#condorandjaybird

The genesis of this blog is quite bleak - I have anxiety (like many do) and I often feel alone (like many do), and somehow my boyfriend’s passion for music increases both of these characteristics tenfold. Especially when he’s on tour, which he currently is...but we’ll get to that.

I’d like to introduce this blog by telling you a bit about how my boyfriend came to love music and how we came to love each other - and from here on out, I’m just going to call him Jake. I asked him to tell me about how his passion for music formed, and this is what he said:

“Well there were always guitars in the house and my mom had us singing in church from the time I was two or three, so I didn’t really have a choice of like being around it or not. Then, when I was 11, I discovered punk rock music because my cousin Daniel gave me a cassette tape that had a bunch of MXPX songs on it. One day, in sixth grade, my homie Garret Traylor had an MXPX shirt on at school and I was like “Whaaaat you know about that band?! How’d you get their t-shirt?”. So he invited me over to hangout and listen to music and stuff. When I got there, his older brother happened to be gaming in a band and all of their gear was in the basement - that was the first time I held a bass. I immediately had to get one. My grandpa bought me my first bass when I turned 12. In the seventh grade, my friend asked me to come play in the Junior High worship band at Heritage Church and I suppose *the rest is history*.”

For the record, he doesn’t know why I asked, or even that I’m writing a blog. Generally, while I will shamelessly promote the band that he currently participates in because they are G R E A T, I don’t plan on Jake having a huge role in my writing.

Rather, I would like to focus on how it feels to love someone that loves music more than anything. You can substitute the noun “music” for literally any other noun in the English language, and the sentiment would still burn like citrus in a wound. Some may read about this sentiment and think it’s ridiculous - that no one should love anything in the world more than the person they choose to love...not only do I not agree with such a hyperbolic statement, but I think it is THE best way to love another human. Because in order for a human to love a thing more than another human, they have to (1) want to search for that thing (2) actually search for it (3) open their mind and heart to letting that thing change them (4) and then let it change them. Often, I think that it’s so difficult to even perceive Step 1, let alone the ripple effect that Step 4 has one the people in our immediate lives.

American culture tends to perpetuate the idea that this Four Step process is most gratifying when applied to the pursuit of love with another human. I’d say that John Cusack is about 95% responsible for my own misgivings about the emphasis romance needs to have in my daily life - with movies like “High Fidelity” and “Say Anything”, what hope does a girl have?

It doesn’t help that from the moment I met Jake, our relationship has been filled with cinematic-style drama. We have been dating on and off for the past six years, but it wasn’t until November of last year that we truly decided on each other; we moved in together in January of 2017. I naively believed that we would be immune to the struggles common to couples that live together - concerns about money, what amount of cats we can have in our home without the label “crazy”, relationships with each others’ parents. Turns out we’re not - and we’re learning every day how to communicate about such struggles better.

The thing I can’t get past, is coming second. Always. The thing is, although music has played an immense role in Jake’s life since before we met, we met at a time when he was focused on other things. I had just moved home from my freshman year of college - the first year I’d indulged in the party lifestyle (if this term holds any illusion of glamour, it shouldn’t - picture coffee mugs of whiskey and nameless sex). Jake was 23, had met his girlfriend at the time at a gas station, and also had a love affair with whiskey. That summer, Jake and I spent every day hanging out with a group of four hilarious, kind, and eternally stoned boys doing absolutely nothing of substance; it’s the best summer I’ve ever had. I didn’t even realize that I was in love with Jake until I was on the road for my sophomore year away at school (luckily, he felt the same).

The first four years of our relationship were spent in a threesome with Black Velvet whiskey, even though it gave Jake a booming, angry outlook on life and gave me loose morals in bed and the trigger finger in ending our relationship. My trigger finger was both a blessing and a curse - time apart always gave us clarity to grow and learn from our past selves, but we never really learned how to grow together. About two years into dating, Jake’s brother started a band called Condor and Jaybird with his friend Jeramie. They asked Jake to be the bassist in their band, and he let his passion for music grow and fill more space in his heart.