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You know, you know, you know.

I've been on kind of a music playing binge these last couple of days. Playing all the songs I can remember on all the instruments that I can for as long as I can. I had a couple conversations with a couple of people about music and life and other things and they both really hit home. Like a punch in the gut. Or a split reed on a lip.

Or something that sticks with you for a while. Not the best feeling. Life's going by pretty quickly now, and I'm still spinning in circles trying to do everything I want. Scattered. Too interested in everything. I've got to sit down and figure out what I actually can do with the time I've got left because time is not a luxury I really have. Which is also not the best feeling. There are just too many things out there I want to be into. It's not fair that I can't do all of them, I think. I'm afraid that if I let music become a side thing for me that I'm going to end up dropping it almost entirely.

Actually, it is a side thing for me and I'm in the middle of dropping it almost entirely. It's hard to accept that. It's also hard to play saxophone and clarinet now. The fingers are jumpy and stiff. There's no control. All I've really got left is guitar, and I'm not satisfied with that being the only thing.

It's just like with the rest of my life. Everyone else seems to be having a much easier time deciding what they want to do. Like being screenwriters, or physician's assistants, or teachers, or married.

I can't go a full day without somebody bringing up marriage with me. What's the deal with that? It's like there's some kind of marital virus in the air and everybody is infected except me because I'm immune via grace of internally freaking out but the virus is sentient and wants to infect me which is why everybody talks to me about marriage all the time. It's freaking me out. I can't understand how someone could be sure it was the right time, right person, right everything to get married. People are worrying about parental blessings and details about marriage and weddings that I don't even know anything about and I'm sitting around moping about how I don't play enough music. I feel like a little kid stuck in the office on 'bring your kid to work day' watching all the grown ups carry on with their lives.

Like, it's not even something I want to worry about yet I worry about it because everyone else keeps bringing it up and giving me reasons to worry about it. If there hadn't been a rash of marriages these last couple of months I definitely would not even be thinking about it. It would be so far down on my worry list I'd have to go through at least ten pages of worry before I got to it.

And don't even get me started on babies. What the fuck!

When I was younger I was convinced that I would live out my days in solitude, working some kind of antisocial, loner job. And when I was even younger than that I was convinced I would spend my nights on the town as a masked vigilante. But now that I'm much wiser and world-weary, I've come to realize the inevitability of marriage and, with resignation, children. People think I would be a good father for some reason. I am not ready to worry about things like that.

So I'm just not going to worry about it anymore. I'm just straight up not going to think about it until my friends lean across the table while we're out eating lunch and whisper things like, "Holy shit, dude: why aren't you married yet?" and my parents call me on the weekends to say things like, "You still aren't married? You clearly have failed the family by not progressing the lineage."

But tomorrow I'm going to Houston to look at Star Wars stuff, so, you know, there's that and I'm pretty excited about it. Ashley is considerably less excited, but, you know. That's just how it goes.

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