win and tonic

There is a song somewhere in my iTunes library that I want to hear, but I know not its name or artist.

I can describe it. I can tell you the instrumentation. I can even play a part of it. But I can’t hear it. Not all the way. Not for real.

I can tell you that there’s ambient tonal sounds oscillating within an A major 7.

Twelve thousand songs. The ones I’ve heard, the ones not gifted to me by friends by the discography like how piles of books accumulate in a warm and anxious way, I can name within seconds of hearing it. Clicking on a tiny gear and describing some heuristics reveals that songs I haven’t heard amount to a mere two thousand. I have heard and have a copy of ten thousand songs. I have here documentation that I have heard ten thousand songs.

I can’t not listen to music without constantly indexing every part of it. Not the fidelity or the equipment used or anything useful like that, but the colours and emotions and shapes and textures and memories associated with it. Sometimes the lyrics are important to me - more often than not, they are a delivery system for more notes. I care the most about the notes.

This track doesn’t have lyrics. The “ambient” tag bears no fruit, either.

It’s a collection I’ve nurtured since eighth grade, since mp3s were a Thing that you could Have and Take With You. Somewhere, someone has bought a pair of boy-sized jeans from a Goodwill with a perfectly round outline of a stretchmark in the pocket, left by my orange, rubberized portable mp3-CD player. I was the hippest fucking kid on the school bus¹.

Every day for a week, the class bully would ask me before I even sat on the green seat of the bus in the morning if he could listen to Daft Punk. Whenever I let him listen, I wouldn’t get it back until the bus pulled into the school lot. It was the nicest he ever was to me. He was a person, then.

The ambient loop is in the eighth octave. It’s plinky - echoing more than a sustain pedal on a piano would allow. It’s full of yellow sevenths, giving a twang of desperation to the quiet swelling of each nondescript phrase. It’s like breathing.

Sometimes bands in my mind that are discovered at the same time are lumped together as a single entity. Animal Collective was the same band as Annuals for a while. From Good Homes still bleeds over into Matt Pond PA. Radiohead is Helvetica: everywhere, not worth talking about anymore - bringing either up seems to make people bored these days. Doesn’t make them any less important, I suppose.

The guitar part is just three notes in a slow, lazy strum, complimenting the glass-like loop that may be in 7/8. A, E, G#. Green, yellow, and a darker yellow. Together they make green velvet against black milk, the backdrop always fluid, moving, in a hurry but not because it has someplace to go, but merely because it is liquid. Just present and moving. Present and moving.

One hundred fifty years ago if you wanted to hear a song, you had to procure a copy of the sheet music, hire musicians to learn it, and sit in attendance while they played it for you live. Now every song ever is a touch away. I keep using ‘tinysong’ as a verb. It doesn’t work, but my friends know what I mean.

The guitar resolves to the fourth, which isn’t really resolving at all. A, D, F#. Alone it’s plain drywall. Eggshell, or some comparably concise pantone nomenclature for “a type of white”. But when played atop the major seven chord it’s busy, woodgrain, black and darker black and porous and cool to the touch, like the plastic imitation wood used in the CD racks every grownup had in their living room in the 90s. Major-fourth-on-major-first has been my favorite dissonance as of late. Four on one. It shouldn’t be right, but I relish it.

Years from now, while traversing my library for an unrelated musical query, this song will play. Everyone in the room will be forced to be at once ecstatic and calm with me. Rapture will fill my eyes and fingers in this rediscovery, combating the tranquility of the song.

And it will be delicious.

I spent the night dancing with dingoes and dragons and tigers. My blood and face and clothes were both hot and cold from Kevin’s gin flask. He’d already gone up to bed, and Michael and I staggered across Pittsburgh at three in the morning to our respective rooms. I was excited about sleep.

“Is she alright?” I thought aloud upon seeing a lump of a blouse on her side on the grass outside the Double Tree. I knew that the faster I went to bed, the sooner the world would stop spinning. The adrenaline I willed into my veins kept me alert, reactionary and rambling.

The girl sat up. “Oh, good.” She smiled. She was pretty with black hair over face. Two sets of noodle straps, one black and one white, adorned her slender shoulders. She caught my gaze and patted the grass next to her, brushing the hair from her eyes while beckoning me to sit. “Hahah, no thanks dude, I’m good.” Mike and I had already shrugged off one beggar that night, and I was in full beeline mode: priority number one was Go To Bed. Immediately I regretted my reflexive dismissal of the nice-looking girl. Why did I call her “dude”? I passed through the revolving door and was on the elevator before it occurred to me that I could go back - Mike had his own room to get to, and my roommates were still partying. I should go back, I thought in the elevator. Go back to the girl in the grass. My drunken brain was unable to parse the suggestion before priority one was in my sight.

