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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.
on transit (9/14/24)
I grew up in Fairfax County, a sentence of little note. If you have seen a suburb, you have seen my house, my school, the people in my life and likely even me. It is an observation of what is common, so common that even noting what is gauche in it has become gauche itself. Sitcom commentary layered onto sitcom commentary. At the very beginning of twenty twenty four, after two years of meandering south in Virginia, a hard turn was demanded of me. So is Boston the pinnacle of human development? I dragged two suitcases and an overfull backpack off the Amtrak in South Station. In hindsight, I should've got off at Back Bay, and skipped the transfer from the Red Line to the Orange Line. But there was no way of knowing that then, inside the days I stared at subway maps as though they were hieroglyphics. It was a brand new city. Though there should be no excuse for this, I would curse, regretting spending so little time in DC. They have a subway too, don't they? But I never went so far north. I had never felt so much like a hick. A city was brand new. Boston must be the highest buildings have ever gone.
Two weeks were given to me, between my arrival and my first day at work, to settle in. Two days after this period would conclude, my then-girlfriend would be struck by a car while crossing a street, and I would spend all day in the hospital explaining our uninsured, fresh-off-the-boat predicament, and hearing in response to this apparent new arrival, repeatedly, "You'll Love Boston!" But there was no way of knowing that then. I was still set on loving the city, though, before even hearing that I should. I burnt down my savings and then smoldered into my credit card getting here, and then razed further still spending my money on a card named Charlie. My then-girlfriend had crossed the United States to reach Boston, so I gave it that same sunk-cost reverence. I played out my part, and at her recommend, I was touring the city between subway stations at what must have been ten miles per hour. It was slower back then. I was attempting to fill out some arc in the dead air, and the slow zones declared in areas of deferred railway maintenance refused to cooperate with me.
Living in a city, among such an impossible amount of people, seems to evoke either of two responses: tremendous self-importance to stand out completely, or humbled acceptance in part of a whole. At nineteen, I felt like I was poised in any given of these directions. I knew it was tied up in the great worldview questions that had in part brought me here, that were so central to the lacunae chasm between me and her, I just wasn't sure exactly how. I wasn't sure which ideology (if any one in particular) either fit into. So instead of arriving at a conclusion, I was simply seeing from the train windows the extreme foil to the isolation of my rented room in Newport News and all the other rooms before it. I was still desperately alone in those first few weeks, when all the people I know now were just subjects of stories suggested at, names I did not glean. But I was alone among many for the first time ever. I wasn't sure how to reckon with it, so it nearly drove me insane. In the space of those two weeks, I learned no answer to the question of my course, and only saw that the city scared me more than I could imagine. By the end, I was grateful to begin my job instead of just considering all day long.
I turned twenty two days after that period concluded. That same day I spent in a hospital hearing how much I ought to love Boston. Hearing what a great girlfriend I was, and how much she ought to love me. The latter of those two loves did not work out and never will, and all the transplant convert's zeal I felt the first few times I feverishly rode the subways, before panic set in, seems to have subsided. It's just a means to a place, all of it. Transit is agonizing regardless of method, it is necessary, it is awful. But I spent that whole day in the hospital with her and thought the place I was then would never end. I had at last crossed over, over the Virginia over the Northeast Corridor and over those first two weeks. I couldn't then know that this, with her, would be yet another movement between stations, that the time in that apartment would become just a space between February and July, just as Newport News had been a space between August twenty twenty two and January twenty twenty four, just as Waltham would immediately after become a space between July and August. It would never end. I would just be asking the same accumulated questions under a new ceiling.
It wasn't just a loss for me, it was the reckoning of a worldview which she so clearly, so dearly bought into. I have friends here who are so incredibly down to Earth, and after enough study I can only surmise that it's because they had more typical parental roles. This is not to say, of course, that they had "normal" or even traditionally stable nuclear families, only that theirs were absent the violent crimes that I became accustomed to growing up, and so too became accustomed to this were the people who almost had me with their world of plotted narratives and self-heroism. We grew up without communities, more so than most, and lacking even the simple family structure, you find whatever groupings you can muster still ripped from you in the cracks of psych wards by wicked nurses confiscating papers with phone numbers, and high school social scenes always failing under the weight of their typical entropy. I'm still trying to put this all to adequate lyrics, be patient. A friend told me that I am more "well-adjusted" than most she'd met with such upbringings as mine, and I didn't believe it. Because privately, I knew part of my own insanity. I knew I was being seduced by the broken-home chapel. I would ask myself its questions, not my own, "Am I plural?" "Am I a God myself?" "Is this all the character arc of a TV show warrior forever fighting antagonists in twenty-two minute blocks?" Anything to break up the cold hue of reality, the reality that there's a world outside of just me, just her. Anything to stay in the shadow of where I am from. The atomic single-cell units of suburban rooms across Virginia and anywhere else. And I went on like under this spell until the millions of the city cracked its back. Too many people I was confronted with, I could not help but disentrench. As the relationship failed, I abandoned the suburban storytime fascism.
