suburbia

Having made the great escape (pilgrammage? exodus?) to the wilds of Everett to live cheaper and easier is, as expected weird. It's nice in that a lot of the things that were starting to grate on me downtown are now gone. With that thosugh is also so many of the daily routine interactions with people that I had grown used to and often looked forward to. I mean there are always pros and cons to any move - no one knows that better than me. This time though, it's been 12+ years since I last pulled up stakes, and I'd be lying if I said this time is especially odd. For so many reasons, really - mostly because I moved in to mom's old place and while my brothers and I did initially remove a lot of the obvious stuff that would n't be needed (her clothes, furniture, loads of duplicate tools and stuff she had acquired) as soon as I flipped and decided it was in my best financial (and if we're being honest, emotional) well-being to move here to reduce what were only going to be more increasing costs. I had a million dollar view, but you can't eat a view, and the building was shit. Water randomly not working at least once a month (or at least losing hot water) the potential for the roaches to return at any moment, elevators being down (not to mention constantly defiled in such a wide variety of ways, every weekend, it made your head spin) and having to hike 12 floors....it was all just getting tiresome. The junkies outside (though that may change with Yarn Dragon going in and being a presence, but still - PSQ gonna PSQ) especially were just a daily reminder of the Fall of America. Living through late-stage capitalism (definding forests, education grants, hotlines for LGBT youth, testing for food safety...I mean and this isn't even adressing the wholesale disappearing of people off the streets) has kind of forced me to hunker down, and I guess I'm glad I have a relatively cheap place to hunker down. That said, it also induges my biggest weakness: drinking alone. Especially with a nice big kitchen to cook in, and handy stores within a mile? My love for a glass of red wine (or three) with food is a sticky situation that I'm gonna have to be careful with. Having a brother whose most serious hobby is collecting whiskeies (so, cruising liquor stores) also isn't a great thing if I can't rein in my "just do it" attitude, because I now have found a taste for tequila, which doesn't hit like wine or whiskey. Anyway, we'll see how it goes. How much of a serious hermit I become. That said - sleeping a whole night with no sirens is AMAZING. No random shouting throughout the night, no gunshots, cars racing around, all of it. Which leads me to a lot of dreaming - which was rare in the last 2 years downtown, unless I was heavily sedated with edibles. But up here, I'm dreaming like I am making up for lost time and my brain is hilariously inventive, and then sometimes steadily on-brand. I'm considering taking up a dream hournal. Here? On paper? Not sure yet. But everything from driving boats with Green Day to last night fighting forest fires with Brad - endlessly entertaining dreams, I just wish they'd last longer. Maybe, as my sleep pattern adjuststs they will.

Pathetic.

This country is an embarrassment to itself. Honestly only 3 days in and I'm already at code-red disgusted and angry, and to be honest do not have the bandwidth to watch this bullshit take hold, again. If it's going to be anarchy, then fine: gut all the stuff, and tax the fuck out of the rich. But this bullshit where the offensively wealthy jet-set are going to exploit a system they are bent on taking apart? No. Nope. Not into it. I have been skeptical of this governemnt and racist excuse for a country all my life, and periodically think (in those brief moments where Mandela became president of SA or a woman under 40 became President of New Zealand, etc) that maybe there was hope for us. But then, social media rotted America's brains and now everyone thinks they are smarter than they really are, and that they all will be rich and famous one day. I hate this place, and to be honest don't even really know where to go, because it appears to be happening everywhere. Brand new passport in hand, and all I wanna do is vanish into the Italian countryside.

Brief respite.

 Why J Robbins' voice and demeanor has such a soothing effect on me is a mystery, but having found a new podcast interview with him yesterday (two hours worth!) right when I was really in a bit of a downturn in the last few weeks was a genuine treat. 

He reminds me so much of how it felt to be part of something that absolutely changed, or better, formed the way I navigate the world. Certainly, since I didn't stay part of the scene or active as a musician and neglected to carve myself a niche as a promoter or producer of a zine, website, podcast or other tangible thing my path has been different, and yet when I listen to him, the same.

