matt nilsen

may 29, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world

Tuesday morning. I find my work keys and lanyard strewn along the driver’s seat, the center console and glove box sitting open, the rear passenger-side door cracked a bit open, my BJJ gi untied, and all the spare sweatshirts I keep in my backseat rifled through. All of this a natural consequence of having left my car unlocked the night before, coming home a bit haggard from a Memorial Day barbecue after a three-day weekend of flippant consumption and leisure.

Nothing was missing. Whatever desperation drove someone to check the street for unlocked cars, for easy targets, presumably under the cover of night and mist, was not enough desperation to warrant taking the change in my center console, which adds up to about four bucks.

Since nothing was taken, I just gave Maddy a kiss, told my parents to check their cars, and left for work. I only got a quarter of a mile down the road before I noticed that unnerving feeling settling in. It’s not the first time someone has gone through one of our cars, but it was the first time someone went through mine. It’s not a big deal—no harm done, really, and I should have made sure my car was locked. The feeling was what can only be described as the mildest sense of violation possible; I couldn’t help but think about how some random person’s hands were all over my stuff, and how the carbon dioxide they exhaled could still be lingering around the air in my car. So, I rolled my windows down, tiptoed through traffic to work, and tried to forget about it.

What I’m most curious about with the whole thing is the feeling of violation. I’d argue it boils down to presence: unwanted presence, unwanted contact with the Other. But in this case all of that was only applied to things. My things, sure, but they’re only things—and are they really mine? Isn’t ownership kind of transitory, owed to circumstance, until either chance takes away your ownership, or circumstance demands you relinquish it? The whole sense of violation feels very Western, with a purposeful capital W, in a pejorative sense, to me. It reveals a level of attachment to the things I think I own that I’m uncomfortable with.

You might say, “well, sure, they didn’t take anything, but some stranger put their grubby hands on your stuff! That’s gross!” to which, I would say, sure, but, haven’t we all used a public bathroom before? Even if you don’t sit on a public toilet (and if you do, I hope for your sake that you teepee-tent the seat to begin with), you’re still breathing stale air, with aerated particles of shit and bile and urine and phlegm and god knows what else flying around, replicating, until you breathe it in and blow it back out. And while a trip to the shitter in your local Dunkin’ is bound to make you feel gross, I’d argue it doesn’t fill you with the same sense of violation I was just talking about. And I’m wondering why.

I guess it comes down to intention. No one is trying to make you feel disgusting in a Dunkin’ bathroom, and you might argue that a would-be thief knows you’ll feel gross about having your things disturbed, and they just don’t care. But I’d also argue that it’s impossible to really hammer down intention in situations like this. Sure, they were most likely looking for something easy to barter or sell, but I don’t know why they felt the need. Maybe they have a hungry kid, a mental illness that prohibits them from working, and no resources. Maybe (likely) they’re an addict, and the most important thing in their swirling world is procuring enough resources to get another hit as soon as possible. Or maybe they’re thirteen years old, and bored, from an inattentive home, or no home at all. Or maybe it was just dumb kids. It’s impossible to know. Regardless, it wasn’t about me– it was impersonal.

With all of these possibilities, why feel violated?

This is not me sitting cross-legged on a pedestal patting myself on the back for how Eastern and relativistic I am, either—I’m just trying to understand why this, in particular, would make me feel so strange. Sure, I rocket down the road in my measly Impreza blasting bands like Kyuss and Slomosa, practicing harmonies on songs like Master & A Hound, kissing Maddy on the cheek at red lights, packing more and more things in the spacious backseat and hatchback for another trip. There’s a level of connection, attachment, and sentiment we attach to cars, especially in America with its car-dependent infrastructure and massive sprawling space that requires significant travel to “get” anywhere.

But you don’t need to turn into Hammurabi every time some slight transgression gets committed against you. Whoever was in my car can keep their hands.

A sampling of responses I’ve gotten from people include “ugh, people suck. That feels so violating” (emphasis mine), “time for a Ring camera,” (so Amazon can harvest even more data about my living habits) or, my least favorite, “That’s Waterbury for you!” as if something like this couldn’t happen, doesn’t happen, anywhere else.

