There’s a love coming to us all.

I’m sitting in Theories of Personality and, in my attempts to stay awake, I have two fingers propping my ever drooping head up. In recognition of the fact that this class could be used in Guantanamo Bay to aid in prisoner torture, my fingers formed a smooth flesh colored gun aimed directly at my left temple. As my pointer finger fiddles lightly with the imaginary trigger, by body screams “pull!” Pull the cognitively constructed trigger and splatter my hypothetical brains all over the girl sitting next to me. I tilt my head and look at her from the corner of my eye. She’d cry. I convince myself, that on the off chance she was sprayed with my emotional brain juice, she’d bawl her eyes out. Nonetheless, it’d certainly send a clear and concise message to the professor. Analyze this professor, I’d say my personality screams boredom induced proclivities towards suicide. Alas, I digress. In my playful manner of bringing a gun to my head, I begin to wonder about the sheer profoundness of blowing your brains out, in the literal sense. I’ve never been one to toy with suicidal tendencies, but I question if that would be the way I’d want to go. Number one, you run the risk of just fucking yourself up enough to put you in a lovely, almost functional vegetable state. Flash to guardians fighting about pulling the plug, press coverage, and well…tubes. Then, I begin wondering where your best off putting the gun. You can’t easily put it the back of your head, and there’s always your temple, where my imaginary gun currently lay, or the more menacing of the options is to go barrel to mouth. So there it is, you put the gun half way down your throat, tongue the cold steel and try not to choke, all the while hopping that your aimed at the back of your brain so that you die instantly. To bring you back, I’m sitting in a classroom filled with students much like myself, me a potentially healthy and non-suicidal human being, drawing up the best ways in which to put a bullet through the back of my head whilst the teacher explains arbitrary and potentially useless ways to test monkeys. Nonetheless, all I can sit and wonder is, if in my final moments, I would want to taste a cool blend of steel and gun powder mixed with an intense fear of messing up and ending up as your favorite Lifetime special. In that moment, I envied suicide victims, at least they could accomplish something.

Murder, love, heartbreak, war…they all coincide at some point. We hit this metaphorical wall where our entire lives are wrapped up in other people. Love and destruction drive us, and we fall for our enemies in a constant battle with our own hearts. In the end, it’s all murder. Love, heartbreak, war…everything is just murder. We all die a little faster, and give up a little sooner every time we experience these things. I’m convinced that emotionally, love and heartbreak are on the same wavelengths. Just as much as your whole body feels love, in the same capacity it feels heartbreak. Frankly, they feel the same. It’s a hard, dark moment that takes over everything you are, regardless of whether or not it’s the promise of love or the bitter spoils of broken hearts. These emotions, whether your value them in the highest, or place them as the least of your concerns, are both diseases people spend their entire lives running from. There is no cure, there is no anecdote, there’s just the searing pain that comes with loving someone with everything you have in you, and the same searing pain we battle the minute our heart understands the capacity it has to break. You know those moments when you can feel your heart right inside your chest? Like its right there, an organ you can manipulate and change. As if you have some sort of control over your heart. Not so much the steady beats that pump life into the rest of your extremities, but more or less the heartache or joy that everyone feels. Much like your legs are not simply modes of transportation, but feet and knees that bruise and scar, you could really feel this too. There it was, pumping absentmindedly inside your chest, and you could really feel the hurt that was left there from all the times you got it wrong. Almost as though you could rip open your ribcage and pull out a vessel built purely on emotion, biological function aside. Attempts at self preservation through personal consolation was never a healing remedy, instead its a round-about way of affirming the fact something really is wrong. Thinking of someone else’s heart worsens the thumping hurt, its just a reminder that they feel nothing. So there you are, battling this pumping organ spreading life past your once numb soul and working as a catalyst for this new hurt. A hurt that you try so hard to mask in the triumph of a new hope. Nonetheless, this new hope, albeit a warming placebo, may be the next hit that spirals into further lifetimes of addiction. This addiction is our love and heartbreak, this pain is our lives…this empty room, a kamikaze solider prepared for battle, is our heart.

