Let's get together, before we get much older
It’s September 2007, fifteen years ago. I live in Olympia, Washington, and I’m taking my second year-long break from college. I have moved out of the weird 70’s style party house in the middle of the woods, which had no central heat through the long, rainy winter, and where I discovered mold growing on the underside of my mattress. I now live in a cute house with no mold, where strawberries and kale grow rampant in the backyard. There’s a cute queer working at a nearby bakery that I have a crush on, and I’ve taken a journal there to have some coffee and write while attempting to flirt.
I have very recently bought my first iPod Nano. My roommates and I exchange music regularly through mix CDs and torrent downloads, through dragging each other to basement shows, through dates to listen to a new record on a roommate’s player.
The Who’s “Baba O'Riley” comes on shuffle, and I excuse myself from flirting to go smoke outside and listen. The synths and violins send my heart skidding sideways against my ribs, and the song holds me on the precipice of some unspoken revelation. Alas, I live in the birthplace of riot grrrl and grunge, and my hipper friends that invite me to acoustic punk basement shows do not respect my dad-rock roots. So I cannot flirt and listen to this song at the same time. I cannot be cool, or even normal. I can only hold a cigarette smoldering between my fingers and let myself spiral out while listening.
I wish I could remember the first time I heard it. Did a friend put it on a mix CD for me? Did I dance to it? I could never resist any invitation to dance when I was young, so probably.
It’s 2022, an unimaginable future, and I live on a different coast. I am done with academia, or so I keep telling myself. I’ve never lived anywhere longer than three years, and I’m approaching that with this cute pre-war apartment with the stamped tin ceiling.
There are many cute queers in the bakeries near my house, but I tend to frequent the ones run by grouchy Greek uncles and their myriad nephews. I have a wife to flirt with these days, which is something else I couldn’t have imagined in 2007. We attempted to grow kale on the fire escape, but with mixed success.
I realize I can’t remember the last time I listened to “Baba O'Riley” that wasn’t attached to an episode of CSI: NY. (I hate that fucking show, all its iterations.) When I queue it up on Spotify, it still catches my heart and forces me to listen. Not just to the drums and violin, or Roger Daltrey and Pete Townsend’s voices. I’m listening to the past and testing the stretch of time, its elasticity under the weight of self-consciousness. I’ll never listen to this song for the first time again. I’ll always worry that this time, CSI: NY has ruined it. At least I don’t have to defend it acoustic punk kids anymore, since their particular brand of hardcore twee has passed out of fashion as well. And the song holds up just fine; one of those songs that feels like a universe compressed into 6 minutes.
Anyway. Happy Thursday. If you have a song that’s a round trip to another space and time, tell me about it? I don’t know how to find new music when none of my friends make mix CDs anymore.
News:
A reminder: Patreon makes up a not-insignificant amount of my regular monthly income, and if you like what I do or what I write, I would love if you supported me there.
My horror-writing class for Atlas Obscura has started again! I'll be teaching another round in October, and seats are starting to fill up. You can read more about the class and sign up here.
What I’m reading/watching/listening to
An instagram post from Little Ghosts Books convinced me to pickup The Devil Takes You Home by Gabino Iglesias. I’m familiar with Iglesias’s criticism over on NPR and Locus, but this is my first foray into his fiction. It tracks a dark spiral of a grieving man into the world of cartels and organized crime in Texas. It’s incredible so far, in that everything is terrible and getting worse by the second.
I also finished Rachel Pollack's mini collection The Beatrix Gates from PM Press. If you're interested in trans speculative fiction, tarot, or shamanistic fiction, I'd recommend it. (Sidenote: I love PM Press's Outspoken Author series. I've got about half a dozen of them at this point.)
SL Huang wrote a deep dive into the history of the writing workshop that I recommend—no, I REQUIRE ITS READING to anyone interested in literary history, artistic colonialism, and/or the teaching of writing.
I’m also nodding along with Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s most recent newsletter: “The Survival Game: Writing and Publishing and the Art of Not Drowning.” I also recommend his newly released short story "Choke."
Nibs and I finished watching the first season of A League of Their Own, and I unabashedly love it. The original 1992 movie was one of my babyqueer touchstones, and the remake makes all of the implicit queerness explicit. It also explores the other major omissions of the original: racism and segregation in the leagues and in larger society. But like: don’t watch this because it’s important. Watch League because it has the best ensemble cast on TV, and because the onscreen chemistry is fucking BONKERS, and because it showcases queer community in multiple lenses. Also watch it for Bert and Gracie.
All hail.