Really when it comes to some strange Other going in my car, the best part of me says who gives a shit, and the worst part of me feels gross about it, and the superego in the middle, the psychic space I live in most of the time, is spending 920 words, as of now, trying to reconcile the two.

The only thing I remain firmly disturbed by is that I had left my garage door opener hanging on the driver’s seat visor, and my would-be burglar could have gotten in my house if they wanted. With that knowledge comes feelings of guilt, of “how could I have left it unlocked,” of “how could I let my negligence endanger the people I live with,” but as I write these thoughts out, I really find them to be overdramatic bullshit, even if they’re genuine sentiments that have occurred to me since it happened. Yeah, they could have opened the garage. And then my two pitbull mixes would have gone apeshit, woken everyone up, and most likely scared off any potential burglar. And they weren’t some Other. They were just a person.

I imagine if the burglar were me, at that point, I’d just look for an easier target.

And on some level, we’re all burglars. It’s just a matter of scale and socioeconomics. But that’s for another essay.

Open-minded Dalai Lama impressions aside, it was a good weekend, filled with booze, a couple cigars, camping, a swimming pool, pretty drives, excessive amounts of barbecued meat and white people casseroles, and very, very little memorializing, as the holiday is supposedly intended for. Plus, I had an extra day off work. And now I’ve been reminded to always lock my car, so I can maintain the illusion that the world outside can be kept outside, the illusion that I am an insular, disconnected (and therefore protected) thing, the illusion that there is a crucible to retreat to.

As if the world is something we can retreat from, and not something we’re always living in, and as if safety and security are modern guarantees, when really they’re probably more like precious gifts given, and taken, by circumstance, by entropy, by bad luck—by whatever you want to call it.

may 21, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the World

This morning I went to work feeling like a can of hairspray. This is owed to my new haircut, which I guess is called a “maintenance cut,” which is another way of saying that I am growing my hair out, and that it had gotten sufficiently long so as to make me look grubby, so I went and spent more money to get less hair taken off my head. The back had gotten long enough to stick out of the sides of my head when viewing me from the front. The top didn’t have enough weight to slick back, so it would always fall forward in these two middle-parted waves, making me look like a Pomeranian. The sides would poof up and make me look like Paulie Walnuts. All of this is owed to the fact that my hair holds moisture, to borrow a colloquial phrase, like a motherfucker.

All of this is to say that I abandoned my typical style of getting a severe mid fade, letting it grow until I resemble a Lego man, and then getting another severe mid fade. I went to a fancy New Haven spot called Skull & Combs and got perhaps the most sophisticated haircut of my life. This is not saying much. But he cut texture into the top and left length there. There was no buzz of a razor until the clean-up stage at the very end. The blow dryer ran for what felt like twenty minutes. And then we slathered enough product on my head to make it as flammable as a nineteenth century factory chimney.

I’m going for the Jax Teller thing from Sons of Anarchy. Unfortunately for me, though, I don’t have blue eyes, and I’m not blonde or Hollywood handsome. I’m what you might call Scranton Handsome, or perhaps Buffalo Handsome. This is no insult to those cities (I’m no slouch), but I don’t have that “are you sure that’s a real guy” kind of handsome. But I suppose we all aspire to something.

Essentially, this is the highest level of effort I’ve put into aesthetic grooming in my entire life, and that includes the awkward middle school and high school years, when the approval of others was one of many false idols of which I’ve since (mostly) abandoned worship. Paradoxically, the less you care about what other people think of you, the more effort you can put into how you look without feeling ridiculous. It’s kind of like writing this; I might judge a sentence here or there, but I don’t really care what people think, and even though that might be owed to my expectation that very few people, if any, will read it, it lets me write more. So, the less you care, the more freedom you have, and the more you can do.

