My Favorite Ryan Adams Blog Post
This is my favorite Ryan Adams blog post so far. It is just lovely. I copied the entire post so I can read it after he deletes it. I hope he doesn’t mind. I imagine it’s kind of strange to post things and have people copy and paste them all over the place and to have little control over it. I would love to be as free and confident with words, but I think I have not spent enough time on writing to be that way, or maybe it’s just not in me. Enjoy:
An ONLINE MUSIC publication described my blog as “bi-polar”. Isn’t that sweet.
I love that. I think it was especially due to my use of “Fickle-Blogging” which is really the lovely process of creating a blog, giving it an actual life-span (I actually time them sometimes, by the minute), then destroying that blog. So that it is actually like a memory or like weather. I enjoy the idea of the blog being an actual entity outside it’s creator. Like a Robot. Like I was just a suggestion and the blog itself were the vessel. Very abstract, sure, hardly “bi-ploar.”
Of note, when I am being honest in my blogs (which only I know because I choose to fill them with truths distracted by absurdity) I touch on real subjects that affect me which I have never hidden in my work. Depression being one of those things. Panic disorder being another.
I think maybe I came from a time, and maybe even a place, where examining and even allowing one’s self to feel everything, was normal. What a lesson it is for me now that I am older to become less afraid to let myself have those feelings. All of them. I am quite sure passionate people do this. They feel elated, and other times they feel sad. I know, in a single day, those things happen to others. Certainly my books can’t all be just fictional characters based on actual people who did not feel. To feel things, is human. To let yourself go into those feelings and translate what happened, and what it meant, well, that takes discipline.
And you know, I don’t have an “off” switch. I never did. I had to pay for alcohol and fog up at least one night of a week in my past so I could feel like I was starting all over. But now, it is one long life. No breaks. And that comes with a lot of new feelings which build and become beautiful, and even, sometimes very sad or strange statues of time and emotion. I am blown away by just how much information I collect over time. It is great. And powerful and I love life, even the bleakest and darkest nights. They all break, eventually, with the light of a new day, or sometimes, hidden behind those awful moments the loveliest treasures emerge. Like a gift.
I enjoy writing about it all. It feels very true.
It is a shame that so many people try so hard to be something they are not, to seem even, at the expense of not getting to know what it is to be free in your feelings. And I am lucky to be able to express myself in so many ways. I taught myself all the forms of art I know, so I go to them honestly and my relationship with my medium is always solid and not filled with hesitation. This makes me so happy and has all my life allowed me to be my own best friend when I needed it the most. When the world was just too disappointing. And especially when I was the one behind that disappointment.
So I guess what I am saying here right now is, it feels good to be true to what I am. It feels right to be a lot and sometimes a mess and sometimes a good listener and sometimes bat-shit crazy.
It is the nature of being me.
And also, after all this time, no matter what the perception, I always know I am the very basic thing I always wanted to be;
PUNK AS FUCK.
have a nice week.[posted 3.24.08 on DRADAMSFILMS.com]
Update: 3.25.08 He’s already deleted the post, and the one after that too, with the robot cat and cloven hooves, which I also enjoyed.
Related Post:
i want to thank you for keeping up with him and his erratic blogging and for saving and then sharing something this delightfully thoughtful
You are most welcome. It’s still one of my favorite posts, if not my favorite.
I as well want to thank you for keeping the best Ryan Adams blog posts up. I only stumbled into this today, and will return tonight to read one and all of these. Life is but a fragile thing, and like the man says – like the weather, or a memory, it’s gone too soon.
It’s been a while since anyone posted about this, but I just stumbled across it. I really think that by copying this and posting it online that you are somehow violating the truth Ryan speaks in his post. If you kept it for yourself, that’s one thing, but to copy it and post it online almost seems wrong. I dunno. Just a thought.
I did think about whether or not I should post re-blogs of RA before I put them up. People were re-blogging him all over the place, so it was out there, and not really necessary to have a record of it on my blog, but it is my blog, so I figure I should put up whatever I feel like and share stuff that I like. I also considered how I would feel if someone copied my words and put them up somewhere. I came to the conclusion that if things are quoted in context, the source is cited, it’s not libelous, and not against the person’s wishes, then I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it.
This blog is also a record of me, at a certain time, stuff that I liked, hated, cooked, ate, watched on TV, eavesdropped, photographed, read, and felt like writing about or documenting. And sometimes I was just bored. In any case, I really liked that RA post, and I still do. At that time, I thought RA’s blog was the best thing on the internet, and better than most television. Seriously. And it seemed silly to rave about something and not put up examples, especially when I knew the links would be dead fairly shortly.
My intentions weren’t to say “You shouldn’t do this because it’s wrong.” or anything. I’m glad that I got to read his post long after he had taken it down, by you posting it here. Just simply saying that it seems contrary to RA’s words for his blog to become a concrete thing, taking it from a ‘memory’ or ‘weather’. Maybe I’m just bad at relaying what I mean. Not saying that you are doing anything wrong by it, just taking some of it’s meaning away. Like you writing an intimate love letter than no one is supposed to ever see, throwing it away, someone finding it, and posting it for the world to see long after. I’m still glad I got to read it here :)