It’s summer 2011, and it’s not the best of places or moods or dormitories in any sense of the word. I was supposed to be at my bullshit work study job at 9, so I can answer all the phones that require answering, and smile at all the people who require smiling. It’s 11:30 now, and I slept through three different calls from my co-workers wondering if I was coming in today; I’ll come in, because five hours of pay for doing nothing is better than no hours of pay for the same pursuit.

I open my fridge, and there’s a flat half of a forty of Hurricane sitting in there. At $2 for the whole thing, it’s the best deal in town, better than St. Ides even. I finish it —it doesn’t taste any worse flat than it does fresh— and I microwave myself some easy mac in the kitchen down the hall. 11:45 now, so I suppose it’s time to shower. There’s another call from the office, and I let it go the same, as I grab my towel and my soap caddy and shuffle to the communal bathroom across the hall. 

I find that stall I’ve grown fond of in the back corner of the bathroom, the one that doesn’t have the exposed electrical wiring hanging from its empty light socket. I throw my caddy on the ground, and my towel over the door, and I return to my room to grab my half-broken ipod and the speaker deck. No one else is in the bathroom, so I don’t feel bad about it. 

It’s been a week or so. I shouldn’t be in my moping stage anymore, but I am, so I crank up the volume to the max, and Needle in the Hay starts playing, and I start showering. Nothing seems very different; I don’t suddenly start crying, or have some striking moment of clarity or epiphany, or do all those things we’re supposed to do while listening to sad music after a break up. I just stand there in the shower, doing nothing, letting the hot water hit my back, only occasionally picking up my bar of soap to vaguely scrub myself. I just let the album play, and I do nothing. At one point, during Southern Belle, someone comes in, and asks me to turn it down, and I tell him to go fuck himself. He’s in the right, of course, but I don’t care. I assume he leaves to go fuck himself accordingly, because I don’t hear anything from him. 

The album finishes, and I haven’t really accomplished anything in the shower in terms of getting myself clean or anything, but I’ve wasted enough time at this point anyways. Towel, clothes, a can of PBR, brush my teeth, and off to work. 

I say I overslept; I’ve used the sick excuse enough times this week. My boss, who is a wonderfully kind and patient woman, gives me the riot act once again. I sit at my desk, and I stare at an empty word document, telling myself all the while that one day, I’ll write something heartrendingly powerful and transcendent and beautiful, and it’l be the great american novel, and that’l show the heartless bitch, that’l show all of them. It is the only response I can muster as the cursor blinks on, daring me to say something when I have nothing to say.

ijustwannadanceinyourtumblrs:

depechemoses:

jeffpeff:

Here’s my remix of Radiohead’s “Nude”.  I did it a couple of years ago when they offered up stems as a promotion/contest thing.  Sadly, I only got 28 votes.  Too high-falootin’, maybe?  I dunno.  Here is a download link, if anyone’s interested. 

This is literally always worth reblogging.

^^^

When I listen to After the Gold Rush, I am brought back to one of my many, many, many all-nighters, back in mid-October. I am hopelessly confused by my mountain of work for Spanish, I am hopelessly distracted by literally everything around me, I am hopelessly tired as I have not gone to sleep earlier than 6 am this month, and I am hopelessly lost in life in general. I am consumed by ennui, insomnia, and crippling loneliness. But, I’m bizarrely alright with all of the above, at least in the moment. This album was on loop for literally about two-and-a-half hours. In a moment of divine coincidence, “‘Til the Morning Comes” burst out through my laptop speakers right at the moment where the sun began to appear in the window of the study lounge, peeking its head right above the horizon. I am unsure whether it is taunting me or reassuring me that everything will be OK. Most would likely say the former, but to me, these rituals of sleep deprivation are commonplace, so I found the irony of the moment to be rather comforting. And I couldn’t help but crack a smile; life can be beautifully absurd in this way. 

“I’m gonna give you ‘til the morning comes; ‘til the morning comes”

When I listen to Braid’s Frame & Canvas, it’s the middle of the an incredibly hot summer. My friends and I have holed ourselves up in an abandoned house and have been living together in close quarters for a few days. I’d been recording music in the basement, others had been staying over for the week, and people had been dropping by on and off all week. At this particular moment, the four of us in the house are each on our own separate computers, enjoying the laziness of the season. I’m laying down on the floor and put this album on to break the silence. No one says a word while we listen all the way through and, to me, that period of time spent listening to Braid defined the entire season.

Later that night, I would drive around aimlessly with the windows down, lost in thoughts.

“At night the cars come curving in confrontation. When you can’t see anything, you feel everything.”

When I listen to Against Me!’s Reinventing Axl Rose, I have just suffered my first truly painful break-up.  The night before had been a soul-crushing Friday where I sat upright in bed for a good amount of time, utterly immobilized.

I woke up that Saturday as early as possible.  I shaved my face and put on some hiking boots and now I am outside, in my backyard, mowing the lawn.  The world awkwardly relapsed into a summer heat, but in late-September, everything still looks like it’s dying, anyway.

In an attempt to make the time go by fast, I play music as I trudge back and forth across my lawn.  This album defines my very existence for that period of time.  Every step slices the grass stems in half as I shove the huge piece of machinery.  I know that, once the lawn is mowed, I will have to move on with my life, but for that period of time, I could be wrapped up in my own world.