I sat in my bed with my laptop illuminating the room. The towels on the floor made the room smell like chlorine. I checked Twitter in a trance while trying to will away the energy preventing my body from sleeping away the exhaustion of another day filled with sparkling, shimmering creatures. I thought about that girl while not-reading the goings-on of people I know or wish to know, thought about going back and sitting next to her on the grass in front of the hotel. “Hi,” I’d say. “Hi,” she’d say back. We’d sit there, on the grass, staring at skyscrapers that stood like tree trunks whose leaves were unmoved by the dank breeze of the city. We would sit there while I slowly sobered up, her too, maybe, and I’d make another friend, another person to add to the list of people I desperately wanted to populate the rest of my life with.

I’ve never been afraid of talking to strangers. I’m never afraid of singing in the car when other drivers might see me. The chances of me ever meeting whoever saw me are practically zero. The chances of meeting said person with either of us recognizing the other is even smaller. If we were to meet without memories attached to the other person, then the event never happened. It wouldn’t be the same person as our first encounter if there are no experiences associated with one another’s face. For all intents and purposes, I think whenever someone cuts me off in traffic, or catches me swaying my hips to some tune in my head in the checkout line, I’ll never see you again for the rest of my life.

Last year, three thousand people were at this convention. There were more this year, probably.

I will never see that girl again for the rest of my life. I thought this while swaddled in my pocket of crisp hotel sheets, and for the first time in recent memory, the thought made me slump.

My roommates arrived soon after that. We breathlessly recounted the events that took place in the short period we spent apart before collapsing into our beds. There were still two whole days left, I thought, momentarily forgetting about the girl.

The low point of my trip was a moment’s regret in not talking to a stranger on the street.

Needless to say, it was a pretty special weekend.

Thanks for making it great, guys.

Pedant

Everyone stared.

If the sound of my heels sliding on gravel didn’t turn their heads, the collision did: my forehead bounced once on the concrete before my cheek broke the second impact.

It didn’t knock me out. Nor did I feel surprised or alarmed. I anticipated the slip moments before it happened, but I failed to take action to minimize the damage. I laid there, ass in the air, while I calculated my next action.

Self-assessment, the doctors said. It’s a new thing. I still think it’s pointless, so I kept my old cron jobs at high priority, resulting in the newly-added process to take longer than it was designed to. My resources are better spent elsewhere.

I laid there relishing the sensation of pain on my skull and in my neck, cataloging the experience until my assessment completed. The cold pulses of discomfort starkly contrasted the warm blood pooling around my lips and ear.

A minute passed before I pushed onto my hands and knees. Gravity pulled my lips and face towards the browned sidewalk. I slid my tongue over my teeth and sat up, resting my ass on my heels, and looked around. Sitting upright seemed to be justification enough for the other pedestrians to not intervene. They unfroze, and resumed walking. I don’t blame them. I would have too.

I climbed to my feet, looking to the ground still - both to examine the fluid I’ve lost, and to keep any further fluid from landing on my shirt. After altering my course to the nearest service station, I too resumed walking.

I arrived ten minutes later. The blood on my forehead had yet to completely clot, but the bleeding had slowed enough that I was confident to stand upright without fear of ruining my blouse. I entered the garage’s entrance and a welder whistled, lifting his mask. He grinned around an expletive, then pointed me toward the door at the back of the garage.

Around the corner I sat in a dirty chair. The waiting room smelled like oil. Through the glass pane I could see other machines being serviced. One of them, a female, had her left arm completely removed. She stared at it blankly while her technician applied a magic wand to its exposed connectors. Blue sparks made her fingers spasm and clench.

A man was on his back behind her, raised 9.66 meters into the air. There were cables and intestines hanging below him. A little girl, perhaps 8 or 9, appeared to be braiding them. A potbellied man in a stained white jumpsuit supervised, nodding approvingly.

The little girl looked up and saw me through the window. She smiled. I smiled back, and saw fluid-stained teeth in my reflection. A large globule of blood dropped from my lip and landed on my blouse. The little girl giggled and resumed braiding.

Outside a car backfired. The machines jumped. The workers didn’t. Their organic eardrums no longer functioned at optimal levels thanks to the tools of their trade: drills. Saws. The roar of kilns. The technicians didn’t share the luxury of upgradeable parts. The did hard work with no reparations to its hazards. Still, they were happy to be here. Happy to be employed. Happy to be left alone.

A young woman in a pony tail snapped her fingers, loud enough for me to hear from the waiting room. She pointed at me through the glass then stuck her thumb over her shoulder, summoning me. I walked through the door, across the garage and towards where she stood. She inhaled through her teeth sympathetically while unfolding a metal chair for me.

