It’s officially one year that I’ve been doing what I do at CD Baby. It comes without ceremony, other than the flower I gave in memoriam to my fellow employee Robb, with whom I was trained. The company I came to then has become a different place and I different in it. I remember well the days leading up to starting here, when I was thinking a new era was about to begin, and I wondered how I would be changed. I thought of the people I’d meet and the places they’d take me and what I would learn to do. Now it is hard, if not impossible, to say where this has led.
I still get the same sensation walking up to and away from the warehouse as I did one year ago in the Portland october air. It’s the excitement and dread of moving towards new mixed all up in paradox with the fresh death from the trees, and this mingles with the somehow inspiring scent of pastries emanating from the industrial-sized European bakery next door. It’s definitely the same kind of scent you may remember if you lived in the U of O dorms when the Williams Bakery was just off campus. Something in that pervasive order of rising yeast creates a doughy euphoria that I will always, always associate with nascent self-discovery. A vital part of education at the U of O of that era, I would say.
And now people have been met, people have left, in turn I brought new people here with me. Oh so many many hours of hungover splendor I have spent, conversating with the aspiring musicians of the world! Forty hours a week to be exact, more time devoted to this than to any other project in my life, and much time spent regrouping from the trials and tribulations this work entails by way of intoxication and debauchery. The music itself, my love for which brought me to this place (the first in Portland that would have me, I should note) well it runs in an endless background loop that blurs and baries the strong feelings themselves. I am left thinking, as I so wisely intonated to a new friend the other night, (in typical unoriginal recapitulation) “it must be the colors and the kids that keep me alive / cause the music is boring me to death”
The colors and the kids. That’s what’s next. I hold them in my head as my future, what I’m working towards, but it’s becoming clear that movement impends and treading water keeps you going but still. I’m realizing in the most real way (as in fully feeling the resonance of reality as compared with one that might be so) what it would look like for my life to change in those ways–towards the day -to-day thus full-time life I want to live, away from a space and time filling inbetween. The translation from imagined to real is pressing. Without the staggered eras of high school/college/career to sheperd me through, I’m left to determine my own entrances and exits, and it would seem that’s something, in all my education and experience, I never learned how to do. That’s what’s next. I’m getting close and I can’t tell you how glad I am for that.
