august 20, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world

The world doesn’t get less scary. We just get older. People are resilient because they have to be and while the world is unequal in how it distributes advantages, nature itself is indiscriminate. It’s not that no one is safe, but that safety is a transient state, and that every calm moment is a gift. 

 

It’s rarely good when your small hometown makes the New York Times. It’s important to point out that it did because of a video showing the Beacon Falls Fire Department rescuing people stuck in Brookside Inn with their engine ladder. Towns band together when they need to. People do.

Videos have been flying around everywhere of people helping each other, people sharing GoFundMe links, people thanking first responders. People having basically decent responses to something terrible that happened in a relatively small geographic region. Nature is beyond our grasp, but how we respond to situations is in our control. Coupled with sadness and concern is pride in my little hometown, in people reaching out to each other to make sure they’re okay.

 

It’s important for a town to have a strong chin, and I think there’s no question of that when it comes to Oxford, and all the other towns around it that took a haymaker over the weekend.

 

There isn’t much positive to say about it, and I think I’ve said all the good things I can manage. The negatives are obvious and apparent and don’t warrant elucidation here either. It’s worth pointing out that similar floods hit central Vermont bad last year, too. Extreme weather is getting more extreme. I’m anticipating a certain kind of reader that would be angry at what I’m implying, who would argue that now is not the time to grind my axe or step up on a soapbox, but regrettably I think the conversation would be incomplete without an overture toward the two scary words: climate change. 

 

I’m not saying I know why the storm happened, and I’ve heard from a couple different places that the spontaneity and intensity of Sunday’s rain warrants prolonged study because of its apparent unpredictability. But unpredictability itself becomes more predictable and less surprising when you consider that the world’s getting hotter a lot quicker than we thought it would by now. The more intense and apocalyptic climate models are more accurate in predicting extreme weather than the more austere, attenuated models that more optimistic climate scientists put forward. And listen, I’m a fucking idiot and I don’t know what I’m talking about, but all I have is my own read on the situation, and I think it does a disservice to towns like Oxford and Newtown and Redding and Southbury and Woodbury and Shelton and Derby, to not point out that this might become more common in places closer and closer to home, if not directly at home, if we don’t do something. What that something is, I have no idea. So maybe I’m just paying lip service to a conscience searching and failing for something to do about a situation much bigger than individuals and their choices. But omission, to me, would read as dishonest.

All the towns that endured the floods are still here. Their people are still here. I heard whispers about the National Guard coming, and Lamont declaring a state of emergency, and I hope that lends some federal relief to our region, so the strength and community of each town can be bolstered by financial support that matches the vitality they’ve already demonstrated.

 

In the meantime, so we don’t hold our breath in inaction, here are some GoFundMes I’ve seen floating around to support a daycare that was flooded in Oxford, raise funds to rebuild one house, and another, that were destroyed. Here’s a general GoFundMe for Oxford, broadly. And if you’re reading this and you know of other links, let me know and I’ll add them here. 

 

Water recedes and towns rebuild. All we can do is try to look out for each other in the meantime.

august 13, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world

You wrote in your blog that Chutes Too Narrow by the Shins was the best album of 2003. That’s the same year that Magnolia Electric Co. by Songs: Ohia came out, so if you were still alive I would call and tell you you were full of shit. But since I didn’t know you that well while you were here, I decided to hear you out. The verdict’s in: the record’s pretty good. Magnolia’s still better, but I’m glad you kept a blog so I can sort of get to know you. 

 

My favorite on Chutes Too Narrow so far is “Young Pilgrims.” I wonder what your favorite was. From what I’ve seen on your blog, you never said. 

“But I learned fast how to keep my head up ‘cause I / know there is this side of me that / wants to grab the yoke from the pilot and just / fly the whole mess into the sea” 

With all that happened, I guess it’s hard not to interpret. To wonder at your premonitions, if there were any. At your warnings. To project, even. The wondering, the interpreting, the projection: all impulses that create a sort of minefield in which the wrong step would result in something really psychically unfair, for you. 

You wrote a lot of it down, though. We could have connected there. I guess back then I was too young. Mostly just a kid on the margin of parties at holidays. If you knew me now, I wonder if we’d be friends. If I could have done anything. There was a crucial time you offered a kind word, and I never forgot it. It’s a karmic debt I’ll never repay—at least not directly. 

“Of course I was raised to gather courage from those / lofty tales so tried and true and / if you’re able I’d suggest it ‘cause this / modern thought can get the best of you” 

It sure fuckin’ can. 

Of course, as usual, I could be totally full of shit. Maybe you were into it more for the instrumentals. I didn’t and don’t really know you, after all. What I do know is you were a hell of a writer.

“in a senseless tragedy, oh Carissa I’ll sing your name across every sea” 

I know the Sun Kil Moon guy turned out to be a son of a bitch but, of course, he has a line that applies. Out of respect I won’t say your name here, but maybe one day I can sing it across some seas. Or at least a lake. A pond. Something or something else. 

From what I’ve read, you’d probably say something morbid and funny here, just like I probably would if the roles were reversed. Not to distance yourself, but to harden the appeal for closeness, make it more akin to something you’d be able to accept. 

There I go with the projection again. I’m human. In the face of uncertainty and ignorance, I make shit up. 

Out of all of this, the one thing I know is true is that it’s valuable to leave things behind. If not valuable to everyone, then at least valuable to one person, even if it’s only ever one, and even if it’s decades later. That’s what the whole psychic time capsule schtick is all about; like my friend O says, “I Was Here.” 

