Category: Uncategorized

I’ve been reading The Name of This Band is R.E.M. A Biography lately, and it’s got me nostalgic for the fact that, for a good number of years there, R.E.M. was the band I was unmistakably a fan of. I think everyone’s been there at some point in their life if music has been in any way important to them: having a band that you listen to and identify with a bit too much, and find yourself spending too much time thinking about.

From Out of Time through… New Adventures in Hi-Fi, probably…? that was R.E.M. for me; I bought the albums — Automatic for the People was the first CD I ever owned! — and the singles alike; I even bought the videos and bootlegs and read books about the band, too. (Not much changes there, I guess.) I had feelings about what B-sides should have been on albums, and what songs should have been singles if only someone had listened to me, whose teenage wisdom was obviously very important on such topics. R.E.M. was my band.

These days, I rarely listen to them, unless I’m feeling particularly nostalgic. Now that we’re a quarter-century out from my intense love affair with the band, it strikes me that their longest lasting effect on me wasn’t aural, but visual; the aforementioned videos and the album sleeves (and tour program art, when I saw them in 1995 or 1996 for the Monster tour, whenever that was) all had an unmistakable impact on me was I was developing my visual language at the same time as I was preparing for, and then starting, my art school career.

I wasn’t aware I was doing it at the time, I don’t think; certainly, when I first started getting into the band musically, I didn’t really spend too much time analyzing the album covers of Document and Eponymous and Green as I got them out of the local library over and over again. (That’s not true; I was fascinated by the texture of the black lines on Green‘s cover, for some reason.) By the time Out of Time and certainly Automatic for the People were coming out, though, and my obsession was at its height, I remember being fully aware of looking at the type choices, or considering why that particular photo had been chosen versus any other options. (I can still remember feeling just a little bit disappointed by the obvious Photoshop filter on the Automatic album cover.) Perhaps more than any single other influence, R.E.M. shaped what I thought looked good, and also what I thought I wanted to create for myself.

At this point, I’m not sure if I should thank them for that, or regret that I didn’t latch onto something more immediately commercial, given how my art and design career went. What could have happened had I found myself obsessed with the visual stylings of, I don’t know, whoever designed Heat magazine or something similar…!

As I’ve already written about, in many respects, April was an aberration of a month — a period that I can look back at already with no shortage of, huh, that was weird. Not bad, by any degree (in many ways, it was a better month than most, if not all, so far this year), but certainly an odd one that threw all of my rhythms out of whack in ways that were probably good for me.

Much of this was work related; there was a full two-and-a-half weeks where I wasn’t working my traditional Monday-Friday schedule for multiple external reasons, which made for an interesting, exhausting experience. The long and the short of it is was that I probably worked more hours than I would have otherwise, but at entirely different times; I worked two weekends in a row, for example, and there were three days where I was working what we called “Japanese hours,” because it was to cover a show in Tokyo, but in practice it meant 13 hour shifts that ended around 1am, which is a problem when my body clock refuses to let me sleep past 6am any given morning.

(There were also a couple mornings where my head decided to get so stressed about things that ultimately don’t matter that I woke up around 4am and couldn’t get back to sleep; those were fun too, he lied.)

What’s more interesting to me looking back, though, was what I did in response to all of this external stress: I read more, and watched more movies, in what little downtime I did have. I went for more walks, as the weather improved, and realized that exercise and seeing other human beings instead of staring at walls was actually good for me. I went to the movies; I found new restaurants to eat at. It felt as if, for the first time this entire calendar year, I was proactively finding space for doing things that felt good, and were good for me, instead of just trying to keep my head above water the entire time.

It’s a nice feeling. I should do more of that, I think.

April was always going to be an odd month, this year; there was a two-and-a-bit week period right in the middle of the month where my work schedule low-key imploded (intentionally so, but no less disruptively; there were conventions and editing and things that needed to be done that knocked my regular schedule and routine on their head) that felt like a black hole, pulling everything into it and warping the sense of reality surrounding it. There was a stretch where I worked eight days straight without a break, with a few of those days really long ones, and by the end of that, I felt notably off, as if my head has simply run out of power.

