I stayed home on a Friday night while my friends all partied. I said I needed to clean, that I felt sick, but the truth is I just wanted to feel alone. I did clean, and I didn’t feel great, but I never got to feel alone. My thoughts accompanied me. They were louder than your stupid party or your band’s set.

They comforted me, yet tore me apart. What do I want? What am I doing? Why do I long for solitude? Why won’t they leave me be? I missed the feeling of feeling alone.

My biggest fear is living a life in which I will never have nights like this again; alone with my thoughts. To be sucked into a relationship or a life that requires so much of me. One that I can’t run from. A person who will take away the carefree, nomadic life I live. I like the way things are. I don’t know how to tell you, or even myself. Or the others. I feel so detached from my own feelings and I needed this night to try to reconnect with them, but I sit here with my pen and my pad and I stare out the window at this beautiful life I have and I’m not sure that I ever want to give this up.

I think I’ll just do whatever I want all the time and stay detached from my thoughts and feelings and have Saturday nights alone with my thoughts while you go out.

Dopeness for my Saturday night.

equalibrum:

Intuition - Best Fool (Prod by Equalibrum)

Lee on the vocals. Myself on the beat. Video filmed at Knocksteady

I am too embarrassed to get up to pee. There are so many weird smells. Why did I take the bus? I really want a cigarette. No fucking wifi!? The girl sitting next to me is too loud on the phone. Do people think I am a hipster? Why is this bus so packed? Don’t these people have to work tomorrow? I hate New Jersey. I hate my friends. I want to eat my weight in Chinatown. I will be an anorexic vegan when I get back. I miss the feeling of feeling alone. People are fucking stupid. I really want to wash my hands. I miss my dog. Why can’t I say anything positive right now? I wish I was actually hand writing this. Arcade Fire sucks, what was I thinking? Time is going backwards. I need a rich boyfriend. Am I really just smelling myself? I bet I have xanax somewhere. My life is so much better than everyone else’s. I wish I had cooler friends. If I wasn’t so freaked out on this bus, I bet I could make new friends. What if something magical happened and I got to NY an hour early? I wish I could stop thinking. Brand New is so depressing. I wonder if the girl next to me thinks I am an asshole for having two phones. I wonder how many people can say they’ve peed while driving down 95. I wish I could work right now. What if we all die? Dottin’ I’s and crossin’ T’s when I should be watchin’ P’s and Q’s. Why are we stopped on the Jersey fucking turnpike? I have a hard time differentiating this dubstep mix from Super Mario Bros. I don’t understand dubstep. These headphones hurt. I might have midget ears. If I stare at some one long enough, it looks like they are rapping to this track. New York Fucking City. I wish I had the balls to move here. Why would you bring a freaking child on the bus? Why don’t you have a car? What is going on!? Are you strangling it!? FUCK. That was the longest three hours of my life.

Pop playing the “harp” (harmonica) and singing to my dog :)

There is no need to be light about the situation. The man I love most is dying and I can’t say how I will go on with the rest of my life. I’ve been here, for sure, 5 years ago (this month, actually) when my own father passed away and as much as I loved my own dad, his dad is the last of a dying breed.

I’ve spent a lot of time with my grandfather (Pop, Gene-o, Edgar, etc.) in my lifetime and I can say that he has been the person who has shaped me the most. In the past few months, he has been sick with CDIV and congestive heart failure and at 83, it is his time to go. I sit here tonight surrounded by those family members (the ones who could be here) that I love most as we care for the founding father, the glue, of our family. As I take a look around the house he built, I realize that this is probably one of the last times I will be here. Everything looks untouched as it did when I was a child. For as long as I can remember, this has been the gathering place for my wild and crazy family, with two amazing grandparents, their 8 (now 6- RIP Uncle Rick and my Daddy, Melvin) children, 27 (I think?) grandchildren and ten great grandchildren. This house holds a special place in my heart and this turning of the page will certainly end a very happy and wonder-filled chapter of my life; the legendary Pop and his house in the Allegheny mountains.

This house both terrified and amused me as a child. I hated sleeping here, but loved being with the family, and after all these years, my perception of it has not changed a bit. Also unchanged is the decor and feeling of the home. This timeless place reminds me that although I am a 26-year-old on my own, I can be transported back to a time when holidays were cheerful and I had not a care in the world. Everything is untouched, the same as it was when I was 7 and giggling on the floor with ten of my cousins while we waited for the Easter Bunny.

My grandfather, pictured below, still looks a lot like this guy:

Such a stud! Edgar Eugene Cornelison (Gene or Pop) had 8 children, but here are 4 and a half (my grandmother is pregnant here- are fetuses half a baby?):

(My dad is the shy one on the left. Isn’t he the cutest? I miss him terribly.)

This lovely wall houses pictures of the whole family. Above are the ones of my dad’s wife and kids; my mutha, my sister Lisa Lu and myself.

This is a picture of all the grandkids up until about ‘94 or so? There were like ten more after that. I am on the far left.