So were you. And in case you were curious, wherever you are, I’m thinking of you, and do still from time to time. 

To close, the lines with which Chutes Too Narrow ends: 

“dissolve / magically, absurdly / they’ll end / leave / dissipate coldly / and strangely, return.” 

august 6, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world

It feels like the world has a head cold. Nothing serious, but a constant, slow drip. You dreamt of floods and you drive in rain, and you can’t get the right wiper speed without the plastic blades whimpering against the glass, but your music is just right. 

The world outside is wet but the rain still spits as if to hold back. 

There’s a heat shield on your car’s undercarriage that rumbles at 1500 and 3000 rpm that reminds you that everything slowly breaks. Since the car has no A/C, you crack the windows and your forearm gets pelted with small cool drops of rain, so you close the windows again to shut out the world. When you do, the music comes through more clearly.

“… with a broken sink for a face, and a head that just takes up space…”

If you sat by a fire today, you would think about warmth but you wouldn’t really feel it. It’s the kind of day characterized by a retreat upward and inward. There you are, sat huddling, cloistered in a crucible in your mind, but you don’t shiver. Sat as if to give yourself a hug. 

Driving on a slick highway down through Hartford makes you think of Boston. You realize you gauge how well you know a city by how much you’ve drank in it. By this measure, basically all of Connecticut is family or a close family friend. New York, having not killed you yet, is like your oldest childhood friend. Denver is an acquaintance—Memphis a high school bully. Boston a rich cousin.

Then you think about how bad a measure of knowledge that is: witnessing and judging places via the dank monotony of dive bars, the stickiness of their floors, the staleness of their air, and the accompanying haze of spending time in such places. It’s not that you don’t know any places, just that you need to recalibrate how you embody the knowing. 

And then you reflect on how little you know, and how little you ever could. 

Then you think about old friends, or people gone from you, and how unnatural it feels for you to let go. People, places, things. What you lack in memory for specifics you have for feelings to excess. You don’t know what you ate for breakfast there, but you remember the majesty of looking out at the Rockies every morning the week you finished your MFA. The pathetic desperation to become something worthy of the tuition you spent to be there. All the shame you felt for bad decisions, and how little you felt for your few accomplishments. 

You remember what it was like for it to rain on your birthday and for that to be a big deal. You remember other things you wish you forgot and have forgotten most of what you wish you didn’t. But you don’t drive to work in reverse. 

“… you’ve heard the road to every truth. it’s just a cul-de-sac…”

How boring life would be without thought. 

Someone told you recently to be kind to yourself. You’re unsure but you think you might have rolled your eyes. Not because the thought itself is wrong, but because of how unnatural the impulse to be kind to yourself comes to you. And the more you think about it, the more you think you’ve unconsciously ascribed some sort of nobility to flogging yourself, mentally. Some sort of sense of superiority distilled from the habit of never giving yourself a fucking break. But any judgment that has become reflexive and governed by a rule lacks true perspective—how can you trust any of your interpretations of things if your default is to blame yourself? It’s the flipside of always blaming others, on the same valueless coin. 

Purposefully vague. 

“… if we don’t know better, no will we try…” 

You park at work and the sky opens. Deluge at last. As your shirt darkens to a different shade of grey, you’re grateful for letting the world in. It’s less about you and your retreat inward than it is about being grateful for the people and things that help you get out the door. The lunch she made you. A kind word. Quiet. The dignity in basic work. 

The world might have a cold, but now at work you commit to watching the rain fall through your window and try to fall into a gentler reverie. It’s only Tuesday—it could hurt you but you won’t let it.  

“… you are a beam of light, maybe that’s why your battery runs dry…”

july 30, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world

Some days you just wake up evil. At least, I do. And by evil, I mean angry. But it doesn’t start that way.

 

The REM cycle doesn’t seem to agree with me. Put differently, trying to catch up on chronic sleep debt in one night never makes me feel good. Either way, I got eight hours of sleep last night and I think I would’ve been acutely better off with six instead. That’s the most annoying thing about bad habits—how you grow into the shape they surround you with. You try to fit into something healthier and nothing sits in the right place, at least at first. I’m a fluid expanding to the edges of my bad behavior; I’m a noxious gas in a bad habit room. 

 

Somewhere around hour seven of an eight-hour night, in the throes of REM, I always dream surreal, bothersome things not worth mentioning. Dreams are the kind of thing that are usually only interesting to their subject, after all. That said, without specifics, broad themes include violence, shame, misbehavior, strange symbolic dialogue from unlikely sources—a hall of mirrors in a Tarantino film, type stuff. They’re shades in the night, passing phantoms, evaporations of tiny daily fears unworthy of worry or deep contemplation, despite what some therapists might say—and what some have said in the past. And when I wake up, the images cling and the negative emotion manifests as nausea, or sadness, that then sublimates into the more socially acceptable and masculine emotion of anger. Which makes me evil for half a day before I shake it off somewhere around coffee three.

 

To the outside observer, this appears as me being a jerk until noon at worst, and quiet and resigned all day at best. I didn’t even want to do this performative journal today—am pushing myself to do it even now. But good habits, like bad habits, are also shapes that grow around you. I’m trying to keep to this shape, even if I have to contort and reshape myself to do it. 

Last night before sleep was peaceful. And yet, I woke up this morning out of a dream that [redacted] and I were [redacted redacted redacted redacted] before he [redacted redacted redacted redacted], and that I was being admonished about it by [redacted], and was then [redacted redacted] by a [redacted] in such a way that the dream seemed to be enacting karmic justice. All ridiculous images and concepts when viewed with a waking eye.