Similarly, or maybe coincidentally, K Harrop posted a quick story about K Cobain, wondering what he might have been like if he had lived, it was her phrasing about how weird or hard it is to believe that any of that happened, 30 years ago. She and I should have been better friends, to be honest. We still have occasional positive interactions online and the few times over the years that we had been in contact was always far more positive than anything that happened in high school. We are weirdos - two different flavors, but weirdos nonetheless. Remembering a time when that was who punk rockers were: weirdos. its not too common these days.

good medicine

http://www.colbertnation.com/full-episodes/thu-september-26-2013-chris-fischer why i'm happy to be as old as i am.

Letters I never sent.

Hey Mike, You know, I used to send so many letters. Remember all the pen pals I had when we met in college? Maybe you didn't notice - but I'm pretty sure you knew about a few of them, and there were a couple, like d. who I probably didn't mention much. I was thinking about you this weekend, in a way I hadn't in a long time, or maybe, conciously, ever. Oddly, I was watching a clip of Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran playing acoustically together in London on the weekend. They have been friends for a long time - I'm not an expert on the fandom, but from what I can gleen it seems like they go back a bit. Certainly, they are the same age and seem to both be products of the same giant ass viral bubble that made rockstars about a decade ago. Anyway, watching them play, doing acoustic versions of songs they'd both written, watching them interact - it made me nostalgic for being onstage with you.
I assume, whereever you are now, you may already know that while I think about you often, it isn't always about us as a couple. It is usually, about the intensity of life in general, or places we traveled, or people we knew together. This was different, in a way that I haven't felt in a really long time. My brain was immediately filled with memories of you writing songs in our apartments or rooms. The way you sat, cross-legged, but not lotus; it was a weird thing you did specifically on the floor. Your SG tucked against your tummy, your head bent so it was parallel to the floor - your hair (when it was long enough) flopping in your face (I have one photo from Serbia when your hair had gotten crazy long and you were also smoking and coughing that is burned into my memory, but so many more, like when we were stuck at the garage in the field in France, or in our apartment in DC, or the room in Silver Spring, or jeez - even the bedroom in Eugene!) and you'd strum, then be reaching over to write the notation down with the lyrics. I loved you so much in such specific moments, you literally created a formative way of looking at a partner - for good and for not so good, obviously. What's weird for me is how warm the memory felt, how comforting and the longing I had to just have that feeling again. While it was sort of expanding, I remembered how it felt to sing backing vocals with you, and the occasional times we would be looking at each other onstage (it didn't happen much, you were the focal point and me and whatever drummer didn't have much to offer the crowds) or the occasions when you would tell me it was a good gig. Remember that show in Belguim when the kids sang with us completely out of the blue? Oh, it also happened the other day when a clip of Neil Young doing Keep On Rockin' on SNL in '89 showed up in my feed - goddamn that song was fun to play. You had such a good sense for so long about music and punk rock. It's sad it kind of morphed into a weird paranoia and desperation. You would have been stoked that you got a mention in the LV music rag though after you died. People were really kind on your FB too - until the new whip got into a fistfight with the baby momma. Ah well. Anyway, thanks for being part of my life Mike, I wish I had tried harder to be me, instead of being so fucking scared all the time about how ugly I was.

"So I enjoy every day, every moment and I thank the god of doggies for the chance to see your little face turn white." -French Beagle-owning Insta influencer on the absolute joy one should gain from having an older dog; especially if your dog has gone through health scares, or dangerous situations.