“Had a nasty spill, didja?” she said, cigarette hanging off her mouth. She pulled a towel out of a plastic barrel and started wiping my face before I even sat down.

“Cron daemon priorities are all messed up.” I winced when her rag passed over the gash on my head, but immediately relaxed when the chair’s cool surface distracted my nerves.

“Apparently. Your equilibrium daemon up to date?”

I looked her over while I checked the changelog. She looked fit. Twentysomething. “Yeah, looks like it. I had better luck with the beta, I think, but that directory’s not public anymore.”

“Ah, probably an IP fuckall somewhere, I bet.”

It took me a full quarter second to parse that she meant not bandwidth or DNS errors, but patents. I nodded in agreement, and she blinked.

“You ain’t kiddin’ ‘bout your crons, are ya? Lie back, lemme poke around a bit.”

I put my hands on my knees and slumped in my chair. The cold metal pressed to my neck helped to distract from the pain even more than it did through my clothes. The repairwoman turned away briefly to pull a bus cable from her utility cart, then unhooked a bulky monochrome handheld from her belt. Her brow sullened once her scanner was interfaced.

“Hm. Your motor daemon doesn’t seem to be getting along with the latest assessment process. When’d you get that updated?”

“The doc did it for me,” I said. “I told him the one I had was just fine, but he wouldn’t let me leave until I upgraded.”

“Fuckin’ scam artists. Bet it cost a pretty penny to get it, too, dinnit?”

“More than that,” I laughed. “It took me half an hour before I got my blood pressure regulated again.”

She puffed on her cigarette and shook her head, reading the screen some more. “Fuckin’ scam artists,” she said again.

I looked to my left and saw the little girl from before standing on a stool. She was pulling one cable from the man’s back while another one lifted towards his spine, like a pulley. She was using so much of her body weight that her butt was practically on the concrete floor. When only a meter of looped intestine remained she jammed her fist on the lift controls in a practiced motion, and the man’s table lowered. She jammed another button and it stopped above her head. Then she gingerly tucked in the last of the roping hardware, folding it delicately between his spine and lungs. With a satisfied smile she put her hands on her hips, nodded, then turned to Potbelly. He beamed, and patted her on the head.

“There,” my technician said. “Found it.” She bent over with the screen turned towards me. “The new version of your assessment job kept booting your motor subprocess from the RTP resource. Looks like this version never learned to share before the vendor pushed it for sale.” She tapped her stylus on the screen a few times. “That should do it. I changed the permission settings on the resource. It’s flexible enough to be used by at least thirty processes - no idea why your self-assessment job decided he needed it all to himself.”

I smiled. She smiled back. “Oh you poor thing - here, let me get Len over here and he’ll clean you up, eh?”

“Thank you.” I sat up as she pulled the cable from my jawline free. She gave a playful salute while hopping back on her heels, then turned to whistle to a stick of a man across the garage. He perked, waved, and saw the wetwear tech beckon him over. After grabbing his clipboard he jogged over, narrowly avoiding a golf cart pushing spare parts across the garage. Its tiny trailer was full of limbs and cables, dirty with blood and oil. A thigh still connected to a hip was hanging over the edge, and it whirred and clicked while kicking in the air. Pink flesh was charred with burns where the knee should have been. It sounded old. Mechanical.

“Whatcha got, Jen?” The mechanic lifted a pair of swimming goggles from his eyes and snapped them onto his forehead. They looked like they use to be pink.

“This one here scraped her face pretty bad. You think we got some spare graft we can hook her up with?”

Len looked me over. I smiled, but not wide enough to expose my teeth this time. He was handsome. “Yeah, sure,” he said. “I got a pigment that’ll match close enough, I think. Be right back.” Len jogged around the table holding male model from before, who was lying face-down now. The little girl was up on the table with him, standing in a straddle over him while she stitched up his back.

On his way back from the skin-bin Len almost got taken out by the same golf cart from before.

“Yeah,” he huffed, catching his breath. “This oughta do it, I think.” He turned to Jen, proudly holding fistful of drooping flesh up to my face. “You?”

Jen looked up from her handheld and smiled. “Damn near perfect, I think.”

Len beamed. “Alright beautiful, let’s get you lookin’ right. You mind standin’ for me?” He offered his hand to help me rise to my feet. “Thanks. Alright, let’s get you cleaned up a bit before I graft— whoa!”

I fell back onto my chair, bounced once, then landed hip-first on the smooth concrete. Hard. It hurt.

