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laundromat (12/3/24)

[I actually wrote this several weeks ago, yet am only posting this now. I will pretend that this is for a reason other than general ennui immobilization. Who knows? Maybe.]

Whole Foods Market is where a great machine is at last assembled. In a lengthy PBS broadcast, economist Milton Freidman explained that there is “not a single person in the world who could make a pencil.” The steps involved in the process are too many, he says, wood is taken from one part of the world to be painted with dyes harvested from the other corner of it, all parts of the whole so wildly far apart in origin. Thousands of men and man-hours, thousands of miles – he means this all to be a charming advertisement for the free-market system, the efficiency of “the impersonal operation of prices” he describes which brings disparate strangers together in cooperation. You could -- rightly -- trifle at this defense of the economy, with how sanitized and self-admittedly impersonally it treats the human laborers involved, you could even just question if the evidently byzantine network Freidman described is particularly efficient at all. But you cannot argue that, in this modern globalized economy, you can lay out the litany of steps involved in the production of a pencil. Or of anything, for that matter. This is what I often think about when I sit in the back rooms of the meat freezer, staring at the seal of New Zealand etched into a series of cardboard boxes, and wondering how all this lamb came to be here in New England. How many hands put this together?

I couldn’t say how many there are, or where they are, or what exactly it is that they do, but of all those laborers involved in the supply chain and the production of grocery store food, my suffering at the end-point of the service industry must be the least of all. Though from it, I do glean the unique displeasure of staring eye-to-eye with the one who is the reason for all this suffering to be set into motion, however indirectly: the American middle-class consumer. He who will point at a filet mignon, buy it, and then ask me how to cook it. Into his gaping maw goes unspeakable amounts of trash food and then, as a byproduct, trash trash. They are typically pleasant, soft-spoken and even genuinely kind people. Do they even consider it?

I don’t read it as a sort of personal virtue that I do happen to consider it. I can’t help that I have a sort of hypochondriac’s view of the world, always so starkly aware of each part of the body and its every possible feeling and ailment – it isn’t the product of some hyper-empathy. Even if it were, hyper-empathy doesn’t do anything, anyways. When the upstairs sink is turned on, the decades-old plumbing of my triple decker apartment conspires to dump scalding hot water onto me through my showerhead. My neighbors are none the wiser, it is unintentional and nearly random. When the student transcripts I had requested as part of the college admissions process became lost in the mail back in September, I agonized for nearly two whole weeks over an image in my mind of each and every one of the corners and floors in mail trucks and service centers that my envelope could’ve ended up crumpled into. It’s all so impossibly big, and so all ready to buckle and fail. The USPS, my apartment, only if it were a human body, and we just assume each of those parts is doing what it is supposed to. So it goes for the grinding of Whole Foods, where I again became terrified by the world of adults who do not know what they are doing, who cannot see the scope of what they are nominally running, even though I grew up expecting they did. Oh, the frailty! Is it right for every part of a system to conspire, to hate another? It seems inappropriate that my body is not just a brain.

There is a nicer side to this. When the rain outside the bathroom window at last falls parallel to the water in the shower, I am just one part of it all. And then at the laundromat. Growing up, such establishments were confined only to the screen, on reruns of Seinfeld that my mother would always hurry to turn off before I could hear any inappropriate words. They were relegated to that world, on TV and separated by ages, and maybe one of those strange cultural phenomena that only New York City has, like the subway or the bodega. All I knew was, they didn’t have them in the suburbs. What apartment buildings were allowed to exist there kept the washer/drier firmly in-unit, neatly kept in a single box for a single family. But when you move to a city and use a laundromat yourself for the first time, not only are you expected to contain your shock at their very existence, you are as well expected to know how to use it. Which is fair, the procedure is all very self-explanatory, very easy. Except one part – it is momentarily embarrassing to pull your underwear out in front of the crowd. There is no remedy for that. Sure, it is as expected as stumbling when the train rushes to pull out of the station, but still no less difficult to confront. Though, everyone else there is doing it, too. Bearing this little vulnerability of themselves. I carry on after a moment’s hesitation. I am just one part of it all.

The basement in Roslindale I lived in for a time, much like the suburbs, also had an in-unit washer/drier. It was befitting of the one I had shared it with, her parasite internet island to trade in pity money and guilt from vulnerable trans women such as myself, to which she would order DoorDash delivery for takeout and groceries and otherwise be a part of that which sets off these vast chains of exploited labor and other assorted human sufferings. While it is no virtue in of itself to be aware of these systems, and for them to consume your thoughts from time to time, it as well is certainly no virtue to knowingly choose to pull the wool over your eyes and remain ignorant of it instead. To reject that you are a participant at all, to reject the world of other people around you. To settle for only yourself. The body is not just a brain. Try as you might, your body is not just a brain. A world of buzzing paranoiacs, all banging off one another, is not one I wish to slip into. I do not wish for a stranger to spit on me and for my first impulse to be to have them jailed. Some among us, who do not wish to be among us, might wish for this. They might even already be in this world. Milling about supermarkets or sitting on the couch with their laptop. But for the rest, at least we can still have jobs, crushing as they may be, at least we can still be briefly humiliated when we pull our clothes from the drier at the laundromat. There are overwhelmingly complex chains of people in everything we do, not all of it is so “impersonal” as making a pencil, as packing meat at Whole Foods. At least we can still feel a lover’s breath across our collarbone. At least we can still build machines.

