JT introduced me to Rickie Lee Jones back in Sellery A.
Those were the days of vinyl and hanging out between classes and Terri, Terri, you gotta listen to this, the needle placed just so on the first track:
And as that fades, the notes slowing into silence, this kicks in:
Eighteen in a dorm room in Madison, the sun flooding in, and just JT and me, just listening.
The lyrics scatter across the music, a mosaic less of sense than mood, and then there’s this:
I’m not asking so much
I try to imagine another planet, another sun
Where I don’t look like me
And everything I do matters
To be nothing and everything, to run away and be fully there; I’ve been scampering across that teeter-totter ever since.
I wonder if that’s why, even though I’m middle-aged, I don’t quite feel grown: isn’t growing up about managing, getting past, that all-or-nothing? To come to terms with one’s presence in the world?
I haven’t, yet. Over 50 years old and I haven’t, yet.
It’s not all bad; it’s not even mostly bad. It’s okay, it’s fine.
But how can that be enough? Shouldn’t there be something more to this, one, life? I want that something more, to leave my fingerprints on something beyond me—not (just) to be remembered, but to have known something beyond myself.
I used to, back in those days. It wasn’t complicated: there were things I wanted and so went for. Not everything, (not everyone. . .) but a lot, and maybe it was running but it felt toward, not away.
Well, then the ground gave way, and gravity was suspended. Took a long time to learn how to walk again.
But it’s also been awhile since I’ve been walking, and I know, I know, I’ve written variations on this theme too many times before, but my steps don’t always reach the ground and I could use a bit of gravity.
AbsurdBeats 
“Shouldn’t there be something more to this, one, life”
you know I really thought so, traveled far and wide, in and out of various organizations/institutions/movements/etc, studied this and that, and after a few decades came to the conclusion that it was just a feeling that comes with being a certain age, personality type, and of a position of relative privileged that has no real relation to what is actually possible, was a bitter pill to swallow in some ways and yet a relief to give up the questing and being let down by the states of things, burned a lot of feathers and some good people flying like that and spent too much time and energy being angry and disappointed that life is what it is, now I try and spend less that way and be more forgiving and accepting, it’s a daily test I often fail but a day at a time as they say, peace to you my friend, d.
It’s not that my life has to be large, but that it’s mine, and it matters.
indeed, certainly wasn’t trying to suggest otherwise was thinking more in terms of the bigger picture and of my phantasy that there would be something to tap/gear into, something beyond what I might patch together.