This change in grooming habits comes at an interesting time. As we all watch the psychofascist American right resurge, the culture war shines one of its many lenses on masculinity. While plenty of people try to expand the notion of what it means to be a man, and welcome in new people, others try to regress, with a wish that it was once again 1950. Opposition to a man metrosexually grooming himself seems rife with contradictions, to me—the people who valorize eras where men wore elaborate suits and gelled their hair back into an oil slick typically wear Sperry’s and salmon-colored shorts, and this hypothetical guy I’m inventing based on things I’ve seen on twitter probably makes fun of transfolk for wearing makeup, regardless of their gender assigned at birth or chosen identity. Essentially, where you fall on the spectrum of not-groomed-at-all to heavily-groomed doesn’t actually predict whether you get ridiculed for being “unmasculine,” which usually comes in the form of epithets like “gay,” “pussy,” or worse. Plenty of macho-appearing men put a lot of effort to look that way. Fuck, have you ever tried to trim a beard before? It’s a royal pain in the ass.

But anyway, what actually gets criticized in situations like those described above is grooming that makes you look feminine. But then you get people like DeSantis, who was probably wearing heels for most of his campaign, and sponsors some of the most regressive and viciously anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in the country.

Make it make sense.

I’m aware there are zero citations in here. But hey, this is my blog, and I’ll do what I want.

Anyway, I’m thinking about all of these things because every time I look in the mirror and earnestly blow dry my hair backward on the hottest setting, comb it back, blow dry it cool to keep it in place, apply pomade, and then tinker with it until it sits right, I can’t help but feel a little goofy. I like looking good, and my discomfort is probably owed to internalized homophobia more than anything, but even though the whole process only takes like ten minutes, it makes me feel like a primadonna, and makes me reminisce on grade-school level insults hurled at me in childhood. The memories parade by my conscious eye like boats on a speeding current.

Maybe these insecurities and anxieties have as much to do with gender norms and internalized criticisms as they do with my discomfort with excess. I’m of the camp that believes its best to look good while using the least amount of effort, and that there’s a sweet spot where both axes intersect where you look hot, but you didn’t spend twenty minutes on narcissistic hand-wringing in a mirror to get there.

At the same time, I’m American.

Living to excess is to Americans as water is to fish—it’s so present we might not even notice it if we aren’t paying attention to the right things. All this contributes to an enduring fantasy of mine in which my hair gets long enough that I can just push it back with my hands, let my stubble grow a few days, and look like Charlie Hunnam in Sons of Anarchy without any effort. Either way, there’s nothing ascetic about fussing about my appearance– it’s all excess.

Another aspect, perhaps one to focus on in another entry, is how much energy I and others devote to the appearance of the outside, when underneath it all I nurse ongoing mental health battles, try to corral substance habits that could run away if I let them, and endure a lifetime bowel disorder that required half my guts to get pulled out when I was twelve and makes me shit ten times a day.

I guess we’re all lucky that unless they cut you open, no one can see what’s underneath. Unless you let them.

Thanks for joining me for this one. It was more meandering than the past few entries.

This instance of ‘performative journaling at the End of the world’ was brought to you by my mother’s can of AquaNet that I pilfered this morning to achieve that sleek, slick hair control, without excess shine and/or grease. Your mileage may vary.

performative journaling at the End of the world – may 16, 2024

I think something might be rotting in my head.

I don’t mean this in a figurative sense—I can feel my upper-right wisdom tooth digging into my lower jaw, with no space to sit at the angle it’s growing in, and my cheek is sore, and sometimes food gets stuck there, and I have to painstakingly dig it out so it doesn’t make an infection. The poor little thing can’t find a place, feels extra, can’t sit comfortably without its edges bumping up against things that already occupy the space, has committed no sin aside from growing in—and I haven’t yet found the time or the funds to get it yanked.

I turn 26 in November. The Americans reading this probably know where this is going. I’ll be kicked off my parents’ health insurance. I haven’t worked at my current job long enough to accrue PTO, so every time I take a day off I miss out on a day’s pay. I have a chronic condition or two and my lifestyle leaves a bit to be desired, so it wouldn’t be the worst thing for me to bring myself in for a peek under the hood at a specialist or two, but as you can see, I’m in a bit of a bind. There’s low pay, copays, and missed pay involved—and how much is health really worth anyway?

You can’t put a price on it, so I don’t know if I can afford it. Typical.

