Turns out I made a post with this song last February. Another loop around.

Well, here's the song anyway.

and the next one:

Ernie's been with me this year. Today I looked at what will probably be my apartment a month from now. I've only lived in a place by myself, that I picked and cared about, for about 6 months of my adult life. I was 19, and had a very strange half year living by myself in a little square house on the outskirts of Milledgeville, Georgia. A lovely little place. I push-mowed the lawn, trimmed the hedges, met the neighbors. Made dinner, did homework, wrote music. Didn't have internet except what I could skim from my neighbor from one spot on the stairs. Had a dream about a web site called "I Love Sitting on Chairs dot com," told my friend Erik about it, and at his behest I made it, using CSS for all the styling, thereby stumbling one step farther down that rabbit hole. I lived around the corner from the first group of friends who'd live in the same big old house; stupidly in love with half a dozen women who probably loved me back but I couldn't move so they didn't either; and so, so pent up and hurt and wishing I felt like I had any sense of what to do with myself. Ignoring the mirrors; terrorized by a vision of a witch tearing back the sunny shower curtain and stabbing me through the heart with long fingernails; playing Earthbound on a 14-inch purple CRT sitting on a floor cushion. I had sex for the first time; she missed her period immediately, despite there being no way; turned out she just had such low body fat that she stopped menstruating, but that was two weeks of misery that stretched into a year of confusion and then another 4 years of happy cohabitation. Receding into myself, getting darker and weirder and howling out songs in the middle of the night. Still, wanting to be happy. Feeling the deep breaths of contentment between tight-lung grips of despair.

So now, technically able to afford it, I'm going to rent my own apartment. A lovely, spacious place. I feel excited to "be an adult" again, and terrified of failure, of not being able to keep up the charade of productivity. Resentful that I still can't invite friends over to see it. Feeling like the total reset of my life that began a year ago is entering a new phase.

I'll take a picture with Ernie when it's real.

Five Iron Frenzy has a new album out, and it's full of antifascist anthems. It's great. It's also got me listening to their back catalog, including this song that comes to mind often when I need to rev myself up for something.

Five Iron's a funny band. They're a "Christian band," often writing overtly about or to god. I was still a christian in my interior when I learned about them, so they're one of like three bands still grandparented in to my despicably-godless present taste. }:) I don't have time to go into it, but the thing I want to say is: more than maybe any other band, they've managed to achieve feelings in some of their songs that approach whatever the material sensation of the "sacred" might be. Their songs can still lift my heart in a specific way; a feeling of aspiration, of there being something special about being alive, and that it's nice to remember.

Some of their songs are just silly. Some of them are solid rock songs. The singer's voice is one of my favorites. They've always opposed the abuse of power ("Riot Gear") and conservative interpretations of christian doctrine (too many songs to list). For their new album to consist almost entirely of songs clearly and directly criticizing the modern right wing in all its guises... I'm grateful for it. I hope there are christians listening.

And today, as I discuss moving into my own apartment for the first time in years, I feel the terror of instability yawn beneath me. Can I really maintain a life of day-to-day productivity? Well, I've been doing it for quite a while now; I reckon I'll just have to keep doing it. And as overwrought as it is, as far away as I feel from this sentiment, this is how I want to feel:

"Hulking, smashing, I come crashing, nothing like when I was small. That feeble coward that you knew has undergone an overhaul. I am unstoppable. I am the cannonball."

I do wish that most of my favorite songs weren't about regret and loss,

but,

well

"Never define yourself by choices others make.
If no one said it yet, it would be a shame. That ends right now.
You're not alone in pain.
Never alone in pain."

They're playing this whole album on a ticketed livestream this Friday. I think it's gonna be good!

Succession is incredible. Clearly made by people with deep, personal experience of abuse. And no patience for the pathways of excess. One of the few current shows I've truly enjoyed.

"Ken, he loves the broken you. That's what he loves."

I remember my mom explaining to a very young me that my dad yelled at me because he loved me. That they hit me because they loved me. This scene drilled directly into a sparking nerve. Shitty people will make you go a long way to defend them because you're afraid of what will happen if you don't.

My parents only loved the broken me. To appease them, to earn their love, I broke and stayed broken for many years. I've had to do so, so much to recover myself, and I'm nowhere near healed. I still live every day remembering what it was like to not be broken in these particular ways.

It's of the utmost importance that you believe yourself about yourself, with all the work that entails. I think to myself a lot lately, "I don't even know who I am." I walk around doing the things I've learned to do, can enjoy myself in honest-feeling ways, but when I look for my identity... it isn't there. Like I'm in orbit around myself, describing the terrain from outside the atmosphere. I used to know what it was like to be me, to want the things I wanted, to feel strongly that certain things mattered to me. I'm mostly not sure about any of those things now. And it takes a lot of patience and pain to try to reconnect the sparking nerves, on top of everything else.

Let's try our best to only have right kind of love expressions.

honestly if I could choose my singing voice, I might choose Petal's. her powerful harmonies sound so good

You remember in Adventure Time, when something really troubling happens to Finn, he gets a certain look in his eyes and says, "That's going in the vault!" And he locks away certain memories, suppresses them, so that he won't have to disturb the appearance of peace?

