Today I’ve got a bit of fiction for you. The story is called “LORD I’M DISCOURAGED” and I wrote it on notepad over a few days at my desk at work.

Below that, I have ranked my favorite albums of the year so far as we are halfway through. I returned to each of my top three today and I found that at this moment they are unmovable. Carly Rae Jepsen is coming for them though.

Okay here’s the story. I borrowed the title (and maybe the tone and literally nothing else) from the Hold Steady song of the same name and here that is in case you want.

LORD I'M DISCOURAGED

There's chaos out in the streets at night kicking and screaming and running away. Big men in big helmets pushing forward as the kids push back, but the big men have big body-sized steel shields and the kids have plywood they picked up from the hardware store, donated by the owner hiding one of the targeted in the back room. One of the kids went in there to bring food he could make in the communal microwave in the owner's office, decent to a certain degree. The owner was kind of indifferent at first but then the kids told him they were coming for his employee, his friend who he thought was a good guy, though he didn't know much about where he came from, he still liked him a great deal and he could always trust the store to be in good hands when he was around, stacking man-sized mulch bags and arranging the flowers for sale each morning on the sidewalk, and the owner will be damned if they're gonna take him anywhere. Fuck that shit he said. Now the big men have descended upon the store and the kids are holding them back and the owner of the hardware store is like what the hell is going on here and he looks around the store which sits under quite a nice golden glow in the night time as the lightbulbs are all yellow and the walls are all wood paneled and he feels a strange calm as he looks at the walls of tools and gardening supplies and everyday items he keeps in stock for the neighborhood crowd, toothpaste at cost and gum and whatever, and he feels good about what he has done here and he thinks about the big-box stores out on the bigger roads and how you can't even walk to get there but if you can find a car you can get all the main stuff for much cheaper, and he thinks isn't that great but then who is gonna be here to provide toothpaste first thing in the morning when the kids just can't squeeze another drop from the tube they've been nursing and they've been up all night long trying to stave off the giants so let them clean their damn teeth and he thought of telling his guy to leave, to clear out of the office and head out the back door, that they were fe-fi-fo-fumming their way to the entrance and the little jacks could only hold them off so long, but then again where would he go? His house is surely surrounded. What could he have done? And he heads back to the office to make a cup of tea in the evening glow of the store, thinking how often does he have the opportunity although he wished he had beers in the back, one for each of them, and he didn't know if the guy drank beer just as he didn't know much about him at all but they were stuck here together and well he didn't know what to do when it was just two fellas other than clink a couple bottles together and sit in the silence and maybe he should have asked him sooner. Maybe he should have asked him sooner to have a drink with him and sit in the communal silence, enjoy the peace. But he didn't do it. Maybe he wanted some tea though and so he went on back there but it wasn't the time, he realized. This room was less cozy by a lot, the walls were concrete block painted goopy white and the lights were florescent, and the man was catatonic sitting on the desk chair, hands clasped between his legs, eyes glazed over. Somehow, even though this room was further away from the street where the kids held down the fort, the sound from outside was much louder in here. The two guys could hear the kids chanting, though the older guy couldn't make out the words. They could hear the big helmet men growl like animals. And here they were, two fellas with no beers and no silence. So the two of them exchanged words, and what they said is lost. The owner wished he could bring the guy out into the peaceful sales floor but it was too risky. The kids exchanged lore about the owner, earlier in the day, as they waited in the heat and the wildfire smoke blowing down from the north, burning their eyes and weakening their spirits just a bit. He had a wife but she died, no one is sure how long ago. They remember, she used to be there, selling them candy bars two for one while the man was turned around not looking. Then the other guy, the one they're trying to take, appeared. And suddenly the place was unnervingly quiet, because neither one of those guys was much of a talker. The kids matched the atmosphere when they went in there, first to get candy and later to get lightbulbs and drain snakes for their own homes with their own partners, batteries for the toys belonging to their own kids. The two men in the back now breathed in the smoke from the street, there must have been a vent in the office that led out into the open air, but the two of them continued to sit there, and neither knew what to say and maybe at this point felt beyond language, but the older man felt bad that maybe he had been a bit too gruff with the younger man once or twice in front of his buddies who seemed to squint at him when they came in, and he wanted to prove to them that he was just there to work, not to make friends, but the squinting soon ended when he offered to carry the mulch or the boards to their pickup, and the older man would jump in too and they'd all get the job done together, and we can't know whether the younger man, the one turned into a target for extraction, ever felt really bad about the slights he received, if he ever felt bad that he had to prove he was good, if he ever felt bitter, because he always kept himself quiet, or something always kept him quiet, and lord knows if he discussed it there in the office when the siege was happening outside, because that discussion is simply lost, and all we know is that they heard a series of cracks. A banging, over and over. A louder banging, a burst. All we know is they felt the whole store shake, heard the blank sample keys above the copier fall to the floor in glittering crescendos. All we know is they heard the animal growl, felt a banging come even closer. And that they opened the back door to find some large heads finding them trying to flee, and then they didn't see or hear or feel or think or clink or drink anything anymore. All they did was slump over, the both of them, before the giants turned their limp bodies over to face the ground, and fastened their hands together, and we only know this because one of the kids happened to be filming from a tree branch behind the building, unnoticed in all the chaos and the kicking and the screaming and the running away in the night.


We the kids submit this report, let the kids across the world and the kids of kids and their kids read it. We want to tell the story differently but this is the story we have recorded, the data we have collected, and we must preserve what we have found here. We let too many exchanges of the regular nature dissolve under the menace of time, burning holes into our atmosphere. We all lost too much.


I'M DISCOURAGED, LORD

The year’s halfway over and I’ve listened to a lot of music, of course. I cannot help but make a good list, so I’ve ranked my top 25 records of the year so far:

1. Ratboys - Singin' to an Empty Chair

2. The Format - Boycott Heaven

3. Death Cab For Cutie - I Built You a Tower

4. Basement - WIRED

5. Kelela - new avatar

6. Hew - Your Version

7. Joyce Manor - I Used to Go to This Bar

8. Mitski - Nothing's About to Happen to Me

9. Tigers Jaw - Lost on You

10. American Football - LP4

11. Muna - Dancing on the Wall

12. Greg Mendez - Beauty Land

13. Friko - Something Worth Waiting For

14. Feeble Little Horse - bitknot

15. Courtney Barnett - Creature of Habit

16. Hurry - Zoned Out

17. Prince Daddy & the Hyena - Hotwire Trip Switch

18. Quiet Light - Blue Angel Sparkling Silver 2

19. Gladie - No Need to be Lonely

20. Vince Staples - Cry Baby

21. Broken Social Scene - Remember the Humans

22. Converge - Hum of Hurt

23. Modest Mouse - An Eraser and a Maze

24. Seahaven - Seahaven

25. Robyn - Sexistential

Basically there’s something incredible about each of these albums. My top four is maybe on brand to a fault but that’s my business. I’ll refrain from writing too much about these albums as there’s too much year to go. Shout out to Fiddlehead who should probably be on there but I waffled on the whole EP issue.

Also basically I’ve just been listening to The Hold Steady and before that just REM. I love the Hold Steady — their parties feel like revelations and their serious songs also feel like revelations. But you have to single out the parties because there simply are so many of them. Here, they turn a party song into a serious one, and obviously I’ve been thinking about it all week:

My name is Jordy Walsh, and I’m a writer based in Philadelphia. I Keep a Diary is a newsletter about music, books, and writing.