“Whoa there girl, you alright?” Len scrambled towards me and reached for my arm. “Jen, get over here and take a look at her equilibrium cron and see if -“

“I’m fine.” I waved them off. “Really -“

“Naw sweetie,” Len said, grabbing my forearm. “That was clearly a problem. Just let Jen take another look-“

“I said I’m fine.” I sighed, then smiled up at them reassuringly. “It’s nothing. I just,” Len offered his arm and I hoisted myself up with a grunt. “I don’t trust this version of the assessment daemon the doc gave me, and I’m still trying to figure out how many cycles I want to give it.” Jen looked just as skeptical as Lem did. “I took too much away from my equilibrium cron that time is all. I’ve worked it out now, though.” I smiled again, brushing my hair from the sticky wound on my forehead. “I’m good. Promise.”

Len didn’t look convinced. “Alright,” he said, and nodded slowly. “Alright, if you say so.”

Jen crossed her arms with a smirk and shook her head. Len caught her eye and jerked his head to the side. She got the message, graciously bowed, and started walking backwards. “Okay. Well, you stay upright, girl, y’hear?”

“Thanks,” I said. “I will.” She snapped a finger gun at me before turning to walk towards some other emergency in the garage.

Len pulled another towel from the bin and started dabbing at my wound. I turned to look straight ahead, as if I was getting a haircut. I tried to stay still while resisting the urge to overcorrect minutiae movements. Though my eyes were staring straight ahead, Len was soon in front of them. His tongue stuck out a little as he concentrated.

“So…” He kept his eyes on his hands while he dressed my wound. “What’s your name?”

“Tam,” I said. “Tammeron.”

“Nice to meet you, Tam.” He smiled, still not really looking at me. He had a nice smile. “I’m Lenny.”

I felt my cheeks flush. “Hi Lenny,” I whispered. At only 11.1 decibels, I doubt he heard me above the 86.7 db buzz of the tablesaw 64.8 meters to my right. His smile widened, though, demonstrating that he’d seen me say it.

“Hi Tam.” He said back, then finally met my eyes. “What say you we getcha patched up then, eh?”

I pursed my lips and I smiled back, nodding. I’ll be damned if he sees my teeth still covered in blood, I thought.

American Idol Syndrome

For a while, American Idol was my favorite sport. It’s still the favorite sport of a lot of Americans, because it has all the qualities of a good competition: protagonists, antagonists, referees and merchandise, favorites and underdogs.

After the first season, the show started digging into the lives of contestants. Before the 12 finalists were revealed, we were shown footage of the players’ hometowns. Viewers were given the resources to become emotionally invested in contestants that would eventually be our weekly entertainment. Sure, we saw mini-biographies of contestants who eventually didn’t make the cut, but the network made sure we had seen plenty of footage of the final round of contestants so that we cared about them when they arrived onstage. It’s drama.

We chose our picks and we rooted for them. And unlike Amateur Night at the Apollo, the audience never booed an off-key singer. Viewers appeared to finally be equipped with enough empathy to wish the best of every contestant, not just their own pick. I mean, totally great, right? American Idol was totally great.

When I watched the X-Games as a little kid, I saw competing skaters rooting for each other, even though they were all competitors. That was the first time I’d seen that kind of sportsmanship. I remember rooting for, along with the rest of the world, Tony Hawk to do the first ever 900. Even though the clock had run out, the crowd cheered him on - and after eight or nine failed attempts, all the other skaters put their hands on him, encouraging him to try it just one more time. And then he did it. And it was lovely - just fucking lovely. American Idol, in the beginning, felt like that: a community of genuine, happy, pretty people doing and encouraging each other to do genuine, happy, pretty things. That camaraderie among competitors was present from the beginning, and it was just great.

But then something happened: Fox introduced a flavor of schadenfreude to the show that encouraged - harvested, even - harsh, useless ridicule that has shaped the tone of a lot of media elsewhere.

Instead of culling for footage to give the viewers a sense of connection with future-finalists, producers realized that the most talked about events on the show were explosions of conflict. This is hardly some grand epiphany - reality television by definition is the voyeuristic spectacle of real life conflict, vicarious ups and downs of people who somehow seem to be more relateable, more genuine than the characters of a scripted soap opera. Of course, how genuine the conflict we end up seeing is debatable: Craig Ferguson demonstrates how basic film splicing can alter the tone of any conversation.

And besides, Big Brother is, what, 15 years old now? Like I said, this is hardly new. But this shameless embrace of schadenfreude, this pointing and laughing at the “other”, is something I’ve seen in a frightening amount of New Media like Gawker, LATFH and the plethora of FAIL blogs, to name a few. It’s a gag reel that’s as useful as it is tasteful - and it’s something that I can trace back to about the third season of American Idol.

I call this effect American Idol Syndrome.

“Dreadful. Absolutely dreadful.”

“Sorry, dawg, but it’s just not good.”

“Marmalade!”

The shock on the faces of contestants when they’re told this speaks volumes. How did this happen? How did these people not know that they were so incredibly bad?

