goth – Signals Fill The Void

I’m happy to be making mixes to cast like a message in a bottle into the vast ocean that is the internet again. This was something I was just beginning to add to my writing practice a few years ago before my life fell apart and I stopped enjoying so much of what I loved for too long. It feels good to come home to myself just that much more.

It’s been a week since the last playlist, and I’m struggling with how to fill this space. I had a few ideas this morning, early in the AM when I was dragging my tired body out of bed. Now I am drawing a blank. It was a week of relative hibernation creativity wise. I struggled to even find time to read. I worked a lot and often found myself so drained by the end of the day that I just wanted to lift weights, play with the pup, watch bad TV and fall asleep.

I think this may be some iteration of the “American Dream”, but I’m not sure.

Over the weekend, I’m hoping to do some reorganizing and reinvigorating my writing/study space at the Signals Fill the Void bunker. I’m hoping that helps shift the stagnation of this last week. I’m not unhappy or anything, though. This week felt like a week of rest and recovery.

Highlight #1

This one occurred the week before last, but I’m noting it here, anyway. I forgot to write about it last week.

I got off work on a Wednesday and raced to Chapel Hill to get there in time to see The Chisel and End It with Maria. I got to town before Maria got off work and wandered around. Chapel Hill isn’t a city I ever think about much, despite having spent time living there a decade and a half ago. My time there was brief and the people I surrounded myself with were, for the most part, inconsequential. Walking around there feels akin to walking through another person’s memories, devoid of context or sentimentality. In hindsight, it looks more like a place marker, an interlude before moving on to better things than anything else.

We got dinner and walked to the venue. I know a few other bands played, but I’m struggling to remember who they were now. We hung outside talking shit and telling jokes during the openers, only occasionally peaking in to kinda say “nah” at whatever chugga chugga hardcore band was onstage. Fair play to you if that’s your thing. I think I’ve just seen so much of that at this point that it blurs together.

We stood at the back while End It played, forever trying to peer over someone’s shoulder to see the stage, because we’re both so short. The bar emptied out after End It; we scoped out a bench off to the side of the room where we could sit and watch the band away from and above the crowd. We sat there holding hands, watching The Chisel play and maybe the set was a little underwhelming. I’m not sure. I was tired after work, apprehensive knowing my dumb ass was going to have to get up at 5 AM to drive back to the mountains for work in the morning. I think it’s also possible that nothing might beat the first time I saw The Chisel – with Xy in a Los Angeles dive bar packed full of rowdy punks and skins, my first punk gig back after well over two years avoiding public spaces.

The gig ended. The bar cleared out. Maria and I walked across the street and said goodnight. Just a little giddy from the gig and from sweet time shared, I made the foolish decision to drive back to the mountains at midnight. My rationale being that I could leave right then or get up at 5. Either way, I wasn’t getting much sleep, and if I left later in the AM, I had a greater chance of the slightest hiccup making me late for work.

The first hour of the drive went by fine. I listened to tunes, drank coffee, and thought about a story I want to write for some friends in Olympia. The second hour, well… That’s when the reality that I am no longer young came crashing in. Maybe I could have pulled this nonsense off in my 20s, even in my 30s, but my early 40s? Nope.

I pulled off at a rest stop near my mom’s house and slept for four hours. I woke up and kept driving west just before sunrise. I stopped at a grocery store, stocked up on food and coffee and hit the mountains just as the sun began to rise over them, bathing the landscape in brilliant orange and red. I caught that feeling I get – No matter where I go, how far I stray from Western North Carolina, nothing ever beats the feeling of returning to those mountains.

I made it to the office with five minutes to spare before my shift. My student was already waiting for me. I clocked in, set my stuff down, and got to work. Let me brag for a minute, friends. I fucking nailed that session. It was one of those shining moments at work, where I am able to connect with a student and send them away from the session feeling more confident in their abilities than they felt when they came in. My supervisor even stepped out of her office to compliment me on how well I handled the session.

And the whole time, I’m laughing to myself.

“Nobody knows I’m doing this shit on 4 hours of sleep in the back of a car.”

This type of punk rock foolishness, the late nights, the long drives, the gambling on gigs that have the potential to be life changing, or some mundanity that I’ve seen a thousand times before, I know how the sands are falling to the bottom of the hourglass on them. I’m getting older. Comfort calls. So do responsibilities and the weight of age.

So I will enjoy these opportunities to live life on my terms while they remain.

Highlight #2

This week we made serious progress with training my little chaos pup. A solution presented itself that seemed so obvious that I kick myself for not thinking of it sooner. With a new training regimen, I’ve noticed the ways he’s calmer, feels more comfortable in the house, and less anxious. I’m stoked.

Highlight #3

I got to work with a student who reminded me so much of someone I knew when I was a teenager who started shooting dope when we were kids, and to my knowledge, addiction has been a part of her path ever since. My student was bright and articulate and spoke without apology about what personal struggles she wanted to write about. She just didn’t know how to get the words out. We worked on an outline, and she left the session knowing what she wanted to write and how to start her project.

I thought about it for the rest of the day, how all the stories we tell, the stories we hear, they don’t have to end in tragedy. There don’t have to be sad scripted endings, and the written word is a way to circumvent those tragedies and write stories with new endings.

I’m not articulating this point as well as I’d like, but you get it.

Low Point #1

The state of the world. I mean… Have you seen this place lately? It always feels just a little strange to find so much contentedness and happiness in my personal life, while everything else is burning down. Did you see that the Doomsday Clock is now set at 90 seconds to midnight? I was joking with Grier about how it fucking figures that the world stands on yet another precipice, just as I’m coming to love living in it.

