change of scene, however slender

good morning ~

(click the link / cutout bat to listen)

My Big Breakchange of scene, however slender

today’s track is a synth drone and my piano cassette warbling to almost ridiculous degree on my boombox that appears to be dying

for various reasons I didn’t think I’d have an email in me this week but keeping going feels better than anything else rn

wanted to quickly shout out my internet friends in the band A Place for Owls who just released their latest LP which will really deeply scratch an emotive itch for some of you - I insisted on recording some vibey overdubs for them and to my delight they made the record - I’m proud of the lads ::heart hands::

also - I am now indeed looking for work starting in December and I remain open to whatever ideas you might have about how I could be useful, hit me up ;)

We emerge once again from the Korean Spa in the suburbs of Chicago with weariness in our hearts and preposterously hydrated skin. The first time we came here we were giddy and squinting into a brilliant spring sun - that sick ass google alert telling me I had been praised in the New York Times hit as we were on our way to shvitz. Which was great timing - if I had been allowed unfettered access to my cell phone then I probably would have permanently nuked my synapses with the dopamine. That's true today, too, since bad news seems to give you a hit of brain chemical, too - I was very happy to shut my phone in a locker while I hit the water circuit. Hadn't even summoned the strength to look at a news website, logged myself out of feeds. All is hard no matter which way you zoom in or out on our lives though yes, our bodies are now pliable and remarkably soft. Still thinking about the vile gloat of the woman wearing an American flag print plastic cowboy hat in the pre-dawn TSA line - something about it being 4:30am made it so much more personal.

I'm tagging along in Chicago while my wife performs her duties as a visiting artist at a college in the suburbs. While she teaches I've been performing one of my top five favorite activities - walking around. As of this writing I've clocked 4.5 miles around a somewhat unremarkable campus on an overcast and grey day. It feels good to use your two legs to carry you from one place to another. Change of scene, however slender. I think within that for me is a beautiful feeling of agency - if you don't like where you're at right this second you can hit the bricks, baby! Walk right on out that double crash door, see what they have in the vending machines at the student resource center, or maybe do a few laps around the ecology conservation areas while you check out some Stevie Wonder cuts you never really paid attention to before. These things help, sorta.

And there's the quiet, too. Turn off the headphones and disconnect from data and hear the USA's cars driving by as they do in every other city in America, every crosswalk of our every intersection a little David and Goliath showdown between the unshielded and machines that can kill you (I've got the slingshot, motherfucker). It's the time of year when everything alive or dying in the ground rustles at maximum volume, a dry and shaking chorus. In the distance down the mini prairie walking path a caucasian youth seems embarrassed that I witness him listening to hip hop on a cubic bluetooth speaker - he quickly stands up and scurries deeper into the preserve when he sees me 30 yards away, then this happens twice more as I continue down the path. In the distance I see four emergency vehicles seemingly mid-arrest and I hear another cop car's sirens doppler bend as it roars past. What could this alleged criminal possibly have done that warrants the in-person response of ten uniformed first responders? They are at too far a distance for me to witness more closely. I walk past the baseball field and notice that the team's warmup playlist playing at maximum volume seems to include M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes" which is totally blowing out the speakers. How did that come to be? Isn't that song like 20 years old? Did they hear it on the Pineapple Express soundtrack? I remember listening to that when I was in college in 2008, some things never change.

Wondering lately truly which is worse - the agony of anticipation or the get-on-with-it reality of the bad thing actually happening. I lost sleep many times this year with worry over whether or not my job would continue - now that the extremely challenging reality has arrived I think I feel better in certain ways. There was a svelte period of time in my life when gaining the weight back was the worst thing I could ever imagine happening to me - now that I've done so (and how!) it's really not so bad. You can come to terms with something actual whereas fear and anxiety are vexingly perpetual. I take the slightest amount of comfort in being free from the what if chokehold. Now we can get to work.

In other times of crisis I remember how unfair it felt that the minutia textures of reality felt eerily placid in the face of whatever I was going through - my life's fallen apart, shouldn't these buildings crumble down in response? A huge fucking rock just punctured the surface tension of my metaphorical lake - why isn't everything else rippling? This was the primary sensation today - haven't you heard? Shouldn't we shut down the airport? How is H-Mart possibly open at this ungodly hour?

Not all is well - I witnessed what very nearly became a nude fist fight at the K-Spa between two deeply unrelaxed people (one of the attendants had to break it up, I think the two naked guys instinctively recognized him as the alpha in the situation because he had pants on) - but so far today has been unnervingly pedestrian (see what I did there?). Bad things happen to us and I expect some kind of fawning response. A very bad thing happens geopolitically and I'm surprised when the Earth doesn't fold in on itself. There's still time for that.

In the meantime I continue doing what I've been doing for what feels like nearly my entire life - running up my step count walking around places where few otherwise dare to exit the vehicle, seeing what varieties of heavy machinery and dumpsters lie behind the buildings and reading signs that have seemingly gone unseen for years. I usually end up right where I started - one big squiggly loop - but sometimes you wind up getting somewhere else.

But what about you? What are you witnessing? What tools are you using to get yourself somewhere else? Are we going to get to work?