Summer Lovin'

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life is too short

"Marry your best friend. I do not say that lightly. Really, truly find the strongest, happiest friendship in the person you fall in love with. Someone who speaks highly of you. Someone you can laugh with. The kind of laughs that make your belly ache, and your nose snort. The embarrassing, earnest, healing kind of laughs. Wit is important. Life is too short not to love someone who lets you be a fool with them. Make sure they are somebody who lets you cry, too. Despair will come. Find someone that you want to be there with you through those times. Most importantly, marry the one that makes passion, love, and madness combine and course through you. A love that will never dilute - even when the waters get deep, and dark."

-The Dame

Summer

Tomorrow is the Summer Solstice. Summer has always had a special place in my life. I think it's the first love I've really felt. I mean, I know I have parents. I love them. I will speak of them later on...but Summer, it took me and never let me go. It picked me up, guided me, filled my soul with a feeling I am sure can only be love and burning adoration.

The first real Summer I enjoyed was in the 2008. My Father had gone away to Romania, I was left with 300 dollars, an empty home and complete freedom. I was frightened and excited and happy all at once. The beginnings of adulthood and first experiences began that Summer. My bike was my method of travel. I didn't really see it as transportation though, it was like liberation... it was my method to my madness, the paved road to places I felt an insanely possessive desire to visit. All I wanted to feel like was to feel alive..and like i'm someone, a bicycle helped alleviate that hankering wanting. 

Being on the bike, riding it at night, letting it wisp me away in any direction, feeling the cool wind among the envelopment of Summer warmth, getting lost without worry... the loveliness and purity of it all was arresting and spectacular. 

My awareness of my surroundings and accepting them without needing interpretation... just acceptance as a thing of beauty was a way of existence I adopted organically--it had happened without awareness; it felt as if it had been a part me always. It is a prime example of when change is good and wonderful in all its mysterious presence.

To think that a bicycle sort of fueled all these internal changes is a bit odd and I know it but I don't care. The ability to go from place to place is magical to me. I find whatever I find to be beautiful because it feels natural to me and that is how I lead my life. 

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My Summer continued onto a sea of beach visits, falling in love with the ocean, filling pages with poems and observations and learning about myself. Summer had blessed me and shown me beauty, she showed me love, she showed me life. 

thoughts

Sometimes, I think about fear. It's an interesting phenomenon. Why are some us driven by fear and others shelter themselves from it?

I think about knowledge. How do we shape our beliefs? Why do we chose one thing over another? Is it a gut feeling... or a genuine, logical decision? What is logic anyway? It's all subjective to each and every person.

I think about the people I've met and how they are are left to just fragmented memories of the past. I see only pictures, frozen strand still moments that have occurred in vaster, more intricate occurrences. Why can't I remember entire memories, from start to finish? It's like I fill in the gaps with something I create in my mind. I can separate reality from falsehood, it's just interesting that the mind can do that.

I think about the validity of what I'm saying here. Why do my words matter? Who reads them and re-thinks their train of thought? Probably no one... but it's nice to think that it's a possibility someone will.

Lynyrd Skynyrd - Simple Man

all that you need is in your soul.

Lana Del Rey - Chelsea Hotel No 2

This is a really, really great cover of Leonard Cohen's Chelsea Hotel No 2. What's great is that I work in Chelsea. This hotel is real. A story was written about with an air of love surrounding it... and hundreds of people covered and re-sung this seemingly effortlessly gorgeous song of highly respectable proportions. Not to mention Lana Del Rey's voice is so reminiscent of Nancy Sinatra that I just feel like I'm in another era when listening to this. Songs are meant to provoke deep feelings and emotions within just a few minutes, well, this one accomplishes it. Lana, all jokes and failures aside, is an incredibly talented human being. I feel as if she fought her share of internal wars and now has fallen into the acceptable of her amazing life and finally getting the accomplishments she deserves.

The world is my vice

There's something about getting older than makes me take a step back and judge things objectively rather than subjectively. I think for the past year, I've found experiences, people and places to be fascinating and worthy of understanding which I might've overlooked otherwise. It seems as if I've the lost temporary but prolonged fear I gained when I moved out on my own; and frankly, it's a good feeling. I think an essential component of life is experience and permitting your steps to be taken outside of a comfortable area. Growing the desire to push forward in life and perceiving yourself as an integral part of the world are of deep, deep significance for one's well being. You must value your life, see it as a gigantic jenga game, and apply that rule to your happiness amongst the billions of others you will never meet but have a deeply significant relation to. Everyone has a battle, inwards or outwards, we are all facing difficulties, obstacles, decisions, misfortunes, winnings... even the richest, seemingly happy people fight battles whether they speak of it or not. We must understand that we are all together and related in ways we will never completely comprehend but still find fascinating and worthy of respecting.

I know what I'm saying now is in a way contradictory of my long held beliefs that we are NOT equal, and that we are meant to be separate. I feel in love with Ayn Rand's philosophy that the intelligent and highly valuable people of society should be separated and kept together in order to maintain the motor of the world but really, it's too idealistic and frankly, impossible. I still find her writing and philosophies to be on a level of genius that I will forever respect and and very partially agree with but alas, there will never be a hidden an imaginary valley in Colorado reserved for the great minds of the world to escape to. We should eliminate our need to "escape" from the seemingly mediocrity of what surrounds us because really, everything is beautiful. It's so beautiful that I almost can't take it. Even the tiny leaves on the tree in front of my apartment building fill me with such joy. I've always had this need to be reminded that the world is still running, people are still going about their lives, and nothing has changed. It's the reason why I keep my window open when I sleep, to hear the sounds of the world before I fall into a slumber... so I can drift into another bizarre world while the real one is still alive and well, patiently waiting for me to awake. I think my growing appreciation of life and everything that surrounds me is the true joy in one's being, or at least in mine. We all find appreciation and love in what we are drawn towards... well, the entire world is my vice. I am addicted to the world and everything about it, all the horrors, the wonders, the beauty, the love, the hatred, all facets of it. I love it all.