We can rule out living in The Bubble for the more, erm, intellectually oriented individuals like William Hung. So if superficial privilege wasn’t the source of this confidence, what was?

The answer is actually quite simple: they were lied to. These contestants were lied to by every single person in their life whose opinions they respect. They were so convinced by their family, by their friends and teachers and classmates, that they went all the way to open auditions thinking - believing that they were going to go far - because they were lied to. So effectively, so convincingly, that they waited in line for hours - days, even! - to show off their talent to anyone that would listen.

Eventually, though, these contestants would perform in front of one particular set of judges. And these judges, unlike everyone else before them, won’t lie.

Which makes for some fucking great television.

“Awful. Absolutely terrible. That is quite possibly the worst performance I have ever seen.”

Producers and lower-tier judges leverage these contestants’ poor performances by graduating them to the next tier, shouting Great! Wonderful! You might be the next American Idol, producers said. You totally graduate to the next round!

And around season three, Fox discovered that nothing gets ratings like Simon making some kid cry on camera. Suddenly, no longer was American Idol about hope and joy, showcasing the genuine talent of lovely, (mostly) humble performers. Now it was a show about bullying and tears, filled with more crushed spirits than a Tolkien novel.

In the same spirit we, as a culture, embrace ridicule as a pastime. We encourage the public humilation of those we deem “less fortunate”. It promotes not charity or self-improvement, but pointing, laughing and then continuing on your way. That itself is pretty shitty, right? But even more insidious, I think, is the lies, this social acceptance of coddling. The American promise of You can do anything, Don’t listen to the naysayers.

Don’t tell me what I can’t do!, Locke screamed from his wheelchair. And everyone cheered.

This terrifies me. This terrifies me like nothing else in the world. I’m terrified that throughout my life, despite whatever I might’ve been told to the contrary, I am actually terrible at everything. I’m terrified that all my friends and family think that they’re just “being nice” by “encouraging me to do what I love”, and all that other bullshit. I’m terrified how it’s become socially acceptable to lie to people to their face about their strengths and weaknesses. It’s not about tact: it’s about the removal of any and all friction. Shouldn’t everyone be terrified of this?

So here’s my request to everyone, particularly to anyone whose opinions I respect enough to befriend: If I am shit at something - at anything, in any way shape or form - fucking tell me. Tell me immediately. Make me cry before I make a fool of myself in front of people that aren’t my friends. I promise that it’ll only make me want to do better.

And I hope that you recognize that when I tell you that you’re shit - and I assure you it will be in the kindest, most constructive way possible (please don’t misconstrue this as an attempt to give myself a free “Be a Dick” pass) (I’m really quite rubbish at being a dick anyway, it’s actually kind of hilariously sad) it’s because I love you and I truly think that doing the opposite - that telling you that you’re a unique snowflake who can live your dreams no matter what they are (which is dangerous career advice for any one) - is not only a disservice to you, but is one of the most unkind things I could ever do to someone that I care about.

If everyone were constructive and honest and nice about the reality of any one person’s ability in anything, I think a lot of problems would get solved. It’d create a few problems, too, but I think that it would solve a lot more.

When something I’m doing is shit, tell me it’s shit.

When I’m doing something shitty, call me on my shit.

And, most importantly, tell me how I can fix my shit.

Because the last thing I ever want to be is cocksure.

I see sounds.

Describing how I perceive music in so many words is still a struggle for me. The inadequacy in saying that I “see” sounds, how there’s no word in my lexicon of descriptors for how it really works in my head, the need for these words, is only as new as my knowledge of how unique it is. Each attempt to describe it feels like sparring, words and I, in a match arduous and stubborn. We’re both stubborn - the words in their elusiveness and me, determined as I am to find them. The fight is tiresome and exhilarating.

The assignment was to write a paper about a unique phenomenon or disease or disorder or malfunction of some sort - a project ostensibly designed to build empathy. The course was held in one of the carpeted classrooms of my school, so it couldn’t have been a Science or Biology class. Social Studies, maybe. A girl with not-black hair whose name I don’t remember went to the front of the room, wearing jeans and no glasses. She was bright. I liked her.

She wrote her paper about a phenomenon called synesthesia, where neurons carrying data from the input of a perceptive sense crosses paths with another sense’s pipeline on its way to the brain’s processing center, resulting in a “mixing” of the senses - touch, smell, sight, etc. Sense-signals are delivered to the wrong decoding facility, basically.

One form of this phenomenon, she said, was sound-to-color synesthesia, in which some or all auditory information is sent not just to the hearing-center of the brain, but to the visual center as well, which in this case results in every sound having a unique color.

“Wait, wait, wait,” I said, interrupting her - it was a pretty informal class - “you mean everyone doesn’t have that?”

Read More

My mother moved again. This means she needs someone not-her to move furniture. This weekend’s not-her was, as is usually the case, me.