But dreams are less seen than embodied, less dreamt than lived.

And the rest of it—the reaction, the nausea, the sadness– that’s all chemical and hormonal. The nervous system is fast, moves at an electric pace. Chemicals and hormones are slow—think trees speaking to one another on the savannah, rather than a hand burning on a stove. Chemicals drift on the wind. Electrons move on neuronic superhighways. So waking up out of horrendous dreams to your feelings all out of wack is just slow to come back from. 

You write your journal, you put in your eight-hour day. Try to exercise, fake a smile now and then. And tonight, you stay up a bit later so an eight-hour night shortens to six. There are more important things happening than the ones happening inside your head, no matter what your body tries to convince you. Look outward, for once. You’ll feel better. 

 

july 23, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world

We’ve finally arrived at the present. I’m not driven to write about much, other than to reflect on a weekend filled with gigs, pools, and political upheaval.

The two-week buffer of material I had, until now, has disappeared after two weeks of inactivity, one justifiable and one less so. This is part of an enduring recent struggle of mine to keep up with things, mostly due to poor time management. But there’s no better time to manage than now. 

I played a gig Friday. It was uneventful in the sense that not a ton of folks came out to see me, but eventful in the sense that I played well and enjoyed the time besides. 

Saturday, I recorded a house show, with the intent to release it as a live EP. To describe it faithfully requires a caveat: that my self-critique has always been brutal, but is especially caustic as of late. The facts of the matter are as follows: 

I set out to record seven songs. I only ended up recording six. I did not record the seventh because I aborted the song in the middle, after fudging lyrics. I had to start three of my songs over again, and one of them I had to start a third time, all because I could not remember lyrics. Regardless, six songs were recorded, and I think a couple of them sounded half-decent. 

There’s the caveat. Now for the self-flagellation. Let me break out my whip. 

Alternatively, I’ll spare you the unproductive and unkind thoughts I’ve been having about myself since Saturday night. I will say that afterward, in the diminished afterglow of a long-planned, long-painfully-anticipated set that didn’t end up going well, my friends were congratulatory and kind, but I couldn’t help but feel that their comments were laced with a sense of apology, a sense of consolation, as if to say that it wasn’t “that bad.” And I suppose they’re right. But part of trying to be the best artist you can be, at least for me, is having near-delusional standards for yourself. 

I set out to record a live EP. I wanted every song to be perfect, and I wanted each performance to be an archetype of what I can do. And they simply weren’t. I wouldn’t call my performance mediocre, but it was close. And that’s simply not good enough.

It’s not like if I played perfectly that I’d put out the EP to instant fame and fortune. I’m finally letting go of those dreams, since history has taught me that the world doesn’t seem to work that way. But, pursuing perfection and a really good performance isn’t even about that anymore, for me. I mean, there were people there who took time out of their weekend, competed for limited residential parking, some of whom traveled multiple hours, some of whom rarely come see me play, and I can’t help but feel like I let them down, in some way. I owed it to them to play at peak capacity, and for whatever reason, I just didn’t.

Luckily, another friend also recorded an EP that night, and he killed his set. I’m omitting names out of a weird adherence to anonymity, mostly because even though I’m sure he wouldn’t care if I was open about it, the friend in question might want to keep the EP on the down low until he releases it. When he does, you’ll know, because it’ll be very good, and off he’ll ride to instant fame and fortune. 

Ok, maybe some delusions of mine persist. 

Either way, I’m hoping his performance made it worth it for my friends, even if I keep thinking my performance alone wasn’t worth the trouble they went to in order to come see it.

Anyway, more productive thoughts: why did I forget lyrics? why did I stumble through some of the songs? The truth is there’s been a lot going on, and I could have practiced more, and some of the songs are very new. The ink on the newest song hasn’t even really dried yet; I finished it on vacation in Maine two weeks ago (hence the lack of a performative journal for July 9th, by the way—I tried to sit down and write, but the air smelled like ocean and I felt like a jackass pontificating on a pad when the beach was fifty yards away. I consider that a forgivable lapse in productivity). I’m up for blue belt promotion in jiu jitsu and that’s been weighing on me, and obviously, like most, if not all of you reading this, I have a full-time job. This paragraph reeks of excuses, but trust me when I say that it’s my attempt to offer psychic balance to the slew of negativity I’ve been living in for the past three days. In other words, an attempt to give myself some leeway.

I woke up Sunday early, after six hours of unsettled sleep, hungover, and I limped into the day. 

Maddy and I took a gracious friend up on an offer to use his pool, the same friend who crushed his EP performance Saturday night, and I tried to let my headache and my anger at myself dissolve into the chemical water around me, cool against the unseasonable 81-degree July day. Even the sun seemed tired on Sunday, at least to me. We found out about Joe dropping out of the race over beers at a brewery after the pool, and the three of us sat there in a quiet sort of reflection, occasionally offering thoughts about the strangeness around us to each other, unsure of what will come next. 

If my thoughts about this era, both personal and political, could be summed up, that’s what they would be: I’m unsure of what will come next. 

Sometimes, curiosity is all you have, but that alone can be enough to keep you going. The future is a big source of dread for me, but I’m greedy enough in my curiosity that I’ll stick around to see what’s next.

In the meantime, I guess I’ll write some more songs and try again with the whole live EP thing another time. Or I’ll just lose my mind self-producing another album. Or I’ll just lose my mind. Either way, the only thing to do after failing to do something well enough the first time is to do it again better the second time.

