Shake me, wake me

Lately I've been feeling unbelievably disconnected from the world.

It's as if I'm falling farther and farther behind on readings I don't even have to complete, and every day it feels like a mounting burden of absolutely nothing is piling up. I've been sitting on ideas for months and even years; never getting them on paper or the screen - it's all just a jumble of notes in my head that are starting to get lost under new ideas that soon become the old and the lost.

Last summer I was in a profoundly different state of mind. It's something that's very difficult to explain - like witnessing something spectacular and then trying to reiterate the event to someone else. It's as if you had to be there to see it yourself, or you'd have no goddamn clue what I was talking about. The words make sense and all, but you'd still have no sense of what I truly meant. It's very frustrating, but I'll do my best to explain:

I felt as if I understood the way everything in the world fit together. The pieces of the puzzle were all falling into place - I saw the mundane as valuable and the materialistic as weak. I saw people for who they truly were (not just the masks that they show the rest of the world), and the networks that connect us were finally starting to make sense in a large scale. I felt like I was hovering above the rest of the world just watching, and laughing at the idiots below.

Imagine climbing a wall of knowledge or understanding, but you know full well that if you reach the top your own weight would send everything crashing to the ground. Well I climbed and climbed, and just as I reached the top to stick my head over and see what the other side held, I chose to jump off backwards and quit. The unknown on the other side was more valuable than anything, but the risk of collapse seemed all-too-imminent.

And man did I ever hit the ground hard. In the past year it seems as if my once impermeable values and morals have come apart at the seams. I've found myself in situations that I despise and I've wasted so much time, energy, and money on things that once meant nothing to me. I used to be above the commonplace and cliche, but I've slipped onto the level with the average.

Things are undoubtedly on the rise, but even now the things that once lifted me above everything are failing to have their impact. I miss the good old days when I could sit there and listen to the History Teacher albums and travel to the ocean, or 1 York, or back to my youth - in an instant. I miss having dreams at night that didn't disappear a few minutes after I awoke. I miss the times that I used to sit down and actually finish a thought before I got bored with it and had to find something else to occupy me. And I miss the contentment I used to get from a single song or movie - now it's almost like I need to be listening to a song, watching a movie, and playing a video game while reading a book - all at the same damn time.

The world seems to be slipping past me as I struggle against the current. With so much happening in the world, and so little drive to comment on it, it's hardly any wonder that I write on here so infrequently. Every time I sit down to write I get sidetracked, or bored, or frustrated with myself, and I usually just quit.

The one thing that's been helping a ton is the oldschool Motown bands. The Foundations, Four Tops, The Temptations, The Supremes, Stevie Wonder, Otis Redding, Smokey Robinson, Ben E. King, and Aretha Franklin can work wonders if your head's off in space.

I highly recommend you check that shit out.