getting high on my own supply - 16. scorpio season 2024
"phoning it in" (october 2007)
(web)
i have not had the energy to write or play music for the past couple weeks as my body mysteriously broke down in new and more unpleasant ways every day and most of my spare energy from not doing my job (which aside from a sick day and a half i kept doing both because i am a little capitalist worker bee freak and also it was a good distraction from thinking about my surely impending death) was devoted to distracting myself and riding out the day's and (mostly) night's discomforts (from within the tunnel of a three-day-straight headache i did feel deep gratitude that i have not really felt this level of all-consuming discomfort before in my life, which i know is not true of many people, and i felt ashamed at the way i have silently judged other people in the past thinking they weren't "really" suffering),
all these tangible ills then of course compounded by meta-anxiety about what larger things they might signify about the durability of the flesh container i live in on this mortal coil which, as i sought medical treatment (i'm thankful i have a job and health insurance and we do not yet live in a world of medical leadership by rfk and dr. oz!!), was also not helped by things like a particular test result being so abnormal that in the UI of the "patient portal" the tooltip with the number was cut off by the edge of the screen or a doctor reviewing my test results writing me a late evening email through said portal with the sentence "if you have any new or worsening symptoms, you should have a very low threshold for going to the emergency room" which as a recovering hypochondriac is like the best/worst thing you could say to me and like on top of all of this injury, the insult that i have not been able to do the daily intense aerobic exercise upon which my mental health depends for the longest time in like...15 years? and i have little appetite and even my favorite foods taste blah and, cherry on top of it all, my primary coping/enjoying mechanism for life (weed) seemed to no longer have any effect at all on me (but i guess silver lining i've never successfully taken a tolerance break before and so having had one imposed upon me i'm hoping i'm gonna get high AF when i'm back at it). anyway, do not worry about me! i am (i think successfully) diagnosed as anemic and getting my iron up and feeling more like myself every day.
but scorpio season is supposed to be my seat of power and this year it was a total fucking bust for me personally (but you know kim there's people that are dying in a genocide). this song is another instance of the "writer's block song" personal microgenre i've previously discussed in this series, where writing a song is not driven by any particular idea or meaning or melody or whatever (though i do like the watery arpeggiated electric piano riff at its core) but just "i want to make and release a song." in this particular instance, i had just received a major influx of attention to my blog after it was mentioned in the new york times (more on this to come), which felt like the biggest thing that had ever happened in my entire life, and i felt that now people were actually reading, that i had an audience, i needed to keep the content flowing, and that day cranking the spigot this is what i could get to flow out. i continue to crank the spigot today and this is what i could get to flow out.