Back to my (potentially) rotting friend. Every time I eat, especially things like oatmeal, or blueberries, or wheat bread—anything small and binding—little bites get lodged behind my crooked wisdom tooth (which I’m really starting to think isn’t that wise to begin with, which means “wisdom tooth” is a hell of a misnomer) and I end up tonguing the roof of my mouth and the tooth until my tongue aches, and I look like a mad man contorting his face like the guy in Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” And sometimes I’m even grabbing my cheeks in pain, too.

I’m exaggerating, but there’s life, and there’s art. This is performative journaling, after all.

Anyway, I’m sure none of this is earth shattering to anyone else in their twenties who lives here. Out sick? Doctor’s note. Funeral? Let’s see a picture of the casket. You were in a car accident? Well, you could uber to your shift. Thinking about jumping out your office window to see if you’ll die? As long as you don’t do it on company time, go right on ahead. Try not to land on a company car. Better yet, save recreation like that for the weekend.

Oh, and none of the places you need to go to administer an adult life are open on the weekend. When do doctors go to the doctor?

“they buy your labor, try to steal your soul. bite the bullet, hold your tongue, and play the happy prole. you need the money, so you’ve got to play it dumb. but if you play it long enough, it’s just what you become” – Quasi, “The Happy Prole,” 1999.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Quasi recently. And by recently, I mean today. It’s a rainy one, and something about Sam Coomes’ tight phrasing, balance of irony and sentiment, and incision is perfect for a low-visibility drive to work. Plus, they are the rare species of rock band that operates mostly as a two-piece, with Sam rotating between keys and guitar, and Janet Weiss bashing drums. There’s great harmonies, long held out notes (seriously, Sam’s cardio must be nuts), ingenious chord progressions, and exactly the kind of bitter lyricism I’ve come to love in my weary years (I’m still young, but the hangovers last longer and longer these days).

“Paranoid and tired—quit before you’re fired” – Quasi, yadda yadda yadda

I would Sam, I really would, but I can’t live another summer waking up at 10:30, stumbling out of bed, putting on a robe, drinking shitty Keurig coffee, looking at Indeed™ as long as I can stand it, and then haphazardly working on music while my bank account drains and my credit card debt swells. So, I’m going to ride this one out awhile.

I’m finding that doing this is revealing to me how inherently negative a lot of my thoughts can be. I think back in psych undergrad they called this negative filtering, or something—a behavioral tendency indicative of and/or contributing to depression. The idea is that a person inclined to depression will be more likely to see negative things at the expense of seeing the positive, thereby increasing their depression, therefore strengthening their negative filter, and around and around the carousel we go until you’re learning to take Gilettes apart in your childhood bedroom.

But I see cool shit too—there was a grackle in the grass at Maddy’s place this morning. A maple tree is blooming very emphatically outside my window at work. I just managed to get a piece of oatmeal dislodged from my nagging wisdom tooth. It’s really not all bad. Unsurprisingly, the positive things I see typically have a naturalistic bent, because the synthetic things in life (the political, the social, even the artistic most of the time) tend to be a fucking downer.

I’m not sure what I’m saying. I guess I’m just offering that caveat for anyone reading this who knew me when I was younger but hasn’t talked to me in awhile. The wiry guy who wandered halls with downcast eyes and said mostly dark shit in monotone is still in there, but he’s definitely not holding the reins these days. I laugh, I play music, I’m not a bad hang (at least, the fact that my friends still regularly see me is evidence of that). I guess that’s what they mean when they say “well-adjusted.”

Now if I could only adjust this damn tooth out of my head.

may 14, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world

I was talking recently with my dad about jobs. More accurately, my lack of job prospects. More specifically, my lack of job prospects confounded by the fact that I don’t know what I want to do.

If you read my first entry of performative journaling, you may begin to see a throughline: these days, I don’t really know what I’m doing, or what I want to do.

He asked me what I enjoy, and it made me consider that maybe all the things I like to do aren’t moneymakers. And I’m content with that. I told him: talking to friends, playing music, reading, and drinking beer. Those, at least, are the categories most of my “fun” falls into.

