the fear is coming...

not to be dramatic or anything, but i think it might be in the mail.
i just spent a while looking up people i used to know on myspace. that's usually not a good sign. it's also not the best feeling.
it seems like when you have really strong feelings for someone at any given time you don't even really see them as a person- just some kind of idea of a person that you see and perceive (project even?) when you look at them. it takes some time and some perspective to really see that sort of thing. i know that i did this an awful lot when i was young. what brought this on you say? i was riding the train to work this morning and i thought that i saw someone who looked like laura mcrae and it made me think about what it would feel like to talk to her. it wasn't a good feeling- mainly because i don't know about that ridiculous little letter i wrote to unburden myself. it helped me get past that whole obsession, but if she ever got it and read it it probably just passed the burden on to her, which makes me feel very bad for having done that. what a terrifying thing to have to live with. but i guess i've kind of paid a price too- i dredge this up and agonize over it.
i dunno. i guess i'm a bit intense whether i like to admit it or not and not in a good way i don't think. it's something that's a bit scary even to me.
i'm not going to make any sense right now.
i'm listening to this elliott smith bootleg compilation that i made. it's about 40 songs long and goes from 1994 to 2001. the bootlegs are especially sad now because they capture these incredibly intimate moments that heightens the sadness in his music. plus he tells all kinds of stories and muses a bit oftentimes. he also fucks up a lot and it just all kind of brings all of the humanity of it into such sharp focus. about a week after he died i was driving around listening to 'either/or' and i'd turned '2:45am' up really high because it's my favourite song on the record and because it's also at a very low level and driving around downtown portland i could suddenly hear all of this incredibly intimate stuff on the recording that i'd never been able to hear before- you could hear his tongue hitting his teeth- his breathing on the rhythm track, the creaking of a chair he was sitting on. it was just so strange in a way that's impossible to describe. normally when you listen to recordings it's stuff that gets covered up and disguised or edited out. i've gotten stuff like that all over my recordings and it just seemed at that moment to be so incredibly precious and miraculous. it's these strange and tiny seemingly insignificant sounds that are suddenly captured for all time. the fact that these tiny 'accidents' have outlived the person who made them makes them all the more unsettling. the more i go and continue making recordings and releasing records, the more i begin to believe that there is no such thing as an accident. it's very odd.
how this ties in with the whole myspace nostalgia-fueled guilt i'm not real sure. i guess that the unsettling feeling i describe is the same way that i feel when i think about things i've done or said or even thought in the past about real people that i'm ashamed of now. on a recording it's a beautiful thing. in real life it's just unsettling in a bad way. it never ceases to amaze me the amount of things in our lives that are solely ruled by chance and randomness. and luck. i don't feel like i have much luck. or charisma.