too quickly

i can feel the motorcycle crashing under me
when i take it above 45
a jolt of gravel shrapnel flies from oncoming cars
splitting my gel plastic eyeballs
i can feel myself trip on the stairs in the darkness of the house
i can heard the sound my skin makes scraping every step
i can feel a million other destinies for myself, accidental
there’s no membrane or velvet rope around anything that’s important
no cases
every outcome placed right up against each other
like all the organs of a cell
transparent on a slide

at night i must drink or the panic rises up
it rises up regardless
it’s like a hot iron on my chest
boiling good air back up my throat
i keep panicking
i keep shutting my eyes and myself down
bracing for the unexpected
i have felt so close to fainting
i have been so close to homeless

and yet it goes on mounting
or else quietly uninterested in me
i keep escaping
or whatever you call it when nothing was pursuing you to begin with and
you are just living out your life totally fine
telling yourself to breathe
feeling every sharp tooth smashed through your face
every time you go anywhere
too quickly

living + dead

my first release under my own name. living + dead.

technically unfinished. you can stream it or download it on bandcamp or youtube. consider this the digital equivalent of me leaving the studio to play a show and roadtest a song.

 

i keep having dreams where i am swallowing your spit

last night
we decided to get back together
or you decided
and i forgot to tell you how i really feel
and so

and your body has changed around
and every time i swallow hard it’s your spit that
goes down my throat
and i want to wake up
so i can be glad i live in the future where we
stayed apart
awake so i can look you up on instagram
and see you’re really not as ugly now as you were
last night
and maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to taste your spit again

my dreams
they teach me lessons i am glad to learn
i guess
but they keep putting your name in my head
when i am close to forgetting
and forgetting would almost be better
than the remembering that comes with the lesson

i posted a version of this song on youtube uhhh four years ago. it was the first non-minecraft thing i uploaded there as a test to see how many people would perform that unutterable youtube verb and unsub. last year someone commented saying it’d been three years and “come on dude,” what have i been doing, why hadn’t i released a finished version of the song.

apart from the answers to that question you could get by doing just the most minimal amount of thinking, i really have been doing not much else besides trying to finish a group of songs, this one being one of them. and it’d actually been much longer than three years when they said that - this song has been a thought in my head for 12 years.

i feel an overwhelming urge to be polite all the time. but being polite makes you into a sort of creep. i would like for a smile at a stranger in a grocery store to be a shared acknowledgement of our humanity, a little glimpse of the truth of life - that everything is better when we remember we’re living in a world with things more important than ourselves and our own thoughts, that we have the power to influence each other for the better. but increasingly that smile feels instead like it is covering up the truth - that we hate each other and can’t wait to karen out over some injustice we perceive to be playing out in the other’s mind or social group or household. i can’t wait to catch you in a lie so i have a reason to hate you and shame you because right now all i can do is smile and make assumptions but not speak about any of it. a smile is just social obligation.

maybe all of that is more a statement about living in south carolina (which i currently am), having moved from brooklyn. in brooklyn it is almost more polite to completely ignore someone. and this is only somewhat related to the song, which is not at all about groceries.

it’s almost there. or maybe not close.

i am likely not the first to say that writing is a terrible wonderful miserable business. it is like drilling down in the earth at random and some days there is oil and some days there is dirt and some days there is one big immovable rock.

the mistake i always make is hitting oil and thinking there will be oil there tomorrow. i don’t understand inspiration. it is some delicate chemical balance. it’s why your favorite ball player still strikes out a lot of the time. and also why he can come out of his slump on a seemingly random day and do something unbelievable.

this is a recording that will probably not get released or exist anywhere else. the lyrics have all been chopped up and moved to other songs. it consists of one or two long vocal takes in which I had a couple lines prewritten beforehand and strung them together with a bunch of improvised stuff in between. this is mostly how i write lyrics, singing over loops.

Yes I am hungry for some abstract comfort, some abtract thing to arrive. Does drinking deliver a sip of such or does it only dull the ache of wanting it. Maybe tonight I am projecting absolutely everything into myself, like some hunk of rock convinced without a doubt it's a magnet, yearning and straining, frustrated that all evidence points to it not being a magnet. Nothing moving. How can such a pulling exist in a person who is so inept at retreiving? A grinding wrenching star that makes no light. Perhaps I am just not used to feeling this way.