missing persons (11/22/24)

It was at a young age that I first discovered my mother’s pregnancy tests. The attached bathroom of your parent’s master bedroom is typically a place children are forbidden to go, and the arrangement of my upbringing was no different – not only was it assumed that we were forbidden, its very geography was hostile to us, the bathroom itself being secluded behind multiple doorways and past the very end of a lengthy Jacuzzi bathtub. So it was that, when I made my discovery, I could not tell anyone. Among myself and my siblings, there are three of us altogether: yet there were four pregnancy tests. It follows that I could not tell you when my mother eventually revealed to me what I had already deduced, that there had been a miscarriage, precisely because I had already deduced it. The emotional impact had been lost, rather, it had already been had, and my memory of it stays hazy and placeless. It must’ve been when things were getting very bad, though, because in all recollections of it, the entire house has a very strangled air to it, and my mother tells me that the miscarriage nearly splittered the marriage, there and then. Until they decided to have me, she tells me in a sigh. In the seventeen years to follow between then and their eventual divorce, the death, the absence of life would hang over them. They hardly spoke a word of it between the two of them. And yet, I still think of him. Nobody ever knew him. He could’ve had my name.

Shortly after the turn of the year, the time for coordinating gofundmes and adjusting Amtrak departure times, I stood in the upstairs bathroom of the house I was renting a room in and had a short revelation of sorts. Looking myself in the eye through the mirror, I put it plainly: “Some of the people you know right now are going to be dead soon.” It was a cold thing, only a matter of statistics given the spaces I’d come to find myself in. This is the sort of thing that will happen in spaces populated by trans women. I was saying it without grasping it, but I was at the very least saying it. It was at last a recognition of the world I’d become a part of, been becoming a part of since I had secretly let my resistance to transitioning finally wither away in late 2021. I would still not be prepared for it to continue to come true in the time soon to follow.

There have been multiple, multiple deaths in my life lately. Autumn came heavy. I will not share specifics, out of respect I assume, because death can be grieved in private. Usually, by assessing the thing that isn’t there. The ghost now left by calls you had just prior to their death now sitting in the logs of your Phone app, waiting to be pushed off the screen, the plans you made to see them just days after. At darker moments, it feels heavier than life. People live on in our memories, then, because it’s the most alive they can be now. It’s a pithy truth to say that, really. But, still – if it weren’t true, it couldn’t be a pithy truth. So I still take comfort in it. If we don’t have memories of the person, we can choose to make them up. You can even do it to nefarious ends. They aren’t going to be able to stop you.

It came to me in the process of planning this that there is nothing new I can add to the concept of death. Before even the breakup, it is probably the most trodden ground in human history, we are utterly neurotic about it and that is the reason we level sections of our cities to make room for the dead, why we speed home from work on the Interstate. We will be them someday, we are fucked for time and we know it. We give a moment of silence to those who have no more moments left to give, and then carry on so rapidly. So I won’t attempt to crest any hills here, I’m too tired to. Writing this is simply how I give that moment.

And to my older brother? He has no grave and has never been in a speeding car. There is no place he could’ve plausibly been, no plans he could’ve plausibly made. So he could be anywhere at all. But the bathroom in the master bedroom, with which he is most associated, is now long gone. The house has been sold and then bought, the doors I grew up behind now locked. I am more banned from that room than I ever have been in my entire life. The pregnancy tests were likely lost in the move. Though, privately, I doubt that my mother could’ve truthfully told you which test was whose. They all look the same. Pink and white and two striped lines. I suppose one of them is me. One of them is dead.

missouri and my identity (11/6/24)

"Just like there are only so many sorts of ways a person can look, there are only so many sorts of taste in music," is what my coworker imparted to me in the wake of my shock. Because what do I know of coworker music? In my working life it has been identified by myself and the online others only in the KISS FM surplus, the imitations of Top 40 and inexplicable The Beatles covers that trickle out of the overhead plastic speakers at retail jobs. It follows, then, that when a man removed from me so both in age and geography plays the very same tracks I might've listened to on the subway commute there, it startles me enough to ask him: "How?" "If I looked though your high school yearbook," he continues, "I'd probably find somebody I thought I recognized from my own." This theoretical grouping of music tastes as a category of people is the same concept by which recommendation algorithms such as Spotify's must build from, and by which David Berman was convinced that he was entirely within Pavement's shadow. And, it is the very same as what compels me to build my own taste in music -- which I had once privately prided, though never voiced aloud, as seeming so eclectic -- around what I now think I am funny when I jokingly refer to as the "western canon", though what my girlfriend now thinks she is funny when she jokingly refers to as "rym bait." But I can't help it.

