Goodbye to Dakota

I'm writing this post sort of in between two very long car trips.  Or, really, if I'm aiming to be entirely specific here, I'll say I'm writing it a few days after the conclusion of the longest car trip, or series of car trips, in recorded history (hey, I said specific, not un-hyperbolic), and prior to the start of another, different, but definitely much shorter car trip.

See?  It probably would have sounded better not to be tediously specific.  Oh, well.

But let me tell you a little about the vacation-trip my family and I just went on.  It was exhausting tremendous.  Seriously, if we had started at the westernmost point of Portugal - just to give a sense of the total distance we travelled - and driven due east, we would have ended up in Moscow.  Or, had we driven northeast from thence instead, Helsinki.  But of course, as I've mentioned, it was not all in one go.  At first, we drove from the East Coast to Missouri, where our taste for the city in which we were to stay was thoroughly soured, immediately and irreparably (because, after a pleasant trip of 1150 miles, and having made good time, who - I ask you - wants to spend 45 minutes in the exact same place, staring at and memorising every feature of the abandoned gas station on the left and the Ozark Visitors Center on the right, because of a Saturday night traffic jam??, only to then discover that the convenience the hotel bragged about on the website was nothing short of a vicious lie??).  We got into the hotel at around midnight, central time, having arrived within city limits at half-past 9.  But the next day, of course, by morning- daylight, it was a fairly different story: there was a charm about the historical district of the city that was not lost on us, jaded though we perhaps may be.  In one of the thrift store/flea market-type stores into which we popped during our stroll around the city, I bought a book called, "Country Music Changed My Life," and I'm very excited to begin to read it.  At a Bass Pro Shop down by the lake, I bought a stuffed bear, whom I later named Cobbler.  (I am not a woman easily defined.)  But I think my favourite thing that day was drinking sweet tea spiked with Seagram's Sweet Tea Vodka - from a mason jar.  I don't think I can fully explain how long, and how much, I have wanted to drink something from a freakin' mason jar.  Seriously, water would have sufficed.  I know that it sounds weird, trust me, I get it (I do hear the thoughts running through my head, incidentally), but I really have wanted to experience that.

Anyway, the next day after that, a day earlier than originally planned, we started on our trip north to South Dakota (I can see you glance at the title of the post, and think to yourselves, "Hmm, now we're getting somewhere with this narrative."  Indeed.  You are very wise.).  And this was probably my favourite part of the trip.  There's something magical about driving and seeing the unadulterated beauty of the varied countryside unfolding before you.  And then something happens: you begin to fall in love with the country, in ways that you never could when you were gathering your knowledge of it from history books and maps and stories and second- or third-hand pictures.  And even though you see signs like this one (that's actually a picture someone posted online of the exact sign we saw; I feel obligated to post the disclaimer that I do not know that man) and every fibre in your being disagrees with it and maybe you realise you might never like the people, you love the country a little more deeply with every rolling mile.  We travel by car with frequency - we used to drive to Florida annually, as previously mentioned, and we have driven, on separate occasions, to New Orleans and to Kentucky/Tennessee.  But I'd never previously understood that satisfaction and, dare I say it, pride in knowing that this is my country.  And maybe my own daily experience with this nation is more one of city blocks and suburban streets and large, comprehensive supermarkets, and maybe the only farms I see are when we go to pick blueberries in July or pumpkins in October, but maybe that's what makes this country something to fall in love with.  I don't know, perhaps now I am rhapsodising about this a bit too much, or am seeing it with the rose-tinted glasses one dons when looking back on a particularly pleasant memory.  But the point is that, as we were passing through Missouri, and Iowa, and South Dakota, and seeing Nebraska to the left of us across the Missouri River, it seemed to me both charming and beautiful.  As we travelled more north, the sky got larger and more expansive, until it spanned from one horizon to the other, open and unsecretive.  I could have written thirty-seven haiku just about the vast expanse of sky above us.  But of course, I did something else instead.

Of course, that last sentence would have served very well as a segway into the song.  But I have a few more things to say before we get there, so please hold that thought.

