7.1.13

And just like that Monday is almost over. I measure the end of the day in terms of how many hours I have left until I’m lying down and trying to think of why I shouldn’t go to sleep. Sleep, for me, is surrendering. Waiving the white flag. Quitting. So around 7pm I start thinking about the inevitable surrender that will take place in about five or six hours. It is both motivating and sad.

The funny part about it all is that I don’t actually dislike sleep. In fact I enjoy feeling rested in the morning. It is the act of giving up my body to sleep that generally disturbs me. Its like donating my body to a science experiment every night, during which I won’t be conscious or learn anything. In a sense, it is lost time. I’ll never get it back and in fact if I try to fight it, I end up losing more time trying to recover from not surrendering in the first place.

I’ll deal with it when I get there. Until then, there is work to be done.

I managed to get some exercise in after the office today. The physical push of the gym always evens things out for me after a long day. I’m back at the cafe. I’m drinking peppermint tea and brainstorming on an array of projects I have in front of me.

The steeping tea in front of me is a recent trend. I gave up coffee the past month. I was drinking so much coffee every day I was sure that I was going to have a heart attack. I’ll admit that I have some hypochondriac tendencies, however my excessive coffee drinking was very real and I needed  to get it in check. So the tea was both an exercise in discipline and an attempt at bettering my health — it is working well.

I made it back to Salt Lake City over the weekend. My brother Lorin, The Germ as we call him, was playing a few shows. Live music, to me, is the ultimate exercise in human understanding and perspective. I seek it out as often as I can. And I most definitely try to challenge myself and my listening. When you go to a concert of an artist you already know, you have expectations but you don’t usually have to challenge your sonic pallet. Most likely you know what you are getting into.

This weekend for me was quite the opposite. I knew my brother’s music, but the other acts were more of a surprise. Saturday was especially like that — we went to the Van’s Warped Tour. I knew very few of the bands, and yet I walked away with a half-dozen new albums to listen to because I was drawn in by the art of random folks strumming guitars and banging on things. Isn’t self-expression great? It is contagious.

Here’s a list of the albums I walked away with if you would like to venture into some new territory:

Billy The Kid – Stars, Exploding

Brian Marquis – Snow Damage

Strawberry Blonde – Warped Special Disc

Emily’s Army – Lost at 17

The Swellers – Running out of places to go