If you're from a family like mine, chances are the first music you heard was Mozart. No doubt some tactic lifted from the pages of a parenting advice themed self-help book on how to raise The MIT Grad, or God forbid a book on "tiger moms" written with very questionable faith at heart, the ritual of placing plastic headphones over the womb and playing the popular ideal of classical music from an mp3 player had swept the suburbs of the early 00's. And if you are from a family even more disconcertingly like mine, the next music you heard was likely by They Might Be Giants. Perhaps your father loves John Linnell, perhaps they've recently come out with albums about the alphabet and numbers. He will beat you far later, but now he has his music to share. Sonically, experentially, that is about all you need to be primed to cry to "Ana Ng" as an adult.

It does all add up, and the score is, in fact, kept. When you finally connect to the internet, so unsupervised and with the stars still in your eyes, the music you wind up finding is not only defined by discovery algorithms, but very much by what your parents had played for you in your youth (as with many things). Those first few formative years, the years when all the music you listened to was about playtime and school -- because that's all that dominates your life at that age, the ABCs and 123s and playdates with the Mormon kids of your parent's Mormon friends, all of which you are beginning to see nakedly and with no priors. Good luck. A decade or so of wading through the Imagine Dragons-adjacent trash of a free Pandora account, then whatever I could run into on YouTube, and the inscrutable workings of my Spotify subscription's algorithm, I was not only prime for listening to Ana Ng, no, I was at full-blast on the so-called genre of midwest emo.

Full-blast enough to need for see it for myself. Real and authentic, I convinced myself. Something must be out there in the bona-fide midwest. So at a time when I was scraping by on a few hundred dollars a month, I resolved to take what was left of my car and my checking account and migrate west for a bit. I needed time away from Virginia, you know, and I luckily had a friend in Missouri. Despite the risks associated, manifested in such times as when I emptied my checking account and had to beg for fifteen dollars to pay for enough gas to scrape back home, I hardly even needed to rationalize my decision. I knew what I was expecting, it was more important than all that. I expected such a monumental drive west to be more memorable -- but I was wrong. I had expected this new frontier, past the gateway to the West, to be more memorable. I was wrong. Because what I first noticed was not the stupendous difference in our states, so far apart, but the sameness. As my car rattled into the westernmost point of Missouri, eighteen hours after I began driving nonstop, a thought flashed across my mind and never left, especially as the music proved it to me again: This was only Virginia, with all her copper wiring stripped out. I was there for a week and yet could hardly fill a page with what I remember from it. The novelty was seldom, the novelties were only two:

Above Branson, Missouri, there is a great steel cross, painted down its face with twelve fat tears. It stands so obscenely tall that it needs beacon lights to alert passing airplanes to its presence. And I couldn't tell you much about the shows I would end up attending near its shadow, not even the one which was nearly busted up by the police for a noise complaint. But I could tell you about the cross, seeing it rise over the highway well after midnight while I was nearly too busy nervously watching the arrow on my gas meter tick toward empty to notice. It felt like such an anachronism, certainly having been born from some Bush-era performance of "compassionate conservative" revival -- but it was opened in 2019. Entirely surreal. I was not roused, I was not turned toward the good book in that particular moment. But I did find what must have been the last open gas station just afterward. You can see a lot of hollow Protestant religiosity in Virginia, but never of that scale, which nearly was enough to make up for the state tourism board's cynical insincerity. If God can be in the bramble of lit-up empty white billboards I saw driving outside Indianapolis, could He as well have been in the lit-up empty white cross outside Branson? I carried that.

By the streets of Springfield, Missouri, there is a decaying parking lot with hardly any painted spaces still visible. Weed is still not legal in Missouri (though this made little difference for me, I am still at an age where all substances are illegal for me anyway), and this parking lot is where we bought it, from a trans woman who my friend explained conducted audio production and mixing for local live shows. I was nineteen, not even yet having begun HRT, and primed now to be completely starstruck by the prospect of her. Immediately after having only briefly met her, I decided that ought to be my path. Being so craven, I set aside my sixteen-year old's dream of retreading Will Toledo's footsteps, or whatever. It should be my job to perfect the work of other people, Lord knows I didn't have my own. But what was the work of other people? It was that simple. Later that day, I realized. In a basement in southwest Missouri, a place with such a chip on its shoulder about its "midwestern identity", and it follows a place so desperate to prove it, I realized that even this invigorated midwest emo now failed to resonate with me. It was only so demystified now, the alibis and new air I wanted it could not provide me. My playlists then began to wither and the short-lived audio mixing dream died just before. So Branson is the midwest, sure, but I do not care. I carried that, too.

