6/25/14

Three working song titles for unwritten songs

#1: ABSENT



Is it okay to say I've been sick? Is that an okay reason to explain why I've taken so long to get back to people.

I wanted to update about a bunch of things but I was sad and weird recently. I guess it's been two weeks. More? I played a bunch of shows, they were pretty much fantastic. I've had some difficult moments. What are you going to do. I want to catch up but I can't catch up. I was talking to my shrink, talking to my friends about how I don't want to blog about anything, I don't want to talk about anything, I don't want to do anything until I can resolve my feelings around this person I knew who passed away recently. We weren't close, I wouldn't even call us friends. It feels disrespectful and invasive to memorialize them, to make their death about me. Let's just say there was someone I knew and looked up to and they're gone and although we were very far from close or intimate in any way, although we only met each other a handful of times, and although I've unfortunately lost a few people I was actually close to, this person's passing really threw me. It made me feel like I had nothing to talk about except how sad I was they're gone, and I had no right to say that at all, so why even start. I've put a lid on this for the time being. Know that I was thinking about some things, but decided to wait until I had a real thing to say about them.  Is this what we mean when we say "holding the space"?

I wasn't sick, I was sad. I was just disappointed. I was going through some stuff I made a few years ago and was totally, totally blown away by how different the voice of the person making it was. I seemed so immature! I think that's nice; progress. Incremental development. But still, I feel like such a fucking baby sometimes when it comes to disappointment: I didn't get this thing I talked myself into wanting and so I keep just turning it over and over in my head.

It's so fucked up and beautiful how disappointment is really just a clarification of desire. How pain is a necessary component of pleasure. How one's ability (okay, my ability) to desire and work towards intimacy is only understood by the constant return to loneliness.

I guess we don't like that word.


#2: BAD COP



The thing of, like, being the one that you know but don't feel good about. You don't want to let me know, you don't want to just say, or just thank me, for doing something you liked. It's like-- I was out with an artist friend of mine who is the same age as me, and we ran into a younger artist person and I introduced them to my friend, I didn't know if they'd formally met before. And the younger artist was very sweet, and told my friend how they'd seen their work when they first moved to the City and they were really into it. I didn't actually hear this, I wasn't listening in on their conversation (I was talking to someone else) but it is that thing of, like, that's really sweet and I felt kind of jealous. Not jealous; it was another object lesson in something I'm doing/not doing or being/not being. I don't have those conversations with people, you know? I'm not the one that, even were it true in such a situation, that you would want to tell that to. I am the Bad Cop. I'm the person who people say is stuck up, snobby, an asshole, because I didn't remember someone's name after meeting them once before, at a nightclub. You know, meanwhile, the person who's name I don't remember doesn't actually know anything about me beyond my name. It's a straw man thing. I feel bad. This is pessimism taking over. I guess it's not how I actually feel but like finding evidence of a dark hunch.

Bad Cops and Dark Hunches. Do you think in terms of song titles?

No, I just mean that I feel like I'm stuck in this role I've adoped for myself where I have to be the Bad Cop. Where I have to be the one most uncomfortable, most impossible to like person in the room. It's stupid. I often feel like this is the only way I get places, is as a punching bag. "Well, we'll need someone at the party to be really resentful of, let's get Billy." Jesus doesn't want me for a sunbeam he wants me for a scapegoat. This is gross, maybe. A running list of demands, of complaints. Why do I do this to myself. "Surely, you think, they must need someone to be the catalog model for these dunce hats. You look so good in them. You really do."


#3: WHOLESALE



This has been coming up a lot lately, for me. The idea of wholesale versus retail pricing. I'd be lying if I didn't admit that part of this is the fact that department stores are having their summer sales, and my gadfly self is always on some kind of calculation. Surely, the t-shirt that sells for $70 when 70% off-- it must cost much much less than that to manufacture it, right? What is the best deal I can get? How long should I wait to buy something. This thing of buying in bulk, calculating the cost. The more you buy, the lower the price. This is the thing of wholesale that gets me. If you bought enough of them, shouldn't they be free? No, it's about getting to the absolute minimum with the supplier. A more perfect transaction. A negotiation. There's the inherent value in something, and the inherent value that only we know and keep to ourselves.

I suppose what I'm thinking about, again, is worthiness. You can only stand up for yourself, demand more for yourself, if you think you're worth it. I'm just so skeptical of feeling worthy, because if I was it'd be different, materially. It would feel different, right? To be good, to be happy, to have your shit together. Surely, it must feel different. Surely if I feel so fucked up, it must mean that I'm not actually good. It's that thing of accepting the face value. If they charge so much for it, it must be worth it. But of course this is a lie. The price is part of the design, right?

And then again, that truism: Nobody pays retail. You know what? I'm a nobody. I pay retail. I don't want something to exist just for the sake of making people look stupid. If those are the stakes (and they nearly always are) then I volunteer to be the stupid person. I volunteer to overpay. I volunteer to test the plank; let me see if I can bounce off of the bottom of the ocean. I want to be the one. Why, why am I so theoretically interested in suffering, in being an example of badness. I'm not a superhero, more like a minor hero. A virtuous villain sidekick. I'm that one who eats the poison so no one else has to. And it sucks. I just want someone to share it with, to remind me I don't have to.

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