Sounds

Alone on a pull-out couch in a Boston hotel last summer, I kept myself awake for two hours repeating the line: I wish I was a pane of glass, sunlight pulling through me, I wish you stood there, sunlight pooling through you. I wanted to make sure I would remember it in the morning. I used the omnipresent mysterious "you" that appears in oh so many a song. I think I told the specific "you" person that I wrote this thing about them(?), which feels embarrassing and very vulnerable and sort of unforgivable now. That summer was definitely weird and lonely in the way that: I felt like a big ship unmoored, floating around with a lot of other boats, and all I could do was call people I missed on the phone. Driving all around the east coast, my bandmates and I noted the suffocating invasion of the Kudzu plant, its omnipresence was apocalyptic. This summer is shaping up to be lonelier in a much worse way, where I'm no longer a ship but instead a rock or something sitting mutely on a shore. Anyways, I'm working on the live instrumentation of the-song-that-this-lonely-hotel-rumination-turned-into and decided to listen back to the original garage band demo I concocted using the piano in the living room of the college-house I used to live in. The piano has this awesome cello setting that I used a lot throughout the demo and now I think about that specific sound often. Here is that recording sans lyrics/guitar:

My favorite part begins around 4:20. Sometimes there's a repeating note that sounds like a submarine morse code signal, sometimes there are awkward silences where the absent guitar/vocals fill out the song. Sometimes you can hear my roommates in the background, or me shifting in my chair. 

Most of the above writing reads to me like grammatically incorrect personal dribble. I think that's partially true and partially the loathing and "talking to the wall" habits that spending a lot of time alone in the summer does to a person (or at least to me). By talking to the wall, I mean literally speaking out loud to my empty apartment for multiple hours of the day, no I'm not crazy, I just like talking to someone smart (haha get it). Writing things like this blog post and throwing them into the wasteland of the internet feels basically the same as when I talk to myself at home. 

Listening back to old recordings, I find some voice memos from almost exactly a year ago of me reading aloud some stories I wrote for a creative writing class. I was living in Berlin, and whenever my dear roommate left for class/the grocery store I would start reading everything I wrote aloud. At some point I started recording myself, so I could listen back and see what parts of the stories I wanted to change. My neighbors in this apartment building had a weekly musical get-together where they would sing old German folk tunes. In preparation for the caroling, my neighbor would tune and play his violin, which frequently didn't sound like music but more like shrieking. Somehow I was never able to capture the singing all that well because the birds in our courtyard drowned out most intelligible sound. This is the best recording I ever got: 

Re-reading and re-listening to things I've written/collected/recorded sends me into a strange stupor that is both boring and soothing. 

These lines from a post I made in November still feel true:

I check my email 17 times a day, the five, six, and dash keys of my laptop are broken, I rarely pay attention, my body experiences sensations like an anemone. 

A couple days ago someone texted me that there is a praying mantis crouched inside of them. Once a day I notice a baseball sized rock crouched inside of me. 

Sometimes, I go to the bathroom and make excruciating faces at the wall, open my mouth as big as possible, scrunch everything, curl my neck back and forth.

I feel serpentine and wicked moving through a crowd. I am neurotic (at times) and completely exploding (at other times). 

The house is much too cold, the floors much too dirty, my circulation much too poor to play the piano. I have thought this for many years.

Tomorrow morning before noon I will grin grin grin, my teeth silverware, yes you can use them, yes I will wash them in the sink. 

I stare at videos and images and blinking lights and old photos of and dig a deep hole and walk down into the hole and decide the hole is nice and maybe I’ll live there for a bit. 

I read palms and songs and weather patterns for proof, proof of something excellent and heartbreaking. 

Last night I dreamt of a symphony hall filled with dogs, silent.

I make vows of silence, usually on days like today. I say nothing important, I listen to the rats fucking in my heater vent. I eavesdrop on all my roommates.

Later, I will wash my hands backwards and upside down. Take an asprin. Lay awake as silence pans through and around me.

I am a satellite dish on my bed, silver oh so silver. 

Alright, now that I've circulated old writing you've probably already seen on this blog, it's time to have a conversation with my glass shower wall. Cheerio!