I’m only a little embarrassed to admit that that early to mid-2000s “Even if the world ended tomorrow, I would still plant a tree today” patch that you saw all over crust punk and folk punk kids resonates with me a bit now.

Low Point #2

I went on a miserable, and I mean miserable date. We talked on OKC for a day or so and I had some hesitations. I’ve had hesitations all around about dating for a while now, but I figured I’d meet up and feel it out. As soon as the person walked into the bar where we agreed to meet up, I could feel it. It was like both of us just said, “Nope.” I’m not sure what my body language telegraphed, but this person could not have broadcasted “not interested” any louder.

What followed was an hour or so of strained conversation where I sipped my mocktail and wondered when I could get a word in edge wise, ducking strange, and invasive questions about a close friend, and then a merciful ending.

I laughed about it with a friend who was DJ’ing, paid my tab and then went to my car to check on my little dude in his travel crate. I pulled out my phone to call Molly, and was just saying, “Yo, I just went on the worst date” into the mouthpiece, when I noticed my date was sitting outside the bar smoking and waiting for their ride, well within earshot.

Oops.

Let that be a lesson to you, kids. The greater the length at which someone blathers on about their self-tokenizing identity markers and “organizing” activities in a dating profile full of leftist academia buzzwords and superficial social justice language, the greater chance they are going to be a vapid, insufferable chump in real life.

Bullet dodged; shit talked.

That’s all for now. I turn 42 next week. I’m happy. I’m healthy. I am largely content in a way I never thought possible. I’m grateful. Take care of yourselves. Take care of one another.

Annihilate This Week Volume 2.

From Ashes Rise – Reaction
From Ashes Rise – Hell in the Darkness
World Burns to Death—Babylon Endures
Lions Law – The Reaper
The Bois – S.H.A.R.P. Worldwide
The Chisel – You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet
Mess – Don’t Look Back
The Last Resort – Beyond The Promised Land
Angelic Upstarts – Ghost Town
Slapshot – Say Goodbye
The Cure – M (Live)
Chain Cult – Witch Hunt
Rancoeur – Rancouer
She Past Away – Rituel
Sisters Of Mercy – Nine While Nine
Shannon & The Clams – The Boy
Hub City Stompers – Dead Nazi Stomp
Prince Buster – A Change Is Gonna Come
Megative – One Day All This Will Be Gone
Swans – To Be Kind

Somewhere in all the alienation and ennui of modernity and adulthood, I lost the magic of solitude. In the age of pandemic, it clings to me with a sense of claustrophobia, sticking to me like a film of sweat on my skin that I can never quite wash clean. The house, the city, the country, the world are suffocating. I search in desperation for the moments and quiet places where I can catch my breath.

1988, Friday nights home alone, in my bedroom with the radio on, huddled beneath a blanket fort with my action figures or my books. The scholastic bookfair edition, dumbed down, violence and sexuality toned down, edition of Dracula, with a drawing of an open grave, spider crawling across a wooden casket with a skeletal, vampiric hand was my favorite.

Power 96, weekend Power Mix live DJ sets coming from the clock radio on the dresser, yellow streetlight sneaking through the slats in the shutters. I felt at home in the night, even back then. At the most ease underneath my skin with nobody else around. My parents watched TV and smoked cigarettes in the living room, maybe Dateline or 20/20, until it was time for bed. I set the sleep timer on the radio for an hour. My mother tucked me into bed, always leaving the door open just a crack with the hall light on. I would lay awake, listening to the radio, watching the light through the shutters, the shadows dance across the floor when a breeze caught the tree outside my window. Late night DJs to keep me company, the solace of sound to lull me to sleep.

A boombox with a strap, I carried the radio with me Saturday mornings, off to the park beneath the powerlines before the world woke up. The Powerlines, all the kids called the park, a mile long, double figure 8 bike path cut through big open fields ensconced on all sides by suburbs. A concrete and high-tension wire canyon cut through South Florida swamp land. The omnipresent hum of electricity above, transmission towers stretching across the horizon, as far as the eye could see, into infinity. Tropical parrots made their nests in the crossbeams, their calls occasionally cutting through the constant hum.

I rode the loop slowly, a copy of Vital Idol dubbed from a neighbor’s older sister in my boombox. While White Wedding seemed so brooding and scary (Gimme a break! I was 7!), and Dancing with Myself to this day remains one of the first songs I ever connected to on an emotional level, AND, I will admit to having come up with a dance routine for Hot in the City, which I performed for my parents, on the kitchen counter, clad only in a pair of blue jeans and a tiny blue denim jacket with no shirt on underneath (I’ve always wondered what kind of nervous post-bedtime conversations between my parents that inspired). The remix of Catch My Fall at the end of the album was my favorite song, and continues to be a song I love to this day.

The song hit, Sitting in an empty playground, watching big, ominous South Florida skylines, wondering where the powerlines ended, imagining the electricity buzzing above me carried to some vast urban elsewhere. A place where gritty city lights never turn out for the night, and there is always a current of excitement in the air. Where there is always music playing and everyone looks cool, leaning against a wall, possibly going nowhere.

A storm rolled off the ocean from the west. Thunder rumbled. Lightning flashed in the distance. Always a sign that it was time to head home. As if on cue, a transformer exploded on one of the lines across the lake. A flash and a bang, the houses just beneath it went dark. The wind picked up, and I heard sirens in the distance. I put one foot in front of the other and pedaled home.

Tag: goth

Annihilate This Week #2

Sunday Sound and Story: 3