I Want to Remember What It's Like to Feel
After reading a few Livejournal entries I wrote a few years ago, I felt this intense need to write. This deep need to “document” what has been going on in my life. This very pedestrian life I have been leading these days. Not that my life deserves such recognition and documentation, but I forgot how much writing used to mean to me. It was self expression, a way to ask myself the tough questions. I blogged to find answers. I would write to seek a sense of comfort. Through wordplay I was able to come to conclusions. It’s as if my mind only allowed my thoughts to run the perimeter of my skull. But once I started typing out my thoughts they seemed to be set free. There were no limitations. There was no bone to penetrate. There was a blank white screen and a blinking black cursor. Anything was possible. Contemplation would ensue and my thoughts would flow as fast as my mind could think them. My fingers were the gusts of wind I needed to reach conclusions. Wind gusts that allowed me to indulge in epiphanies and sort through all the dead ends and orbiting thought processes I would find myself in late at night.
I miss writing like that! I miss blogging. I miss posting a journal entry in Livejournal. I miss the sense of community and the dialogues we shared. I miss leaving an “away message” on AIM, even if I can’t remember my screen name. I miss this self-documented history. I read a journal entry about a car accident I was in a few years ago and this rush of emotion came over me. It was a beautiful piece of writing. But more than anything, it reminded me of the passion I had for words, for life. There was this creative energy still stirring within me.
Here is an excerpt from that Livejournal entry:
"They roll the stretcher into the hospital. Immediately the smell and sounds of the hospital invade the patient’s head. A male nurse takes his temperature and blood pressure and asks him on a scale of 1-10 how much pain does he feel. The patient is very aware that the question is very subjective. He is also aware that he doesn’t know how to read his own body, including his own pain. He lets out a stifled 6 and they lift him into a bed, but keep him attached to the backboard. They leave him alone in a room, strapped and taped and suffocating in a neck brace. For some reason the bed has his legs raised up and the blood continues to rush to his head. He feels helpless and struggles to get comfortable. He fails at squirming into a better position and starts crying quietly."
These past few years, I haven’t felt this kind of vigor for writing. Yes, I have been writing since then. But the writing I have been doing isn’t personal. They are articles. They are musings about Lana Del Rey and Charli XCX. They are movie reviews and blurbs about music festivals. It’s not real writing. I’m more interested in how things affect people. I want to know how “art” moved you in some way. Did it fuck with your head? Did it change your perspective about sunrises and sunsets? I’m not good at being funny. Each time I try to make a clever comparison or tell a joke, it always seems to fall flat. I’m not a funny person. Yes, I’m a bit aloof and bewildered. There’s this weightless ditzy air about me in person, but I’m not witty. Have you ever heard me do an impersonation? I’m the worst. I can barely speak with a Long Island accent and I spent most of my life living there. Though to be fair, I spent most of that time trying to stifle that accent as much as I could.
As I sat down to write this journal entry, I wondered to myself, “What should I listen to? What song would inspire me to get some words out of me?” Iron & Wine’s “The Trapeze Swinger” was the answer. It’s beautifully nostalgic, evoking all of these feelings and images of my childhood. It also helps that it’s ten minutes long with a repetitive guitar riff, so your mood has time to sink its teeth into the melancholy melody. A change of song or tempo doesn’t disturb your thought process. You have to time to feel every moment of the song, you have time to feel every thought that passes through you.
But things have been such a whirlwind. I feel as I get older the years are passing by more and more quickly. There’s a part of me who still has no idea what he wants to be when he grows up. But at this point I’m grown up and I’m probably doing what I’ll be doing for the rest of my life-more or less. I don’t know if this realization is depressing or comforting. But I’m very familiar with those two words: depression and comfort. I find an immense amount of comfort being depressed. The familiarity soothes my anxiety. I know how to operate under these circumstances, these symptoms. The fatigue is a defense against the bright light of day. Naps, sleeps and closed eyes. It feels good to turn everything off. To lay in the darkness. That feeling in the pit of your stomach reminds you that you are alive. A corporeal reminder that you have a soul trapped inside of you.
