x-amount

I dropped my acoustic on my laptop today and put a small spider shaped crack in the screen. I need to be more careful with the two things that accompany me everywhere I go. I took my first acoustic out of its misery by putting my fist through it a few weeks back. Actually, I’m shocked that guitar made it so long. My folks got it for me when I was fifteen and having my first interest in playing. The day I brought it home I put the first hole in it, one that I kept covered up with the original electrical tape that I’d placed over it that day. For the entire last year of tour it sat, in an incomprehensible tuning, in the second bench of our van, getting brought to life on long drives when Will and I would have the desire to jam or I’d have the discipline to practice my scales. I put my fist through it on the morning we returned from our final tour stretch in June. I couldn’t find my keys.

Things are good now, though. I’ve been a complete flake when it comes to seeing anyone, even people that I care for deeply. I’ve been very content in a routine of coffee shop afternoons, mostly alone, but at times meeting friends on their lunch breaks or wrangling unemployed buddies to bring their job search to the coffee shop while I spill through my fingertips onto my fresh cracked screen.

It’s strange to now be back home, surrounded by friends that are somehow all at least a year removed from college. What happened? Everyone has a real job, is getting up at a very real hour of morning, is bearing real adult responsibility. More and more friends are confounding me with the concept of making X-amount each year. I had no idea that this number, which is more of mark of profession than value, would be chained to us once we got released from the collegiate incubator. Now as I walk down Market, passing those businessmen in their confident suits, I know that in the back of their head they are turning this number over and over, breaking it down, adding it up, comparing and contrasting, dividing it by their age or the amount of women they’ve fucked. I keep to the shadows in my t-shirt and jeans, smile at the junkies, and shuffle along, counting only my blessings. I’m working on songs and writing it all down, I’m practicing guitar and doing my vocal warm-ups, I’m avoiding the brand of the dollar and decimal as long as I can.