Why can’t we have it all?
31 Days of Brannan – Day 9
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Today’s Playlist: Can’t Have It All
Author’s Note: Okay, so I wrote this one yesterday but like the dork I can be – I thought I pressed PUBLISH but instead only saved it as a draft. So here it is, a day late but as they say…
I’ve been contemplating the words to this song for some time now. It’s a concept that is not foreign to any of us – gay, straight, whatever race, creed or color. We want the best in life that it has to offer. Jay’s words in this song are universal in their reach and appeal. We’ve all been there at one time or another –
applying moisturizer in the microwave window
for the tenth time, he should have call me an hour ago
would he be here with flowers if i loved in Arizona?
they say there’s no love left in the big cities, it’s kinda true
i guess you’ll find me coming soon to the small town near you
i’ll sell my guitar so i can buy myself a tractor
fuck this, this can’t be my life
i moisturized ten times tonight
why can’t i sit down and write,
bring this question to light?Chorus:
do you want a lover, or do you want a life?
one hand or the other, the butter or the bread knife?
do you choose winter, spring, summer, or fall?
it’s driving me crazy that i can’t have it all
The pondering of what if’s. Nothing could be more hellish or cyclic and demoralizing than pondering those romantically laden ‘what-if’s’ – am I right?
Yet, because we strive for that moment of recognition, the ‘I see you…’ from some we find attractive or desirable, if only to validate that we matter somehow in this crazy fucked up world. The constant swimming upstream when everyone else, who already have that special someone get to coast along with the flow of life headed in the opposite direction. If anything so we can put down the struggle to connect with another human being in a meaningful and fulfilling way.
I particularly like Jay’s turnabout moment in the ‘fuck this, this can’t be my life, I moisturized ten times tonight…’ – humorous and yet so revealing in how we all feel at that poignant moment when we feel we just can’t bear it any more. Then that specter called defeat looms over our shoulder and whispers how much simpler it’d be if we just gave up the struggle. If we just pursued some life endeavor that would cloud the loss in us. That would sweep it under the rug of being aggressive in some other fulfilling part of our psyche. Overwhelm the hole in our heart with other pursuits.
Then Jay poses the questions that hang in the balance – ‘Do you want a lover, or do you want a life?’ A simple, if complicated, question to ponder. Ultimately he is pressing the whole concept of why do we have to ponder one over the other at all. But he presses on with the inner debate –
if these walls could talk, they’d probably cry out for mercy
’till i’m outlined in chalk, i’ll be romantically thirsty
so i drink and i drink from the proverbial time sink
fuck this, this can’t be my life
tears flowing in full force tonight
why can’t i sit down and write,
bring this question to light?Chorus:
do you want a lover, or do you want a life?
one hand or the other, the butter or the bread knife?
do you choose winter, spring, summer, or fall?
it’s driving me crazy that i can’t have it all
So now we’re at the emotive moment where we’re ready to throw in the towel. We’re over it – though our hearts scream and plead with us to keep up the search, to know that he’s out there, probably just as lost and lonely and we just haven’t turned the right corner, or bumped into them accidentally at the grocery store. You know, one of those movie land moments you see in all the rom-coms? But it is in the bridge that Brannan’s distinctive brand of pathos cuts and reveals the question we all have in ourselves. No matter how confident we may be in our lives, what we feel we’re worth, there is inherently some part of us deep within that constantly ponders – will someone find me special, find me worthy of their love and devotion?
Bridge:
do we hold the future, or does it come in peace?
and if it’s in my hands, are you sure it should be in brittle hands like these?
life, love, and the pursuit of, all the things they promised me
can i have all of the above? are the best things in life truly free?
These are heady moments when contemplating the value the love of another can bring to our lives. I’m lucky. I’ve got the man in my life that has blessed me with 20 years of his life by my side. Solid, unwavering and resolute that we’ll face everything together – up unto our last breaths. And if there’s a beyond… well, I’m sure we’d find each other then. Somehow.
Which brings us to the same round of questioning as before but with a defiant turn with the last line –
do you want a lover, or do you want a life?
one hand or the other, the butter or the bread knife?
do you choose winter, spring, summer, or fall?
it’s driving me crazy that i can’t have it all
And therein lies the rub: we should be able to have it all.
The Always, Then & Now Tour…
Please check out his site with links for his upcoming shows. I am definitely a late comer to the Brannan bandwagon whenever he pulls through my city. But now that I am going this year, I am making it a goal never to miss when he swings through town. I hope you take advantage of the opportunity as well. Also be sure to check out his web store at the following link.