Or you could give up, I guess. But that would be sooo lame.

july 2 – performative journaling at the End of the world

Nothing screams America like explosions in the sky. Friday. $4 Coors Light, a beautiful night, a nice walk down to see some fireworks. But then Toby Keith had to go and ruin it.

Maddy and I were standing in this “beer garden” cordoned off by orange temporary construction fencing. We had walked down to this carnival for something to do, on a whim after I passed a sign for it heading home from work. Like I said, cheap domestic was running $4, and a craft option was $5. A Ferris wheel spun lazily in place and AC/DC competed for our attention in the background through a loudspeaker. We got there twenty minutes ahead of fireworks kickoff, and kids ran around shrieking and laughing, and older kids maneuvered the crowd deftly en route to some desperate adolescent fantasy. The whole thing was like something out of a John Prine song.

“I’m gonna kiss that pretty girl on the tilt-a-whirl / ‘cause this old man is goin’ to town…” 

I stopped giving a fuck about the 4th of July around the age of twelve. I don’t say this to be edgy, and it certainly isn’t special. I would hazard a guess that sitting by the water drinking or watching fireworks isn’t a patriotic activity for most of our generation anyway—or at least the sector of it I call my friends. 

Things are so bad that any attempt at patriotism is almost quaint at best and downright embarrassing at worst. I’m sure for those in the know, it’s always felt that way—post WWII, our track record is not good, to say the least, whether you’re looking at McCarthyist witch hunts at home, CIA coups abroad, illegal wars in places like Laos, or transparent evil fuck ups like Vietnam or the invasion of Iraq. Especially now, as the Supreme Court erodes the power of its own government to regulate big business and turns the presidency into a pseudo-kingship with impunity, and we sanction a genocide in Gaza, there’s virtually nothing to feel good about in terms of America’s place in the world.

When peak COVID shut down the privileged world, people seemed to become more generally aware, to that point virginal initiates to a culture war that the terminally online are long familiar with. I’m not sure if people were so insulated by privilege that until 2020 they just didn’t care, or if the monotony of full-time work just sapped any energy they might have reserved for civic engagement. Either way, when lots of privileged service workers were home, watching the apocalypse live on CNN, political slacktivism and public statements of virtue became much more hegemonic. And ever since, I think everything has just gotten worse– not because more people are engaged in the conversation, but just as a simultaneous consequence of time progressing.

Talking to people, you get a sense they’re jaded. Or tired. Or angry. Or a kaleidoscopic combination of a range of negative emotions re: the whole America/American thing– a combination that takes on a new unique quality every day depending on the specific given flavor of a day’s bad news. 

Basically, it’s a weird time to watch fireworks to begin with. And then, as the first booms sizzle above, a song like Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red White and Blue (The Angry American)” comes on, and what began for me as a tepid discomfort with a public display of patriotism, even a watered-down symbolic one, turned into a visceral anger and shame. 

If you haven’t heard it, I envy you. Note that I haven’t even linked it above, as I typically do when I mention a song. I’ve heard it plenty of times, on long car rides as a kid, the whole cabin swirling with Marlboro smoke and road rage, my sister on my left with the good sense to block it out with a Walkman and headphones while I shook in the burnt orange of the highway lights and got carsick. Even if the song didn’t have those associations for me, I would still fucking hate it, but as always the personal and the political intersect.

Circumstances surrounding the song: America gets attacked by a group of Saudi hijackers in 2001. Mediocre country artist writes jingoistic anthem about how we’ll “put a boot in your ass” because “it’s the American way” and releases it in 2002. Swept up in a tide of ignorant, reactionary, xenophobic right-wing hawkism, the song gets popular and we go to war in 2003. We justify invading a country by blaming them for an attack they had nothing to do with, kill a bunch of their civilians, create fertile conditions for terror groups like ISIS, and destabilize the general region as a whole. Bush gets a second term and the FCC doesn’t give a shit that “news” is funded by advertising, so dumber and dumber and dumber and more reactionary takes generate more controversy so more people tune in, and the worst people on the planet get rich on the suffering of people a world away, and then claim they care about veterans while they endorse slashing their benefits and get excited about fireworks that ignite PTSD symptoms and scare dogs. Oh, and Twitter comes to be, and makes us all dumber still.

If I have to relitigate the Iraq War and how much of a disaster it was, you shouldn’t be reading this. And luckily I’m not running for office, so if you disagree with me, fuck you. 

Sorry. Toby Keith pisses me off. Come back. It’s alright. Let’s talk it out. 

So we’re watching fireworks, and this song comes on. There’s all these bullshit lines like “a mighty sucker punch came flyin’ in from somewhere in the back / soon as we could see clearly through our big black eye / man, we lit up your world / like the Fourth of July” (emphasis mine).

The whole thing just makes me angry, because here we stand in a small Connecticut town on a beautiful night, while portable generators suck electricity for us to have our fun, and all around we celebrate a decaying country by consuming. All of these, of course, are things that I was successfully putting aside until that bullshit song pulled the moment into focus. 

We should have all been ashamed of ourselves, listening to those lyrics while pretty colors exploded in the sky, at a time when we still enable and embolden an ally to destroy a region and its people, and our choices for our upcoming November are Orange Mussolini and an incumbent president who can’t stay awake for primetime. I don’t want to vote, and in conversations with friends recently it has been emphasized how much fight and sacrifice people go through across the world to be given the right to vote, and here my privileged sanctimonious ass sits not wanting to take advantage of that right. I know which one I’ll never vote for. I’m still building up the stomach to hold my breath and vote for the other one. I guess I have a few months to get it together. 

