Hi.
Coffee: Maxwell House Drip, Office Coffee
When I lay awake in bed past bedtime in the mid-nineties – or lay down in my parents’ shower to think while the water washed over me – I found pictures of the future. Like opening a time capsule in reverse: there I was, walking to work at a non-descript high-rise, eating white-bun hotdogs on a city streetcorner, polishing my black mustache (I never saw myself with a full beard), coming home to a house full of cats. Not a damn one of those dreams came true. The time capsule – it turns out – was a fraud.
Well, I guess I could grow the mustache if I wanted, but we all know that’s a bad look.
What I’m trying to say is: everyone imagines a future that’s never real. My idea of what 2019 would look like was informed by the art and entertainment of the late 90’s. Business would be oppressive, cities would be weary, tech would be neon green. I imagined the congested cityscapes from Cowboy Bebop and the after-work chatter of Friends or Becker. There was an acceptance that the world as a whole would be functioning well enough so that your only real effort – your real despairs – would be personal. Instead, we live in a remarkably easy environment where anything you’d ever want can be ordered to your door. The streets are open and clean. Meanwhile, the whole globe burns down.
I remember getting into avant-garde rock in the mid 2000’s. Me and my friend Z would spend whole summers in high school driving back and forth to record stores in Chapel Hill. It felt like I was on the verge of something – a secret from tomorrow, the next big thing. Flash forward fifteen years and the college radios are playing these old sounds, old chords, crooning vocals, a real nostalgic anguish for sounds you used to hear in the late 50’s. ‘Tomorrow’ turned out to be fond feelings for yesterday. But maybe that’s just how it’s always been.
Novel Count: 34,368
Currently Reading: The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes
Support Relief for Family Suffering at the Border – RAICES DONATION CAMPAIGN
Disappear like I come in your world
Broken Social Scene, Hotel
Five is a number that I dream about
It looks like it could’ve been time
But that is a word that I dream about
Livesay Writing 