1.17

He was macerated paper pulp, wet and clingy and full of unwritten stories. I had been listening to him for a half hour already, and every time I poked a word in, he bounded off it (rebounded, really) into a reiteration of the old topic as though what I had said were a question and not an insightful comment designed specifically to let him know I had not only heard of but was bored with the thing he had chosen to tell me about. He was a very well-intentioned person and I honestly had nothing better to do. Why not?
Alas, not every sixty two year old substitute teacher has good stories.

1.16

I wrote about her. It took me an hour and a half to draft and I let my best friend read it. He said to post it. He said I should never post it.
Nobody needs to hear what I have to say. I'll leave you with my translation of Catullus 85, not because it sums up what I was feeling, but because it's lovely and you deserve it.

"Odi et amo. quare id faciam fortasse requiris.
nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior."

She's nothing and everything, and there's no way I could explain it.
She's as inherent as my mysterious bones, and she's killing me.

10.15

When you write a letter to just one person (or a note, or else), there's a bond of two parties sharing a secret, and it draws you together if you know what to look for. Maybe that's what makes books of correspondence between two lovers so salacious and gratifying: we're party to a lovely enigma built over a lifetime of tiny unintentional secrets. We get to piece together the terrible force that dominated their lives and drove them to such unthinkable joy. We're their lovers, too, then.

And yet: we never do think, when we wrote these things to each other, that anyone would read them, and love us, and ache.

Songs for a Neophyte: 2015.30

Fatal Flaw
Anchor and Braille

I've been slapped out of the atmosphere
She doesn't think I belong
Space is silk, you know
When you're weightless
It only took me thirty years
(and you know, I still don't understand)
But
The distant shots all connect
And I disintegrate

I don't know if you've all been following, but I keep writing poems of free-association and zero drafts while I listen to each song, and I'm completely unapologetic about it.

Lyrics
There's something I'm missing in the lyrics. I'm sure there has to be; it's tantalizing. Somewhere under the surface, there's a terrible story that would wrack me to the bones just to hear it. The reverberations would shatter me like a wineglass, the song screaming at my resonant frequency.
Is . . .
Is this my story?
I won't allow it, and I think that's sort of the point. I've been alone too long, sure. I'm unable to answer why it happened, sure. I can't think of anything I did that was worthy of what happened, sure. But [an angry voice inside me wants to yell about how it couldn't have been my fault, couldn't have been anything I did, obviously. I don't think I deserved what happened, either, and even if I knew why it happened, why she left, I couldn't expect that I caused it by anything I did] the song is, probably, my story.

Oh, cuss. I hope she never reads my blog. That hadn't occurred to me until now. Not--now, listen here, friend, there's nothing here that would probably surprise her much, and honestly she'll never tell me if she does, so it couldn't possibly matter to me whether she reads my work or not, but I sure hope somehow that it never occurs to her to google my name, even. Does that make sense, because it did when I typed it. So, and follow me here, I just kept writing and writing because my life didn't stop when she left (although I suppose it did, actually, thinking back on it only recently) and she doesn't matter now, and I never gave a second thought to whether she would read something that would sting (or cut [or eviscerate, though I don't suppose I ever had that much power over her (she was always so free of me, and maybe that's sort of the point) so probably in the end it doesn't matter]).
I looked at her instagram feed, for a time. It was the only thing she didn't delete, and then she deleted it. And then there was nothing, as though a ghost had been by and warmed a seat for you in an empty room. I didn't, uh, delete or change anything. Actually--holy moses

friends

oh my word
I literally just didn't do anything when she left
I was still married on Facebook because I forgot that was a thing

this song is about me

[14 January 2018 Robby died of embarrassment]

Stephen
When Stephen released this top 40, this song was new-old. Maybe he didn't have anything to say, and maybe he picked this song accidentally for me, and not for him. Stephen, you didn't write anything. You've left me alone with this song, and I think that's unintentionally cruel. A friend caught me twice, recently--once, I said "wife" instead of "ex-wife" because honestly I don't talk about her, so my brain has never re-wired, and and and once, they saw my ring on my keys where I put it last May, on the last day I ever wore it, and I was ashamed because.
Everything has been in stasis, waiting for me to notice and do something. Well, world. Stop holding your breath. I did something.