Tallahassee by the Mountain Goats was the last album I bought before I left for good, from the moment I saw it at Armageddon Records I knew I needed to have it. I took it back to the apartment and immediately displayed it as a sign, much like my parents had done when they both blasted opposing breakup anthems as their marriage drew its last days. There is very little new I think I could add and laud onto the much-lauded artistry that is singer-songwriter John Darnielle's body of work, and more specifically his famous, winding subject of the doomed "Alpha Couple" who's final notes dominate much of the album. But clearly, there was some of it that I could've still said to her, as at last a message on display she failed to receive. Regardless of my signaling's failure, I would be driven out, or was it I left on my own accord? days later, though the album would still remain, faced outward. Boston my Tallahassee. I thought. And now it remains on my shelf, still faced outward, still, when the damage is long done and the relationship is long gone. It is a bookend, an exit fare paid to the subway operator. I remember the space I traveled. Despite all my refutations of it, I still attempted a steadily complete ending. It is so grossly seductive to me still, why I spend so much time in the stage of reappraisal. But Darnielle's story of the Alpha Couple doesn't end. They live and probably die with their dysfunction, even after one tries to leave, they still return to the other. Like poetry, when the words stop but the body keeps going. The plot doesn't end, because it doesn't start, it lives and probably dies in media res, in media res. All things are born already unfinished.
short thought on plurality (9/8/24)
I've received some amount of good word after my last post, which I wasn't immediately expecting. I had assumed that whatever I had said would be seen by no-one, and was still okay with that, hence why I took the time to write it in the first place. As long as I could see it, that was enough, as long as I could say something in a hypothetically public forum, that was enough. It's different to have people actually read it, though. In this case, it only served to further reinforce the thing which has been causing me so much strain -- what I have just endured is so, so common.
It reminds me what a fringe world we've built for ourselves here. One part of it, which must be so alien to the average person, and which continually leaves me restless is the concept of plurality. That is, to put it lightly, the real-world re-enactment of dissociative identity disorder as shown on screen. It's incredible to me, a filter of a filter, it feels so perverted to even look at it and yet I cannot look away. I get a juvenile sort of pornographic thrill from paging across old tumblr and fandom wiki pages about or adjacent to it (as an aside, "fandom" really is such an apt term for it, especially with the inclusion of "fictives" within its mythology). I've known people who self-identify as plural, and chose to never really press on it, for however much it set off my bullshit alarm. It was a harmless sort of private literary device for contending with various parts of the self, I had rationed. It was harmless, I left it at that.
Only, it isn't harmless, because it isn't private. It is very much designed to not be private, in fact. There are, as I touched on earlier, entire psuedo-communities based out of the internet (and I'm sure in real-life Portland, Oregon) which militantly enforce various fractious political lines within and without the space of plurality, ones which mimic real ideological conflicts within trans spaces. These cleavages form along questions such as: Are traumagenic systems the only valid ones, or are endogenic systems just as legitimate? What is the exact nature of fronting? What type of system are you? They mimic genuine politics, but have absolutely no weight to anybody outside the group, who would without a doubt find it entirely inscrutable without having some sort of pet interest in it, like me. It is hyperreal. It serves only to further divorce individuals from broader society, outreach hardly ever enters the question because it by design should not. This, of course, it what sets it apart ultimately from recreating trans politics.
On an interpersonal level, it became harmful, too. I have both heard of and been subject to the excusing of a person's behavior by alluding to this vague condition of plurality, never further elaborating beyond pointing to a somehow even vaguer wiki page. My alter made me do it. This is far less interesting than the broader implications of plurality, though, and I'm sure speaks more to the character of any given individual within plural-themed spaces rather than some systemic factor of it. Really, it's just me and a collection of others griping about exes and former friends.
And unfortunately, there's not much more to it that I can say. I haven't conducted some great anthropological dig into the world of plurality, though I do know more that I'm choosing to hold onto for now in case I ever decide to. I think it may be interesting. Or maybe it won't. All I know is it'll take a lot of time, and sadly the market forces dictate that work is a more productive use of my time than reading old blogs from the mid 00's.