In the meantime. 

The song, written for pop-country radio play, ends mercifully after just three and a half minutes, roughly. 

Then, what comes on? “Born in the U.S.A.” by none other than the subject matter of June 18‘s performative journal, Bruce Springsteen. I thought I might have a stroke, and finally abandon this plane for a different one, from the sheer absurdity of what I was hearing. I don’t have the time, energy, desire, necessity, or chutzpah to explain to you why “Born in the U.S.A.” is not a patriotic song. Read the lyrics and get back to me. But you know whoever was playing it either thought it was at least adjacently patriotic, or they were playing a cruel joke designed to kill any brain cells of mine still successfully evading the destructive wrath of the $4 Coors slowly warming in my right hand, that amber liquid that perennially explodes neurons in colorful fireworks displays in my skull.

*

The temperature of the air was perfect. Ash didn’t fall in my beer until I was already basically done with it. I was with the love of my life and happiness all around kept trying to enter me through a kind of spiritual osmosis. I was still disgusted, but managing fine, sitting there thinking about how much better I was for seeing through all of it. But really, I’m all the same. I was buying, I was consuming, I didn’t make a fuss. My self-righteousness functioned solely to absolve me of my own guilt, because even if I felt powerless to enact any sort of change, at least I knew the score, could point the finger, could pass on the blame. And I don’t blame myself for the world’s problems, either, but that’s the thing with systemic problems: they go beyond you and me. You can’t blame any one person, and blaming all of us is the same as blaming no one. But I guess if you can’t blame anyone, we’re all to blame.

There’s no one accountable, and things certainly aren’t getting better from the top down. 

I know this is a rambling one, but I think Toby Keith broke my brain. And as we tiptoe toward the Fourth and wait for more headlines about what shitty thing the Supreme Court is doing, how bad the situation is in Gaza, or anything election related, I find myself just feeling bad. Simultaneously, I know sinking into my learned helplessness and doomerism serves only to empower the worst people in the world. But what do we do? 

I held Maddy’s hand and typed furious notes on my phone with the other, the scaffolding for what is slowly becoming a more and more disjointed and confused piece, and writing out this scene now, I wonder what untellable horrors were visited upon vulnerable people a world away just to ensure the stupid device in my hand that only upsets me has some rare earth metal powering its battery. My blood diamond, my cursed ring, my iPhone. 

Abundant consumption in a world of manufactured scarcity. Brought to you courtesy of the Red White and Blue. 

addendum: july 16, 2024

When I wrote this piece, no one had shot Trump yet. That someone now has done so semi successfully certainly hangs over this piece like a ghost. My thoughts on it aren’t particularly unique and yet to express them would warrant another piece entirely, and I won’t do that to you, dear reader. At least not today. All I’ll offer is that it seems like things are just going to keep getting weirder, and in the face of my growing dread and fear, I’m leaning on curiosity to shepherd me into the future. I don’t know what’s coming, but I promise to meet whatever it is with my eyes open, until they close for good.

june 25, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world

I don’t want to do this. But there are lots of things I don’t want to do lately, and that lack of desire has been winning out more than I’m comfortable with. I enjoy writing, and I’ve been enjoying these journals, and I feel better than I did before I wrote them once I’m done, so I’m going to get through this, and if you’re choosing to read it, I hope you do too.

Some things are fun retroactively. Working out is the best example. Running in particular. While I’m doing it, I can’t fuckin’ breathe, my legs hurt, my lungs remind me they aren’t what they used to be, and psychologically, it’s all self-criticisms and negativity, thinking back to when I used to run half marathons and how now I struggle to stumble a couple miles around the block. But as long as I do what I set out to do, even if it’s two miles whereas in the past it might have been ten, I feel good afterward. It’s fun, even. Just, it’s fun in hindsight. 

Lately, I’ve been more into what I call “rollercoaster fun.” The sensory, the exciting, the immediate. Things that gratify without delay. Things that make me weaker. 

It’s the marshmallow experiment. Give a four-year-old a marshmallow. Tell him if he waits to eat it until you get back, you’ll give him two marshmallows. Leave the room. See if he eats the marshmallow before you get back. Track the story of his life for twenty years. 

It’s not an exact science, but the ones who end up in the ditch are typically the ones who couldn’t wait to eat the marshmallow. And lately, I’m all fucking marshmallows. 

So instead, this salad of a thing that I don’t want to do. 

My recent marshmallowness is a useful metaphor, because it’s making me look like the Michelin man. Past disordered eating and flawed cognitive patterns about food aside, I weigh more than I ever have, and plenty of it is extra. The number is irrelevant and sharing it would probably only make some people feel bad, but the point is that I don’t want to be as large as I am, and I don’t like being out of breath at the top of stairs, and I don’t like yadda, yadda, yadda. 

I guess this is what the Stoics were harping about when it comes to discipline. One of the more famous Marcus Aurelius quotes gives a hypothetical, of a guy laying in bed who doesn’t want to get up and start his day yet. The enduring question of the passage is, “were you born to lay in bed? Does the lion lay in the grass and complain that it has to go hunt?” And writing this, I can already anticipate the cringeworthy alt-right bullshit Ben Shapiro clips that could be made with this line of thinking, but if you don’t take it in that direction, it’s useful advice. We all have duties, if not to a job or a passion, then at least to each other, and if not to each other, at least to ourselves. We can’t lay in bed all day, even if we want to. We can’t simply gratify every whim. 