This song should apologize to me, or I to it, or something.

1.13

Portion control is so important.
What are you talking about?
I'm saying that portion control is . . .
Are you trying to say something to me? Say it. Say it out loud.
No. No!
This is a single portion, Marcia.
I'm just saying.
You're literally not.

Songs for a Neophyte: 2015.31

Right Now
Mary J. Blige

There's an old person in new clothes
She looks at me and smirks
An unseen beat drives a jive
I retreat
But she follows, beat with her
An incessancy
Viewed in glimpses
Unspeakably calm in face of my panic
Absurd horror film of the new millenium

Lyrics
Is this a breakup song? I mean, the words would make me think so, but in the music there's nothing of the melancholy of a loss, none of the triumph of an escape. It's not exactly joy, either, to my ear. It's more aggressive than joy, unless it's a purely spiteful happiness (this is honestly not an unbelievable proposition). But the words!

I'm telling you right now, I'm telling you right now
No, I won't play this game with you
I'm taking it back now, I'm turning it right round
My love won't be the same for you no more
My love won't be the same for you no more
No, I won't play this game

It has to be a breakup, or an ending, or a disaster of some kind. Which means this song's text is entirely inaccessible to me. I've never been on that end of a breakup. I've only ever been on the barrel end of a sudden terminus. What is about me that forced such an incredible cut? I mean, maybe you've got reasons, if you've done something similar. If you've ever acted as though a person didn't exist even when you saw them face to face on occasion, if you've ever avoided all contact with a person, if you've ever (when forced into contact) felt antagonism and fear--who knows? Maybe you had a good reason. Please, if you're at least metacognizant enough to be able to explain why you did so . . . maybe I don't need the explanation, but maybe it would help.
I know myself. I live in the thin liminal binding between egotistical asshole and codependent wretch. I know that neither is worth keeping up with after a relationship ends, and I know that if you've had someone treat you outside that interstitial, it's exhausting and condemning and terrible. I get that, really, I do. But sometimes I feel like nearly the entirety of humanity lives in that brief gap between self-obsessed and other-obsessed.
Maybe the feeling of this song, this triumphant abandonment, maybe it's genuine. I suspect that I cannot feel it without dread and guilt riving great gulches in what once was a smooth exterior.
It's a very fun to listen to, if we're honest.

Stephen
I guess I'm ashamed of everything I wrote, now that I've read your feelings about it. You're right, it's a breakup with clear delineation, it's not dependent on a thick paste of victimhood . . . it's an atypical breakup song. And it's probable that MJB is an adult who isn't coy with her partners. But after so much high school drama in college, I'm probably a little touchy. This is the attitude of a person who assigns themselves the moral high ground and walks away without considering the alternatives. Who lives like that? Who can be so confident that they're right?

Now that I've said it, I'm that person. I'm that confident, sometimes. Not about relationships, by a long shot, but--
I'm the trampling rhinoceros come to destroy your innocent opinions with my cold logic. I've done this about a lot of things. Well, cuss.

1.11

be super vulnerable and awkward and ruin things

I am a thief because I stole that from my very good very friend.
I am also not a thief because it is something I would say to him.
Do opposites attract, or is it birds of a feather? Someone should make up our minds for us. My mind is filled with beautiful thoughts that can't be articulated except by the most painstaking work by a puppeteer who is well versed in wood and cloth and glue. Or maybe it's articulation like words, but the thought has just collapsed when I touched it, and maybe my entire train of thought is actually like that, and the puppet master is working with materials that are disintegrating in the sun.
Have you? uh
Ever seen anything so beautiful that you don't know how to put it to words? Or like, you just didn't want to, because if you did, you know that somehow you wouldn't get it all?  I mean you would need watercolors to approach the fire bruise of the most fantastic sunset you've ever seen and you would just keep painting as its subtlety grew and its power grew until you were just washing over a hundred darkening layers with the deepest blue-black in your kit until the palette is untouched untouched untouched untouched empty where the black used to be and you look at it and it's your life, now, on the old page, an india ink palace where once there was glory-rose and dandelion bloom and you've hidden the subtlety just far enough under the surface that nobody has the chance to see it but you. And maybe that's good, you know. Maybe it's good to have an experience so beyond transmission that you just know you'll never be able to give it to another person unless they were there with you, and then to wake up from your reverie and realize that you've been alone this whole time and no one else will ever see what you're seeing right now and you're so desperate: so frantic to absorb a multitude worth of lifetimes' enjoyment out of this second and a half of fading light because you'll never be able to give it to the scattered billions of people who needed it, and now, somehow (without irony) you're the only one who's got it.
The only one who will ever