First.  I remember two years ago, the summer before Speak Now came out, studying abroad in Barcelona, and staying up (very) late to watch the web chat where Taylor Swift announced its release date, and cover art, and first single, and first single release date (on a side note: I also remember being in Prague when the first single - "Mine" - came out, and watching the music video on Youtube on repeat when I got back from class; what lovely memories - I will always love that song for that reason, among others).  The reason I bring this up now is because when we were away on holiday, she held another web chat of this nature.  And of course, everyone knew what it meant, but of course, I couldn't watch it live this time - although I did, after we came home, again stay up late to watch it in full on Youtube.  So, surprise, she's got a new album coming out!  October 22nd.  It's called, Red.  This is the cover art.  It's really no secret that I love Taylor Swift.  I've loved her and her music (especially the latter) since November 2007, when I first heard her play "Our Song" at the CMAs that year, and she won the Horizon Award (it's now called  Best New Artist).  But...but.  I am not overwhelmed by the cover art.  The first single, which she released that day and is called, "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together," is similarly underwhelming (to me).  For me, it continues on in the same vein as "Better Than Revenge," from Speak Now, arguably the most petty and, well, ordinary, of the songs on that glowing album.  This new one is too vindictive, too spiteful, and it borders on undignified.  It seems to me that she's trying too hard to be mainstream, when, in fact, the majesty of her music is due, in part, to it being undiluted by outside influence, by pressure to be anyone other than herself.  She mentioned that, on this album, she worked with other artists and writers she's admired ever since she can remember, unlike with Speak Now, which she wrote entirely by herself (and was her best album to date).  We fans will love her no matter what she comes out with, but I hope she doesn't become complacent and take that for granted and put out forgettable, though catchy!, pop ditties that go to Number 1 just because her name is on the record.

Okay, wow, sorry.  I have many more thoughts about it, but I will move on.  Actually, one more thing: don't get me wrong, it's a good song.  It's just not a Taylor Swift-caliber song, or so it seems to me.  Again, this is all purely academic, purely my own opinion as a media consumer and music aficionado.

Now I'm really moving on.  Gotta screw my head back on.  Introduction to the song, okay.  There are a few tenets (or what I would call tenets) of country music with which I do not agree -  or, at the very least, with which I do not - and cannot - identify.  I've never said that I am a prototypical country music fan.  In fact, quite the opposite.  If you were to set down the basic elements of "country," and then set down, on paper, everything which makes me, well, me, I think you and I would both be shocked that this is my thing.  But here, in this song, I happen to embrace especially one, if not more, of those potentially-alienating elements.  I guess, as I was falling in love with the country, I was falling in love with country (again) as well.

I finished with about 92% of it before we had even driven out of Iowa on our way back to Missouri.

Goodbye to Dakota

I stayed up all that last night

just to watch the endless sky grow dark, then get light

forever wouldn't be enough to get my fill

I've never felt so much at peace

as when the quiet silence kept on washing over me

and the sight of all those stars stays with me still

CHORUS:

I won't say goodbye to Dakota,

even though I'm driving away

because I already know for sure

I'll be back again someday

this time tomorrow, I'll be in Missouri,

but my thoughts won't be

so I won't say goodbye to Dakota,

'cause it won't say goodbye to me

I fell in love with every cornfield

and every single sunflower that grew from a planted seed

it's all a part of that picture

and even the Badlands seem like good ones

when you can count all the colours of the setting sun:

rose and gold and purple above the dirt

CHORUS:

I won't say goodbye to Dakota,

even though I'm driving away

because I already know for sure

I'll be back again someday

next week, I'll be in New Jersey,

but my thoughts won't be

so I won't say goodbye to Dakota,

'cause it won't say goodbye to me

so...
stay beautiful, stay breath-taking, stay wild and free
and my mind'll be here, until you say goodbye to me

CHORUS:
I won't say goodbye to Dakota,
even though I'm driving away
because I already know for sure
I'll be back again someday
next week, I'll be in New Jersey,
but my thoughts won't be
so I won't say goodbye to Dakota,
'cause it won't say goodbye to me

I can't say goodbye to Dakota,
'cause it won't say goodbye to me...

I hope you like it.  It's not much, but it's true.  Well, except for that staying up all night part.  I did stay up (my insomnia will kill me one day), but I wasn't able to see the sky.  We were able to see Mount Rushmore from our hotel there, though, which was pretty supermegafoxyawesomehot.