It's day 25 of this practice. No drinking. Tonight it is fierce. And I can't tell if I am terribly terribly angry at not being able to have a drink or if I am simply alive with all the little bits of things that usually get drowned away. My tongue fights against the water I give my stomach, pulls away like eyes from sunlight; it tries to convince my throat the water it's discovered is close to pouring into my lungs, that it's displacing air - any lie to get the others to do the right thing: stop this mad act, close all entry points, give us what we really want, give us that thing that burns.

Forever sucks. You learn that in school with Tuck Everlasting, I guess. Or that Disney Channel movie The Other Me, where a kid clones himself and sends the clone to school while he stays home to play video games. He realizes video games forever sucks. Especially when your clone is hanging out with all your friends.

Point is, forever obviously sucks; I knew that when I - I guess at age nine according to google, jesus - absorbed media made for children. I’m talking about a different kind of forever. The kind I can’t help but project into every day, doing anything.

The thought of not drinking again forever sucks pretty hard. I keep saying sucks because I’m trying to force myself not to express this idea too dramatically. It’s maybe obvious and shouldn’t be poeticized. If I just think, ah well, today I’m not going to drink, or I’m not going to have a drink right now, or I won’t drink till next Tuesday, then it is dead easy. You could probably tally up all the till-next-Tuesdays one by one and make it to forever without realizing.

I am doing quite well in that regard. I am comfortably turning away from forever because it feels so good to not be drinking today or till next Tuesday. It is way easier than I thought it would be. The first few days were hard. I think it was boredom. It felt good knowing that I’d told someone (by which I mean that I wrote it in this place), that I’d told someone I can’t picture.

Telling my friends was not helpful. They insisted the holidays were a bad time to quit. Just wait until “Dry January,” they said. I didn’t tell them these were things I’d first told myself before deciding they were excuses not to start today and that if I didn’t start today I probably never would, unless I got this weird feeling at another inopportune time in another year or two. I just told them I was an alcoholic and I was being vulnerable by telling them anything at all and that I wanted to live. They laughed. I think that’s the response I wanted, I don’t know.

But I drank on Christmas Eve and Day and New Year’s Eve anyway. It was alright. I was a vegan for four years and now I’m no longer a vegan and I often wonder how many animals’ lives I could save by simply eating meat and dairy as a tiny portion of my diet my whole life, rather than swinging between extremes every few years. The day I started eating meat again, I was very hungry. I would like to abstain from drinking for a while, but I would not like to come out of this very very thirsty.

I have been loving making coffee at night now, the part of the day when I’d usually start drinking. A small strong decaf from the aeropress, poured over sparkling water - or tonic with a lemon peel if I’m feeling bad.

Coffee is the one thing that eludes fatigue by forever-ness. Every morning it tastes just as delicious as the day before. It makes me just as happy as the day before. Is anything else in this category? Even your lover’s face stales with time. Tiramisu is heaven but not every day. I get tired of people and things, tired of myself most intensely, tired of drinking water even, tired of many dull aches of wanting. Coffee stands in perfect poetic opposition to all that, like Azaro’s mother, a loving face that welcomes the baby as he first opens his eyes, not wanting to be born, deciding upon seeing her, to stay in this world, for her.

the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious

There’s that guy in the original Matrix movie who wishes he could get plugged back in and forget about the real world. Cypher. He gives all his reasons for wanting to return, in his villain-explaining-to-main-character-his-evil-plan type speech.

His list of reasons is mostly negative; that is, he wants to get away from the “stink” of the real world and the synthesized food they have to eat, to go back to ignorance and a life of false meaning. He doesn’t say, “I miss walking the streets, I miss hugging, I miss watching tv, I miss going to bookstores,” though he does, at least, seem to miss eating steak.

All this to say, as I’ve unplugged myself from Spotify, my reaction has been a little different. I do not feel hatred for the real world of music. I do not want to return to Spotify. But I find myself missing a million records at once.

I went to target while Christmas shopping and got a Starbucks americano to drink while walking around. These things together are how I play dress-up as a thirty year old. It’s fun for an afternoon, to see how it feels. I can drink endless coffee, but for some reason, after I had left the store, I began to sweat and feel a rush. I got on my motorcycle to go home and the wind made it better. When I’d hit a red light, the feeling of stopping was unbearable. I needed to move! Overheating, caffeine buzzing, sweat collecting under the impermeable plastic wind-breaker, balancing a hot bike under me, trying not to step in the puddles of oil that collect at red lights you never notice when you are in a car. A rush to action inside, an impasse out.