“Tomorrow, tell me, where will you wake up?  Beyond title, beyond lease, careers, and laws.  Something more than borders on a map.”

When I listen to Nada Surf’s The Weight Is A Gift, it’s the summer and I’m on metroing back home after my first 40 hour workweek.  It’s Friday and the weather is brutally hot and humid and it smells like hot iron, stagnant coolant, and burned rubber in the Fort Totten metro station.   I’m ready to go home and lay down and sleep for the rest of my life.  I chose this album to be my soundtrack for the ride home.

It feels like high school again: I’ve turned the music up so loud that I can’t hear anything.  I don’t do anything but stare at the ground and listen.  The words mean a lot to me even if I can’t exactly tell what he’s saying, because in that moment, it doesn’t really matter.  Whatever was coming out of the headphones was exactly what I needed to hear.

I spent all my energy walking up right.  Maybe this weight was a gift, like I had to see what I could lift.

I am eight years old, and I am about to steal my first album. My dad had just gotten Rubber Soul for his birthday, and, two days later, he made the colossal mistake of letting me listen to it.

Now, mind you, this was not my first time hearing The Beatles; my parents raised me on oldies and classic rock radio, and so “Help!” and “Come Together” were as much a part of my childhood as Blue’s Clues. But I had only heard the hits, in little bits and pieces. I had never heard a full album by ANYONE before, at least not that I could remember, and never one so mindblowlingly awesome as this was.

From the moment “Drive My Car“‘s opening riff passed through my ears, I was hooked. I crawled on the ground, and put my ear as close to the speaker as possible, in spite of my parents’ repeated attempts to pull me back further.  The serene calmness of “Norwegian Wood” was like nothing I had ever heard; “Nowhere Man” instantly became my favorite song to sing along to, and “In My Life” is the first song I remember making me genuinely feel sad. It was incredible, it was beautiful- and I had to have it.

My dad is at work for the day, and my mom is on the phone; it was my chance. I run into my parents’ room, grab the CD, and sprint up the stairs to my waiting walkman knock-off, and waste no time immersing myself in the spoils of my plunder. I spend the next four hours listening to the album over and over and over again, tinkering with my LEGOS as I belt “BABY YOU CAN DRIVE MY CAR”, with absolutely no idea what the lyrics really mean. It was the beginning of a life-long love affair with music.

To this day, I have not ceded possession of my dad’s copy of Rubber Soul. It’s not like I could if I wanted to, anyways; my youngest brother stole it from me last year, and shows no intentions of ever giving it back. 

All these places have their moments with lovers and friends I still can recall

It is September 24th, 2009. I am a newly christened college freshman, and I am already on my second emotionally draining breakup of the past thirty days. 

I have, by this point, not slept for twenty six hours; by the time this odyssey is over, it will have been forty. Forty hours, three papers, a test, one woman who I am infatuated with who is now bored with me, and one woman who I used to convince myself I loved who now hates me with every fiber of her being. It is raining. It is unnaturally cold for September, or at least it seems that way. It could easily be my imagination. 

I pull up In the Aeroplane Over the Sea because I’d been meaning to give it a listen, and I just wanted something, anything to pull my mind away. It doesn’t work, or so it would seem initially. In fact, by the time Jeff Mangum ends with his plea, “please don’t hate her when she gets up to leave”, I am hunched over in my room, inconsolably sobbing. Goddamnit, there is love in this world, but I clearly know fucking nothing about it. And so, naturally, I press play again, and listen through once more. I grab the loudest headphones I have, my ipod, and my raincoat, and I set out into the night. I walk up the bleachers to the viewing area atop the pressbox at the football stadium. I scream as loud as I can, and I sit down, and let the rain hit me.

God is a place where some holy spectacle lies.

When I listen to Cursive’s Domestica, I’m almost done with my Junior year of high school.  I’ve moved out of my bedroom for the first time in my life and have been living in the basement for the past week after grandmother took my room. She was staying with us until she rested from a bad fall. 

I secretly eat Klondike bars that have been left in the basement freezer and barely ever sleep on the futon where I work endlessly on papers.  I pull my first all nighter while listening to this album and it makes me feel the depth of my humanity.  Afterward, I just want to be left alone for a long time.  Only then, I figure, can I write the painful music that I can feel stirring in my gut.

I want to help you, but you’ve got to say the words: “I want to be cured.”   Drowned deep in this hole we’ve dug for ourselves.  Throw me in headfirst, submerged in this great depression… Impoverished, and impotent.  And don’t call me pretty baby anymore.

When I listen to The Lawrence Arms’ The Greatest Story Ever Told, I am laying on a cot inside of an army-issue tent which is in the center of rows and rows of hundreds of other identical tents. 

Inside, it reeks of canvas and sweat, the air is thick and I’m savoring the loneliness.  I have just returned from a 14 day hike in New Mexico and this is my first time listening to music since then. It’s a hot summer day, but there’s a breeze outside.  It isn’t until the last song that I realize that I’ve been laying in the hot tent for so long. 

When I open the flap of the tent and see the sandy ground and gigantic blue sky, I know that I’m ready to go home.

“Good friend, how loud do you want life to shout her answers in your ears?”