But I’m learning to be optimistic, to see the the glass half full if you will. My boyfriend has offered me new perspectives on how to live my life, on how to perceive my future(s). While dropping him off at his apartment tonight he said one of the sweetest lugubrious things. “Nothing hurts when I’m with you,” he said while stepping out of Olive, my Fiat. I wanted to instantly cry. He’s a bit under the weather and rather emotional these past few days. We just parted ways after seeing EMA at Rough Trade. I wasn’t always a fan of hers. It wasn’t until I saw her at this year’s SXSW. She played in a church for Pitchfork’s official showcase and blew me away. Standing tall in a pair of Dr. Martens, blonde hair, wrapping a mic cord around her neck as if she were going to hang herself up there on the altar of some beautiful church with stained-glass windows in Austin, Texas, for all of us to see. I sat in the pew in awe. PEW/AWE. Since she was sharing the bill with 5-6 other people, it was just a tease to see her perform only a few songs so the boyf scored us tickets to her show in Brooklyn. “I wish that every time he touched me left a mark,” she sang tonight and I was feeling it. All of it. “20 kisses from a butterfly knife,” she sang and it really hit home. “You were the goth in high school. You cut and fucked your arms up,” she sang and I knew she was the one for me. Once her new album The Future’s Void dropped it was on constant rotation. The boyf has always been a fan, it was the reason we rushed to church in the first place. Tonight’s show didn’t start until 9pm and there were two opening bands we didn’t care for (I did investigate. Here’s a suggestion for new artists out there, never compare yourselves to Sigur Rós, it won’t end well. I’m looking at you Owel.
“Through our saved e-mail and Google searches and social media interactions, a computer could precisely reconstruct our personalities, and in fact that computer would probably be able to create a persona that is more ‘us’ than we actually are,” Michael Tedder mentions in an interview with EMA on Spin. He’s referring to her ballad ”3Jane” which is drenched in cyberpunk references. William Gibson’s Nueromancer to be exact. It’s a postmodern classic I had to read in college. “Disassociation, I guess it’s just a modern disease,” EMA sang tonight and I understood her fear of this alternate AI version of ourselves that could exist without us even knowing. And I don’t even smoke weed or mess with hallucinogens and I share the same fears as her. “This song is a capitalist critique. I’m not shitting on millennials,” she confessed. I didn’t even know there was drama surrounding the song.
I spotted Fred Armisen at the show and considered walking up to him and mention how awkward and off-putting Bret Easton Ellis was when he appeared on his podcast the other week but I decided not to. Before the show, I tweeted that I had a headache asking EMA to keep the screaming to a minimum and I think she may have considered my health because things seemed a little less frenetic and a little more hazy and psychedelic.
Even the PJ-Harvey-meets-Hole ”So Blonde” seemed tamed and a bit quiet. It also helped that I plugged up my ears with bright orange earplugs and my boyf offered me blue and yellow pills to alleviate my migraine. After spilling a drink during only the first song a fan brought her another one. It was kind of adorable. A few minutes later the same fan got her a shot of tequila with lime. During her slower songs the boyf would lean in closer to me and I could feel the weight of him beside me and it flooded me with feelings. I have never dated someone who has been so musically synched with me. Our tastes differ only slightly but in the best way possible. I wouldn’t be at this EMA show if it weren’t for him. We compliment each other well, expanding our tastes into further realms and realms of realms. “We make the constellations out of her beauty marks. We make the constellations out of the falling stars,” she sings during ”Solace”. I just think about the countless hours James and I have spent laying in bed, with his fingers connecting the beauty marks on my back. They’re foreign to him and his Armenian skin. They amuse him as he traces lines in all directions on my skin. It tickles and I get a bit self-conscious about the bizarre circles that take residence on my white skin. I’ve had most of them my entire life so I’m no longer curious about them. They’re just there. His curiosity is sweet even when he suggests I see a dermatologist for that one over there. He likes to point out his one beauty mark, that is more like a freckle on his olive skin. For all I know he used a fine-point marker to mimic the marks on my body.
Here is EMA performing “California” at Rough Trade.