And maybe that's okay, I guess, because you haven't ruined things after all, for all your fumbling, and all your pain, you've solved this moment because it's yours.

1.10

Five words to describe a life, my life, any life, you:

Dissatisfaction
Don't nail me down, please. I once worked as a janitor doing the same thing every day for three hours, and it nearly killed me. I am a dilettante of the highest order. I can't eat a sandwich without growing bored and looking for something else to stuff into my head until it's so full I can't even remember how I forgot some things I used to think were important.

Sublime
I'm not it, but I want it. I gape at sunsets and sunrises. I make plans for eclipses months in advance. I lose my mind when I learn something unbelievable. I have memories of losing all sensation to my body because I could feel the sanctity of the moment and I was terrified of living in it and too afraid of losing it. I remember hearing a colony of bees in a silent wood and watching the shadow of the earth slip over the moon and hearing the crickets in midday with Russell and standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon and my first time making love and the feeling of a major injury just after I knew I was bleeding but before I felt pain.

Perfection
If I try, really put my mind to something, actually knuckle down and give every effort I have, I care more about your opinion of that work than whatever inconsequential meat sack I happen to be living in. Jared saw it and cut me to the bone with a knife made of this observation. Call me what you want. Think I'm petty, small, egotistical, loud, idiotic. Do what you will, just love what I've made for you. Maybe he was right. (He was.)

Optimism
I don't know how this word applies to me. I take the contrary view to everything. I poke holes in everything. I can see both sides to everything. I do all these things, and I still believe that humans are trying to be good, that the planet is incredible, that God exists, and that if I just laugh every day, I'll look back and accidentally find that I've lived a very good life. So far, I'm not wrong.

Yes
There are probably more things in this world I will not do than things that I will. I'm pretty straight-edged, boy-scout, clean-cut. This isn't about saying yes to anything. This is about being willing to take the right risk at the right time. I will ride my bicycle across the country by myself. I will quit my job just as I get good at it. I will drive somewhere unknown. I will fall in love. Yes, I like my life. Yes, I will take more of it, thank you, and pass the sauce.

Songs for a Neophyte: 2015.32

Can't Pretend
Tom O'Dell

Since when did love grow dark?
Perhaps it was this beating drum,
An itchy sound at the back,
A crashing cacophony that breaks
Sudden
Into light I don't deserve.
When you wrote me down,
did you notice my spelling?
Or did you scribble too passionately?

Lyrics.
This is a childish, wonderful, aggressive view of love. This is Prince Charming saving Briar Rose from the castle where she was enchanted to sleep. This is driving a hundred miles on the weekends every weekend just to see somebody. This is choosing someone else over yourself because you're selfish enough to think they're more than you, somehow.

The first time I ever fell in love, I felt this way. I guess it's better for both of us that nothing came of it, that it (in fact) fell apart even before I realized my personal disaster. In fact, the letting-down of a long talk in the dying summer on a Friday afternoon was exactly what I deserved, even though I felt entitled to more. I think back to how magnanimous she was to talk for that hour with me, to attempt an explanation to a thing she didn't understand fully herself, and I feel the old sadness and loss again. I remember walking back to the ratty old apartment on the hill, sort of bawling my way along Apison Pike, and a classmate whose name I'll never remember stopping his car and calling to me across the road: "Do you need a ride, man? Are you okay?" I waved him off, and I don't even remember his name. He was too good for me.

