the long lonely

How to get to new york, part five

Happy thursday!

Hope you’re well.

Whenever i put my socks on i have to close the door to my bedroom; inadvertently i have to close myself off from the air conditioner in the living room window.

Thankfully there’s also an AC unit in my window. Unfortunately turning on both AC units trips the breaker so i have to Tromptromptromp down to the basement, avoid the sheer plethora of rat traps down there, and flip the switch back up.

Upstairs, in my window: KrckrckrckckckBRRRRRRRRRRR.

I love the summer¹ far more than I should,—it’s this time of year when the summer begins to whisper in my ear: you can make it as an artist, the summer will say, or you can fully pursue these two things which you spend all of your freetime pursuing, quit your job,—you can make it, I, the summer, believe in you so fully. Oh god i believe in you. Isolate yourself, make it real.

Because whenever i want to make art, whenever i pull my hobbies up my leg, not unlike two tube socks, these hobbies which give me a sense of a present-future confidence, i need to close my door. And here’s the time of year, late summer through the fall, when i close my door.

I’ve had unrealistic expectations of success since i was a small child.

BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR, says the AC.

My twenties have so far been an anxious grasping at raw feeling, at the moment of expression, trying to make it blossom. BRRRRRRRR, says my AC.

There’s a fire-in-my-lungs belief that it’s possible to make a career doing the things that I enjoy doing but at the very same moment there’s a core truth in the lining of my stomach that i’m wasting months and months of my life running on an imaginary hamster wheel going nowhere as fast as i can,—to eventually be washed up at some dive bar around a neighborhood which i will never think to leave.

At the same time, i love this hamster wheel. I adore this hamster wheel. I run it all year long, refusing to build any sort of longterm life outside of it. I record demo after demo after demo and the song changes but the tune seems to stay the same. I isolate myself just so that i can read, write journal entries, write songs, take long walks,—friends of mine have made careers for themselves, sometimes i see them, sometimes i see them on instagram—but at the end of the day, i still sit here trying to make a career out of creative work without ever being all that productive about it.

Glued to social media to check notifications, stats, meaningless qualifiers for success, i’ve been pacing around endlessly. On monday night i walked to the train station after walking a friend to her apartment and i just narrowly missed the train towards the loop so i took a moment to smoke a cigarette outside the CTA stop, to check my substack notifications, and raynee-fisher quann had liked my most recent post so i stood there with a feeling of making it but that feeling goes away quickly the next morning when waking up and realizing in the barenaked sunlight that there’s no one i can really talk to about any of it.

Everyone on your feeds are doing the exact same as you,—they’re pushing their personal brand into the aether of cyberspace, into the arbiter of hope existing therein,—or they’re abdicating completely, somewhere off in the real surrounded by real people.

So yeah, it’s hard to maintain relationships.

But every occasionally i wake up and look to the other side of the bed as if i expect someone to be there. I find myself attracted to ethereal people and find it difficult to know how to hold on.

BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.

Anyways.

It could be that i started my main two hobbies (songwriting and writing prose) rather late. I’ve taken writing seriously since 2020, and music since the fall of 2021, a time in which i had a massive creative breakthrough and found myself writing close to two hundred songs in the span of four months,—all of them now buried somewhere in a hard drive sitting by my desk,—but the hard truth of the matter is that if you want to be an artist right now you have to have been working towards it as a singular goal since the time you were thirteen, or else you must have been born into some sort of substantial generational wealth.

For the rest of us twenty-somethings: here’s the long lonely.

Trust your notes app, at the end of the day it may be your best friend.

The realization thought bubble pop that hits me some mornings over coffee hits me, prods me, bashes me into remembering the parts of myself that i’ve lost with time, the parts i’ve neglected until they’ve almost died in me had they not also made into a small, pocketable nostalgia which i can carry along with me in the lighter parts of my soul.

I’m thinking back on the time in my life when i meditated twice a day, when i discovered ram dass for the first time, the peace with my breathing and namaste and ahhh what a beautiful walnut tree this is four feet off of this rooftop where i’m sitting crosslegged with my ankles digging into the rooftop. I’m not sitting on that rooftop anymore. That house in Madison, Wisconsin has now been bulldozed for an apartment development.

Meditation is a wonderful tool, though. Sitting still for a little while to clear one’s head is an act of revolt, of open rebellion against the forces that have developed rapidly in this country since the 1950s’ cultural hegemony proved to be ill equipped at suppressing anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist strains of thought, which, i might add, are as tied up with american history as the racist, domineering, capitalistic slave-master mold. Those two are the yin and yang of the American universe and of course it’s only natural that the centrist american political strain of the moment has allied itself so completely with the latter because the latter would permit powerful, monied centrists to continue unfettered while the former would tamper their chokehold. This is why leftist politics has been shunted so often here. And here we are, chokeheld in a loving embrace by monied forces. You and me. In this together.

On friday night I worked and afterwards went for drinks with my coworkers. We sat around a table outside, drinking cheap beer and gabbing about shift stuff before Maddie and i left for a party in andersonville of late twenty-somethings and early-thirtysomething musicians and producers sitting around various corners of a gothic old house. Acoustic music was played in every corner. Good weed was passed around. Pleasant vibe. I heard the best ever rendition of Michael Jackson’s The Girl is Mine by a black man playing a nylon string guitar with glorious dreads and a woman with a shaved head nearby on the couch singing the McCartney bits. And you’ll never hear it. It existed in the top floor of an apartment building at 1:40am on a Friday night in July and will never exist again. The people there were wonderful, I had a good time hanging out with them. The thought emerges, like any thought: God I wish they would be my friends. But then: no I have my work to do.