Don’t get me wrong, either. Today is a good day. A great one, in fact. It’s beautiful and not too hot, I have a job that is tolerable, I’ve been with Maddy for one year as of today and we are going to go out and celebrate each other later with delicious food that we can afford. I would write about it more but our relationship is a lovely privacy for both of us. On the whole, I am happy. 

But there are layers to happiness. I am of the lucky that can honestly say that deep, spiritual level dismay doesn’t get to me these days. The bulk of my unhappiness is superficial and deals with things that are within my realm of control—I could make more money, I could write more, I could work out more, I could go to jiu jitsu more, so this looming belt promotion and shark tank rite of passage wouldn’t feel so fearsome. 

And at another layer, one that doesn’t go so deep, part of me is unhappy with myself. I guess that’s nothing new. It’s good for me on some level to be dissatisfied—it’s part of what’s propelled me to achieve the modest things I’ve gotten done so far. Things, the big ones, feel bleak, often—things like wet bulb temperatures and the growing looming horizon haunt of climate change, the abysmal job market, poor health—and they make me feel powerless, which then makes me give away my power by seeking relief in passively harmful indulgence. 

So, I’m making changes. I desperately wanted to haunt a bar last night and drink four beers in two hours and try to write lyrics. Instead, I went home and jogged and did some push-ups, and cleaned my room, and played that silly video game from 2007 again while I listened to a podcast. A night that I felt satisfied with. 

And this morning I did some more push-ups, and I’ll go for a long walk on lunch, and then Maddy and I will enjoy an ambulatory golden hour. 

Pleasure delayed is always greater than immediate pleasure. I just need, as the kids say, to lock in. I heard some quote somewhere last night, scrolling mindlessly at the end of the night, that war is won by people who can fight when they’re tired. That it’s about not cracking under pressure, psychic or otherwise, and remembering who you are and what you can do even when you’re uncomfortable. For the past few months, I guess I’ve forgotten—but I’ll remember soon. 

I promise you that.  

Eat your broccoli. Do your push-ups. This is all done. Doesn’t that feel better?

june 18, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world

I found my first gray hair yesterday. They’ve been in my beard for years, but this is the first one to grow out of my head. And it’s all Bruce Springsteen’s fault. 

After sustained and enthusiastic recommendation by one of my good friends, I finally tried out the ’78 album Darkness at the Edge of Town, and now I’m on kind of a kick. I’m getting older, and the first time I heard “Badlands,” its straightforward sentimentality kept me interested enough to keep listening, whereas in the past I would have found the intimacy of it foreboding and unsettling and turned it off in pursuit of something “cooler.” 

“talk about a dream, try to make it real / you wake up in the night with a fear so real”

Then, “Adam Raised a Cain” came on and I thought, “damn, this does kind of kick ass.” Bruce is easily the coolest boomer. Not that it’s the stiffest competition. 

(Call me ageist all you want. You guys inherited the most robust economy in this country’s history, stripped it to the bone, and called us snowflakes for complaining about inheriting a carcass. Whatever. Back to regularly scheduled programming.)

I’m not going to go track by track with my analysis of a record that everyone and their mother has probably heard at some point in their life. Even writing this feels like it would if you went your whole life never eating ice cream, had your first bite at twenty-five, and then walked down the street extolling the virtues of vanilla to everyone you see. It’s like, yeah dude, obviously. Me being late to the party isn’t that interesting to read. But, one song in particular warrants further conversation, my favorite on the album: “Racing in the Street.” 

It’s a piano ballad, which makes the fact that it’s my favorite song on the album very funny to me. My music taste is such a shifting kaleidoscope lately, owed mostly to my eccentric songwriter friends. My poor girlfriend suffers Warren Zevon, Townes Van Zandt, Connie Converse, Springsteen, Kyuss, Magnolia Electric Company, and lots of assorted dad rock lately. It’s part of a larger effort on my part to simplify, get out of my Elliott Smith rut, and find new (old) stuff to obsess over. My first record wasn’t the greatest, but I think it’s not bad. At the same time, I think trying to write toward more complexity isn’t the right direction for me. Plus, it wouldn’t be the worst thing to have a couple cowboy chord songs in my live set to give my hands a break. Travis picking takes its toll.

​But back to Bruce. The line that grays my hair these days is:

“now some guys they just give up living / and start dying little by little, piece by piece / some guys come home from work and wash up / and go racin’ in the street”

I’ve always had an Energizer bunny in me. I don’t typically go home after work. It’s usually jiu jitsu, an open mic, hanging with Maddy, or haunting some barstool alone if I have no other plans, scrawling half-baked lyric ideas in a journal or reading, glancing around occasionally to see if anything interesting is happening. But “Racing in the Street” has been propelling this to new heights. Every time an opportunity to go out surfaces, I think that I don’t want to be the type of guy that dies little by little, piece by piece, who goes home after work and trades the Bad Screen for the Good Screen and just rots away into a complacent and boring, slowly fattening husk of who he used to be. Last night was the first night in over a week that I got home before ten, and it was purely due to exhaustion, which manifests for me in a general elevated dickishness, a flat negativity and lack of desire to do anything, and a general unproductive attitude. 

​But, I also found that damn gray hair. 

​So, most likely due to some subconscious belief that it would make me feel young, I drank a few beers and played a twenty-year-old video game until I fell asleep on the couch (I’m recreating Randy Johnson’s career in MLB 07 the Show, in case you were wondering what form my arrested development takes these days. He’s 11-0 so far in his second season and his fastball regularly hits 102. No big deal). Then, I woke up, and my headache, bloat, nausea, and chest pain reminded me that I’m getting older, and maybe there are better ways to feel young, to race in the street, than to just casually drink. 