The thing about all of this, though, is that it’s happening at the same time as everything in the rest of the world — or, really, the rest of the country, with what used to be called “norms” and “the rule of law” breaking down at such speed and with such severity that it only added to the sense of having accidentally fallen off the face of the Earth and ended up somewhere that looked kind of the same but was notably, importantly, different in such a way that I couldn’t actually explain.

(At the end of that eight-day work stretch, I sat down to look at the news for the first time and saw that Trump was planning to withdraw all funding for public broadcasting; it seemed at once inevitable and the kind of thing that someone would object to, if we weren’t all exhausted by objecting to everything else that is arguably more important.)

There’s something to be said for that liminal feeling, when things just don’t feel entirely right, but not necessarily wrong, either. Even in such dire circumstances, to be able to sit there in that feeling just for a few moments and feel lost but not terrified is a wonderfully freeing thing.

And then, of course, reality sets in and you remember to be terrified again.

The wonderful thing about Spring is how easily I forget it after it’s finished each year.

Despite how that sounds, I don’t mean that sarcastically, or as any type of warning that I actually hate Spring and look forward to it ending every year — just the opposite, in fact. What used to be one of my least favorite seasons (I’m an October baby, I’m naturally predisposed to the fall, what can I say?) has become more and more of a highlight the older I get, and the longer I stay in Portland with its lengthy and emotionally difficult winters. (Man, the unrelenting greyness gets to you after awhile.)

That said, I feel as if Spring is something I remember in the abstract, at best; I know in theory that everything comes into bloom and plants sprout new life, and the sun starts to shine, and all that good stuff. If you asked me to describe the kind of thing that happens in the season, I could do that, no problem. I just forget what it looks like, is all. And then, each Spring, there will come a moment when I’m out on a walk, and I look up and see all the trees covered in their new growth and it takes my breath away.

It reminds me of something I realized when I was back in my hometown for the first time in years, back in 2023; I went for a walk in the early morning before anyone else was up, it felt like, and there was a point where I realized that I’d grown up surrounded by beauty and nature, and hadn’t even noticed at the time. There was such lush greenery all around me, and it had become alien enough that I noticed it again, and appreciated it as if it was new.

I get that every Spring here. There’s a point where I suddenly remember that there’s all this life happening all around me in such colors and varieties, and I feel humbled and touched at the same time. I always forget how genuinely beautiful Spring can be, and I actually love that; every year, I get to see everything new and fresh and fall in love all over again.

Ever since I started in this job, I’ve made it a point to keep analog, handwritten notes whenever possible. I have multiple notebooks — I generally go through two a year, although that’s in part because I always like starting a new notebook at the start of each calendar year, so the real measurement is probably closer to going through one-and-a-half-maybe-more — filled with comments to myself from meetings, from planning sessions or those brief moments of inspiration where I suddenly know just what I should be doing to achieve success or whatever; I have notes that are instructions for specific tasks, and notes that broader plans for, if not world domination, then at least ways to move through the world without too much disruption.

And, for the most part, I rarely look at them a few weeks after they’ve been written.

There are certainly some notes that I find myself poring back over, however long later; there are instructions for specific things that require codes or particular steps to be followed to avoid failure, or there are things that should be remembered very particularly for the desired result. But for the most part, almost everything I make note of is temporary, and forgotten about within weeks. Each of these notebooks is filled with comments and phrases that are meaningless to most everyone, including myself after enough time has passed.

Occasionally, I’ll look through old notebooks, looking for one of those codes I need or something else that suddenly seems relevant long after the fact, and I’ll find myself lost and confused: what does all of this mean? Why did I write these meaningless phrases, and did I even know what they meant back then? I’m creating an archaeology of myself that no-one will be able to decipher if they tried.

Tax season, every year, is a stressful time for me. That’s been the case since I came to the States; I remember that first time of trying to do American taxes and basically thinking to myself, this is arcane and ridiculous, and somehow I have to do this every year? (Yes. Yes, I do. Every single year.)

