Hot dogs and wine for dinner lately.
Hey friends. Hope everyone is doing okay. One of my new goals is to try and communicate more to the people out there who still look at this thing. So you can look forward to my typical long, reflective journal entries again.
Communication is pretty difficult at the moment. I’ve been in a dark place. Music feels far away. Everything feels far away. When I talk to friends about this feeling, neither of us really knows what to say.
Between reading the (ever so sad) news online and feeling unproductive and tired, I’ve been writing again. Which is good but also kind of frightening since I’m writing about my life like always.
In the years since I released my first album, life has changed a lot. I have a pretty normal office job and struggle to find time for creative thinking. I’ve gone through 3 different bands in 3 cities in 3 years. I don’t really have a drummer at the moment so I’ve just been playing and recording songs in my bedroom.
in the last 6 months or so, I’d been thinking a lot about moving somewhere cheaper than SF, settling down & growing old with someone. i was in a long distance relationship and those tend to require a lot of trust. a persistent dialogue of “this is hard but this is right.”
it ended very abruptly. so now there’s kind of this weird purgatory going on in my life. where I’m relearning what it’s like to feel alone. feeling like you need to be alone. feeling like it’s inevitable you’re going to be alone forever. even if there is always a part of you that knows this is not true. that you are not actually alone and there are still a ton of people who care about you and an infinite amount of strangers who you will perhaps befriend.
it’s still a weird purgatory. lots of overthinking. questioning what conversations and emotions were “real” and not “real.” worrying. becoming cognizant of how differently you concoct your own identity when you’re in a serious relationship.
i was pretty upset immediately after we broke up. abruptly without much of an explanation while on vacation in seattle. but as the weeks have gone by, i’m more sad than angry. i texted a friend yesterday that “it’s so strange how someone can just up and disappear and not talk to you.” No huge fight but no conversations either.
Maybe it’s just that usually i’m the one doing the disappearing. I realize that moving from city to city has afforded me the fortune of meeting new people and learning about new places. but it’s also pushed me further and further away from my friends’ lives in the other cities i’ve lived in. The mundane details and small day-to-day wonders get skipped in favor of long catch up phone calls or hangouts.
which is not to say that a gap in friendship is 100% on me. people aren’t really good at keeping in touch anymore–myself included. i feel very lucky to have friends that i’ll always have a degree of closeness with–even if we don’t talk or see each other for weeks, months, years.
my friends back home did make a lot of jokes about being pissed off that I called the last EP Homesick and recorded it at home right before I left to move across the country.
anyway I’m going to stop there for right now. This is probably an insufficient intro to the next album and a poor attempt at detailing “the state of thick red wine” over the last few years. But I will get there. Just need to keep at it.
Xx
mike.