The show ends late and we decide to stop by Oasis for a falafel before we part ways. They still have the best falafel I’ve had in New York City. We reminisce about one of the first times we hung out. He was dropping me off at my car that was parked a few blocks away. We just got back from seeing Andrew Haigh’s Weekend and were in deep conversation about the importance and value of the moving image. We spoke about the narratives we watch on our televisions and all of the different stories we consume on a weekly basis. We missed a few turns in Williamsburg to get to my car but we didn’t mind because the conversation was meandering and seemingly infinite. In retrospect, this was the moment I started to fall for him. Up until a few hours before, I thought he was heterosexual. Our friendship was based on a mutual appreciation for early 90s alternative indie rock and the bands that sound like them now (Yuck!). It wasn’t until we were descending down an escalator at the Chelsea Clearview after watching one of the best (gay) films I have ever seen that he opened up to me. I was still sorting through Russell and Glen’s troubling, whimsical yet devastating, short romance and here is a boy beginning to peel away the protective exterior we all wear in our day-to-day lives. He’s offering me a glimpse into his heart. The movie left us vulnerable and open. We dropped our guards. We were sharing our stories and tragedies. Revealing parts of ourselves not everyone sees. He told me about his family as he drove through the veins and traffic of Manhattan. I felt special that he would share these stories with me. We get to Brooklyn and I’m not sure if he wanted me to linger or not. But he missed some turns and that prolonged the conversation.
I must have been smitten because a few days later I added him on Facebook and messaged him about how much I enjoyed myself. He responded in such a genuine way, bringing up Weekend again. “My sexuality is kind of a muted topic within my friends. I think of that line from the movie about how your friends won't let you be any other version of yourself, and being trapped in concrete.” We really are on the same page. That was 2.5 years ago. It’s now been 3 years (exactly) since I first met him at Bowery Ballroom and here we are eating a falafel talking about our past. We now have a shared history. He’s part of my story, my narrative, my life. He’s a main character who has the power and capability to alter my plot. He could be the reason my story becomes a sappy romance novel. He has the power to destroy me. It’s alarming to realize someone has your heart in their hands and there’s nothing you can do to retrieve it. It’s the reason I’m here writing. I’m attempting to put the words down. I want to document this history we share together. Proof of our love. I want to chronicle these adventures with him. I want a novel worth of words to look back on when I’m 80 years old. I don’t want to just rely on images and status updates on Facebook. I want the stuff that’s underneath those photographs on Instagram. I want to remember what it felt like to feel in 2014. And I think words are the only way to get back there. They are the bridge that connects our present to our pasts. Images help, but they don’t tell the whole story. Give me your word and you’ll have me forever.
I miss writing like that! I miss blogging. I miss posting a journal entry in Livejournal. I miss the sense of community and the dialogues we shared. I miss leaving an “away message” on AIM, even if I can’t remember my screen name. I miss this self-documented history. I read a journal entry about a car accident I was in a few years ago and this rush of emotion came over me. It was a beautiful piece of writing. But more than anything, it reminded me of the passion I had for words, for life. There was this creative energy still stirring within me.
Here is an excerpt from that Livejournal entry:
"They roll the stretcher into the hospital. Immediately the smell and sounds of the hospital invade the patient’s head. A male nurse takes his temperature and blood pressure and asks him on a scale of 1-10 how much pain does he feel. The patient is very aware that the question is very subjective. He is also aware that he doesn’t know how to read his own body, including his own pain. He lets out a stifled 6 and they lift him into a bed, but keep him attached to the backboard. They leave him alone in a room, strapped and taped and suffocating in a neck brace. For some reason the bed has his legs raised up and the blood continues to rush to his head. He feels helpless and struggles to get comfortable. He fails at squirming into a better position and starts crying quietly."
These past few years, I haven’t felt this kind of vigor for writing. Yes, I have been writing since then. But the writing I have been doing isn’t personal. They are articles. They are musings about Lana Del Rey and Charli XCX. They are movie reviews and blurbs about music festivals. It’s not real writing. I’m more interested in how things affect people. I want to know how “art” moved you in some way. Did it fuck with your head? Did it change your perspective about sunrises and sunsets? I’m not good at being funny. Each time I try to make a clever comparison or tell a joke, it always seems to fall flat. I’m not a funny person. Yes, I’m a bit aloof and bewildered. There’s this weightless ditzy air about me in person, but I’m not witty. Have you ever heard me do an impersonation? I’m the worst. I can barely speak with a Long Island accent and I spent most of my life living there. Though to be fair, I spent most of that time trying to stifle that accent as much as I could.
