what the fuck did Brian Wilson mean when he wrote “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times”, if he did so in an era that current old soulds would love to visit?
there is so much i do not fully understand yet about the passage of time and my place in here. tonight was another eventful night, filled with the beauty of the mundane. another night where i i was confined inside the walls of my apartment, where everything has happened in the past 25 months. sleepless nights twilighting with conversations by the sunrise, rivers of tears of joy and despair, hairs from different people on the same couch and shower and the song from the birds changing with every season. i finally deep cleaned my home this week and it may have been the mania kicking in, but it also inspired me to trade my furniture for different pieces. the whole place feels distinctly like me and yet it is the same space I have been living in.
i am currently unable to see the big picture above me because every time it feels like i have reached the top, i look down and the ground is still so close to me. it is contradicting how much i enjoy this kind of nights when i feel the current context has me in chains, and there is no other way everything could happen. there are three continents and countless ideological differences and somehow between us and we are here, sharing whatever it is that we have left. the ritual of the routinary brings us together in these mundane but trascendental nights. it feels like we are closer than ever. but i just wish i could have everyone over and make a fire. listen to music and share a joint after we are done with a 24-pack and it is too late to get more beer so we just stay in and talk shit and pretend to catch up when we are doing everything but. and yet that remains so impossible, at least right now we are sharing our humanity even if it is through a transmission of a voice while we work an algorithm that pretends to be a board game. given the current destruction of humanity it is unimaginable to fit everyone in here right now. there are more than a few hundred thousands of miles among us. would it feel more raw and meaningful to receive infrequent and tangible outbursts of humanity every once in a while, rather than sharing everything so often?
but then i think of a certain someone. of how anxious i get without knowing anything about her until her name is in my mailbox again. it was probably weed-induced paranoia but recently i was wondering, how would i even know if she received my letter? what if the mailman drops her letter off in a different mailbox, just like that one time my next door neighbor had my sunglasses? whether the weed had something to do with these thoughts or not is ultimately redundant since the nature of these anxieties comes from being used to having everything microwaved to my instant disposal. then one night, after disappointingly checking my mailbox everyday, her name is there again. and it is all so worth it.
how tangible this experience is does not matter to everything bigger than me. the sun will explode and there will be no trace of existence, let alone humanity in this galaxy. but that is exactly why we should not accelerate the process of leaving nothing behind. an extremely pretentious and self-indulgent reddit post today asked what would be considered nostalgic for future generations and the most prevalent answer was physical media. i hate to think about this because of how true it is. how bittersweet that we traded transcendence in the name of consumption and accessibility. we put out the deepest parts of our soul into this well of full of everything, for everyone to consume and act as if it exists outside of it because we are adapting and always evolving. there is no other way to do it right now.
father john misty released two singles this week that were supposed to be a vinyl-only edition. i wonder how it would have felt to receive them on the mail, instead of a notification from Sub Pop letting me know the MistMan had new music out. i have been recently listening to my favorite albums in vinyl and I feel more connected to them than ever. these pieces of oil are mine and i have to take care of them. they contain the most precious parts of my soul. tonight i finally finished listening to all the vinyls a certain someone sent my way and it is obviously a deeper musical connection than just sharing a playlist. she has played these records hundreds of times, they moved to wherever she went and have been listened in countless contexts that i can barely picture. and when they come back to her, they will now have a brief history with me. they were played states across their home, transmitting a different message and emotion each time they were touched by a needle.
but making a playlist is an art of its own. i can send a similar message to my writing by putting a bunch of songs together in a titled list. a list that exists nowhere but everyone and anyone can consume. but people can break my own rules, shuffle it, let it drop off the face of the emotional and turn into background noise. the imaginative results of what happens to playlists are way beyond the creator’s control. and yet, it is also very personal and says a lot of everyone involved in this act.
if my one bed-room apartment contains more stories than it could if they were actual written pieces, my previous cell phone is the world’s greatest witness and medium. i am still trying my best to understand everything that happened inside that little guy in the last eighteen months. she existed for so long just inside of it and did not become a real person until last summer. we shared our deepest fears in a matter of minutes and the connection was instant. photos and voice messages and phone calls and messages and playlists and tweets and videos is how we began to live inside this little world we created that only existed for us. we knew it had to lead somewhere outside of this universe. i remember walking in the middle of downtown one afternoon listening to one of her voice messages and after it was over, i walked past this bar blasting The Beach Boys and all I could think of was “Yeah beach boys, it would actually be fucking nice.” months and months of lead up and getting lost in translation and me falling in love as i had never done before climaxed in a week where i felt the most alive and happy human inside my body could hold inside. waking up in the middle of the night and feeling her heartbeat in my wrist eclipsed every single wonderful thought and emotion before this moment was even conceivable.
i am not here to write about everything that went wrong in that relationship, but after she left we no longer held citizenship in the world we had created before. we were too loud and fast and intense for it then. i deleted all trace of her that was in my phone while we were breaking up and let me fucking tell you how daunting it was. i still found small pieces here and there in the upcoming weeks, even after double-checking every single space i had. but this was piece of fucking cake (at least for a few months, but more on that later) compared to when i had to get rid of every letter and journal and receipts and basically any physical proof that this relationship ever happened. i just had to do it, for my own sake. there is no way i could have survived this quarantine had i not done so. it remains to be seen if eliminating everything even remotely related to her is a decision i will regret. but i still do not need any sort of reminder that this is the most in love and happy i have ever been, how painful it was to let it go.
my icloud account betrayed me a few weeks ago when i got this new phone. basically everything it decided to save was pictures of her, us, memories from that week together. nothing else. not even my trips to austin, houston, mexico city. thankfully i had that backed up somewhere else, but i had to go through everything again. it was easier than i thought, definitely easier than it would have been to find a letter she wrote months after we broke up.
with my twitter account gone for good, there is no evidence that this ever happened. but i will never forget her voice, how her face looked by the moonlight, how warm our lips where under the snow, her smell and taste, our laughs in the morning, our (freudian slip!!!!!!!! FUCK) my**** neighbors complaining about our noise. how my guts were regurgitating minutes before i picked her up at the airport. and i do not anything to remind me of everything i just listed.
my apartment is unrecognizable from that week. even i am. i have not heard anything from/about her in close to five months and i would rather keep it that way for even a longer time. as i was cleaning this week, i found a scarf she left on purpose and it still smells like her. my feelings were mixed, but life goes on. i do not remember her phone number, email addresses, usernames. the only thing that remains installed in my brain is her mom’s address. this killing of us definitely has had its perks. there was no break-up/make-up sex, intense fights where our faces would become unrecognizable from the lovely beings we thought we were. there is no way we will ever see each other again, i hope so. what remains (at least from my part) are memories and feelings.
where do i exist if some of my most significant experiences have only occurred inside my soul and a place i cannot physically go into? it’s not like i am arguing that we should abolish technology and go into survival nostalgia mode. i just want to know if there is currently a place for people like me. because if there isn’t, it is time for me to create it.