The second time I ever fell in love, I felt this way. Even though I knew better, or should have, I threw myself headlong into it, and who wouldn't? Even with the benefit of hindsight, the two and some fraction years we spent together weren't what made me weak, after. The bond I built with her wasn't worthless just because she left. The value of the relationship wasn't negated by its end. And now, I think I did much better than the last time. Maybe, now, I was the one who listened more than I strictly speaking should have. Maybe, now, I was the one who went out of my way. Maybe, now, I was the one who, years afterward, can look back and strain to remember my drunken idiocy as I staggered through five days of ripping loss. Maybe, now, I'll be remembered in a good light by an ex.
Sadly, I know it's not the case. There's some perverse need in the human heart to remember yourself in a better light than originally illuminated you, and that need has driven something dark in me to be the entire picture she holds anymore. I'm not naive. I know these misconceptions are actually just exaggerations of a small truth well-hidden. I know she fears me because there's a real capability of violence that lives in my bones, evicted from my heart but still lurking somewhere else. I know she fears me because there's a hidden avarice in my aura, not alive in my actions but somehow visible through when the light hits me just so. I know she fears me because I could have found her address and seen where she lived and cried when I knew that she cheated on me, even though there's no reason for it, no desire for the memory, no will to make it happen. I'm not a perfect child of some forgotten race of higher beings. I'm disgusting like the rest of you, and she only amplified what was already there for her comfort.

Why do humans fall in love? We don't deserve it, even if we deserve each other.

Excellent song. I liked it a lot.

Stephen.
Tom O'Dell has tried just as hard as anybody. The production is polished just as mirror-shine as the last. The lyrics are, if possible, simpler. Why does this appeal to me, when the other doesn't?
I think there's some quality that I can perceive, or can convince myself that I perceive: some quality that separates hard-working effort from effort to appear hard-working. And you know there's a separation. I can write two poems, and you can see the difference between a sudden production and the careful result of hard work. It's not even actually that difficult to see, but there is difficulty in explaining the nuance that's there. How is this verb somehow better than that one? Why does this phrase seem better-formed? What has made the exaggeration in his voice more pleasant than her voice. And who has decided what better should be?

Perhaps I think about love too often. Maybe I'm partial because this song is for me. Either way, I'm glad you liked it enough to include it on the forty.

Songs for a Neophyte: 2015.33

Into the Past (Reboot)
Nero

Vacuous
And where, friend, are you hiding?
Jumping off the cliff in a field?
A fuller sound;
A thinner voice
And again, you press yourself upon me
Without end
Until ending
without signifying yourself

Lyrics
Nineteen times. Nineteen times, she proclaims she'll follow (you).
You know, this song doesn't say anything. The lyrics are groaned and hissed in a forced, edgy way. I don't like it because it communicates something exact about the singer, something difficult to specify and verbalize. There's a certain sort of person who sings with the creaking onset, pressurized lift, breathy consonant style of this woman, and I've met more I don't like than those I like. They're small women, not physically, but experientially, relationally, psychically. It's a style more easily put on than forgotten. I was trying to help choose a person who would sing a very important song at summer camp, and I heard four accomplished vocalists with beautiful voices, and three of them had such extreme affectations (so unrestrained, so aggressive, so unlikeable) that I abandoned them with alacrity.
It's the sort of affectation that this song reminds me of, perhaps, that I hate also in the lyrics. I understand from Genius that it's something to do with the Great Gatsby, but the connection to the green light of Gatsby is so tenuous and assumed that I'll leave it exactly where I found it. Taken at face value, it's nothing if not a gallery of a hundred photos of a boy holding a girl's hand from behind while she walks away from him into an impressive travel destination. It's the sort of slavish devotion to style that destroys all substance. It's the sort of transparent attention-seeking that turns me off entirely.
I guess I don't like this song very much. Maybe it just hit me at the wrong time.

Stephen
If nothing else, you're definitely right about the sounds behind the lyrics. It's a massive-feeling song, sometimes hollow, others full, but all-told enormous at nearly every moment.

You said it was a makeout song. I don't know if I would make out to it. I honestly can't remember making out to music? I think the art of choosing music for physical intimacy is an art I have no possible connection to. I guarantee I would get it wrong.
I'm honestly trying to think about it, and I don't even know the possible pitfalls of picking music for a makeout. I guess music one or more parties doesn't like--that's the simplest. What happens if the music runs out? What happens if an ad plays on Pandora in the middle (this seems to me an egregious sin). Should you pick fast music? Slow music? Very slow saxophone music? I would assume it would be better if it matched the intensity of your romance, but I'm not paying a DJ to play my bedroom live.