She had classical music playing on the television when I walked in. It stayed on as I moved couches, lifted potted plants, hung blinds and wrestled with the butcher slab that has been around my whole life. It’s been missing a leg for nearly a decade. It’s finally on the curb.

It was a good table.

Listening to classical music, I could hear where all the musicians were emulating what was on the page. That’s when there was a crescendo, I’d think. They’re trying to be mezzo-piano, but that second trumpet is a little too eager.

There be staccatos all up in there.

I’m no longer able to parse joy from classical music. I dissect it critically, and only hear the interpretation of the song - not the intent of the song’s composer.

A friend of mine once told me that when he goes to a concert, he wants the band to play their songs exactly like the album versions. I can understand that. He’s a systematic person who wants to see how this music happens, to feel it on his face as he stands there witnessing it first hand.

I prefer the opposite.

I think too many musicians feel obligated to give a completely predictable performance. “I made this song,” they say. “The album version is canon. Any deviation from this is no longer the same song.”

Academic music programs reinforce this notion from grade school. “Play this song how it was intended to be played,” they say. “What’s written on the page is canon. If you don’t play what’s on the page, you’re playing it wrong.”

After 15 years of rehearsals and recitals and concertos and competitions - I’ve decided that I really, really hate that.

Music is as fluid as humans are fleeting. Playing a logarithmic retelling of the same story will get old very quickly. I respect Broadway performers tremendously, as they aren’t allowed the artistic freedom to deviate from the pre-determined plot, which must be performed impeccably, passionately, every single performance - sometimes for years.

I’m no longer interested in classic plays or old movies. I’d rather go to an improv show. I don’t want to hear Tchaikovsky’s Thirteenth Whatever again. I’ve heard it all my life. It’s original context is lost. When we hear Public Domain Concerto #29 we think of Christmas, or of a jewelry commercial, or of an old cartoon. All of these shared memories are sometimes destructive to art, I think. Everyone agreeing that this thing is a happy thing, that’s great. Everyone agreeing through sheer commercial conditioning that this song is now associated with a product or a brand, that’s terrifying to me. Having other people decide what this thing that a person made for his or her own reasons should be associated with is what art has been reduced to in popular culture. Classical music, with its convenient lack of licensing fees, has been perverted this way. All of the contexts of the agreed-upon “greats” have been decided for us before we’ve even heard the song.

I’d rather go to a jazz show and watch people make something on stage - something that’s never been made or seen or heard before. I want spontaneity. I want tangibility. I want conversation.

When I go to a concert, I don’t want to hear a mechanical recreation of a four hundred year old pop song. I want to hear you.

You, the person standing in front of me.

You, alive - alive! living! breathing! thinking! - with thoughts and feelings and memories and experiences and stories and gestures. You are infinitely more interesting to me. There are two decades of memories and experiences in my head - and you have that many - probably more! - that are completely different that mine. I want to hear what you, a person both complete and completely sovereign from me, have to say.

I want your brain splattered on the stage. Not Schumaker’s. Not even Mozart’s. I’ve heard and played Mozart all my life. You, though - you I’ve just met.

I can’t wait to meet you.

Bands

I’ve only ever been in orchestras and symphonies and choirs and shit where the objective is to perform an exact replica of what the composer of a piece has tried to represent on the page.

I’m getting serious about music again after a long while, and while I greatly admire and am somewhat guilty of idolizing singer-songwriters like Andrew Bird, Sufjan Stevens, Sondre Lerche, Bon Iver, St. Vincent and so on and so forth, the concept of a band - a collective that exists together to make music, is something that I’ve never had the pleasure of trying.

Being like the aforementioned acts and conceiving a piece of music from beginning to end, then auditioning for a touring band is what I always imagined - or, rather, fantasized - what I’d do someday. But the concept of being in a band, being in a room full of people who are all trying to make a new sound, and everyone in the room eventually all agreeing what the sound is and ought to be - that’s magical to me.

My favourite bands, you can hear the chemistry of them. You can hear how they act as an organism, their group think, the hivemind, no words needed much more than “here, listen to this” and then one dude joins in then another and an hour later they finish, they’ve made it, this thing, from all of their brains collaborating on this new original thing.

Sometimes you can hear the band having fun while recording (Matt & Kim). Other times you can hear all the history, where all the revisions and cuts were made as they worked to write their opus, something specific needed to be engineered from the ground up to express what’s in their mind(s) (Flaming Lips, Radiohead), and other times you can tell it was just the second or third take and magic just happened (Elbow, Spoon).¹

I know that there’s drama. And I know that there will always be disagreements. But to find a room full of people - or just one or two others - whose musical tendencies aren’t necessarily similar to one another, but complement one another, and perhaps even challenge one another, and then get them all to sit in a room and Make - together - that’s magic.