It was these things that made me realize that the type of person I wanted to be had so suddenly changed, changed from my parents making and now changed from my own. And that type of person I now wanted to be was no longer one who listened to midwest emo. Because it was missing something for me, something which I imagined could possess the Real Midwest I had seen, and I was disillusioned. It was not actually about something I could not be sold back at home in Virginia, as I had imagined priorly. Because the genre, in truth, goes no further than you can throw the Suburbs, and I wanted to see something else. I wanted to hear something truer, something foreign, that metal cross and the consequences of that quickly-dead dream. My eyes crossed on the drive back, and I passed a thought similar to how my coworker now thought just a few days ago: sure, the days of looks determining behavior have been gone since the time of Ancient Greece, but if there's only so many ways to appear and so many ways to listen to music -- I extrapolate, then there must be only so many ways to be. So many ways to want to be. Our sense of music is greatly tangled up in our sense of self, it seems, and so I would too carry a third, more dormant novelty. A worn old GAP coat which would take me through the inbound mild Virginia winters, and stay with me further into the far harsher, far later Massachusetts winter I witnessed earlier this year, where the sort of person I wanted to be would change once more. And, it followed, so too did the music I listened to. I left the coat in my ex's apartment when I moved out this summer. I finally had no need for its associations anymore.

But, I still listen to bands I picked up when I rolled through that among a series of very doomed relationships, just as I still listen to some of the music of my very doomed parents. Even when other people are assigning it to me, even when I am trying to be another thing for them, I still must be pulling something honestly for myself. And now time again, I walk myself into being every single joke anybody has ever made about me. My own nascent worldview tells me I must avoid self-parody, but surely, in group settings and in the presence of those we look up to, one always will become a parody of themselves. At least, sometimes. Why shouldn't you? As the old saying goes, other people know you better than yourself. So what do I know? I listen to Yoni Wolf despite my ex, I listen to John Linnell despite my father, yet I also listen to both because of them. I cannot help but question it. I must be more similar to them than I care to admit if I listen to their music. I must be more wrong and they more right. After all, did I not date, was I not raised by? There are more similarities than I'd ever care to admit, and I cannot ever hide from it when I browse through my saved albums. Perhaps the gap between our selves lies in the ways we choose to receive the music we do, perhaps on my worst days there is no gap at all. I wish I had a steady conclusion. Either way, I'm set. I will be accused of stealing from things I have not seen or read from people I have never met, because I will be permeated by the same music as a hundred others just like me, because there really are only so many ways to want and so many ways to be. Even if this may change. I may have found my way to want to be, and it was not actually in Missouri nor in midwest emo. And between me and my coworker, me and my ex, me and my father? I have arrived, I can only try and mind the gap.

(11/6/24)

There is so much body heat in the room where the people have gathered to recieve the news of death. It is somebody I did not know. There is so much body heat and then they all leave to smoke, there is no more body heat and I am sitting in a living room alone. A friend of mine died on October Fifteenth, she was twenty-three. I had been privately upset at the time that nobody had anything to say to me about it. But now I am their position, and I learn that there is nothing to say to anybody about it at all. You can't say shit.

She had a question to ask me and she never got the chance to ask it. I didn't let her. I never got back to her message in time. The dead don't get to say shit, neither. I am so sorry I have to reduce these things to words, I have a photo of her grave and a thousand messages and multiple dormant accounts. It really isn't my place to.

digital graffiti of an eye (10/14/24)

When I first moved here, months and months ago, the people I met loved to tell me stories best described as "portending." It was all a flurry of names, half of which I did not know, and places, all of which I did not know (outside of one or two mentioned in a Modern Lovers song), and the shape of only a single vignette really stuck with me through it. Told to me by a friend of mine, it would be the most prescient, though I did not know it at the time -- or rather, I did know, but I did not want to know. Of course, I will not relay specifics, but it is likely one you've heard before: girl moves to a city, and after a long enough time begins to see things on its walls that she hates. Reminders. Things put there by other people, representing other people. So lucky me, the public works of both Boston and Cambridge can bail me out of some of these instances of vandalism. But cities are made of the stuff that happens in them, actually. And white-out still leaves indentations, even when it is painted over.

This constant buildup takes up more than just physical space in our Real World, it also much more visciously permeates the digital space. While idling for a bus recently, I read a piece by Lauren Goode for Wired describing how she was persistently trailed by photos associated with her abortive wedding by way of the "memories" feature now-ubiquitous in all photo storing apps. I myself am hounded in the same way by years of accumulated photos, of the interiors of psychiatric wards, of the aftermath of messy domestics, of my own doomed relationships. In an interview with Goode, an employee for Pinterest refers to this consequence of data accumulation as "the miscarriage problem," so to speak, the algorithms across the internet know to cater content to you if you are having a baby, and they do not know to step off if you have a miscarriage. So the old axiom repeated to us in every computer lab class went: "if you put something online, it is there forever."

It doesn't just stop at photos, or even advertisements, though. The piece reminded me of something a friend pointed out to me. While sitting on the deck of my new apartment, shortly after I had moved in, she noticed how obsolete her set of pinned locations in her maps app had become. Names attached to places now long-vacant, queer housing situations long-fallen through, new adresses not yet made old. Reminders. She said it was nearly something out of a Phillip K. Dick novel, to which I nodded even though I hadn't read anything he'd written since freshman year of high school. I figured that I must've gotten the gist of what she was getting at. This bizarre science fiction we live, to immortalize a fragment in time kept just as alive as it was when we set it. I was unsettled for a bit after. Returning to this thought, though, I decided to look back on my own.