Much love, and thank you for the musik,

Just Another Ordinary Girl

Man, that sounds like a first-class seat on the plains of Oklahoma: with a windshield sunset in your eyes, like a watercoloured-painted sky...

Never Easy

Today, I picked up Lee Brice's album, Hard 2 Love.  Will report when I've had a chance to listen to it the requisite twelve times.  (I am also at 0.11 GB left on my iPod.  Holy smokes.)

Also today, I stumbled upon something truly relevant to this blog: the very first song I've ever written.  And I can tell you that for certain.  It's a few years (two, maybe?) older even than "Zach," so you can trust me on this.  I was in the middle of organising everything I have ever placed in my room - doesn't everyone when on 'vacation'? - and I had finally gotten to the filing cabinet in my closet.  Oh, yes.  I have a filing cabinet in my closet.  That was what I wanted more than anything for my thirteenth or fourteenth birthday, and I still remember the joy of going to Staples to pick it out.  But anyway, enough about my bizarre idiosyncrasies.  I was going through everything in there, because I really didn't need most of the stuff I had filed in my blithesome adolescence.  Among other things, I had separate files each for "Cycling," "Giro d'Italia," "Tour de France," and "Vuelta a Espana," in addition, of course, to my multiple binders about the Tour.  I also had a separate file for every single awards ceremony under the sun, which was actually kind of fun.  I'm such a girl.  But anyway - I will not fall into the trap of self-importance under which I wrote the previous (deleted) post.  I will return to the point.  The largest file was a bulging one labelled, "Miscellaneous," and in there, I found all sorts of stuff.  But smack-dab in the middle were two pages torn out of a notebook and covered in colourful ink and disastrously large and terrible cursive, and I immediately knew what that was about.  You see, I'd always written creatively outside of the structure of a classroom. It was my thing.  Like Matilda, only much more ordinary, and way less heroic.  But that year, 2004/2005, was the time when I first began to be more ambitious with my work.  That was the year when I disliked my teachers, all but one, and so I decided to stave off my boredom in class (because when I didn't like my teachers, or the way they taught the subject, I tended to think I didn't need to pay attention) by branching out.  That was the year I began writing an ill-fated play/screenplay about an indentured servant falling in love with her employer.  In the same notebook, when I had abandoned that attempt (and left my poor heroine, Julia, walking the streets of Philadelphia in exhaustion), and between pages upon pages with lists of songs I had heard on the radio and wanted to have, I set down this very first song of mine.

I remember extremely well the circumstances and the subject of this...interesting...work.  They have nearly everything to do my imagined life and very little to do with actual reality.  It was the year I was "in love" with Mike R, the guy who sat behind me in Social Studies - the only class in which I actually liked, nay adored, my teacher - and "stole" the answers to my homework (I never really made it difficult for him) and had me make his sewing project in Home Ec.  Oh, yes...  But it was also the year I discovered that I could be doing anything inside my mind, as long as I looked normal on the outside, because no one would be able to tell what lives I was living within my mind (a useful discovery: it has served me well in the ensuing years), and put it to great use.  Every time Mike spoke to me during class and thus got me in trouble - but oh, how beautiful he was and how kind when telling me to blame it all on him because he could deal with it but holy mackerel how gorgeous he was is he just getting better-looking for the memory or was he always that way? - my mind would curl up and get away.  I'm probably coming across as nuts right now.  But it's 1:14 in the morning, and I have no desire to hide.  I may delete this, or at least edit it, tomorrow.  Right now, though, I'm just trying to explain that my mind has lived stories I've personally never experienced, and that is what birthed this song. (Side note: this sort of translation of imagined experience into song is not unusual for me; it's how all of the most beautiful of my love songs - and of course, the "beautiful" is surrounded by an air of misguided conceit - came about. Even if I never have something like love in my real life and have to turn to artificial insemination or whatever, I will at least have lived the Greatest Love Story Ever in my head.)