I think I wanna start a band.

In grade school there evolved an unspoken rule that if you stood by the support pole of an occupied swingset and silently counted to 100 to yourself you could then ask for your turn on the swing. It was all very civil. I don’t remember anyone using the same tone used in the water fountain queue. Save some for the fishes!

One particular person, whether it was a boy or a girl or a bully or a friend I cannot recall, was feeling particularly insidious one day and badgered me for a turn of their own mere seconds after I had achieved optimum momentum. I screamed back at him/her something immemorable, then jumped off at the peak of a swing - a favourite past time of mine at any park, but this time out of theatrical passion rather than daredevil glee. I stormed behind the school yard, through the green grass backyards of houses lining the playground and ran into the cul de sac a block behind the school. I sat on the curb with my back to the playground, middle class homes towering over me like adults. Obscured from the other children by houses I cried my eyes out in a then-inexplicable swell of juvenile emotion.

After no grown-ups came to comfort me, I decided that I was done crying. I went back to the playground before recess ended, and with tears still streaking my face, I went to the dirt yard next to the concrete square of the playground to dig for dinosaur bones.

Sometimes after consuming something profound, you integrate its profundity into your state of being. Your mindset gets a little boost where you feel like you have benefited and, somehow, become profound yourself after having consumed this thing, this profound thing.

Powerful movies are the best, most accessible example I can think of. Remember how you felt after Schindler’s List? As if you had just witnessed something profound? And even though you had literally nothing to do with the creation of it, you felt like you were a better person for having watched it.

I’ve been having a lot of those moments. Through the verbosity of the Internet, in spite of my fear of constructing an airtight echo chamber, I’ve been able to have a steady influx of things that I consider profound. iTunes Genius, Amazon suggests, Twitter and Tumblr friends — all act as sources for things that I tend to admire so greatly.

This profundity, I’ve found, has three unique effects on me:

1. Reverence. I feel grand, and need to share this grandiosity with the rest of the world. Make sure they experience it as exactly as I did. “No no, listen to this album first, THEN go back to their debut. You’ll appreciate them more that way.” That’s the formula that led to how I revered them, so I am making you follow it as well.

   I have become a disciple of this profound thing.

2. Make. I feel as if I’ve learned something, and I need to use these new tools to make things. This is the most useful and best kind of profundity. I feel good before, during, and after I have Made from the profound thing I just consumed.

3. Intense jealousy. This is a recent thing. And crippling. And no fun for anybody.

Right now I’ve got 1 going on. And then it changed to 2, and right now, just now, right this very moment as 2 manifested itself into me writing this observation, it has changed to 3. I, right now, fleetingly, hate Tao Lin.

The profound thing in question is Shoplifting From American Apparel.

You should read it.

…Preferably while listening to Elbow’s Asleep In The Back.

“Webmasters are the new truck driver.”

The silence of our studying was broken by another of his unprovoked non-sequiturs. He always jumps from one subject to another in between pauses, and continues the latter half of his thoughts verbally, as if I was following his internal monologue with as much clarity as he does. I sighed. “What?”

“You know how they say that truck drivers rule the world? Without them, the entire world economy would crumble - virtually every commercial good ever harvested, produced or manufactured requires a trip on a trailer from vendor to store shelf.”

He never fills you in begrudgingly, though. He’s incredibly caring and surprisingly not vain - he doesn’t resent having to catch you up to his train of thought. It’s almost as if he realizes that he spoke out of context, but prefers to have his conversational postulates in reverse order. Not to keep anyone in the dark intentionally, I don’t think; like I said, he isn’t vain. He’s just brilliant. “Okay, yeah. So how do computer nerds take the place of truck drivers? We move data, not physical goods. We can’t eat numbers. At least, well, not yet anyway-”

“See, that’s the thing!” Charlie turned in his computer chair to face me, hunching over with his elbows on his knees with his hands suddenly eager to emphasize his words with more motion than any sort of visible meaning. “We can’t eat numbers, but we can make numbers bring us our food.” He paused for a minute when he saw my brow furrow with confusion.

“So, essentially, since I’m a computer programmer, I can build a robot to replace a truck driver to deliver a Hershey bar to my door?”

“Nono, too literal, hang on.” He always says to hang on when he needs to re-articulate his thoughts for us mere mortals. He never makes you wait more than a second or two, though, his eyes darting from one side of the floor to the other before looking back at you with renewed enthusiasm. “Okay, say, for instance, that all private transit just suddenly disappeared. No truck drivers, trains, or airplanes - like, say we ran out of oil. We thought we had a reserve for a while longer, but - but we miscalculated, and we ran out. What would happen?”