But, truly, the best moments are when things are combined—say, I’m drinking a beer while listening to records on my buddy’s couch, while he and another friend and I shoot the shit about nothing and everything in between. Or, say, I’m hanging out after a successful gig at a Denny’s or something with loved ones who chose to come out (note: all my gigs are attended almost exclusively by loved ones these days, given my lack of quote unquote “fans” [yes, I just wrote out the phrase “quote unquote” because I wanted you to hear it in your head. Powerless man enacts power by putting sounds in your mind. More at eleven.]).

This is not unique. We like to be together. We’re a social species. Sartre said “hell is other people,” and I think that’s true, but I think heaven is too. We are the most beautiful barbaric thing the stars ever made.

Oh, look at him go, waxing poetic. He only made it four paragraphs.

Anyway, it is not unique that I enjoy music, getting intoxicated, and laughing with friends and my girlfriend. And it isn’t exactly unique, though I find it problematic, that these are seemingly the only times I can find joy. And if I’m just sitting on a sleepy late spring day at work, with nothing obliging me, I’ll often find myself doomscrolling twitter, or watching car crash compilations or jiu jitsu techniques on YouTube, or, in my wiser and more and more infrequent moments, reading a book.

(At the time of writing this, I’m currently reading Catch 22 by Joseph Heller. It’s funny and kind of boring so far in the sense that as a white guy I’ve already consumed a Herculean amount of World War II era art. But it comes after a read of Kafka’s The Trial so, that, combined with Catch 22, combined with my boring admin job, is giving me plenty of existential angst about the everyday horrors of bureaucracy recently. But at least I’m not a bombardier or on trial for some indiscretion I don’t remember committing.)

Anyway, I wonder if this inability to find joy in the mundane is an extension of how dopesick I and the rest of us are on dopamine from these stupid computers we hold in our hands.

Give them the world in their pocket. Then the real world out there will rarely feel real. And when it does, it’ll often feel inadequate. Or, we’ll feel inadequate to face it.

All of this does nothing to address my main current problem, which is that I need more money and better work.

How fucked up is that? Local man writes that he can’t find joy in basic daily activities, and then he says his main current problem is money and inadequate work.

It all ties in, somewhere. From recent conversations with friends, I’ve also gleaned that the things ailing me are not at all unique for anyone in their mid-twenties. With fortuitous exceptions here and there, we’re all broke. We’re all underemployed. We’re all doomscrolling and quivering for the next hit of the next thing to distract us. And I don’t intend to turn this into a manifesto, but I think most of those things are by design.

…Anyway.

It’s hard to break life up into eras while you’re living them, but it’s easy (and safe) to say that there’s before Covid and the After. In the before, in undergrad, I read one too many things by Samuel Beckett and got obsessed with the idea of secular purgatory, living in the in-between, waiting around for something to happen. That pretentious undergrad had no idea how lucky he had it, and how much better it is to feel between two things than at the end of one. Everything now is just After, colored by what came before. And perhaps that’s nothing new. Faulkner said something like “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Something like that.

But, we’re in the After of our time.

After covid: four beers with a friend after work on a Monday? Absolutely.

After covid: putting out a new song on YouTube haphazardly recorded in selfie mode on my iPhone in my bedroom? Why not.

After covid: quiet quitting to the extreme by using my downtime at work to bang out halfthoughts on a state computer? For legal reasons, no, I would never do that.

But really, there are plenty of things I’ll accept and do now, in pursuit of joy, that I would have considered irresponsible in the past. But after covid, after I got that silly pulmonary embolism in ’21 and almost shuffled off early, after the thousand small cuts of the past 4 years, I just don’t give a shit anymore.

If the world burns, you might as well use it to cook a hot dog or something.

And lo and behold, writing this has made me feel a bit better. Go figure—stop reading an endless barrage of bad news on a dumpster fire of a social media app owned by a South African robber baron diamond heir with the body of a shellless king crab and your mood will improve.

I do miss the times when the sentence above would make absolutely no sense to me, though. If it makes no sense to you, count yourself among the lucky.

So– my new and improved list of things I like to do is: talking to friends, playing music, reading, drinking beer and, apparently, sharing halfthoughts with the world.