out of the dark caves of time

Am I the only person who looks at old photos (I mean, proper old, like 50 years or more) and tries to imagine what that person in the photo's life was like, or even what they were thinking in that captured moment. I'm not sure if it's because I looked through a lens for so long, or what my weird obsession with people is but I'm always inordinately curious about what people are thinking, why they do what they do. My biggest regret is not having more time to pursue this, but that being said, maybe I'll just fuck off and go back to school. In the meantime, I will just, I guess, continue to ruminate. Literally, and figuratively, as once again, the Spring Crud has infiltrated my lungs and I am coughing, have a ridiculously itchy throat and just wanna go to sleep. Ideally for like 10 years, and just wake up, none the wiser, none the older, just well-rested and ready to do battle. No such luck though. Instead, I am chewing on old personal bullshit.Yep, Daddy Issues. They are a mountain I climb, and then get to a ledge and feel like it's futile at best to continue. At any rate: here I am again. This time, courtesy the TV show in it's final season, Succession.
Now, this show ostensibly has nothing to do with me, or my life experience. It's all about a super-wealthy family who control a media empire.
However, what all the siblings share is a debilitating (in various ways) level of need for their father's approval. That part has always resonated, but the most recent episode, where they kill off the old man really struck me in an odd way that actually took about a day to come to the surface (so to speak).
My father keeled over during his second heart attack while working his post-retirement hobby/job at a classic car lot. I was at the family house (which was the largest in the neighborhood, and looking back, I often wonder if people assumed we had more money than we really did - which was my father's goal, I think: to appear wealthy and successful as quickly and easily as possible) with my mom, it was a Saturday. My younger brother swears he was there as well, and perhaps he was (downstairs maybe?) but I can't for the life of me remember much other than being in the kitchen when my mom answered the phone and my dad's coworker explaining that he had collapsed and they had called the ambulance.
I can't remember either if they told her then that he was dead, but I remember that she got directions to a hospital in Edmonds, and I drove there. I remember (distantly) being confused and panicky, but also, much like the Roy siblings in the show, oddly concerned about what we were really being told.
Being told your dad is dead by a third party is disorienting, to be sure. To travel to the hospital and find him cold on a gurney is a sudden shock that I have never really processed. Watching a somewhat similar scene unfold on TV to some really terrible characters who, much like my own family (though for somewhat different reasons) are wholly unable to physically express emotion or comfort, really hit a damn nerve.
It's just picking at a scab, essentially, and I am nothing if not a mental scab-picker. It's weird when your family just wasn't all that close. We didn't do a lot of things together, as a unit, especially once we moved to Seattle from Southern California.

Leaves are falling.

While it's not as melodramatic as sawing off my own thrumb, or having a brain too big for my skull, over the weekend the gel in my eyeball has lost viscosity, and now it is a veritable snowglobe in my right eyeball. I've always had floaters, but this is something else: it's layered and makes for some horrible headaches given that I spend a major portion of my days typing into the big shiny screen all day, much less trying to read an actual page. Unfortunate. Not as bad as it could be, and apparently, according to the opthamologist "just part of the aging process - though it is a little early for you to be experiencing this much flux" apparently nothing I can fix, or stop doing to make it better. I blame the mainlining of certain powdery drugs for all physical maladies, and this is no different. Addnedum: It turned out, 5 days later, to be a detached retina, and only a quick detour on the way to work to the opthomologist followed by emergency surgery kept sight in my right eye. It's wonky, and having to keep your head parallel to the earth for 72 hours is not as easy as it might sound - and having a weird gas bubble in the eyeball as it refills with fluid is about as distracting as it sounds. It is a hell of a way to get 2 weeks away from work (though one week was me working from home, because I am nothing if not a masochist).

Found it.

You know, sometimes I do ridiculous things when I have spare time on my hands - today, because I have been just bingeing the shit out of De La Soul and when I see video of them, Plug2 always reminds me of Jon Loggins - the whole band does, of course. They just immediately send me back to DC in 1989/90 and being at Common Concerns with Jon doing the security and just generally doing his cool fishboney thing. So I tried a couple searches, but as per usual, like so many of our generation, we are vanished unless we reached legendary status. Anyway, FB brought me to once again read the chats we had been having those last couple years and I found the quote that I keep telling people about that really made me feel genuinely sorry for you, and also crystalized the understanding that there was no way you'd ever come back to where I knew you had once been. Do you remember writing this: If I'm responsible for my own happiness, then I'd rather die. Because what's weird - it's exactly what you did, I guess? I mean, I'm still not super clear about the crazy bitch you had managed to wrangle in that final round, but damnit. It really is the most accurate thing you've never meant to say. You said the inside part out loud, and it is exactly the battle that is the hardest. What even is the point of this?