I’ve already lived long enough to see this track I’m on warp into a collision course. You look at some people’s lives, especially ones that end badly and early, but also the ones that slowly wither into wrinkled dependence, and it’s easy to ascribe some sort of inevitability to it. “Oh, he died the way he lived, fast. We all should have seen this coming.” I’m not there yet, but I can look ahead and see traffic slowing down, and I’m thinking I should ease on the brakes so I don’t have to slam on them to avoid a crash. Because if you’re not careful the crash is always there, and even though you should enjoy the view, you still need to watch for it. 

​My gray hair isn’t Bruce’s fault, either. I don’t know about you, but I notice more and more that the explanations I give for the things I do almost always come retroactively, especially for decisions that are mostly harmless, but suboptimal, and unsustainable. At some point, not holding yourself personally accountable gets boring at best, bleak at worst. Bruce himself said it: 

“daddy worked his whole life for nothing but the pain / now he walks these empty rooms looking for something to blame”

Sometimes, I don’t want to go home because I’m uncomfortable sitting alone in myself. And I shouldn’t use a lyric Bruce Springsteen wrote forty-six years ago to make excuses for that. Not every decision is noble—if it were, nobility would be meaningless. 

For the record, I made it to work today and I’ll still exercise and make money and spend time with people I love later, so last night’s decisions have not lost me today. I’ll just feel like shit physically the entire time I do it, and that’s no way to live long-term, even without considering concerns about long term health. 

I’m not at the point yet when I’ll fully admit the party’s over, but I’m getting there. But maybe that’s the wrong way to put it. Maybe the party won’t end—its texture will just change. The nights won’t always need to end in a haze, and fun won’t always need to come at the expense of quality sleep. Intoxication comes in many healthier forms. And the guy who sips bourbon alone on a barstool never looks young anyway. Reckless abandon doesn’t equal youth. Maybe all the ways I try to stay young are the things aging me. The habits of a more weather-worn and lonelier person, the kind of guy I used to think I was and am trying to leave behind, now with my robust circle of friends and solid happy relationship and the steady job and new music on the way. It’s hard to step out into something new when you don’t know what it is.

But it beats standing still. And rest assured:

“tonight, tonight the highway’s bright / out of our way mister you best keep / cause summer’s here and the time is right / for racin’ in the street”

 

june 11, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world

Sunday, I was hungover. This is no surprise. Many Sundays have begun that way for me. It was nothing I hadn’t experienced before: waking up and having just a moment or two of no pain, before I started feeling blood pound in my temples, and my head started to throb, and nausea settled in.

Typically, this demands a choice: rolling the dice on Tylenol (I can’t take Advil or any NSAID because of my ceaseless IBD) and seeing if it will make me throw up, or just resigning myself to a headache for most of the day.

The only thing that was different this time was that I hadn’t felt like I had drank much the night before. I played a gig with the usual suspects which, for me, means some combination of beer and whiskey. As my early twenties have decidedly passed in favor of “mid” twenties, I’ve tried to be more responsible—I eat more solidly, I drink water, I don’t get blackout drunk even if I have a ride secured. I determined, after some memory reconstruction, that Saturday night, I drank about 7 drinks over the course of 6 hours. Yes, firmly in the realm of binge drinking and definitely not great for my health, but far from my worst night, and I’ve survived worse without too much punishment the next day. 

I attribute the intensity of Sunday’s hangover to getting older. I’ve had a couple of bad ones recently, in circumstances in which I thought I wouldn’t. In circumstances which, in the past, I wouldn’t have been hungover at all. My body seems to be telling me that the party isn’t over, but maybe I need to be more “adult” about it. When you’re 20, you can get away with a lot. When you’re 25 you can get away with a lot too, but, evidently, less than when you were twenty. 

After the dry heaves made way for wetter heaves and the Tylenol started to kick in (I rolled the dice and lost), I laid in bed with Maddy and sipped coffee and choked down a banana while we watched this movie Blaze from 2018, about the cult folk singer Blaze Foley. That viral TikTok sound of Michael Cera singing “Clay Pigeons?” Actually written by Blaze Foley. Covered by John Prine, among others. He wrote other classics like “If Only I Could Fly,” “Election Day,” “Sittin’ by the Road,” et cetera, et cetera. He lived hard and died young, broke and unaware of his eventual fame, like so many of those folks did. 

​Being hungover on a Sunday is the right way to take in that story. 

I’m no cult figure, and I don’t have even local fame. And that’s fine. But writing songs is enough to make you feel like part of something bigger—part of a tradition. At the very least, you are a person trying to make the best thing you can make, which gives you something in common with your heroes. And as a result, I end up comparing my life to others’. It’s impossible not to notice how many musicians and writers I look up to were addicts in some way, or at least lived lives that don’t seem appealing at all beyond the shallow glitz of fame. 

There are plenty that don’t fit that mold, too. But given my history of drinking, it makes me wonder which path I’m walking, which camp it’ll lead me to, and how long I can maintain my priorities the way they are once I get there, wherever “there” is.

​Blaze Foley was shot in the chest over some fight over a disability check. Townes Van Zandt died in his fifties from congestive heart failure after years of beating the brakes off his body. There was Bourdain and what happened in Kayserberg, France. And there was Elliott Smith. 

My Mount Rushmore of artistic heroes is full of suicides, overdoses, and premature deaths by bizarre means.