You can pack your whole life up into bags and move forward, but where are you really running to? The last days of my stay at “home” are diminishing right before my eyes. It’s been more pleasant than I had prepared myself for. The first breath into the airs of Newburyport were filled with angst and fear, I didn’t think I’d make it through three weeks. Nonetheless, Christmas was eventful and so were my days here…mostly spent with friends. Homecoming is such an experience when you’re in college. You’re never quite sure as to where you belong, but you exist within the city limits as best as you can. The placed you called home becomes just a place you stay, at least for me. I’ve talked to people that I’m in school with and they love going home -they crave it. They’ve got so much pride for their home town, whereas others just exist within theirs. Eastern Massachusetts is an experience, its much different than the Western outreaches of this great state. The people are more crass and hard, and that alone effects the entire experience of being here. I feel more at home here, but at the same time…when I am here, I feel like an outcast. It’s like you’re homeless in your own hometown. Nonetheless, it’s safe to say there is not much left for me here. Even the best friends I do have are moving out and away, and I just get frustrated by the city streets and salty air with nothing to do on a Friday night, for free. Freedom has it’s price and I’m beginning to see that it costs your weight in homelessness.

The days are beginning to wain away, no more Shaw’s for months should be refreshing. There’s nothing more nauseating than having your mother knocking down your door at 9:30 in the morning to tell you that your boss has called and left a message on the answering machine asking if you could work. It’d be alright if she hadn’t already decided that I would be available, and tells me that I should go in. So, frustrated and utterly crestfallen I showered and attempted to resist the urge to throw the shampoo bottle through the window. Personally, I love grocery shopping. I throw in my ear buds, put my tunes on full blast [Lately, it's been Crime In Stereo on a pretty consistent basis.], and lean my entire upper body into the carriage [Welcome to New England, it's not a shopping cart.] and roam the store at a leisurely pace. It’s even better when you find good deals, don’t have to roam back through the store to find something random because you’re a horrendous grocery shopper, or when you get to the register and it’s cheaper than the total you had come up with in your head. Nevertheless, I despise working at a grocery store. I’m at about 5 years of being with Shaw’s, and I’ve outgrown my job. You can be the smartest person in the checkout and you’re still an idiot. Customers look at you like you have some mental handicap because you’re bagging groceries, and heaven forbid you’re on register and you fumble something up. Fumbling something up…now that doesn’t take much effort. The sheer monotony of your job can make anyone’s brain turn to a jello like substance. So, I PLU-ed [Not the technical term, but work with me here.] your Anjou pears as Bosc, may the produce gods strike me dead. No seriously, please? I’ll stand real still, perfect target.

Johnny Cupcakes posted a myspace bulletin about how Billabong is stealing his ideas, it’s pretty hysterical. I came upon the shirt at PacSun a while back, and giggled with a friend of mine…it’s sad really. I guess Massachusetts just might be taking over the world. It sprouted this big discussion about hardcore. Johnny Cupcakes is from a “pretty” popular hardcore band called On Broken Wings [take from them what you'd like, I don't particularly enjoy them.] Nonetheless, the discussion that ensued was about how silly things like the t-shirts that Johnny used to sell at On Broken Wing’s shows have blown up into a cult classic, how Nike dunks have taken over the world, and how graffiti [insert my groans of displeasure] has become trendy. The point of my story being, upon clicking on to the Johnny Cupcakes page and getting absorbed by his web blog, I’ve decided to venture past LiveJournal, to more pleasant [ahem, less emo] adult worlds. It was hard to decide between this and BlogSpot.com …but since I’ve already got a WordPress account with The Empire of Sound and WSKB, for which I am the web master…it seemed the most fitting.

Needless to say, welcome to my WordPress.