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The Other Two Were With Me

Out of nowhere, I suddenly remember the excitement I felt about the tour program for RE.M.’s Monster tour in 1996; even more than how excited I was at the gig itself — which was pretty fucking excited, because they were still one of my favorite bands by that point and there I was, seeing them live — was the weird, inexplicable electricity that flowed through my brain as I flipped through the program again and again in the days and weeks afterwards.

It wasn’t a misplaced early nostalgia for the concert that left me so thrilled. It was, instead, the excitement of the way that program looked, the way in which it approached the design and the very thinking behind that design. Remember, I was in art school studying graphic design at the time, and with teachers who were very very rigid and fixed in their approach to the subject; at some point in their lives, they’d heard the maxim “form follows function,” and it became their entire way of life — it informed all of their thinking on the idea of graphic design and they couldn’t see any further.

With this tour booklet, though, the exact opposite seemed true. Flush with the financial freedom that came with commercial success in the 1990s music scene and still informed by a left field visual approach that they brought with them from their indie days, the R.E.M. program was gloriously pointless and indulgent: oversized, full color, with different paper stock for particular pages and images that had no purpose beyond “feel,” or looking cool. There were pages where the dominant element was a photo of TV static or tin foil put through a scanner so it was curiously, colorfully, reflective. Things were upside down or entirely absent from where they “should” have been. Form followed whim, and whimsy, in that very 1990s manner.

I returned to that tour program repeatedly over the next year or so when it came to my schoolwork. Not stealing anything directly (I was not so sensible, nor so bold), but trying to absorb the attitude and approach to it by osmosis. Remembering how freeing it felt today, I wonder if I’m still trying to replicate what it meant even now.

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How To Disappear Completely

A common subject in my therapy sessions is, unsurprisingly to anyone who knows me, my utter discomfort with being the subject of positive attention. This is, perhaps ironically, a situation that co-exists with my utter discomfort with the idea of being the subject of negative attention, so you can imagine how well I deal with being perceived in almost anyway beyond passing recognition — and even that makes me a little nervous, just in case.

I mention this because, when it was announced that I’d been named as the new editor of Popverse, there followed two or three days of people congratulating me, or saying that it was a great move on Popverse’s part, or similar sentiments, and it was the most uncomfortable thing in the world to me. It was something that I found myself entirely unable to acknowledge, never mind respond to, because anytime any of the social media mentions (or emails!) came into my vision, I folded in on myself in a vain attempt to disappear entirely from view, if not from the very concept of actually existing just to be on the safe side.

I knew, objectively, that this kind of attention was a good thing and that I should appreciate it and file it away for future humblebragging purposes, but I froze at even the first step of doing so; instead, I was just horrified by the very potential of people having any kind of opinion on me or my work and wishing that I could burrow into an alternate reality where that wasn’t the case.

All of this is to say: if you were one of those people and are now one of the people reading these words, I am sorry for not replying, and I do appreciate what you said, honestly; if my brain wasn’t wired quite the way it was, then I’d have been able to say that to you directly. As it is, I’m just going to blush and then step away quietly in the hope that we can all pretend that never happened in the first place. That shouldn’t be too hard, should it…?

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On Elm Street

Let’s talk, for a brief second, about nightmares.

Up until about a month ago, I would have said that I didn’t have nightmares, or perhaps that, if I was having nightmares, at least I couldn’t remember them. It had, at that point, been years since I’d woken up with that unease or tightness around the chest and clouded confusion, and I felt reasonably grateful that, for all that my brain can be a contradictory and messy place at times, at least I wasn’t letting my sleep be ruined by it. And then, I got the new job.

It is, in retrospect, very funny to me that I had nightmares about the new position in the space between accepting the offer and actually starting. There was a four day window — time off that I’d already been scheduled for (part of it a weekend) — between the two things happening, and I was already spending it exhausted and sick, which meant that it was the perfect time for my subconscious to really take pleasure in transmitting what is, looking back, the most specific and shitty nightmares about the new job possible.

Reader, I had nightmares about not filling in spreadsheets properly. Moreover, I had those nightmares for multiple nights in a row.

There’s so much more about my new position to worry about than spreadsheets — there’s so much in life to worry about than spreadsheets — but for some reason, that was the thing that my brain kept coming back to: that I wasn’t updating editorial schedules properly, or that I was inputting the wrong information and ruining things for other people accidentally. Everything was centered around me doing spreadsheets wrong in some way, and that making life difficult for other people.

Only I would have nightmares where it’s not about me being in trouble, but me making things difficult for other people. Now we really know that my subconscious is playing dirty.

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Come On Come On Come On Come On Come On

I wrote about my 2023 playlist three separate times last year, and I’m doing it again this year. (That’s no surprise; even last year was the second time I did it.) The thinking behind it is simple: it’s songs that I’ve been obsessed with that I add to the playlist in real time. (Originally, it was primarily songs I’d discovered for the first time, but that’s slipped a little this time around with old favorites I’d forgotten and rediscovered entering the mix.) As I did last year, I’m sharing the playlist as it hits multiples of 50 entries, so here’s the first lot, and if you want to listen to it for yourself (Hi, Alex), you can do so right here.

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Sound Off

Every year, there comes a point at some time in the middle of Spring when I start wishing that it was a little bit warmer, just a little bit, because then it’d be time to sleep with the windows open once again. Portland Springs are mercurial, tricky things that like to pretend to be heating up only to trip into three more weeks of freezing rain, but each and every single year, there’s a time when I think, maybe we’re there, maybe I can start opening the windows now with such eagerness and anticipation that it’s almost tangible.