When I first moved here, months and months ago, I was completely lost. As a young child, my mother had barred us from the DC Metro -- and anywhere with numbered streets, more generally -- and by the time I was able to leave the house I was huddled into reliance on my car until I was nineteen. Living in a city for the first time, I had no idea how to navigate by subway, or bus, and consequently found myself often leaning on the crutch of Google Maps to get anywhere, taking tangled and backwards routes to get across the city for work. It remained that way for a few weeks, until a friend finally noticed my error and set me on using Apple Maps, which she said had far better public transit routing. It was after this that my Google Maps account remained, now locked in stasis. There remains the uncomfortable pins from my childhood strewn about Virginia, the town halfway to Harpers' Ferry that I marked with the help of an ex, certain that it was the one sung about in Beach Life-in-Death, all the places I knew and hated for nineteen years. And, in Boston. Shadows of my prior twenty-twenty four and my spectacularly failed relationship stared me down. People I would come to know were absent from the map, and the home I had then still was marked so defiantly. The brand's old label still sits next to the new look, unaware of its hypocrisy. This haunted me, this I had curated for myself.

The Boston portrayed to me by Google Maps is a very different city from the one I see most days on Apple Maps. And even with Apple, it is one which has to constantly be updated to keep pace with the Real World. Bike stands are put up for the winter. People move. Little red and blue dots disappear, only to reappear elsewhere. In her article, Lauren Goode references Kate Eichhorn's book The End of Forgetting, from which she pulls, "our lives play on a constant digital loop." The life I had then still lives on, then, in the implications of this map. Ultimately, this fake world on my phone is projected from a server farm somewhere in a Valley, which will too dissolve in the rain or be subject to physical human forces, just as the posters and graffiti associated with my past do across town. But it is in transit, but it is always in transit, again and again and again, bounced between mirrored servers and other peers. I can close the app, it doesn't cease. I could prune it all from the map, I could even delete my Google account of twelve years. But I won't. Some part of me doesn't want to disturb what I put there. So it exists there. A reminder.

Subways are transit, cars are transit. They are conduits, they are between here and there. But they are too places unto themselves. It is for that reason I had various rituals when driving, I never played Tyler The Creator while behind the wheel again after getting into an accident while listening to New Magic Wand, I always kept my hands on the bottom half of the steering wheel. And it is now why I attempt to avoid that final stretch of Orange Line, inbound towards Forest Hills, and keep a weary eye out for Car 1461. These impermanent places can still violate us. I can still wince as I do in corners of Fenway, just by opening an app on my phone. It's inescapable, now. Staring down a ghost of what I was. Static in transit, always going somewhere but never being there. Moving to a future doomed not to happen. The bus ends up being late, and I feel sick.

quick memory of a stupid answer (9/29/24)

From a very young age, you learn to contend with the 'icebreaker.' It is a functional and streamlined means for introducing a litany of people -- say, a class -- to one another. It is almost never fun, at once both demanding far too much vulnerability on display to total strangers, while as well expecting you to perform to them. Gradually, as school years grind by, you begin to compile a list of possible prompts and acceptable answers, filing down the edges as the performance aspect overtakes the initial vulnerability aspect of it. Acting is still uncomfortably betraying of the self, but it is in a different, more manageable way. In my own case, it was by the freshman year of high school that I had arrived at a carefully pruned answer to the favorite: "If you had a superpower, what would it be?" With put-on nonchalant, I had decided. "I would choose to let other people read my mind."

It was perfect to me, I was enamored with its subversion and my own portrayed sensitivity. I let on a fakery that first day of school, of a young boy craving only openness, sacrificing even the omnipotence of the equal-but-opposite power to read others' minds, all for the opportunity to be an open book. In hindsight, though, despite my counterfeit it let on exactly what sort of kid I was. And on top of that violation, I was lying, too. Of course I wanted to read other people's minds, I wanted more than anything to know what people were thinking and saying about me behind my back where they all must be. Of course, it must've been obvious to anyone listening. I'm a poor actor.

Icebreakers still continue into my adult life, though frequently in an informal and semi-ironic fashion. Recently I was posed again the superhero question, and the same old answer came clattering out by way of autonomous reaction more than anything else. It felt like a foreign object. I did not have the same personality to comfortably tell such a lie anymore, and what's more, I found myself genuinely wishing that I wanted it to be true. To wish to turn myself open like the ideology I've been scratching at lately demands of me. As I was rightly poked fun at for my answer, I quietly lost myself in the paradox my fourteen year-old self had trapped me now in, lying about wanting total honesty while wanting it to be true. It must've been some divine punishment for it all. I now so desperately want to genuinely be the person I had once only wanted other people to see me as, and there is a palpable difference. You can live a lie in public and sleep just fine, but if you begin to do so in private then you cannot live with even the person making your bed.