- Jay’s Website – jaybrannan.com
The Half-Boyfriend… we’ve all been there…
31 Days of Brannan… Day 2
Today’s Playlist: Half-Boyfriend
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So here’s the song that crystallized it for me. It made me a bonafide Brannan-ite (?), Jay-Fan (??), I’m gonna need help with that one. There’s gotta be a marketing moniker for Jay’s fans out there – The Jay Babes? I’ll keep thinking on it.
Anywho- Half-Boyfriend.
Yeah, man or woman, we’ve all been there. The guy you can’t possibly believe you’ve hooked up with but he’s hella hot in his own bad boy way, treats you like a second class citizen at times, but damned if he isn’t either great in the sack or will bust your balls with some romantic (and completely unforeseen) gesture that just makes you have one of those ‘well fuck me running’ moments. So you give in yet again, even if your brain keeps screaming behind that thick pane of glass that separates your head from your heart telling you to give him the boot but you just can’t cause he’s one hell of a number and the other guys and gals are all thinking how you so scored with that one.
Am I right?
Now, I can’t say with any certainty that that is what Jay experienced (I mean, I don’t know the man, personally) but the song had enough common truth in it that that’s what I took away from it.
For me his name was Ron. And lord did he fuck up my life for a while. He was the son of a friend that my mom knew back when she was a kid in her old neighborhood. Small world right? I mean the guy’s family moved away when my mom was still young. But somehow fate had a hand in it and Ron turned out to be gay and so did I – what were the chances of that? Say nothing of his finding his way to me?
Stupidly, I took it as a sign. The universe was saying we should be together… (yeah, not so much).
We did a lot of shit that was technically illegal (how we got away with it I’ll never know). I was in my late teens (just outta high school) and just yearning for some man on man love. Ron was energetic, he was built, he was – okay, he was a little quirky when it came to the bedroom (at least at that stage in my life). Ron was far more sexually adventurous than I was at that stage but I went along for the ride (save the dumb-ass remarks ’cause you ain’t thinkin’ anything I haven’t thought or said to myself). So I got into shit I probably shoulda saved until I was a bit more mature. But it didn’t go that way. I wanted the bad boy adventure he promised – it was wild, it was certainly dangerous, and it was flat out stupid.
Ron and I were really rarely on the same page – probably why Jay’s lines from Half-Boyfriend hit me over the emotive head rather hard:
I could give a million reasons
Why we should not be friends
Our moods change like the seasons
My mood ends your mood begins and
You’re a tease, you’re a cockblocker
You’re a loud mouth bitch, and a big talker,
But that’s okay.
You’ll grow up someday.
They are certainly what I latched onto and took away as ‘preach it, brotha…’ because in those few lines he took me right back to those heady and wild and completely stupid days of young love.
Oh, and a sidebar here – I should come clean about my fangirl stalker write up of the day before. I tend to write with tongue firmly planted in cheek. So while I have nothing but complete admiration and am often awestruck by Brannan’s prose, I am hardly the wild and nut-ball cray-cray I prattled on about in yesterday’s post. I was just having a bit of fun. I can be off that way sometimes. Partially why I get it when Jay riffs esoterically on his YouTube channel. When I am in the doldrums and can’t figure out how to get the creative juices flowing I just listen to a few of his mental musings and it’s like splashing cool water all over my tired brain. If brains could gain any benefits from such an exercise. But, well, hopefully you get my meanin’…
So back to Ron the bad-boy Half-Boyfriend in my life:
So I finally got smart, or should I say my friends and family got smarter than me at that point and made me see the light. This after a bad drug induced moment where Ron went completely off the rails and I had to, with the assistance of his parents who were then living in Seattle (we were in San Diego) have him committed to County Mental Health so he could recuperate and get some much needed help. Turns out there were a whole lot of issues I didn’t want to even look at then that came out in the wash from that little drug induced scene.
Looking back on it now, I just shake my head and thank the universe that I smartened up. In a way, I kind of thank Ron for being the whack job that he was. I got my bad boy phase through early on in life. Which led me to the man who I would spend the next ten years of my life with (and no, that’s not the hubby of 20 years that I am married to now). But more on boyfriend number 2 when we get to the post about the song that reminds me of him. I’ll let you all know when that is.
Now for a completely esoteric moment from Jay – I love it when he just does something fearless… never fails to make me smile.
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