No one needs a thousand words to understand that idol worship is bad to begin with. The Christians might’ve had that one right. But I think that misses the point. We all have heroes, especially as artists. But you could live their lives to the letter and never write “Waitin’ Around to Die,” or Kitchen Confidential, or “Wouldn’t Mama Be Proud,” or anything like it. Contrary to the mythological idea of the drunk poet, I think folks probably do their best work despite the damage they do to themselves. But then you hear stories like the one about “If I Needed You,” which Townes Van Zandt supposedly wrote while completely obliterated on codeine. 

But that shit is just legend, and so what if it was true anyway? What are you going to do? Sip Robitussin and await your masterpiece? It doesn’t work that way.

All of this has nothing to do with the fact that I was hungover on Sunday, aside from the fact that it’s important to keep yourself in check. I have the kind of substance habits that can creep, usually ebbing and flowing from nonproblematic phases into vaguely problematic ones. Luckily, touching the hot stove has only left me with minor blisters so far, no serious burns. But I’m tired of blisters. And I know what touching the stove does by now, and have long since fallen out of love with the scars it leaves.

Really, I’m tired of dry heaving on Sunday and not feeling human until 3 pm. 

So I guess I’ll go on worshipping my heroes. And you take the good with the bad—their stories are incomplete without their bad habits, without their often-meaningless and/or arbitrary endings, without how shitty they could be to the people they loved because of their tendencies for self-destruction. The same is true of me and you. But the hero worship should really be work worship. I don’t want to be friends with any of these people; I just want to write like them. 

And you don’t write like them from the bottom of the bottle. Fuck, you probably don’t write like them at all, ever. If everyone was Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan would be working at Target.

But your only chance at being anything is by being yourself, and by not mistaking your attempts to numb a wound with the art that comes from having the courage to look the wound in the eye in the first place.

june 4, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world

How boring would life be if it wasn’t all by chance?

It was the usual setting for a conversation with friends about fate: the only light came from a lit anti-insect candle, beers were warming in our hands, and we sat around a wooden table on my buddy’s deck while I calculated how much money I would lose if I called out of work the next day.

I didn’t—call out that is. Part of the charm of late-night hangs is the pain of work the next day, which produces a sort of sleepy mania. It’s how I wrote basically all of On the Breeze, except usually in those writing sessions I was either hungover or still drunk from the night before, sitting staring bleary-eyed at a screen in a cubicle. I’m a little tamer two years later than I was in those days.

But last night I turned to the boys and asked them if they believe in fate. This is the kind of question I would consider insufferable if I were sober, and I owe it to the distinct brain fog that descends halfway through your third double IPA that I thought it right to ask. 

Thoughts abounded. My take is that it exists, but only in small doses. I think on the grand scale, chaos reigns supreme, and it would laugh at us if it had a mouth to do it with. But it’s chaos—it’s chance—it’s impersonal. And where fate exists is in small, pivotal moments. You know the ones—they turn the gears of history. Fate intervenes by a margin of inches. Think war stories in which a guy’s flask blocks a bullet to the heart. Then that guy becomes president or something. 

You know, I had imagined writing this long thing giving all these different examples of fate nudging certain things to happen, but my mind just buffers trying to think of examples, and the idea of it falls flat when I try to commit it to words. Maybe there’s something innate and human about believing in fate, at looking back and thinking that the things that happened had to have happened in that way. 

That doesn’t make it any truer.

That line of thinking seems to crop up when intense things are happening, either good or bad. Falling in love feels like coming home. A health scare can make you think you’re meant to die. When you face a big, scary situation, or a big invigorating one, in both of which you feel powerless, it’s common to hear someone say “if it’s meant to be, it will be.” And we take that and hold onto it because we have to hold on to something, but the beauty is that that’s actually not true at all.

I think the truth is that it’s all chance. You might call that meaningless, nihilistic even. But to me, it just makes anything good feel like a miracle, because with every good sandwich, every avoided accident, every comfortable moment, chance smiles on you, when if it wanted to, it could just take a fat shit on your head instead. 

Maybe you and your true love weren’t meant to meet at all. Instead, the paths your lives took spiraled out, doubled back on themselves, pinballed off of all kinds of things you thought were obstacles, which really just ricocheted you on to the right trajectory to fall into their orbit. What are the chances? 

There’s beauty in thinking the universe conspires in your favor. But I think there’s more beauty in believing that you’re defying the equal chance of something horrible happening every time you encounter something good. 

Mind you, none of this came out eloquently whatsoever in the lowlight of my buddy’s porch. I guess that wasn’t really the point of asking. If it seems like I’m omitting what my friends had to say, I do so solely out of wanting to only speak for myself. But rest assured they had thoughtful things to say, more thoughtful than I did in that state. And I found myself tilting my head back and noting how good a view we had of the stars, and how small that view made me feel, and wondering if there’s anyone that can look up and feel like there’s any sort of design with all those rabid explosions burning out so high, so far away. 

And what about free will? You gotta be careful not to let this kind of thinking make you passive. Even if we don’t have a say in the matter, even if the domain of chance’s power extends all the way inside our heads, and free will is nothing but a dream, we still need to live as if not only that are choices matter, but that our choices are ours to make in the first place. 

“the real truth about it is no one gets it right / the real truth about it is we’re all supposed to try” – Jason Molina, “Farewell Transmission” – RIP, to him and Steve Albini

I’m not really sure what all this adds up to. But it’s a good reminder for myself, someone that feels dissatisfied with work, dissatisfied with his fledgling music career, dissatisfied with my living situation and dissatisfied with who I am. We’re all supposed to try. What can you do beyond that?

The rest is chance. Or maybe even fate. Who am I to know?