getting high on my own supply - 9. "retouch me"
episode 9 - "retouch me" (august 2007)
like "dear abby" this song is about a nontraditional relationship, in this case between a person in a picture singing to the person on the other side of photoshop, sculpting a different version of their image. the first time i used photoshop was in suffolk virginia in eighth grade on the computer in the office in the back of the art room. there was a flatbed scanner and the first thing we did was scan a dollar bill and take pictures of ourselves with the low resolution digital camera and then try to create money with our faces on it and when we printed it out and the teacher came back to check on the good students who he allowed to use his computer unsupervised and the first thing we did was print money (later in the semester we tried to block up the sink with plaster of paris). he was a kind if imperfect man and that year's honors art class (including me) did not do him right.
flash forward to august slipping away like a bottle of miller high life and i was still (or rather in new and different ways) kind of a (lauren conrad voice) "sucky person", in the way that dumb twenty-one year olds often are. a thing i had leaned into on the back half of college was a kind of affected shallowness (my facebook wall for a period featured me describing myself as "like a swimming pool, shallow but deep"), a shallowness which came from a place of insecurity and which in some ways i meant ironically but also like other things you can do ironically at the end of the day you're still kind of doing it! that wasn't all of who i was and i had good and worthwhile parts too but i tried to refer back to my blog archive to double check the chronology of the recordings a few times and also thinking the posts will be generative or provide useful context and maybe they will eventually but they're honestly for now a million times more excruciating to revisit than these songs (trust me, please don't look for them) and i cringe out every time: i see myself too closely and the distance between the person i think i am now and the person i read in the words feels very far (but then that makes me wonder how me in another twenty years will think about the me of what i'm writing here now: i hope better, but i guess you can't know). the closing monologue of this song is dumb fluff in a way that was typical of my worst angles at the time, my most tired looks, but at least it's dumb fluff sung over a groovy bed of space age bachelor pad bossa guitar.