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.