Four years ago, I had to cut my parents out of my life. It wasn't just because they voted for Trump, even though I had explained why they couldn't, and my mom had said she wouldn't, and then she did, and then she scolded me for being a bad loser. It was the other things she said that proved she didn't give a shit about me, or any of the people I cared about; asked me, "when did the gay thing become such a big deal for you anyway?" when almost every person close to me fits somewhere into the lgbtqia+ spectrum, and she knew that... I realized she didn't have my well-being at heart, nor the well-being of anyone I cared about, and then in a sinking moment I realized that I didn't love my mother anymore. That I couldn't even choose to, which is what I had been doing, despite the way she treated me and others for years.

I was walking around an unfamiliar yard, a place Caleb was house sitting, a week before christmas 2016. I paced around and tried, for the last time, to explain my values to my mom, and why I thought she was not just mistaken, but dangerously wrong in her politics. From the high ground of the recent election, she scolded and sniped at me, unable to hear me over the rumble of propaganda. I remember this conversation and its physical setting vividly, and I remember the rapid hardening of my heart. I'd forced it to be soft and pliant toward my parents for so many years, despite knowing they were full of shit, manipulative, and so often unkind in ensuring that I always did what they wanted me to, or else do nothing at all. I put my life, my sense of self, on hold repeatedly for years, because when I would discuss a big change with my parents, they'd talk me down from it, and I couldn't reconcile the possibility that they could always be wrong about what was best for me. But they were.

I felt my heart close up. I felt anger rush in, anger that kept me awake long into the night, and woke me with a start, for most of the next two years. Anger emerging from unaddressed hurt, at realizing I'd diminished myself to please these very small people, and that in the end it could never be enough.

Tonight I'm thinking about this because I can recognize that this wasn't without further-reaching effects. It's become harder for me to... be there for other people, in the intervening years. Harder for me to remember that other people really can care about me. Easier for me to take smaller perceived slights, get hurt and angry, and then not be able to address it. Harder for me to apologize; not because I'm not sorry for times I let people down, but because I worry, needlessly, that my apologies will be received with venom instead of forgiveness.

In a way it's like all of the anxiety I had about the ways my parents did treat me for so many years, but which was concentrated on them, is still rolling around inside me but points in other directions now. There's plenty else to be anxious about, too; many atrocities and indignities have been suffered on the world by the hideous dipshits my parents have been convinced to identify with. I've been on the verge of bankruptcy for most of the last three years. Everything goes increasingly to shit.

And the thing about the vault... things go in the vault, now. But I don't choose to put them there. They just vanish. I forget for weeks or months at a time about... all kinds of things. But mostly conversations or appointments with the people closest to me. And I'm not aware that it's happening. It's almost like... I still can't believe or fully trust that anyone really wants to talk to me; the effort of beginning a conversation feels so fraught with the possibility of being attacked or having to apologize for something, that it's so hard to start. And then I do have to apologize, because some ridiculous amount of time has passed with me frozen in anxiety, or tottering around in oblivious effort just struggling daily to do the work required to survive, plus whatever other other bullshit I'm embroiled in.

I can't even say exactly what the problem here is. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's the emotional fallout of having watched my mother's petty cruelty sever what was left of my connection to my entire family, and most of my past. Nobody in my extended family has tried to talk to me since January of 2017. I have to assume they, conservatives all, have written me off as a maniac. And I'm not saying I'm not a maniac!!! But I don't think I am. I think I'm a sensitive person who has had a deeply difficult time enduring life in this very bad country.

My sensitivity is what's finally been diminished somewhat. It feels very strange to realize I just don't feel as strongly about most things anymore. I think some of that is from my antidepressants, but this was true even before that. I just can't keep feeling bad about every little thing that I used to. There's enough ambient hurt.

As I'm typing I feel myself spinning out into a dozen tangents, so this isn't a coherent essay. I sort of just wanted to capture a description of this non-deliberate vaulting that occurs, but also to note that recently... the vault has been opening periodically. People and events that I haven't thought of for many years have been springing to mind, and without the hurt that accompanied them for various reasons over the last 15 years. I can look back on things with fondness, rather than resentment or despair. Or, with less of the latter. It's kind of nice. Feeling sentimental about the past, instead of like I'm being run through with a horse-propelled lance.

Anyway. It used to be that anytime one of Trump's horrid attendants did anything public, I'd immediately feeling boiling rage toward my parents. I'd be explaining it to them, chastising them, screaming at them in my head, and ultimately getting nowhere. I was finally able to let go of that, after I embarrassed myself about it in front of Sara as we drove her new car back from New York, before I let her down as just another emotionally-unavailable man-appearing person, despite her only ever being kind and caring to me. And this week, as we see the fruits of unchecked disinformation finally reaching the calcified heart of our government, the one thing I take comfort in is not thinking automatically of my parents. There are more present specters to deal with.

Chase This Light is such a great album, but these songs from the back half are just so goooood

"I'll say it straight and plain: I know I've made mistakes. I've always been afraid."
"You say that love goes anywhere. In your darkest time, it's just enough to know it's there."