I need to take a break from writing this. BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR, says the AC. I scribble a picture of some nonsense on a piece of printer paper.

Baudrillard said something in Cool Memories vol. 3 (which I can’t quite remember now, the copy is back with the Chicago public library system) about the increasing automation of the world, about the goal of reducing time spent doing menial tasks like washing dishes, drying laundry, etc. so we can better “live our lives,”—but at the end of the day, spilled time is the same as spilled blood. Taking time to enjoy the menial tasks of the everyday is what makes life worth living. Life is so hard now, I think, in part, because we’ve increasingly eliminated the time in which we live.

Think about it,—using the example of knowing the time of day here,—not even thirty years ago, even what time it is was privy knowledge. You had to either have a watch or know someone who had a watch who could tell you. Or you needed to be in a building with a clock on the wall. Or you would need to wait until the church bells chime charmingly in the town square. Finding the time was a real act of finding, of seeking. But now, well now there’s the time in your pocket and if may as well be a part of your arm,—there’s no separation between you and the time of day. There’s no question. There’s no mystery. There’s less time in our day-to-day spent in the meaningful act of seeking.

And what if time is a lie? What if the calendar is a lie? What if every day is really just the same day? These are constructs,—sure they’re made up of celestial markers,—but nonetheless everything seems to repeat ad infinitum and our lives become a single monolith that rises and dies with the dictates of these constructs, these mere habits we’ve resigned ourselves to? Now that the acts of living have been taken from us and automated, what else is there to resign ourselves to? The grind? I don’t think this is the answer yet I can’t seem to throw myself into anything except it, that beautiful hamster wheel.

BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.

I had a dream last night wherein I was in a car with friends traversing a wide web of aboveground highways with my acoustic guitar and a number of personal belongings and we were all driving to a talent show in Duluth but the car flew over one of the handrails and I remember succulently thinking, hey we’re going down, and the car floated,—the car floated on the breeze! stuck in a gust,—and thankfully the car sank slowly enough in the water to throw all my belongings out to the beach. We were in a town filled with friendly crustaceans whom were all very nice and well articulated; however by the end of the dream, my guitar had been split into pieces and I had failed Jigsaw’s puzzles and the character I had been at the start of the dream I now sat across from, I watched him from the outside as he lay at the bottom of a dark, stale sunlight lit staircase with a very racist rubber gypsy mask strapped over his head, containing two steel balls at the temples, contracting inwards from either side steadily into his temples as he rocked back and forth and tried, tried, oh he tried, to pull the mask off. But he couldn’t. I woke up. I worry he’s still in the dream

It’s getting dark outside. I’m turning on my desk lamp.

BRRRRRRRR-wckwckwckwck. Ok well now the power’s out. The AC’s out. I can feel the summer heat creeping in.

Need to go downstairs to the basement to flip the breaker up.

But before i go, i don’t want to end this post on such a negative note.

I restumbled upon the Wild Kindness by Silver Jews the other day. I think David Berman expresses well in it the equal-and-opposite hope on the other side of this week’s rather depressing coin. Here’s the lyrics:

I wrote a letter to a wildflower
On a classic nitrogen afternoon
Some power that hardly looked like power
Said, I'm perfect in an empty room

Four dogs in the distance
Each stands for a kindness, yeah
Bluebirds lodged in an evergreen altar

I'm gonna shine out in the wild silence
I'm gonna shine out in the wild silence
I'm gonna shine out in the wild silence
And spurn the sin of giving in

Oil paintings of x-rated picnics
Behind the walls of medication I'm free
Every leaf in a compact mirror (bye-bye, babe bye-bye)
Hits a target that we can't see (babe, bye-bye, goodbye)

Grass grows in the icebox
The year ends in the next room
It is autumn and my camouflage is dying

Instead of time there will be lateness
Instead of time there will be lateness
Instead of time there will be lateness
And let forever be delayed

I dyed my hair in a motel void
Met the coroner at the Dreamgate Frontier
He took my hand and said, "I'll help you, boy (bye-bye, babe, bye-bye)
If you really wanna disappear" (babe, bye-bye, goodbye)

Four dogs in the distance
Each stands for a silence, yeah
Bluebirds lodged in an evergreen altar

I'm gonna shine out in the wild kindness
I'm gonna shine out in the wild kindness
I'm gonna shine out in the wild kindness
And hold the world to its word

xoxox,

briffin

1. I deeply believe that the summer’s not the summer until there’s an AC taking up half a window. In the winter a home becomes a dusty, dark cavern but in the summer months the windows go up and the home becomes a part of the season.

Before I had this AC unit in my window, only a week and a half ago, the summer felt more inside my house; the windows were always open,—the expandable screen with the wooden sides pushed towards the edges,—and sleeping felt like I was outside. It’s been years now since I lived in a house with central AC. Truth be told i prefer to be without. Why? I don’t know why. A window AC is like a music box. Its little square frame is charming in a way. I like how my window is wide open. Something about it just feels more summery. When the golden evening sun comes in over its white brrrrr I feel more perfect than any other time.