Perhaps it doesn't matter though. We will never have superpowers beyond that low-stakes thought experiment. It is at most just an expression of your own personal worldview, which is a luxury that, in capital-R Reality, we cannot Really afford. There is only one world, one view, and everything we see is reflected and refracted through our own looking-glass, then approximated from there. So I can only want to want It, and even then I will never know if I really do want It, because any threat of It coming to pass is hollow. All I'm doing is banging words together without any program of action. Personal beliefs chafe against the social reality, and a culture of narrativization and individualism is applied to us, socially -- how ironic. Even deeper, maybe, the individual conscious self is positioned versus the collectivist unconscious. Little burning contradictions within and without each of us. I tell a story about how I want to be honest while lying, I tell a story about how I want to not tell stories.

It is uncertain how to rectify this. Caught up in modern anxieties like Am I Living A Life That Someone Else Has Already Lived Or Is Still Living Right Now, modern anxieties like They All Think I'm A College Student Despite My Insecurities About Not Being That. Telling things through words themselves confine it to the boundaries of narrative. Sometimes I say nothing at all and look into her eyes, and convince myself that is the honesty of honesties. But even I grow uncomfortable with prolonged eye contact, even with her. Telling things at all is a story, seeing things at all is a story about the outside, being things at all is a story we tell to ourselves. As in an icebreaker, as following a rubric, it is not fun it is unresolvable conflict. We cannot knowingly say things which are completely true, the crucible of what we say and what we are is from where the truth may be unwittingly pulled.

autumn why? (9/22/24)

In the first part of the documentary Get Back, which altogether is unintentionally a mutedly tragic look at the dying days of the Beatles, a section is dedicated to an early version of what will become the song "Carry That Weight." At first, it is a song about a man running afoul his wife by drinking, and then waking up hungover -- the subject of which prompting a remark, either from George or Paul, describing it as "finding out there is a weight on your head, and then realizing it is your head," to paraphrase. Common troubles, as the band would put it. And we know how they end. The song about a spatting couple would eventually be reworked into a song about the spatting band, which would then ultimately break up forever like lovers tend to. And to me? It was my own drunk, my own breakup, and my own head, the weight, which I was carrying as I stumbled back to the room I was bunking in, when decided to create this website. It was very late August. I had no mission statement, I just wanted to write something again.

Of course, a raw drive to create, to say and to see, is only going to take me so far without anything to cohere it. I tend to begin these projects with little concept in mind, allowing that to form only as it goes, and so more often than not letting the thing burn apart when said concept fails to manifest. So while this is not some certain artistic project, I do want this to have a goal beyond words just for the sake of them. I start college soon, and I am sure my writing makes painfully clear that I have no higher education and have not so much as read a book in an academic setting since twenty twenty two, let alone done anything else in such a setting. In fact, I know it must be obvious, so much so that a friend of mine lightly joked at me, saying my letterboxd reviews were painfully that of a college freshman. Unsure if that was an insult or a compliment given my unschooled station, I asked, to which she only shook her head and said that I "will make a great English major." I would be lying now if I said that my two-year long "gap year" wasn't now a source of insecurity for me, particularly living among the degreed denizens of America's Athens. I feel so far behind. Until the semester begins, I think this will suffice to re-establish any amount of confidence in my own writing, or if nothing else give me an avenue to practice where I can receive genuine criticism, a bona-fide public eye.

Because why write, why create anything at all if you plan to show only no-one? At that point it is only journaling, which there is a definite place for, Lord knows I have shelves of my own journals (and have faithfully since I was eleven) -- but that's just it. I already have journals. I don't need to add to that now. If one is supposed to have any amount of trust and confidence in themself, then they will allow some piece of their inner core to become folded outward, intentionally or unintentionally, and present bare in their art. Publish something. In earnest, in honesty. We all betray at least something of ourselves when we make anything, it is an unavoidable byproduct of the process. With that in mind, the worst thing you could betray is that you yourself are insincere. So I needed to say anything, and above all I needed it to be true.

I oscillate frequently between either of two venues, really. When I have not decided to myself, as I wrote priorly, that art is some universal cosm, that we all have a unique voice layered underneath somewhere if only we allow it to be heard -- I am convinced that all I could ever want to say has been said already, and then it follows that the most logical answer to this is for me to kill myself. Which must itself betray how much this all intrinsically means to me. I know the latter of these two lines of thought is an improper impulse, defeatism of defeatisms, but I can't help it. Because I think at some level I know it is not true, only that I sometimes want it to be. It's my own idea, because it would make the whole ordeal simpler. But simplicity is not the point. I knew the type of person I was, I knew it was coming for me when I was sixteen, and still coming here today at twenty. For however much I can try and convince myself that I have walked all avenues in life, that teeming futurist inside of me so determined that at my young age I am already obsolete, I know it isn't true. Van Gogh's older brother was an art dealer, and as a young man he must've been steeped in culture. But he himself did not pick up a brush until twenty-seven. This looms over me. It's only over because you want it to be. I'm doomed.

