PUP — "Can't Win"

I'm feelin' pretty good right now, but I know these feelings too well. I really appreciate how much this album blasts forward into the fun zone, while capturing and redirecting all the vicious self-recrimination of the depressed and impoverished. The whole album is one of the most constructively cathartic I've ever heard.

GOOD JOB, PUP

OZMA — "BAD DOGS"

fuck yeah, it's ozma time again. I've been hollering to this album since 2003.

jimmy eat world — "polaris"

i'm going to live on the hill that jimmy eat world is one of the great rock bands

the juliana theory — if i told you this was killing me, would you stop?

I still love this album, allllll these years later. Playing this live with my high school rock band is a very happy, satisfying memory :)

(though for the record, I felt it so deeply because I kept trying to say it was killing me, and unfortunately they did not stop)

I'm trying to write letters to several people. Apologies, catch-ups, explanations, reconnections.

Writing used to be the most natural thing in the world to me. I wrote notebooks-full and novels-worth of letters, diaries, lyrics, stories, and poems, throughout my life into my 20s.

The less pleasant my life got, the poorer my wallet, the longer my various biochemical conditions went untreated while material conditions failed to improve to compensate... it got harder and harder to access the free flowing of words.

My own voice. Disgusting to me. Painful. Recriminative. I didn't believe in my own thoughts. Didn't want to write letters because what was the point? Just to tell someone who cares about me how bad I felt? To write another story that turned into self-destruction? To write a song nobody was going to hear?

I miss it. Desperately. Always. But when I start, in any medium besides a vague live journal-style post, it hurts so badly immediately. My heart races, I flood with anger and regret and despair, at all the lost time, at my lost life. It hurts. I can't describe how badly it hurts, and how venomously angry I am that my enjoyment of my own mind has been taken or lost. I truly hate it in here, y'all. And when my voice, my heart, comes out, it is furious. It can't believe this is still going on. That the happy-hearted, creative little kid has turned into a resentful, stymied, old bastard.

... See what I mean?

Anyway, I want to write letters to people I've let down or let go. Not to justify myself, but to explain that they didn't do anything wrong. That it's just me, suffering primarily in silence, confused and lost and hurting, unable to communicate clearly.

I've been accosted too many times for my words. I've written from my heart and had my life literally ruined, harm done, attacked by those who were supposed to care for me. I've also written things that have made other people happy, entertained, informed. Sometimes the same things. I haven't had a stable enough foundation of confidence to withstand the criticism, deserved or not, for a long, long time.

Sara once wondered aloud why she so often fell for emotionally-unavailable men. Meaning me. I said, "I don't know." But in my heart I was screaming, because I wasn't born this way. I was made, damaged, beaten, coerced. The friction of so many meaningless, moneyless days. The insistent and abusive control of my parents, who only loved me when I did exactly what they wanted. The partners who misinterpreted me despite my best efforts, out of their own trauma and suspicion. My naive belief that if I just kept trying to make a connection with someone who was dead-set against me, that a bridge could be formed. A childhood surrounded by friends, family, and people who clapped for my clowning, giving way to an adult life cut off from the world, trying and too-late escaping my family, sweating in rural Georgia for no reason besides literally never having enough money to entertain moving elsewhere under my own velocity.

Anyway. I can write this, and hope that it will give way to writing more directly and constructively to a person, instead of generally to whoever still clicks to this webpage, despite everything. Instead I'll go back to work, where communication is draining my energy, where again for some reason I can't get people to really hear what I'm saying, to believe that I know what I'm talking about, that maybe the reason I seem so strange and threatening is because I do know things they don't, and that I am, as usual, several steps ahead and falling increasingly behind.

I want to believe in my life. In my voice. I don't right now. This is just barking at the window. I'm trying to find my way to myself. I've been trying for almost 20 years.

"to the birds that sing in cages" — michael flynn (not that one)

Beat back the night
Tell it to leave you alone

the weeknd — "out of time"

"stay down" — silversun pickups

Smothering our sons and daughters
Some swim, some float
Washed out of particular seas

I wanna swim in a beautiful ocean
Feel waves with low emotion
A little change, a little hope

Some words ring better than others
Limiting the sounds we mutter
Some sing, some don't
A little piece of a beautiful world
Once said and overheard

Just another sign
Best to keep that body down

the velvet teen — "no one gets the best of me"

Yeah, some say that this life ain't the only one we get
I once claimed that I'd found myself when I'd only been chasing my own silhouette

So point the finger at whom you like
Or raise your head and curse the sky
It makes no difference
That's why I never could decide

the velvet teen — gyzmkid

one of the coolest-sounding songs? or the coolest-sounding song? you decide

Do the people you love
Still come greet you like you'd never left off
Or has your skin become too rough
Is it too hard to even keep in touch

Yeah, i try my best, but when i can't
And i'm away, know you've all my love
In this sea turtle moment