It’s not just that I’m hardly fiscally-minded. I try to make myself feel better about that each year by going, oh, I’m creative, that means I get a pass on being business-minded or serious in a way that actually benefits me — a theory that certainly makes me feel a little better about myself before the crushing reality sets in and I worry if I don’t have all the paperwork I need and perhaps I’m going to be destroyed by a system that really couldn’t care less how creative I may or may not be. It’s also that the tax system is this very strange, seemingly very intentional anxiety machine that makes things as difficult to understand as possible: do you have the right forms? Have they all been filled in by other people appropriately? Because if they screwed up, that means you screwed up. Are you going to get everything filed in the appropriate manner to two different entities in time? And, because I’m in Portland, Oregon, will you also remember to pay the entirely separate Arts Tax, which isn’t included in the State filing for some reason?

It doesn’t help that I have experience of having done it wrong in the past; I remember being told, the first time I went to a tax specialist, that I’d been doing it so wrong for the past three years that I owed an entire subsection of taxes I wasn’t even aware of. Oh, and because I’d owed it for so long, I’d be charged a 100% penalty for non-payment, so I basically had six years of back taxes waiting for me like the worst Christmas gift ever. I remember being called while on a business trip to the UK by a separate tax preparer that something was wrong with my paperwork and they probably wouldn’t be able to file on time unless I scanned and submitted entirely different documents that I didn’t have to hand because, again, I was in a different country on a work trip.

Because of all of this, I try to do my taxes pretty early each year — preferably somewhere in February, so I have two months or so to fix things if and when they go wrong. Except that, this year, I spent February and the first half of March sick, so I had this internal pressure of gotta do taxes gotta do taxes GOTTA DO TAXES in my head the entire time. They were done before the end of March, filed and accepted, but still. I’m half-convinced that, somehow, something is going to go wrong at any moment and I won’t have time to fix it.

Happy tax filing deadline tomorrow, everyone.

So, let me tell you about the last week of March from a work perspective. We have traffic goals that we’re set at the site — no surprise, because that’s been the case at literally every single website I’ve worked at — and, for reasons too complicated to go into, March’s goal went from “oh, we’re definitely going to hit that” to “oh, we have no chance of hitting that” in the blink of an eye about a week out from the end of the month. (It was a technical thing, not the fault of any particular person.) The reason I’m sharing this isn’t to complain, but to tell you that what happened next surprised the living shit out of me. Namely, I refused to accept it.

That’s not entirely right; I knew throughout the entire week that the goal was virtually impossible — there was a chance, but it was the slimmest of slim chances — but, for whatever reason, I just decided to act as if we’d do it anyway. I worked stupidly long hours, I set specific targets for particular writers to write particular stories for me to edit, I just… pushed, for want of a better way to put it, utterly determined that if we were going to fail, at least I’d have tried my very fucking hardest to succeed and no-one could say anything different. I got the bad news, I spent about a couple of hours being upset and mad about the extenuating circumstances, and then I just… went.

Part of this came from the fact that, the week before, when we were all thinking it was a sure thing, I purposefully took my foot off the gas to give myself, and the writers I edit, a break. February and March had been stressful, I figured, let’s all take a breather for a little bit. The numbers are good, we can afford ourselves this luxury. And then we found out the numbers weren’t good, and I felt embarrassed and mad at myself for that decision.

More than that, though, I was just mad. I was mad that, after these past couple of stressful months, the win that looked like it was right there suddenly wasn’t, and I just decided that I wanted it anyway. And if I wanted it hard enough, and if I really, really, applied myself, then why couldn’t I get it? Or at least, get close? As the song goes, anger is an energy… and at least this way, it was one put to good use. There’s a lesson there I should probably take into other parts of my life.

We ouperformed by the numbers by 10,000 by the time the month was done.

One of the stranger things about having been, essentially, continuously sick since the start of February is that I feel as if I feel as if I haven’t really managed to have any downtime, despite the fact that… well, basically the entire time I haven’t been working across the past eight or nine weeks has been downtime in a technical sense. I mean, what else would you call lying in bed, or on a couch, feeling dizzy and unable to do anything that requires focus and attention for more than a few minutes?

Of course, it’s downtime of one kind, but only one. The ability to do any of the many other things that, honestly, I very much would have liked to have managed by this point of the year — a list that includes anything from “doing my taxes” to “going for more walks,” or even simply “watching all of the movies I have on my ‘to watch’ list” — has been absent, and by this point of the calendar, I can feel the pressure of all those ambitions, from small to necessarily larger, weighing on me. It’s gone from, “man, it’s be nice to do something else” to “I really need to do those other things, before it’s too late.” And yet.