Having been so denied it throughoutt my life, I am now loathe to not have my own voice. I told my girlfriend that she has a nice view of the city, but she only grimaced and said it wasn't much. Just a few buildings to the treeline. Though the concrete outside still stunned me, such a welcome human break from the operative color green of my apartment. Its outside tree canopies and its mint-green painted walls. "Well, sure, but the city ends at the treeline, as all cities do," I told her. She smiled. "Yeah, you would say something like that."

a review of apple music (9/20/24)

I was sixteen, and I was fucked. Drunk out of my mind and blacking out. It had become typical. I was sixteen, and I was probably the biggest Car Seat Headrest fan you would ever meet. So it was that I was engaging with both at the same time, drinking myself into a stupor as the Twin Fantasy demos played from my cell phone speakers, anything to stop from confronting the realities of my life at the time. It was a two-pronged strategy, really, the shows I had seen on TV prescribed drinking as the traditional remedy for ailing people, and the lingering doom in my heart advised I listen to music. At an indeterminate hour I woke up, still half-drunk, the album still looping from my phone, now lost somewhere in my childhood bedroom. Disoriented and without light, all I could do was let my thoughts grasp around at things while the final thirty seconds of Times To Die/Open-Mouthed Dog played me into complete ether. In that moment, the soul won. I remember it. I knew I was gay.

Times To Die/Open-Mouthed Dog would be reworked into the third track on the album Monomania, incorporating parts of an earlier song "Fuck Merge Records", then altered further still into a re-recording on the album Teens of Style. My revelation that night would be reworked too, associating it with an older crisis of the self from when my cousin came out as trans, all the frequent times I drank and insisted to people that I "wanted to be a girl," and I would eventually come to the final conclusion that I was a woman in the following year. The songs still remained, though. Even now when all the prior strife is just a memory, I can return to the songs. It meant a lot to me, being as intensely self-obsessed as I am, that I could return to their associated memories demanding constant appraisal, forever. It was why I signed up for Last.fm. It was why, afterwards, I bought a Spotify subscription.

But things change. Four years go by, and Spotify decides to raise their prices just a bit too high. I become just a bit too concerned with nonsense like "codecs" and "mixing." I finally make the reasonable push, the one all my friends had been urging me to make, and moved on to Apple Music. I was expecting much the same, just better audio quality (and I use wireless earbuds mostly, anyway) and namely a price that was one dollar cheaper. While it agonizingly does not have the Hang Onto Your Ego recording of I Know There's An Answer, much of my music library remained untouched. The Last.fm integration, or lack of proper, left something to be desired, though remembering to press the "scan" button every day or so in the app was little hassle. Though, I did very quickly realize something -- Spotify had changed how I interacted with music, and for the worse.

In an era of on-demand streaming and constant information, we are a bit spoiled. And to little good end, too. Nations (in both the Westphalian and Leninist senses) are leveled for the American's maw, gaping as it is, and it is done all in the service of a new plastic box to watch Netflix Original Content on. Blood-money cell phones to watch Saturday Night Live on. Of course, I'm not the first to take issue so impotently with this. But I did not realize my complicity in an on-demand economy had reached so deeply as my perusal of art. I was still there, though, answering to the Spotify algorithm's auto-generated "mixes" which dictated much of the music I discovered. Taking songs as they came, piecemeal. Removed from context.

When I primarily took my music from YouTube and my parents' old CD collection, I understood it, the nature of the album. Why artists choose to make cohesive, identifiable albums as opposed to only singles and unbound compilations of songs. It wasn't a concept that was ever explained to me, I simply knew it on instinct. Much like one knows to read a book, when given an album, it is generally best to listen to it all the way through. I gradually lost that unspecified knowledge, though, with the constant stream of music I would become bombarded by on Spotify. Without the guidance of the medium, I fell through. Sure, the songs given to me were adequately related to one another, could adequately approximate what I might want to hear when in any certain mood. Yet times would come when I would hear two songs back to back, ones which were meant to be heard in that manner either as part of a medley or just a pairing, and I would get a quick glimpse at what I was missing as I listened to music in this way.

Apple Music is different. In a phenomenon which makes a lot of sense given the company's history with iTunes, it is arguably far more centered around the album than the individual song, far more skeuomorphic to the actual experience of owning an album. From its inclusion of standard and deluxe editions, various mixes and re-recordings, to its very design layout. When you open the app, you are dropped into a "home" page, which, unavoidably in our age, contains a few mixes of different tracks. Then, avert your eyes down, and you are met with your own recently played albums, then a slew of further album recommendations. Beneath that still there are also approximations of radio stations, though my slavish devotion to my Last.fm statistics constrains me to not using them. Instead, I listen to music solely in my library, which isn't an intended feature of the app but rather out of my own peculiarity. When I find new albums, either from the homepage or from my friends recommendations, I add them to my library. At first, when I was transitioning my heavy rotation over from Spotify to Apple Music, I only added individual songs -- though I quickly realized that this was taking up a lot of screen real estate. I can only fit about six album covers at a time on my phone screen, and it was becoming very unhelpful to have only one or two songs behind each of them. So, my hand was forced.