I've been forgetting my one-word review. I suppose it's superfluous.

Songs for a Neophyte: 2015:34

Don't Wanna Fight
Alabama Shakes

Aligned
Sideways
A man about to boil
A cloud-song
Burning hot
A quality of fear is
Expansiveness
Unmoored and adrift
Expansiveness
(For you, and for me,
this would be called
hollowness)

Lyrics
But this song isn't about the same things as the last song, Love Yourz. Why are the adjacent? It's either a weird coincidence or a happy accident. I don't suspect Stephen put them side-by-side to purposefully undermine  J Cole, but what if the effect is there regardless?
We've nose-dived from self-satisfaction and a healthy self-image to an (admittedly energetic-sounding) lethargy bordering upon giving up. Don't Wanna Fight is about not putting out that energy anymore, about building out a world that doesn't deserve you, about signing off. It's the yelled admission at the end of Network. I'm not going to take it anymore.

There are moments I feel like dropping from the face of the Earth. I'm living in a broken house in my parents' driveway (which, I must reiterate, is very kind of them). I work infrequently right now—just as often as I can find substitute work, and that only once a week or so. I spend money on food, gasoline, and YouTube. I've got this feeling that I am halfway out of the bike trip and halfway into a PCT or AT hike or a canoe trip down the Missouri, and the only thing binding me to this liminal space between is this irresistible desire to throw myself deeply into debt getting a PhD in English. Without that conventional itch, I wouldn't have a binding to the everyday. I wouldn't fight anymore. I would opt out.

I picked up some hitchhikers three or four weeks ago. Jenny and Jeremy were traveling from Ashland, where they had been house sitting for a stranger, to the coast and beyond. They saw my ukulele and played some excellent songs. We talked only a little. I drove them to Grant's Pass (which, if you understand the geography of my drive, took me far past my turn home). They were out, as far as I could tell. I didn't envy them.
There's something subtle about bums and homeless people and vagrants, and I'm about a thousand hours from being about to articulate it appropriately. There's a class distinction among the checked-out. For the highest class, I find the gorgeous couple I met in Great Sand Dunes NP, who supported themselves through part-time contact work in graphic design, who were homeless in name only. The empowered below them are my Grant's Pass friends, who were hitchhiking from place to place in time to arrive in Portland for their flights out, to their normal lives—not tourists to homelessness as I was, but rather chasing it as an alternative. Then, there's a shift of intent, of behavior, and you find a thermocline in the population, and hovering just at the edge, the momentary homeless: folks I have never met, people who hide their situation, people who are ashamed, those whose directed effort is to buy back into society and hide that they were ever out. Below that echelon, I've met the incidental or perpetual homeless, whose lives have grown slowly more entrenched in the eternal struggle to get out: not homeless by choice, but by reaction to a crisis or a condition. I've met a schizophrenic who lives entirely off his support from California, and a couple whose medications are the only expensive thing they own, and that from Oregon's health plan. I've seen the tent-bound homeless in San Bernardino, Oakland, and elsewhere that I just . . . walked past. These are the lowest homeless, unlikeable even to other homeless folks.

What is my point? America has accidentally romanticized being homeless. There is a healthy subculture of attractive white couples opting out of the mainstream to adventure in their RVs, making YouTube videos and aggregating a following to support their vagrancy. This is not homelessness. There is a strong movement of young people of all stripes spending a small piece of their lives to abandon normalcy and run around, an off-pattern rumspringa of non-religious youths. Believers in identity politics scream and rave about cultural appropriation, but this is a movement of more distasteful perfidy. This is the dismissal, appropriation, and romanticization of a truly disenfranchised and invisible group. To all of you and me too: stop it. You're not homeless, and if you are, you'll know, because you didn't choose it and don't want it. Stop it.

Stephen
This is your second inclusion of Alabama Shakes in a 40, and I can't understand why I haven't gone entirely fanboy. I like rock, this is very good rock, and I like this. Maybe it's just bad luck?