The entire experience is, in its own way, an unexpectedly renewing one. I feel appreciative of the small joys of time off (especially when it isn’t, you know, actually free time because tasks and other demands are looming) in a way I wasn’t months ago — mostly because, you know, I miss it — and I feel as if the trial-and-error of “maybe I can do this without feeling bad, oops” has also taught me the value of actually listening to my body and taking a break in a way I probably should have mastered decades earlier. Assuming that there is, at some point, an end to this phlegm-filled project I accidentally and unintentionally signed up for, I might end up looking back on it somewhat fondly in the future as a necessary reminder of my own limits that I’d been ignoring for too long.

Or maybe that’s the Stockholm Syndrome talking.

It’s a strange thing to realize that, a quarter of the way into the year as we almost are at this point, I’ve spent two out of the last three months basically sick and/or recovering from being sick. As much as I’m tempted to make a joke about this being a sign of my old age and obviously fragile body due to same — an impulse born of the desire to make that joke before anyone else can, because that’s just how uncomfortable I am about being 50 years old — the sad truth is, more than anything, I’m learning the limits of what I can, and can’t tolerate these days and realizing with no small sense of sadness that I just can’t bounce back the way I used to.

To be fair, I was literally told by multiple medical professionals that the virus-that-was-probably-the-flu was something that everyone seemed to have a hard time getting over; when I was at the emergency room, I was given estimates of three weeks, maybe longer — a timescale that basically worked out, except it very much didn’t work out in that it ended just as I headed to Seattle for a week for work, running on longer-workdays-less-rest-and-less-food for that time and watching my health get knocked back as a result.

Things weren’t helped by the fact that there was, apparently, a second, entirely separate headcold running through the staff that probably dinged me as well; I can remember hearing about it from three different people within a five minute period on the second day of the show, each one giving me a different name of someone who’d mysteriously gotten sick the day before with exactly the same symptoms and thinking to myself, oh shit, I’m going to get sick again, aren’t I? (Spoilers: yes.)

There was a point just before I left Seattle where I was bent double over the bathroom sink, unable to stop coughing to the point where I coughed my throat raw and saw blood hit the sink where I thought, do I even remember what it feels like to be healthy anymore? Must be nice, and then immediately imagining myself still asking that question next month, or the month after that.

There has to be more to 2025 than being a plague year, I hope.

At the doctor’s office for my physical, I sit in the room and wonder to myself, what if the doctor is just making all this stuff up? Does anyone ever actually check his work?

There’s a reason I’m thinking this beyond simple paranoia, it’s worth pointing out. While doing all the traditional doctor-doing-a-physical things, my doctor was also chatting away, telling me his point of view on anything and everything I happened to ask about, and his views were… well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say “crackpot,” but certainly unconventional. He would happily tell me what supplements he believed were a scam, but also which fruits and vegetables he believed were essentially worthless and should be avoided in any sensible diet — or which diseases were actually great weight-loss tools, for that matter. All of this, delivered in a very friendly, conversational style that somewhat undercut the fact that none of it actually seemed that professional, and then he left the room to go check on something, leaving me to sit there and think, I’m sure this guy is on the level, but what if he’s not?

It left me fully aware of how utterly unknowable all this stuff really is — although, admittedly, I’d be thinking something similar since my maybe-flu brought me to the emergency room where I was all but told, yeah, we don’t know, we can’t help you I guess and sent home none the wiser. There’s a hope we all have with doctors maybe more than any other profession that they fully get it and understand and never make any mistakes but have all the answers, and it’s inexplicable and unfair. Why do they have to be infallible when we’re not? Why aren’t they able to not have the answers, or say the wrong thing, or have weird opinions about why apples are pointless when you really get down to it?

The answer is, of course, we don’t go see doctors when we’re feeling ready to be playful or challenged or have a good back-and-forth about random topics. We go when we want someone to tell us what’s wrong and just know it for sure, because we’re scared and we don’t like the unknown at that point in our lives. It’s got to be hard for the doctors in question, who (just like the rest of us) sometimes will just want to bullshit and say dumb shit and not have to be right all the time.

But when they try, they leave someone in the room thinking, what if the doctor is just making all this stuff up? Does anyone ever actually check his work?