Get Me Away From Here, I'm Dying

I started using JetPunk at nine years old. A great deal of time has passed since then. This corner of the internet felt like home to me for a long time, and in some ways, it still does. I thank those who made this website what it is, because for a long time it acted as an important outlet for one autistic boy who couldn't help but draw maps and list names and places. I suspect I am not alone in this experience.

I don't know why I'm writing this blog. This week has felt like a turning point, a dam broken. I guess I just feel like realizing the assortment of my thoughts and words that are gasping for air right now, and JetPunk seems a good a place as any to scatter them to the winds.

Lately, I've been thinking a lot, like I always have. But something has felt different. I can feel myself growing. The change permeating every aspect of my life is so palpable, almost too close for comfort. I used to loathe stagnancy. The horseshoe crabs have come to the shore again, as they have every mating season for 400,000,000 years.

For the past few years my website outlet has been last.fm. I suspect that tracking my listening habits might have somewhat taken the place of memorizing flags and counties and locales. If anybody cares, here is the link to my user profile. (Today, I mostly listened to Cocteau Twins, Yo La Tengo, and Belle & Sebastian - from whom this blog title is stolen.)

Earlier I thought about the books I read when I was young. I keep thinking of new ones to shelve in my mind, to add to my personal canon.

I've been reading the writings of Philip Guston, for my money one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century. When I read him attempting to express how he thought and worked, I understand. I want to be able to know myself and conceptualize the processes that define my creativity like he did.

I like how my hair looks lately. This past weekend was my high school's spring musical, and my appearance in the photos I took with my friends and family strikes me strangely. There is something that I can't place. I have all these indescribable fleeting thoughts that add up to something uneven yet whole. I feel like something is being realized. And with that realization comes the shock of memory and experience and the fact that I'll never be back in my first grade art class, writing lists of classical composers on scraps of paper, or on my grandma's porch, watching the cardinals and turkeys.

I know that in years' time I will look back at high school in much the same way. I am lucky enough to be growing up somewhere with a sense of community that probably rivals most. Last year it used to frustrate me that I wasn't able to cry, but I just cried for the third time this week alone.

There are things about me I don't think anyone would understand. I feel myself peculiarly. I experience myself in a multitude of ways and lately I've been savoring every last one of them. It feels good, remembering and trying to wade through your own history. There are places that I feel, where the light hit just so one day and I never forgot it. There are exchanges that, I'm not sure if they even happened, but to try and find out would cheapen them. I wish I could go back to watch my younger self because if I did, I know that only then would I begin to understand. That sentence doesn't make any sense.

These are things I don't really know how to articulate. Just know that, somewhere in New England, there's a teenage boy who's trying and feeling and wondering and knowing and not-knowing and it's all happening too soon and not soon enough.