There's good rock out there, I'm sure of it. But there's
So
Much
Bad
Rock.

Thank you, Alabama Shakes. Keep it up.

Songs for a Neophyte: 2015.35

Love Yourz
J Cole

Modern
Stilt, or a lilt, if you like
Like a contained panic
A quiet artistry
How much effort
Wasted

Lyrics
Does J Cole really think that being broke was better? No.
It's more about his rhetorical questions "What's money without happiness, or hard times without the people that you love?" It's like money is an insulator from the things that used to work for him, like money has driven a wedge split-wise between him and the old ways.
It's a simple message. If you actually just listen, you can get it. He's not a hard rapper to understand (the all-pervading disease of mumblecore doesn't seem to have destroyed his health yet), and the song isn't clever enough to obfuscate. I'm not saying anything new here, because J Cole said it first. Someone else's car, house, woman--these things will always look better for one reason or another. Grass is greener, et cetera.

Is it true, though? I mean, it's a pleasant change from the attainment rap of the early two thousands when the genre finally "made it" and all white boys from Missouri knew of rap was that it was about former gang members bragging about their bitches and cars. But is it true that money can't buy you happiness? Is it true that attainment isn't worth attaining?
Ok, so I spent a couple months as a vagrant, so I have some expertise on this subject. Mine was chosen, rather than forced. I had a comfortable amount of money because after she left I just didn't spend anything anymore. I was healthy and knew my family still loved me. Take all these caveats when I tell you that I once ate from a trashcan and desperately wished I knew how to do it again. Remember my safety net when I tell you that I wrapped gauze on a wound that deserved stitches and took a nap in front of Walmart instead of going to the hospital. Don't forget that I'm disgustingly privileged when I tell you that I earned fifteen dollars playing a ukulele in front of a Casey's in Appleton City, Missouri and had a shocking moment of realization that I could probably quit my job and earn just exactly enough to eat every day playing stupid songs in public places.

No, money can't buy you happiness. But poverty can sure complicate holding onto it. I've seen miserable rich people and contented poor people, of course. But I think anybody who has lived even a touch of both lives can tell you that it's hard to listen to rich people complain.
Of course, the feelings you have are valid (no matter who you are). Your tears are exactly as deserving as anyone else's. Nobody can tell you that your heartache doesn't hurt. You should take exactly as long as you need to heal from emotional and physical trauma, and it's okay to be cautious when you step out again. Everybody takes risks, and no matter your situation, risk is scary. Everyone feels pain, and no matter your bank account, pain hurts. Everyone runs from their past, and no matter how protected your present, the past can still haunt.
But! If you can be happy despite your situation, rich or poor, healthy or ill, comforted or alone--be happy.

Stephen
See above.

I think the risk of admitting that you listen to rap is that when it was coming up, it was counter-cultural, associated with people that had been locked up for anything, fair or not, sung by people who had been shot, or at least shot at, or at least living in a life that was awash with that. It's not anymore. Real permanent wealth isn't just a pipe dream for the audience anymore. Rap is mainstream.
So, how long do we have to have the J Coles of the world writing heart-felt, moving, positive songs before we all look away from Gangsta Paradise?

Songs for a Neophyte: 2015.36

My Shot
Lin Manuel Miranda

New and Old
Strained
Stretched to the edge
If I could be this clever
Maybe it took him years to write
A permanent wall of careful pieces
A stylistic mix of
Self-aggrandizing
and
Monomania
Worth forgiving
Worth loving

Lyrics
If the only awkward lyric in the whole song is "where I come from, some get half as many [years]" (and this only because of how it sounds), it would still be better than any song I've written, many times over.

1. The words: Not only lyrically, because let's be honest, a five minute song of minimal repetition is already something astonishing, but Miranda made a story told narratively, told cohesively, told artistically. It's exceedingly clever. There are twists of phrase and rhyme that catch me new every time I listen to the song. To hold both cleverness and functionality in the hand and not let either overpower the other is a task I have never even attempted. I can't imagine the time it must have taken to refine the bespoke idiocies from the first dozen drafts of this song.

