User blog comment:VikingFyre/Strange Memories/@comment-7706473-20130917101643

Maybe there is nowhere to go; maybe from here, we find ourselves in a long spiral of introspection and looking to the past while reaching for the future, and feeling both trickle through our fingers like so many grains of sand.

... I love history. I'm intelligent enough to know that if I went back as far to the places I feel the most kinship to in my mind, I would probably last a day before something horrible happened, gahahaha. But that doesn't change the fact that this modern world - well, saddens me. I could say depress, or anger, or anything - but all of those are too emotional, too instinctual.

Instead, there's just this feeling... Why *can't* we get along more? Why isn't there a sense we should be amongst the stars - or failing that, stardust? It isn't actually very hard to be nice or pleasant, despite what naysayers may say - though it does take energy, perhaps - and will. And I'm a hypocrite, as I am rather bitter person. Hmrn, maybe more-so online, actually... That's kinda weird to think about -

Looking at metal - this actually applies to a lot of punk and goth ballads as well, though those poor genres have been misused and appropriated so much that I doubt some people would know them under the layer of pop-punk and scene - many of the most touching and beautiful, even hopeful, songs I have heard have been metal. Symphonic metal, folk metal, classic metal, speed metal - songs to warm the soul on a day when the weather is cool and the people are cruel.

But in how many of those songs - for some reason I'm thinking exclusively of Rhapsody's Beyond the Gates of Infinity which isn't even that great a song, but comes to mind at this moment - are messages of escape, of longing reference to another day, or time, or place..? Even in our music, we long for otherwheres, lands beyond the sea that do not, or no longer exist. It matters not which.

... I think personally, I can live with the wistfulness and late-night wondering, the feeling of being in the wrong time. It is the vapidity and unhappy acceptance of that vapidity - we make games about the social media we waste time on in between playing actual games, where the point is to accrue likes on fictional social media..! - that wears me down.

All that aside - I don't think it's bad to feel this way. Some of the strength I find to keep writing comes from the bitterness I feel about all of this, and some part of me that still just wants to pick and braid flowers keeps me from becoming a horrible, hateful person with no redeeming qualities whatsoever!.. So perhaps this Link to the Past (aha!) is something good. Something that keeps us human and alive in an increasingly dead-but-walking age, and tells us that just as the past seems so far away and the future seems yet to come - so too will this age fall.

Memento mori; remember you are but mortal. Well, that was quite a rant, and I don't know if I made nearly as much sense as I thought I did - but between yourself, Flaky, and myself, that is at least three metalheads (of sorts) on the wiki! I'll count that as a small, and extremely cheerful little victory - and take it as such.