It’s not simply that fresh air is a wonderful thing, and something that I suspect will make me sleep better in some magical, indefinable and probably not actually true manner, although that’s certainly true. (The reality is, admittedly, that at least the first few times when I open the windows and it’s too early, I sleep worse because at some point I wake up because I’m so cold.) It’s an optimistic belief that sleeping with open windows will leave me more connected to everything happening outside the house, all the birdsong and nature and all the life in general; this sincere hippy-ish thought that has only grown in stature across the past few years.

Here’s the thing, though: I believe this every single year because I forgot how fucking noisy it actually is outside my house. This past weekend was the first few nights the windows were fully open, and it was terrible.

Part of that is because I live on the same block as no less than two bars and a handful of restaurants, which means that the weekend is the time when there’s a lot of shitty music being played very loudly right outside my window. Another part comes from the fact that neighbors, reasonably enamored of the weather, decided to invite friends over for a late-night private party, which meant even more shitty music and loud conversation essentially directly underneath where I was trying to sleep. A third element was the traffic, which included a number of people seemingly trying to recreate Fast and the Furious along the street where I live.

That first night, I was woken repeatedly by a bass drop and resultant cheer, a revving car, screams of recognition for some newcomer to the party, or the like. I’d just be slowly, slowly falling asleep, and then noise. Back awake.

I fell asleep eventually, exhausted and grumpy, only to wake up too few hours later to the sound of birdsong — the very thing I’d been looking forward to for weeks. I groggily opened my eyes and registered what I was hearing as it slowly started to sound correct in my head. “Shut the fuck up,” I whined, pointlessly.

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Everything Was Still

For the first time in a long time, I found myself woken up by a nightmare the other night. I’m not going to share what the nightmare was, because (a) I don’t fully remember everything, and (b) what I do remember was less of the “oh no, a giant monster is hunting me how cartoonishly terrifying” and more of the “that emotional fault line I have in my heart because of relationship trauma is still there and the dream decided to wrench it open again a little bit, just for fun.” Which is to say: not for public consumption, sorry. The reason I mention it isn’t to be a tease for emotional sadists, but to share what it felt like after I woke up.

When I was younger, I remember waking up from nightmares and just essentially shrugging internally, turning back over and falling back to sleep. “That was annoying,” I’d more or less think, and then immediately move on. Apparently, that’s a skill I’ve lost. Instead, I lay there in existential turmoil, replaying what little bits I could remember of the dream as the memory decayed and fell apart around me. Worse yet, I had that moment of uncertainty whether or not what I’d dreamed was actually a dream or a memory in the half-awake haze, and spent an worryingly long time (it felt like) going, but that didn’t really happen, did it? It couldn’t have, but maybe it did. Did that happen? and dealing with a kind-of pre-emptive follow-through of how I’d feel if it had, in fact, been real.

During all of this, I was very aware of the stillness of everything around me — the lack of any noise or movement even outside the window, as if the entire world was lying there beside me, around me, stuck in that same uncertainty about what was real and what wasn’t, and what would happen next regardless. I was unmoving on the bed, in fear of what I’d just felt and what I’d hopefully imagined-as-opposed-to-remembered, and everything else seemed just as frozen as I was.

I thought to myself, it was really just a dream, it didn’t happen and no-one said any of that and I thought to myself, I wish I could just turn over and go back to sleep, but I’m not even feeling tired anymore, my brain won’t stop and it’s still the middle of the night. And then, I closed my eyes for a second and it was hours later, full sun outside and I’d forgotten even more details about the thing that seemed so all-encompassing what felt like just a minute before.

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Mumble Gripe Moan

Secrets behind the blog: There was, originally, an entirely different post here that you’ll never see. I wrote something that was, reading it back weeks later — yes, sometimes I manage to write these weeks in advance (and sometimes I really don’t; the former is what I prefer, being the particular brand of deadline-obsessed weirdo I am) — nothing more than a rant about a work thing that, while I still entirely agree with it, is of zero interest to most people and probably pretty unprofessional to boot.

Re-reading it, I started to think about the idea of “quality control” when it comes to this place — wondering about the extent I think about other people reading what I write here, and how much (if at all) that colors what I write here. It’s a strange thing, really; I write for “an audience,” because that’s what I think I’ve always done, everywhere and everything I write, stretching all the way back decades by this point — but that audience is a different thing in my head in different places that I write. (When it comes to work, I am keenly aware of the audience and when I’m writing to them or not; it’s debilitating sometimes.)

Here, though, the “audience” I’m writing for has always been a strangely amorphous thing. I think of this place as more self-indulgent and, to an extent, “just me,” but then I get rid of a post because it feels too meaningless and too self-indulgent, so there’s some other bar(rier) at play here, although I’m not sure I could articulate that if pressed. Perhaps it’s simply my way of confessing that there are parts of my life that I think are too boring to share with the world…?

(Oh, friends, just be glad I don’t share my love of doing the dishes as self-care here. No-one wants to know about that.)

Sometimes, I think that I should give more thought to what I’m doing here. Other times, I just remember how necessary this space — and venting here, with these streams of consciousness — has been, and how it feels when I don’t give myself that opportunity. All of which is to say: if you’re reading this, thank you. I don’t understand why you’re doing it (and I’m not asking! Please don’t tell me, I’ll get in my head about it), but I appreciate that you’re here so much that I’ll delete a ramble about work to save you from my worst impulses.