2. The music: Not just catchy, it's also beautiful and soaring and inspirational. It's an anthem in the middle of a predominantly-rapped narrative. It's a song of height and size, aided by a choir in just the right places singing just the right pounding and insistent reply to the melody. It's an orchestral composition that only serves to augment the lyrics and the singer without ever detracting or distracting.

3. The consistency: I've written two funny and one lovely song for camp. I admit I am not a practiced poet/lyricist, nor an accomplished composer, nor knowledgeable in any aspect of writing songs, in fact. I've written three songs over the course of two years (give or take) and each time I wrote my mediocre garbage, it was a one-off. I worked for three days, putting nearly all my effort into writing the last one, and I crapped it out in a way that was acceptable, using a deeply flawed system that is irreproducible. Lin Manuel Miranda wrote an entire musical, and there isn't a bummer on the setlist. My Shot might not even be the best/most artistically relevant/most cohesive song in the play.

Essentially, this song is close enough to the sorts of things I want to do (I've been kicking around the idea of writing a musical for camp for a while now) that it just scares me how good Miranda is at it.

Stephen
He did a decent job with the history, as far as my sister and Ashley McMullen have said. Both of them are highly intelligent, have read multiple books about early American history, and have seen the play live, so I trust them. Enough.
But, like you said, he could have botched the history dramatically and still have a banger. My Shot is just a very good song, and, for a lot of reasons, it makes me sad and tired.

1.3

[a brief break]
Ask the christ-figure in your life for a taste of the true man. Ask the devil in your life to prepare your eyes to see lies. Ask the anarchy in your own heart to ignite, in a single moment destroyed, forgotten, ash. Ally yourself, friend.

Songs for a Neophyte: 2015.37

Stressed Out
Twenty One Pilots

Dark, my friend, is back
A child
A warm lonesome
Balding
Sincere
Reverberant
What use is technology, anyhow
A fat man finishes

Lyrics.
A friend at camp was listening to Twenty One Pilots and talking to another girl about how much she loved them. She said "Have you heard them? They're so good!" This, to me.
I looked at her and said "Oh? I don't much like boy bands."
I think it was the greatest burn of all time. The most casual, unthinking destruction of a person, accomplished by accident in an attempt to be funny. I'm sorry, Jelly. If I could take back time, to the good old days, I would.

Maybe I'm just not like the rapper here, but I don't envy my childhood. Mom, don't feel bad. I had a huge accumulation of advantages and privileges. I had a loving family, I was lucky and rich and healthy, but I don't need the past anymore. Even as I lose things from that time, there's nothing better there than I can see going forward. Even through the divorce, my losses, my loneliness, and whatever strange half-destitution you would call living in an RV you can't drive away from your parent's house, I have no desire to go backward.
I see and pity people who peaked in high school, who talk about their children's accomplishments to live vicariously through their sporting achievements or their academic records. I think a lot of people shake their heads and laugh at those sorts of itchy-sad people. But I also see and pity people who peaked in college, who had the most intelligence and success they'll ever have, who get into a workforce and develop soul-rashes that don't heal, great scabrous welts that they stuff into suits and carry with them because they'll never get back that brief moment of experimentation when they were still building themselves and learning who they are, free of the saddle that rubs raw their sores. I also see and pity people who peaked in childhood, who cast their eyes back to the time when nothing was expected of them, they had everything they wanted, and they didn't know the troubles of the future, whose entire idea of a good time is to suddenly realize they didn't have anything in their head to worry about for a brief time. Maybe pity is the wrong word, but I don't empathize with these sorts, because when I look backwards, I don't see a long chain dragging me down, nor a staircase leading me up, nor any such thing. I don't feel nostalgia because I have never been so satisfied as I am in the present.

This all to say: my sister used to think Blurryface was the name of the song, or the album, or something.

Stephen.
I can't agree with what you said. I think you're better off today than you were as a child. I can't expound on it here, but you've never been more Stephen than today, and the same will be true of tomorrow when the clock finally rolls us inexorably there. You've never been more able, more intelligent, more independent, more empathetic, more correct than now. You've never taken less crap, walked with more pride, or gotten more of what you wanted than now.
Stress is constant. Don't let the fog of your memory convince you that backwards is somehow better when you know that it's not.