“Probably something along the lines of Mad Max.” I reached for my ill-kept zen garden on an upper shelf of my desk, and grabbed a fistful of sand, theatrically crying “Noooo!” to the heavens as I let it run from my fingers. He laughed a little. Just a little, but it was enough. I love making him laugh.

“Hah, no, seriously, what would happen? If trucks and cars suddenly didn’t work, what would we, as resourceful Americans, do?”

I stopped to think a bit, unintentionally mimicking his thoughtful pose of nose to the floor. I smirked a little, barely succeeding in suppressing a toothy grin once I realize it. I look up briefly - luckily, Charlie didn’t notice. I didn’t want to explain to him why my similarity to him brought me joy - the admiration I had for him; his brilliance, his looks, his demeanor, his… kindness. He’s always so fucking nice, all of the time. I wish I could do that.

A split second later I regained my composure and thought over the question. What would we do?

“Well, let’s see… the government would probably intervene. Do some PR stuff, telling us that it’s for the best and that they’ve had a longstanding plan for this outcome. They’d have some sort of rebate, or, like, tax-cut for trading in our cars. The economy would dip tremendously - vendors wouldn’t be able to receive anything from one another that can’t be carried by foot….” I trailed off. I tend to over empathize in movies, and this hypothetical scenario was quite literally depressing me. We wouldn’t last a month.

“Now see, out of desperation comes the most brilliant ingenuity. What would the scientists busy themselves with? What would the guys at MIT do?”

My eyebrows perked. “They’d… shit, they’d fix it, wouldn’t they? They’d be the smart ones, rejecting all unreplenishable fuel sources and making that final push towards shit like hydrogen cell batteries and… make solar power useful, or whatever. Probably in a matter of months. Weeks, even, if every resource available in the scientific world were focusing on it. Which is probably what would happen more or less, yeah?”

“Exactly!” He almost stood, but instead just dropped back in his computer chair, sliding his butt back in the blue fabric of the seat cushion. “See, all the reasons the government had put in place for the current means of economy - GM, fossil fuel, all the jobs they’d worked so hard to protect in the automotive industry to keep our economy afloat, they’d all collapse within hours of the news.” He shifted in his seat again, his posture straightening while looking intently into the alley his palms made as he spoke. “But that’s the push the scientific industry would need to make some serious breakthroughs in applicable, everyday sciences. But in between those breakthroughs and the collapse, what would the rest of us do?”

“Considering we still have means of electricity with the depletion of fossil fuel, we’d… well, we’d all network, I suppose. All the sedimentary types would stay put and organize.”

“Right! We’d continue to curate information, keep each other informed. Entertainment and communication would make a definitive paradigm shift to computers, since the means to see each other face to face would be increasingly difficult. Those currently rejecting technology would have to embrace it, or else they’d literally starve.”

Now it was my turn to sit up straighter. This was getting interesting, but I’d completely lost sight of the original query. “So the internet would push the economy out of a rather imminent depression. What does that mean? What’s your point?”

He beamed as he stood up. “Webmasters are the new truck driver.” He stretched his arms some before flopping on the bottom bunk, bouncing a bit on the creaky mattress of my bed. “If truck drivers disappeared,” he continued, staring up at the underside of the mattress above him, “life would suck. Then computer nerds would keep us alive. If it were the other way around -”

“If computer technicians all died because, like, silicone is a carcinogen or something, then the world would fall apart. It’d be pen and paper - the dark ages.”

“We’re too reliant on technology for the world to suddenly do without it. But truck drivers, they’re simply means - a medium for transporting stuff. But information -”

“- information rules the world.”

Charlie grinned. He clasped his hands behind his head and leaned back, feet on the floor as he lied on my bed. My heart skipped a little when I thought of him leaving a warm spot on my mattress. I silently hoped he’d step out for a minute so I could lay where he laid, pretending his warmth from the blankets weren’t second-hand. I swallowed and held back a blush.

“I mean, it’s the fucking Information Age - we named an entire era after today’s currency! We sell information, and we can pack more of it in a minute than we could in a whole library a hundred years ago. Information can push goods and goods need information to be made, to be transported, to do everything. Even though we haven’t the technology yet for pure information to literally make a physical impact on objects, you have to admit… we’re practically there.”

There. That’s the thought he had. That profound visualization that he plotted in seconds inside his mind before he mentioned anything about trucks or computers to me. And he guided me through the flowing creek of consciousness that is his train of though. He relived it all, verbally, at what must have been eons longer than if the conversation were held completely in his head. And he just laid there. Grinning.

On my bed.

There’s a good side and a bad side to falling in love with your college roommate. On one hand - if he takes the top bunk - you get to sleep under him. On the other hand… you’re stuck sleeping under him.

It’s at once the worst and most comfortable hell I could have ever hoped for.