Click to viewAs I sat down to write this journal entry, I wondered to myself, “What should I listen to? What song would inspire me to get some words out of me?” Iron & Wine’s “The Trapeze Swinger” was the answer. It’s beautifully nostalgic, evoking all of these feelings and images of my childhood. It also helps that it’s ten minutes long with a repetitive guitar riff, so your mood has time to sink its teeth into the melancholy melody. A change of song or tempo doesn’t disturb your thought process. You have to time to feel every moment of the song, you have time to feel every thought that passes through you.
But things have been such a whirlwind. I feel as I get older the years are passing by more and more quickly. There’s a part of me who still has no idea what he wants to be when he grows up. But at this point I’m grown up and I’m probably doing what I’ll be doing for the rest of my life-more or less. I don’t know if this realization is depressing or comforting. But I’m very familiar with those two words: depression and comfort. I find an immense amount of comfort being depressed. The familiarity soothes my anxiety. I know how to operate under these circumstances, these symptoms. The fatigue is a defense against the bright light of day. Naps, sleeps and closed eyes. It feels good to turn everything off. To lay in the darkness. That feeling in the pit of your stomach reminds you that you are alive. A corporeal reminder that you have a soul trapped inside of you.
But I’m learning to be optimistic, to see the the glass half full if you will. My boyfriend has offered me new perspectives on how to live my life, on how to perceive my future(s). While dropping him off at his apartment tonight he said one of the sweetest lugubrious things. “Nothing hurts when I’m with you,” he said while stepping out of Olive, my Fiat. I wanted to instantly cry. He’s a bit under the weather and rather emotional these past few days. We just parted ways after seeing EMA at Rough Trade. I wasn’t always a fan of hers. It wasn’t until I saw her at this year’s SXSW. She played in a church for Pitchfork’s official showcase and blew me away. Standing tall in a pair of Dr. Martens, blonde hair, wrapping a mic cord around her neck as if she were going to hang herself up there on the altar of some beautiful church with stained-glass windows in Austin, Texas, for all of us to see. I sat in the pew in awe. PEW/AWE. Since she was sharing the bill with 5-6 other people, it was just a tease to see her perform only a few songs so the boyf scored us tickets to her show in Brooklyn. “I wish that every time he touched me left a mark,” she sang tonight and I was feeling it. All of it. “20 kisses from a butterfly knife,” she sang and it really hit home. “You were the goth in high school. You cut and fucked your arms up,” she sang and I knew she was the one for me. Once her new album The Future’s Void dropped it was on constant rotation. The boyf has always been a fan, it was the reason we rushed to church in the first place. Tonight’s show didn’t start until 9pm and there were two opening bands we didn’t care for (I did investigate. Here’s a suggestion for new artists out there, never compare yourselves to Sigur Rós, it won’t end well. I’m looking at you Owel.
“Through our saved e-mail and Google searches and social media interactions, a computer could precisely reconstruct our personalities, and in fact that computer would probably be able to create a persona that is more ‘us’ than we actually are,” Michael Tedder mentions in an interview with EMA on Spin. He’s referring to her ballad ”3Jane” which is drenched in cyberpunk references. William Gibson’s Nueromancer to be exact. It’s a postmodern classic I had to read in college. “Disassociation, I guess it’s just a modern disease,” EMA sang tonight and I understood her fear of this alternate AI version of ourselves that could exist without us even knowing. And I don’t even smoke weed or mess with hallucinogens and I share the same fears as her. “This song is a capitalist critique. I’m not shitting on millennials,” she confessed. I didn’t even know there was drama surrounding the song.
I spotted Fred Armisen at the show and considered walking up to him and mention how awkward and off-putting Bret Easton Ellis was when he appeared on his podcast the other week but I decided not to. Before the show, I tweeted that I had a headache asking EMA to keep the screaming to a minimum and I think she may have considered my health because things seemed a little less frenetic and a little more hazy and psychedelic.
