At the Risk of Sounding Like a Fanboy

The cover of this month’s Paste displays a photo of Death Cab For Cutie‘s Ben Gibbard surrounded by books and backed by an odd biblical-esque light. He wrote the cover article. It seems weird to me—I don’t altogether like his prose, though for a long time I thought I would as I do like his songwriting, fictional and no, very much. The concrete peculiar feeling I get from this article is how much I feel like my life is following a pattern similar to Gibbard’s. He describes his interest in Kerouac’s works:

I read On The Road in college. I was 18 or 19 … and found myself reading it between classes, and at that time in my life it was exactly what I craved, exactly what I needed to hear. I thought, “That’s the way, that’s the ideal life, that’s great” … The romance of the road, particularly from Kerouac’s work, encapsulated how I wanted to live.

But then in reading Big Sur, it’s the end of the road. You end up with a series of failed relationships and you end up being an alcoholic and in your late 30s, and not having any kind of real grip on the lives of the people around you. That’s the potential other end of the spectrum when you’re never tied to anybody or anything. I run the risk of losing touch with the people in my life that mean the most to me…

What I’m saying is not that Gibbard was in a handful of failed bands in high school, then at 21 attended college in western Washington and started a band and later became huge so therefore I, at 21, with experiences from a defunct band will start a band at university in western Washington that will make me huge. What I am saying is that I’ve been slowly, unintentionally collecting all of these parallels to Mr. Gibbard that produce and reinforce a worry in me that my life will go unfulfilled. I feel the need to move all the time and I want to be in a band again and write music I’m proud of and not care if anyone hears it. But that kind of prosperity comes to very few people. My worry is that I’m going skip straight to losing touch and die broke and alone with a series of personally unfulfilling jobs and relationships in my wake.

A further question: is that how it will really be or just how I assume I will see my life then (this assumption being an extension of my current worldview)? But that’s altogether tangential.

None of this really had a point, but then, most blogs suffer that same pitfall. I just have to write it and you just have to read it and that’s my unspoken agreement with the anonymous Internet.

The article is really telling and very interesting. Gibbard explains his songs and his songwriting, playing shows, getting old, and other stuff. You should read it.

Today I woke up at 1:18pm. I don’t know what possessed me to sleep so late, but I was having dreams that were strange and creepy but not unfamiliar somehow. I need to eat and maybe get some tea at some point. It’s been a while since I’ve been to Remedy.