Perhaps that means this will continue.

Until then.

may 9, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world

The first step to finding something to do is to do something. In this case, after searching fruitless job boards and nursing a shameover from last night’s decisions, that something is taking the form of a formless screed that I’m considering putting on the website. That thing I pay sixty bucks a year to have, and then never use.

Life is such a precious thing. So precious, I have no idea what to do with it.

A brief history of my professional wandering:

I’ve worked in coffee shops, done some landscaping, spent four years white-knuckling through covid with an emails job at a data company, was gifted a small freelance writing assignment that kept me afloat through summer ’23, and now I work as an admin at a maximum security psychiatric hospital.

I’ve developed very few applicable skills beyond bullshit ones you talk about while applying to bullshit jobs.

I’m a musician. I have a master’s degree in writing from a college that only kind of still exists. I very rarely write these days.

I can make a mean old fashioned and a decent latte, but seemingly, hiring managers see “master’s degree” and think, “he’ll be gone in six months when he finds something better. We’ll pass.” So I struggle even to get interviews at places like Starbucks, jobs I once looked down on as I trudged through grad school, that I am now desperate to have.

I try to be a good friend, and I love my girlfriend. I still live at home because I don’t make good money, and living alone or with roommates in Connecticut requires semi-decent money at worst, and usually leads to hunger. My privilege insulates me from hunger and has given me a kind of golden handcuffs. And I am deeply unhappy.

My job has a lot of downtime, so I usually spend it reading books or doomscrolling twitter with an album bombarding me through my right AirPod. Therefore, I’m exposed to many thoughts about the state of kids these days, otherwise known as Gen Z or Gen Alpha, many of them negative, boiling down to something like “kids these days just don’t want to work.” Which, of course we don’t—who wants to work—but truthfully, my biggest problem these days isn’t a desire for rest or leisure. It’s just simply not knowing where to direct my energy.

I can work hard. I have in the past—especially when I’m motivated or interested in something. Despite slow movement in this direction, colleges don’t actually give out degrees for nothing yet. The three that sneer at me from my bedroom wall are evidence that I’m capable of doing something. Or, they’re evidence that you can get decently far in this life in bourgeois spaces, as a white privileged guy, on pure bullshit. Considering I don’t currently know how to frame a house, install commercial HVAC, or install a toilet, it’s probably the latter. More importantly, I don’t know how I would go about learning how to do any of these things.

Next week I’ll be halfway between 25 and 26. Overall, on a personal level, things are much better today than they were a year ago. I’m more stable, I have a strong and beloved circle of friends, a healthy relationship with a woman I love deeply, flaws and all, my drinking is under control, I’m writing new music, my niece gets bigger and smarter every day, and bouncing ideas off of my sister brings me deep reassurance. And yet, I can’t help but feel that things are worse than they were three years ago. It feels like there’s less opportunity; things are more rigid.

I’m part of a class of people that inarguably have more opportunity and agency than the vast majority of people on this planet, and yet that agency feels like sand in my fingers. I would work, hard even, if I knew where to work.

I hope I’m not alone in feeling like I just need to find something to hold on to. Lately it’s as if the table is stacked with condiments, spices and utensils—but where’s the meat?

And while I feel like the central character in a rich personal drama wholly within myself, bombs fall on Rafah, kids not much younger than me who I feel deep political compatibility with are getting shoved around by fascists in riot gear about it, I have friends that struggle to meet rent, others in crisis for legitimate interpersonal reasons. So while I get high on my own bullshit here, I’m surrounded by people with real, material problems visited upon them largely by forces far outside their control. And with that comes a level of guilt that is entirely counterproductive, and leads to a spiral of complaint and then shame at complaining.

So maybe that’s a sign to stop, at least for now. But before I do, going forward, I would like to maybe do this now and then. Maybe weekly, or monthly. Maybe organizing my thoughts, or, put another way, broadcasting my lamentations from this small corner will lead to something. After all, I just need to do something, and this is a thing that I can do, at least for now.

Local man, unsure what else to do, falls so far as to become the very thing he always dreaded he might: a blogger.