It's really more like a poem, really, considering it doesn't rhyme.  Except in a few random places that I suspect were just accidental.  I've transcribed it in the way it's set down on the pages I'd ripped out of that notebook; the line breaks could be just because my tentative and rather large cursive (now, condensed to a sweeping, minuscule elegance of which I am beyond proud) accommodated them so, or because that was the intent.  Not sure on that one.  And one last note: the verses were originally set down in a different order, but then there were numerals written into the margins labelling them differently, so that's the order in which I wrote it down for you.  Interesting, though, that the verses could be in any old order.  I'm impressed, eighth-grade self.

Never Easy

Sometimes when I think of you
I hear you in a different language
sometimes, when I think of you,
I dream about forever
Sometimes, when I think of you,
I know I must be going crazy, since
you and me, we so obviously cannot be

CHORUS:
it's never easy, I know,
it's never easy
never easy to understand
that your life falls apart in the end
I know that I can never
love you again
it's never easy, I know,
it's never easy

we grew up listening to stories of broken hearts
as children we scorned them
and dared life to try it on us
saying what we would do differently
and taunting the authors for not asking us
so I never expected you to turn on me

why do we always seem to
hurt the ones we love the most?
and dance with those who don't matter?
why do things never happen
the way we plan?
I used to think you held the world in your hands
and all the answers in your heart.

CHORUS:
it's never easy, I know,
it's never easy
never easy to understand
that your life falls apart in the end
I know that I can never
love you again
it's never easy, I know,
it's never easy

I wish I could make you understand
how strange my life is now
without you, everything seems different
but I know how things would be
if I held on
so I let you go
but it killed me to see you leave...

(it's never easy, I know,)
(it's never easy)
(never easy to understand)
(that your life falls apart in the end)
(I know that I can never)
(love you again)
(it's never easy, I know,)
(it's never easy)

There are parts of it that I had forgotten, some parts which make me cringe, but other parts that I love.  You can pick and choose for yourself whether you like or not, but I'm so proud of myself for not having thrown it away.  I've just finished my third song notebook, but I only have two left to me, because in a fit of masochism and self-hatred, I threw away the first notebook I'd ever filled, only stopping long enough to rip out the aforementioned "Zach," so I don't have that progression anymore.  At least I have this, though.  I'm curious to hear what you think, still.

Much love, and thank you for the musik,

Just Another Ordinary Girl

And bad mistakes, I've made a few.  I've had my share of sand kicked in my face...

p.s.  I sure hope y'all are watching the Olympics.  Some really great stories are coming out of London.

p.p.s.  I cannot believe that, after all these years, the memory of Mike's face and his STUN-ning smile is still taking my breath away.  Aren't middle school crushes supposed to go away???

p.p.p.s.  And...I just tried to find Mike on Facebook.  It's getting kind of creepy at this point; I've bumped into several people's profiles, all of whom I had never wanted to see again.  All sorts of unpleasant memories are back.  I'd tell some here, but then I'd feel like an idiot (okay, there's this one prevailing memory coming to mind of when this jock hit me in the head with a volleyball "accidentally" during gym and my ear hurt so much I cried).  Thankfully, I think, I can't find him.  So then I googled myself instead.  I'm much more high-profile than he is, and than I wish I were.

p.p.p.p.s.  I'm heading back to Nashville for a few days at the end of this month.  My friend is moving back there, because the reason she moved away is gone, so we're making a road trip of it.  Should be great.  Also, because she's going to be living there, it'll be easier for me to go now!  We have some other tentative dates planned for me to come visit her: one in October (I'm actually trepidatious about this, because it would happen on the same weekend as the Devils' season/home opener - and this, ladies and gentlemen, is probably why I don't have, and have never had, friends), and one for New Year's.  It's my favourite city in the US, and I myself intend to move there, after I get my Master's.

p.p.p.p.p.s.  Because, I'm going back to school (grad school, this time, joy) for a Music Business degree.  Sure, you say, that's the usual trajectory after a Bachelor's degree in History.  So what if it's not "usual"?  It's me.  This, right here, is me.  I'd like to work for ASCAP - because I am not stupid enough or foolish enough to believe I can make it, talent-wise, in songwriting.  I may have had my eyes on the stars when I was younger, but I'm older now.  My dreams are smaller, if not more reasonable.  I'm content to be ordinary, forgettable.  It's what I have always been, I'd just never realised it before.