It’s amazing how fast my life has changed. 19 years of building a life in a small town, capped off and put in a jar for safe keeping. To look at, to pick up and inspect from all angles, but not to touch. Everday is a new experience now, occassionally I have to stop and reflect on what exactly is happening, and how the hell I got here.

One year ago I was in highschool, just barely passing. Doing anything I could to escape reality. A teenage cliche. No direction, no longing for direction, living for the day, doing absolutely nothing in school.

That person has fallen away, like a flower petal and the peak of its growth. I’ve collected all the knowledge and experience of nineteen years, massed it in to a giant ball of experiences, and am now using it as my guide for the future. To not do the same things, to clean myself up in areas, and to loosen up in others.

Sometimes I lay awake at night, just staring blankly in to the pitch black room, and if I do this long enough it’s as if I'm dreaming. Any moment I might wake up. But for now I live this dream, I get up in the mornings and I go about my business that is so foreign to me, but somehow, like a dream, it’s completely natural. Each step seems to have an order to it, each thought seems as if its been spun from the yarn of orderly chaos. It’s like an abstract painting that at first doesn’t quite reach you, but once it does it’s like a tidal wave, it hits you like a freight train, with all the power of raw emotion backing it.

Tomorrow is the death cab for cutie concert (dismemberment plan opening). It’s going to be so awesome. This band has quickly become the source of many of my inspirations. They're often heard playing in the background as I lye on the floor working for what seems like days on my art assignments, or sitting at this computer writing until my brain just can’t produce any more.

ps. this great and wonderful person gave me some space for my songs on fading.org. So I posted a couple more songs to the song section today.

In a world where popularity is the deciding factor, and television controls, and majority rules. In a world where we elect our officials with dollars. That is where we live. We live in a world of filth, where our leaders are great actors. In world where a bomb sais a thousand words, and why say it when we can drop it? Where I can walk down a street and see a blind man begging to survive. In a world where a mask is our only shield from the constant barrage of bullets, aimed at our foreheads. This where we live, my friends.

but

In the mornings when I wake and the breeze brushes against my face, and the sun is on my back, everything is perfect. When someone says hi for no reason, it’s perfect. When I stay up just a little too late, and drink just a little too much, just for the sake of being social, its perfect. And when I’m driving, my window cracked, the wind in my hair, the city’s buildings my only landscape, its perfect.

The trick is to find the medium. To block out just enough of the shit to let everything else shine through. Thats a tough balancing act, a life lesson even.

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I just put my song page up, but I ran out of space and I've got a couple more to post. If anyone knows of a good place that I can put my songs, with ftp access, let me know. Or, if anyone has any space they can share, I would be eternally grateful.

Sometimes I have these thoughts, and I wonder, and as I’m wandering about in landscape of a thought, certain things pop up at me, landmarks, scars, holes, everything. I wonder if there is someone who has thought the same thought, and dissected its every morsal, as I have. If they have discovered things like I have. I just don’t know.

Sometimes, while walking, my eye will catch something. The faintest, most obscure things will catch my eye. A leaf, with its incredible fractal patterns, or a rock with a peculiar shape, anything. Somehow these things are compiled in my mind. Like an index of inspirations. But sometimes, while I can see them there and there presence is very real and organic, I just can’t touch them. It’s like a barrier from beautiful things. It’s all there, in my head, every beautiful thing I can imagine, but it’s like I’m diving after a moving target when I try to get to it.

Sometimes It’s all I can do to block out the negative, pushing against a falling brick wall. Beauty is farthest thing from my mind as I devote all of my energy toward blocking out its counterpart; pain. And its hard. Really hard.

And as the dust settles and I can smell the air, thick like black tar, dawn is appearing over the hill. Reaching back, hands in the air, my eyes gazing at the rock that, only moments before, was my rocket, my weapon against the world. My one and only shot at breaking through the mucus sky and killing the stars. With all my might I flung that rock, so hard I could feel my joints crack. And I saw the heavens split open. I had destroyed the world, I just knew it.

Welcome to the new cracksinthepavement redesign.

this is the type of hair im talking about. this image is lola from the film run lola run. its a good one.

I wrote a long entry today, one full of introspection and notes on society. Then I started talking to this girl and all of that flew out the window. We got on the topic of girls with bright red hair, and how I thought it was a sexy. Well, somehow I was inspired to write a song about girls with bright red hair, because really, they are great. (right guys?)
Anyways this one is a pop song, kind of, and I'm not proud of that, but that's the way it came out and who am I to argue with myself? I dedicate it to all you beautiful bright redheaded girls out there.

It's kind of a crappy song, and a less-then-great recording because I'm poor and can't afford real recording equipment.
Josh - red and orange hair.mp3
*edit
here are the crappy lyrics, if anyone cares
i can see you there
with your red and orange hair

staring at me
with my plain brown hair

i can count your stars
and i want to be there

i see you there
and i wonder
where you are

i count your stars
and im not there
you dont care

Foreseeing a boring day yesterday, my roommates, our friend who spent the night, and I all went down to pioneer square to waste our day away playing hacky sack. Somehow the four of us managed to create a crowd, before we knew it we had ten people playing. It started with a couple homeless guys who just jumped in without saying a word and started playing, then some teenagers jumped in. To my right, About 30 feet from us, there was a choir of blind kids who's singing was incredible. Behind me, about 15 feet from away, there was a guy selling dime bags, they make themselves so incredibly obvious that its amazing they don't get caught.

So, there we were. Ten guys guys, most of which I had never met before, kicking a hacky sack around, a blind choir, and a drug dealer. Pioneer square is a fruit salad of people.