I can easily roil myself into musical fever dreams, once I get started on albums I don’t have access to anymore. If I consider the time and money it will take to recover every album by Prince or David Bowie - artists I had only gotten into through Spotify - it is enough to set me on fire. I can’t help but picture every era, every album, every collaborator and their individual albums, every bit of gear they used and every record subsequently made using that gear. I need to be air cooled. I need to move but I am stuck at the light.

So unlike Cypher, I miss this whole colorful world, I miss a million things from that world. Somehow knowing I could get it all back very quickly if I needed to, for just $9.99 a month, makes it worse. Makes this feel entirely pointless. Why must I be so difficult?

I have dabbled a bit in other streaming-type services since giving up Spotify. “Accidental meandering,” I tell myself. It is an addiction and I am trying to micro-convince myself it’s not as bad. I already pay for Amazon Prime for the two day shipping. So what if it comes with a bunch of streamable music, too? I’m technically not paying for the music, it’s just there. I’ll just try a little.

Well, it’s even worse than Spotify. It’s music thrown in with a bunch of meat in the trap. That’s an easy one. So I also cancelled my Prime membership.

Then there’s Qobuz, which I did not even know about until trying to buy WAV downloads of albums and realizing they are really the only option with a wide selection. You can get a pretty huge discount on purchases if you also subscribe to their lossless streaming plan. So that’s like $15/month but then you make that back if you buy two lossless albums in a month. This is trickier. I mean, it’s way easier for me to walk away from this service I’ve only known about for two weeks, compared to a huge thing like Amazon. But I sense that I will be out in the wild trying to track stuff down, rooting through used CD bins, until finally resigning myself to dumbly typing out “qobuz.com” and buying the album at last. It makes me nervous because I don’t want to in any way fund a streaming platform.

This leads better than I though it would into the last big option I have, which is CD buying. A CD is like a paper plate at a family barbeque. Utterly disposable once you have feasted the information off of it. I crave these stupid discs now. And the good ones are mostly available through sifting and getting lucky. Most stores around me that carry CDs do not organize them well. It feels usually like people try not to go over to that section of the store. They are permanently fixed in time, all Back Street Boys and Gavin DeGraw and Dave Matthews. These can’t be the last artists to have released music on CDs, nor can they be the main artists that current-day-CD-buyers are most into.

So today, mainly: overheating, feelings of loss, and questions. Chiefly, what the fuck is going on?

[Note to myself:
After writing this quickly and reading it back, I think I am more like Cypher than I am arguing. I think I could rewrite this to be more honest. That’s okay. Instagram pictures don’t look completely like me, either. I’m just gonna leave it. Uh bye.]

Like a dog spinning in a ring several times before laying down - why doesn’t he just do it already - laying down is easily better than deliberating - I have been thinking at the bookends of each day, of making progress on many things.

I want to get off social media and spotify. I want to quit web 2.0. I want to see what I look like outside of someone else’s frame. Even this website is held too tightly in a frame. This is a start.

If I want to make a simple list of things on my computer, I must deliberate greatly over what type of list it is and what future occasions I might like to refer to it. Something as simple as this is trapped in an ecosystem. That’s how they get ya, etc etc. I’m curious what other little pieces of myself are similarly trapped, trapped without my knowing, that may be freed by resisting the platform-ification of everything, the hosting-of-elsewhere. A note is never really in your hand anymore. It’s very very far away. Even these words are hosted elsewhere. This is just a start.

So I have rung and rung and rung about the idea of writing words messily here instead of making neat but inaccurate vignettes on instagram or twitter. “Nothing will come of it,” I say while circling. That is my web 2.0 mind speaking. The timelines are hungry and they have taught me well to feed myself to them.

So this stupid blog is maybe just a tool to avoid giving in, to remember that the cloud wants to eat me, to resist becoming its breakfast lunch and dinner, or at least resist tasting good.

Another sleeping place I have been hovering above is the idea of giving up drinking for a bit.

I don’t want to give up drinking. It’s one of the only things I do each day that makes me happy. I don’t think it is destroying me or anything so terrible. Sometimes it helps me dream and see the future and feel optimistic. Unlike the simple pointlessness of starting a blog as a reason not to do it, the thought of not drinking makes me bristle. Maybe there’s something valuable on the other side of that. It will be tough finding out.

So this stupid blog is maybe also a tool to avoid giving in, to remember that alcohol doesn’t always love me back, to resist drinking.