drives to and from santa barbara, all my drives to and from high school...all my radiohead and jimmy eat world and u2 cd's....fogging up the windows with whoever it was i was fogging up windows with at the time...ouija board sessions on that hill in altadena...driving around pasadena when i found out my grandfather died...aimless driving to clear my head or cry or scream or just sing loudly with no audience...ethan, patrick, the band, kirsten, and vincent who dubbed it the white coffin of death...oh and the gas station boy, lets not forget him...and that car was so fucking durable...survived everything i ever hit with it and protected me in the meantime...all its scratches and dents, the grate tied on...pasadena, hollywood, los feliz, burbank, sierra madre, santa barbara, oxnard, ventura and a million little places in between....it was a lived in, friendly car...a jalopy by the end, but a good car.
i dont know - i guess its that it wasnt simply a mode of transportation...i loved driving it, i loved the escape it provided me (escape is important to me), i loved that it was mine, when it was still mine.
anyway, the point is...im sure its not about the car...its just ive come home this summer knowing its time to clean out, to let go, and to grow the fuck up already...but i was always a homebody...and i have also always clung to dying causes...
the cat no one loves but me. the house everyone wants to move from. the old car everyone hated. hundreds of books ive read but cant part with, relationships with people who dont really mean anything anymore to me, nor i to them...and boxes and boxes of things...just things that i guess really mattered at the time and that i probably sensed wouldnt matter eventually, so i fought the natural progression of moving on and kept peices of all of it. all of my journals full of similar moments that are so irrelevant now.
ive been trying to clean out my room but its so hard...im surrounded by the wreckage of all of my false starts, all of my projects...paintings i abandoned, scrapbooks that were similarly shelved, journals i kept starting but no longer ever finished, colleges i attended and then fled, the exercise bike i can count on my two hands the number of times ive used it, the acting classes, the books on subjects i always wanted to know about but never read once i had them, the vitamins i pledged to take every day, and...haha - bartending school! and there are hundreds more projects just like them...its not surprising - i have always had the attention span of a gnat. always wanted what i couldnt have....the present is too easy and the future too intimidating which leaves the past.
the past is an animal i know, perfectly and beautifully distorted now so that i dont look at the car and see that its a disaster, so that i refuse to get annoyed by the cat who never shuts up, and so that i view the destructive five year relationship as the love of my life, when i was the one who wanted my freedom...
but above all, the past is something i can always reach for but i will never ever get...and i have always loved a good game of playing hard-to-get...
no wonder i dont know what i want to do with my life. seriously...no fucking wonder.
blah - back to cleaning out my room.
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