I'd rather die than try to keep her by my side.

Maybe sometimes all we need to get inspired is a change of pace, a different point of view. Took a road trip with my roommate to Charleston on Friday. Eight and a half hours = a lot of music. He drives a stick so I didn't get to actually drive at all, but even just riding in the car and listening to music made me feel more like myself. I couldn't even tell you all the things we listened to in those hours that just made me feel. Made me feel anything at all. It gets to the point where being numb is such a shield. You get tired of being tired or sad or agitated and it all just melds into this light sheen of numbness and you stop consciously noticing how you feel at all. Some days I am so bored with myself that I cannot even function at something close to normally.

I heard Black Rebel Motorcycle Club (B.R.M.C) for the first time in August, driving to Philadelphia with Sharon. They stand out to me because they sound like something I should already know. This is the only song of theirs that Jimmy had on his iPod but it was enough. I haven't been able to get it out of my head since Friday. "Love Burns" off of B.R.M.C., their first album. Which was out in 2001. Clearly, I am behind the curve on this one.

How to describe this song? Layered. To the point of being unable to claim that it is guitar or drum driven. The vocals come dangerously close to being too perfect for my liking. They are a producer's dream. Melding perfectly with the rest of the band. Classic. And if you weren't paying attention to the lyrics, you'd think this was some typical love song, lamenting the loss. But, it's not. It's about unhealthy obsession. Not even with the person you were in the relationship with or the relationship itself, but with the drama that goes along with it. Nothing else can hurt us now, no loss.

Does love feel sweeter or more urgent or more real when it hurts? Are we less accepting of the kind of love that everyone claims to want but, that isn't as fetishized as the kind that's a constant uphill battle? I mean, isn't that the plot of every other romantic comedy? Creative fodder. How infinitely more satisfying it is coming from music. I wish that I was more inspired by actual events currently, but somehow it's so much easier to write about the dark than it is the light. Especially when I feel like I am, literally, in some alternate universe of perpetual dark and cold.

I am turning to bluesy, smoky-voiced and garage rock driven bands to get me through this horrid painful winter. Though, to be perfectly honest, I'd much rather be listening to this in my car with the windows down, wearing something scandalous en route to places warm, smoky and boozy. A year ago I would have added something about kissing strangers to that last sentence, but somewhere over the past few years that particular thrill left the building. And somewhere over the past six months, I've ceased romanticizing pain and started to re-cultivate an appreciation for the real thing.