So, if you’re interested, stay tuned. Here’s a shitty picture of last month’s eclipse from Talcott Mountain in Connecticut, as a reward for getting this far.

Owen McMahon is nostalgic and inventive in his latest release, “The Voice Memo Demos, Volume II, ‘Live and New at Open Mics.’”

The title of CT singer/songwriter Owen McMahon’s latest release is a good indication of what listeners can expect to come from the tight twenty-four minute EP: a down-to-earth maximalism that McMahon has honed through extensive performance at humble open mics across New England and Greater New York.

He’s not secretive about his influences. In “The Greatest Singer-Songwriter You’ve Never Heard Of,” which he jokes is “not about me [McMahon],” McMahon lists them almost exhaustively by name while describing a mythically talented and yet unknown songwriter playing in a dive bar: Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, Noel Gallagher, Tom Waits, Jason Isbell, Josh Ritter, Frank Turner, Brian Fallon, John Prine, Woody Guthrie. McMahon playfully and harmlessly mocks this crowd of legendary influences, describing the way they might mock and jeer at this hypothetical “greatest” singer-songwriter. “Neil Young and Noely G they rolled their eyes, highly sarcastic; ‘You’re no Tom Waits for no man,’ throws his hands up says ‘I’ve had it,’” he sings.

Like most of McMahon’s songs, “The Greatest Singer-Songwriter You’ve Never Heard Of” vacillates between humor and heartbreak. “It was all filled up with sweet talk and self-deprecation, and ended up in hard-won, happy-ending adoration,” McMahon sings, describing the greatest songwriter’s first song during this hypothetical set.

That McMahon describes the best songwriter this way is no surprise—listening to his songs, one easily realizes that “hard-won, happy-ending adoration” is his particular MO, as is heard in the song “Break-Up on the Pony Express,” which describes an aspiring novelist who falls in love, and is subsequently heartbroken, by a New Englander named Paul who initiates the separation via Pony Express. “It’s about a long-distance text breakup, but when they only had Pony Express, and it goes like this,” McMahon begins, before singing the “new” song to an open mic crowd in Middletown, CT. Any frequent attendee of New England open mics recognizes the nervous charisma, the trepidation of an obscure creative sharing an intimate part of themselves, in McMahon’s stage banter.

Your correspondent is not typically fond of songwriters who give preambles to their songs. I’m more of a “play it and let it stand for itself” kind of person. However, McMahon’s songs, carried by strong narrative, witty turns-of-phrase, and playfulness, are more than worthy of brief introduction—particularly “Break-Up on the Pony Express,” which transports the listener to 1860s Kansas for its setting. The stylistic choice to provide context fits the EP’s aesthetic: live, bare and very human performances of songs that are artfully crafted without crossing the line into being cerebral or abstract, played to crowds who are likely experiencing these songs for the first time.

What McMahon lacks in pristine vocal delivery is more than adequately made up for with precise and intentional guitar playing, arresting lyrics with clear and idiosyncratic enunciation, and a clear knowledge and appreciation for the history of folk music on the part of McMahon.

“I ate a spicy Italian sandwich today and I think I’m gonna die, so this might be the last thing I ever do,” McMahon opens one track. Listeners can hear scattered laughter in the background, heightening the charm of the EP and its live performance structure.

“The Voice Memo Demos, Volume II, ‘Live and New at Open Mics’” is an important example of what is possible for DIY musicians in Connecticut and larger New England. McMahon proves that strong narrative, charismatic performance, and presence are what is truly important when capturing music, particularly a genre as down-to-earth as folk music. The recordings are not studio quality, but they don’t have to be – we are in the room with the lucky open mic crowds that happened to catch Owen’s sets, and we experience the banter, the awkwardness, the crowd’s hesitation and subsequent convincing, and the beautiful transience of live performance.

Extensive analysis of each of the EP’s tracks lies outside the scope of this limited review, and it would also negate arguably the best part about the EP: the listener slowly discovering and being won over by McMahon’s honesty, humor, and originality. The release is a surefire way to add humanity to a commute, to laugh and cry as one cooks, or to just enjoy some damn good songwriting.