time_may_change_me birdmad pondering here in the tenth year of red blather, in my eleventh year of being a blatherskite how much different i feel and yet how little, perhaps i have really changed (does that even make sense?) in the beginning, i was in a state of near constant despair, leavened by occasional manic bouts of weird jokes...now, as often as not, i am more disturbed by my lack of angst? going from my late 20's now to my late 30's, could it be said that i have "grown up" in any meaningful, measurable way? Or is it that i just quit fighting those darker more chaotic feelings and declared myself to be good with it, whatever it might be? While it's certainly nice to no longer feel like the world is constantly caving in around me, I do tend to think that i felt more creative and more interesting in general when my outlook was more negative ( i may have even said this before, not too long ago, maybe i've said all i had to say...eep...) (♫ so i turned myself to face me, but i've never caught a glimpse...♫) 110131 ... raze ("but i can't trace time...") change "late 20s to late 30s" to "late teens to mid-late 20s" and it's almost the same story over here. it'll be 10 years for me in march. i was a lot of people and names in that time --- myself, and baby satan, and various self-indulgent pseudonyms. i seemed to have a whole lot more to say in the blathersphere back when i was a raging ball of self-destructive energy, and then again when i felt a need to leave blue and try to reinvent myself over here. now that i'm fairly content and well-adjusted (comparatively speaking), i'm a glorified blather ghost. funny how that works out, isn't it? the creative energy isn't gone by any means...if anything, there's more of it now than there ever was back when i wanted to obliterate myself and everything around me. it's just been redistributed. it was always a fear of mine that if i lost the anger, i would lose the music. thankfully, that didn't happen. i think it says something that we all keep coming back here, regardless of where our lives take us. i like to think of us as a ragtag little red family, with crowl the father who keeps it all together (things seem to get very quiet when he isn't around for a while). hell, there are some people i consider to be very good friends who i never would come into contact with if i hadn't randomly stumbled across blather all those years ago when i was looking for something on the internet about leather pants. it cracks me up that i spent so long trying to be anonymous dust in a corner, and now i send cds in the mail to 'skites and i might as well go back to using my actual name again...except something about that doesn't quite feel appropriate. not that a name adopted in a state of confusion and anger seven or so years ago seems appropriate any longer either. maybe it just comes down to the fact that some connections can't be broken. even with all that's changed, in a strange way, blather still feels like home. 110131 ... grendelbirdmadsatan etc. funny you mention baby_satan, as i was on the verge of revisiting the snack_tips back in the blue, but as "Gille de Raisin" (lately, i've been more into politics or at least politics-as-theater-of-the-absurd when i get to jabbering on my Facebook account...which is rather dangerous considering i work for a state-level govt agency and am diametrically opposed to the current crop of leadership in my state...so, hell maybe i am still secretly self-destructive, just in an entirely new and much more passive-aggressive way) 110131 ... unhinged time didn't change me; the work i put in on myself changed me. step_into_fear smile_at_strangers shambhala_training and when shit hits the fan, for all that work, i'm right back to the self_indulgent petulant kid i was ten years ago. 110203 ... unhinged but beer brings me right back 110204 ... grendel It's funny, I actually am less perturbed and angsty even when my universe actually IS imploding around me. Either I've stumbled into a very Zen state without realizing, or I've had the gentlest, most perfect psychotic break It is bizarrely beautiful in its wrongness 150809 ... raze listening to "changes" last_night made me think about how it was the third bowie song i ever heard, on the first album i owned that had his name on the spine. a reissue of a compilation on a clear cassette. i used to listen to that tape in my bedroom after my mother and stepfather shoved me in the basement to make room for my sisters upstairs. the man who wasn't my dad built a shelf into the wall that almost touched my headboard. a place my alarm clock could sit, along with whatever else i thought to put there. i want to say the shelf was grey. maybe blue. maybe it was both colours at the same time, or one touched by the other. it might have been the only thoughtful thing he did for me when i was growing up. hearing that song for the first time in a while also reminded me of this. it's a little surreal now to read what i wrote here over a decade ago. i did end up losing the music, though not for any of the reasons i thought i might. i went from having nothing to say here to writing more on red in the space of two years than i did in the twenty that came before them. the place i thought i could take or leave back then has ended up being the thing that's stopped me from completely disintegrating. so there you go. ♫ oh, look out you rock and rollers. pretty soon you're gonna get a little older. ♫ 231212 what's it to you? who go blather from