David Lynch has famously, correctly expressed his chagrin with people viewing films on cell phone screens, and I think a similar principle applies here. Singles do exist, and with reason, of course. It is perfectly fine to listen to a track isolated, and it has been a thing long before technology caught up with individualist social rot. But to never listen to a full album is cheating yourself. How could I experience the sweeping medley of the B-side of Abbey Road, without ever knowing it had a B-side? How could Twin Fantasy have resonated with a sixteen year old me so much as it did had I only experienced parts of it in Spotify mixes? I would've been missing out on an artistic work which calls back to itself, which builds into a whole. You can, in fact, take excerpts from a book. But to never read the whole thing is to read nothing at all. To rob yourself of the whole. An album, all art in fact, demands you sit down and receive something as it is given to you, not as you take it. It becomes rarer and rarer, though.

If you have a premium subscription, Spotify does not force you to listen to its mixes. You can, if you know well enough, decide to listen to complete albums. But nothing of the app's gimmick-laden homepage or its library interface encourage that, on the contrary, they discourage it, burying them behind user-curated playlists and auto-generated mixtapes and even podcasts and audiobooks. I am glad I finally had the clarity to make the switch, but I am nervous inertia has already swung too hard the other way. I am nervous that some day, the album, with all its emotional and artistic weight, might die.

on a song i recently heard (9/16/24)

I was drunk with friends the other night, the social aspect making it dissimilar enough to drinking alone that it was something I could abide, when one raised her voice and decided we should do karaoke. As is typical, we cycled through the same old half-joking suggestions of the most mood-killing artists to possibly pick from, Silver Jews, Car Seat Headrest, and finally arriving at Lex Walton. "Hyperconfessional and Overwhelmingly Sincere," from the album I WANT YOU TO KILL ME. Despite everything that should compel me to, I have to admit that I've never personally listened to the album in full, and this might've been my second time ever hearing this particular song. This was far from the ideal setting. The karaoke never came, though, as thank God the lyrics were not on Spotify. Instead of drunk singing, I heard from someone in the apartment: "this is why I poke fun at this album, this is embarrassing." I'm unsure if it was derision, though, because on its face it is such a neutral statement. You can poke fun at something you love, and something can be embarrassing without it being an appraisal of quality. I remember thinking that then. Of the so few other things I remember from that night, the song itself sat with me, and in the hungover morning to follow my girlfriend read the lyrics to me in full. When I am hungover, my own thoughts flow so much more freely, the usual background static no longer present to cling to. In my clarity, it all felt pretty clear. I really loved the song.

Embarrassing, though. Isn't that the point? The song somehow manages to tell what I imagine are all personal vignettes without the self-aggrandizing "look at what crazy things happened in my interesting life" importance that characterizes so many other things which might be termed as "masturbatory," but it also doesn't fall so self-effacing as the Woody Allen-styled faux self-deprecation (we all know the excerpt about him from the one Orson Welles interview, I'm sure). It's an impressive balance to strike. But I'd be remised to stop there, that's almost all technical. It would be like admiring a painting strictly for the brushwork. Be more specific -- why, instead, are the brush strokes like that? I discovered only a few months ago how incredibly fake almost everything is, and ever since it's been driving me mad, I've been appraising it from every possible angle, from my ex and our hyperreal trans 4 trans polyamory to the way plastic bleeds into my water and then into my brain. How you can have two completely different conversations at once with one person across two messaging apps, how you can put wildly disparate books on your shelves to show to people and know you'll never read. And I've been trying to find any sense of something real. "Overwhelmingly sincere."

When I set out on this website, it was on a whim. I just one day remembered I had a command of very rudimentary HTML and CSS, and stackoverflow to fill in whatever other gaps. My lack of any cohesive statement becomes clear with every entry. When I write here, I increasingly strain against not only what I want to do and say, as anybody would, but also justifying this. Why say anything at all here when I have my near-decade worth of journals to continue to fill? Why write something which could instead be tucked away into a notes app or thrown half-composed into a tweet? If I am to have an audience, why waste their time with something specific only to me, but as well why waste their time with something numbingly universal? It is an impossible juxtaposition to compose, but a personal essay worth seeing does need to somehow be both specific and universal at once. Masturbation should have something in it for the viewer, voyeurism is no fun when nothing can be meaningfully seen. Finding this balance as well is something that the song manages quite neatly. This website is not the end of what creative output I wish to have, I am only twenty, and all the other things I have to remind myself of so often. But I do want to hammer something worthwhile out of it while I am here. And for that, I have been provided a reference point of sorts.

It's not all about me, though, I just don't find myself well-studied enough to seriously rate music. I only want to say I really value this song. I ought to write while more sober.