Here is my close up. I still look exactly the same and this is the age I am transported to when I walk into this house.

I remember running down the hallway as fast as I can because I was scared to DEATH of this elf/ gnome thing. It has not moved from its spot in over 26 years. I want to have it to scare my own grandkids one day, but for now, I am still scared of it.

I guess my Nanny like to decorate with gnomes because there are definitely more than just this.  Interesting….

The bathroom is decorated in a wicker butterfly motif ( insert Girl, Interrupted reference here). That blue color is TERRIBLE. Why did everyone do the whole powder blue thing back then? (Ant, you know what I am talking about; your dad’s living room).

EVERYTHING is powder blue. The sink, the curtains, the bath mats, the shower curtain. But then, you have this:

It’s my favorite… and its IN the shower. Trippy, man.

The porch is still complete with (I’m sure of this) the same coats, hats and signs as 1988.

And check this couch out:

SO 70s… I think we call it vintage now.

And then there was the basement:

Is that not some creepy shit!? Ugh. I HATED this place when I was a kid, but it was the only place we could go to misbehave and get in to all kinds of trouble.

More creepiness… I think it is the barren floors and halogen lighting.

My cousin’s locked me in this closet once and I screamed until my dad came and got me. It used to be filled with all of my great grandmother’s stuff.

I used to book it up these steps when I was little just to get out of that basement. (Look how cute my dog is!)

There are 5 porches in this house. There are always signs hanging. A lot of them make references to “porch monkeys” which I never understood until recently.

This deer is probably older than I am. Complete with trucker hats and wind chimes?

So many Jesus and angel pictures! This was really eerie to me when I was young. My mom is jewish and we weren’t raised with much religion, so I was always weirded out by all of it.

Pop has a LOT of tractors. Like ten. We used sit in the front-end loaders and go for rides when we were little. In retrospect, this was really dangerous.

Truth.

The house that built me :) There were a lot of easter egg hunts and hide-and-go-seek games in this yard.

So many birdhouses everywhere! Pop likes birds because they sing like he does. Last night he wanted me to watch American Idol with him because the girls “sing pretty like a canary bird.” I will post a video of him singing.

The last of the dinosaurs, as we call him. I will miss the house, the memories and most of all, him. I love you Pop and I will see you on the other side.

whydoihaveablog:

Talking like a jerk
Except you are an actual jerk
And living proof that sometimes friends are mean 

Killing it with close inspection
Killing it can only make it worse
It sort of makes it breed 

grayandgreen:

- “Sorry, it’s just that I have this pogo stick and I like to jump on it while each of my 100 dogs runs around me.”

- “Sorry, it’s just that I’m a dinosaur and I love to go bowling.”

- “Sorry, it’s just that I like to lay out thousands of rolling pins side by side and try to run across them.”

-…

I’ve lost a lot of good people in my life. I’ve lost the ones I’ve loved most. Those who guided me through my (almost) 26 years and people who have touched my soul in a way I cannot describe. This morning, I woke up with a new day ahead of me. As I scroll through my facebook feed and realize I have lost another friend, a sad realization hit me.

Ron and I met through a mutual friend in 2008 when I was working for the radio station. He attended Phil’s church and wasn’t from this area. He would come to all of our promotion events and was like an instant brother to me. He walked to me to the store late at night, helped me move, shared turtle lattes with me, told me all about his kids and kept in touch even when he was sent to Afghanistan. I had just talked to him last week.

The reality that struck me and what I can take away from this as a whole is that we are still at war. WE ARE STILL AT WAR. You see it on TV, talk about it in passing, hear about some one else losing a military loved one. It does not truly hit you until you realize that some one you hold dear to you is over in another country fighting for your own while you are (in my case) battling spreadsheets and deciding what shoes to wear that day.

The news of sending the troops home was a relief to many, myself included, but we have been fighting this war (on terror, on drugs, on capitalism, etc.) for ten years now. A decade. My life was very different and much more simple ten years ago. In the last ten years I have graduated high school, college, gotten a job, moved 7 times, laughed, loved, cried and have not once thought about the reality of war until today. I knew it was there, I paid attention to the news, I talked openly about it with those who surrounded me. It did not full hit me until today. The actualization that my friend had put his life on the line so that my peers can concern themselves with the Kardashians.

It’s a strange thought to process. It gives you a whole new sense of meaning to the insignificant life you may be leading. We are still at war (we always were, silly) and there are people facing battles (real ones) that are different from yours. Trying to be a part of a bigger picture and fully comprehending it is something I had not actualized until today. I am sorry to see you go, Ron, but thank you for opening my eyes and thank you for protecting my right to freedom. RIP.

My Life with Ron

Ron’s Real Life

If that doesn’t put a perspective on things, then I don’t know what will.

darksilenceinsuburbia:

Jimmie Martin. Love Hurts - Chair.

http://www.jimmiemartin.com

Truth

darksilenceinsuburbia:

Danni Zamudio. Knives Out.