On a ramble

[muckefuck]

Brother, have you got a smoke
Or, baby, have you got a dime?
Seems like we're all
Just a little down on our luck.

Baby, if you're workin' now
Out in Bakersfield
At some honky-tonk
They call "The Wagon Wheel"

I was managing my LJ tags the other day and came to the sobering realisation that I've used "rant" about three times for every two I've used "strolls". So tonight I went for a walk. Not a particularly ambitious or interesting one, just to the end of the street to pick up antacids and then back the long way. It was even a bit longer since a half block before I came to my corner, Camper Van Beethoven's "Come On Darkness" came on my iPod (my favourite stanza is quoted above) so I walked around the block in order to keep listening to it.

My iPod is a monument to nostalgia. I haven't updated it since before we moved house two years ago, and even before then I'd been buying so little new music that most of the songs--like this one--were about twenty years old. Case in point: the first song that played when I left the house, "Perfumed Lies" by The Judybats. Two weeks ago, I'd actually dug through a couple of boxes searching for the CD so I could play this.

It was nothing at all
The time we shared
And still somehow
I've never felt so alone

I needed the TUMS, I needed the exercise, but even more I needed a break. The personal e-mail account I've had for ten years almost to the day is expiring at the end of the month. And it's not POP-enabled (why didn't I think to look for such things back then?) so the only way to save any of the e-mails is to forward them individually. So I've just completed looking through over 2700 and weeding out the ones I think I may actually want to read again.

We've all done this, I reckon, so I don't think I need to describe how emotional it is to sift through a decade of your life and ponder all the personal connexions made and lost, all the times your friends delighted or disappointed you in ways you never could've imagined, all the mistakes you made and lessons you learned. Am I really any better at any of this shit now than I was back then? I confessed to monshu a couple weeks back that I didn't think so, but perhaps I was only feeling sorry for myself. Scratch that--I know I was feeling sorry for myself. But that doesn't mean what I said was false.