Even the PJ-Harvey-meets-Hole ”So Blonde” seemed tamed and a bit quiet. It also helped that I plugged up my ears with bright orange earplugs and my boyf offered me blue and yellow pills to alleviate my migraine. After spilling a drink during only the first song a fan brought her another one. It was kind of adorable. A few minutes later the same fan got her a shot of tequila with lime. During her slower songs the boyf would lean in closer to me and I could feel the weight of him beside me and it flooded me with feelings. I have never dated someone who has been so musically synched with me. Our tastes differ only slightly but in the best way possible. I wouldn’t be at this EMA show if it weren’t for him. We compliment each other well, expanding our tastes into further realms and realms of realms. “We make the constellations out of her beauty marks. We make the constellations out of the falling stars,” she sings during ”Solace”. I just think about the countless hours James and I have spent laying in bed, with his fingers connecting the beauty marks on my back. They’re foreign to him and his Armenian skin. They amuse him as he traces lines in all directions on my skin. It tickles and I get a bit self-conscious about the bizarre circles that take residence on my white skin. I’ve had most of them my entire life so I’m no longer curious about them. They’re just there. His curiosity is sweet even when he suggests I see a dermatologist for that one over there. He likes to point out his one beauty mark, that is more like a freckle on his olive skin. For all I know he used a fine-point marker to mimic the marks on my body.
Here is EMA performing “California” at Rough Trade.
The show ends late and we decide to stop by Oasis for a falafel before we part ways. They still have the best falafel I’ve had in New York City. We reminisce about one of the first times we hung out. He was dropping me off at my car that was parked a few blocks away. We just got back from seeing Andrew Haigh’s Weekend and were in deep conversation about the importance and value of the moving image. We spoke about the narratives we watch on our televisions and all of the different stories we consume on a weekly basis. We missed a few turns in Williamsburg to get to my car but we didn’t mind because the conversation was meandering and seemingly infinite. In retrospect, this was the moment I started to fall for him. Up until a few hours before, I thought he was heterosexual. Our friendship was based on a mutual appreciation for early 90s alternative indie rock and the bands that sound like them now (Yuck!). It wasn’t until we were descending down an escalator at the Chelsea Clearview after watching one of the best (gay) films I have ever seen that he opened up to me. I was still sorting through Russell and Glen’s troubling, whimsical yet devastating, short romance and here is a boy beginning to peel away the protective exterior we all wear in our day-to-day lives. He’s offering me a glimpse into his heart. The movie left us vulnerable and open. We dropped our guards. We were sharing our stories and tragedies. Revealing parts of ourselves not everyone sees. He told me about his family as he drove through the veins and traffic of Manhattan. I felt special that he would share these stories with me. We get to Brooklyn and I’m not sure if he wanted me to linger or not. But he missed some turns and that prolonged the conversation.
I must have been smitten because a few days later I added him on Facebook and messaged him about how much I enjoyed myself. He responded in such a genuine way, bringing up Weekend again. “My sexuality is kind of a muted topic within my friends. I think of that line from the movie about how your friends won't let you be any other version of yourself, and being trapped in concrete.” We really are on the same page. That was 2.5 years ago. It’s now been 3 years (exactly) since I first met him at Bowery Ballroom and here we are eating a falafel talking about our past. We now have a shared history. He’s part of my story, my narrative, my life. He’s a main character who has the power and capability to alter my plot. He could be the reason my story becomes a sappy romance novel. He has the power to destroy me. It’s alarming to realize someone has your heart in their hands and there’s nothing you can do to retrieve it. It’s the reason I’m here writing. I’m attempting to put the words down. I want to document this history we share together. Proof of our love. I want to chronicle these adventures with him. I want a novel worth of words to look back on when I’m 80 years old. I don’t want to just rely on images and status updates on Facebook. I want the stuff that’s underneath those photographs on Instagram. I want to remember what it felt like to feel in 2014. And I think words are the only way to get back there. They are the bridge that connects our present to our pasts. Images help, but they don’t tell the whole story. Give me your word and you’ll have me forever.