just words

Back in 2016, when I was 25 years old, I was living in one of those single-wide mobile homes perilously held up by stacked cement blocks, one of those ones with the cheap vinyl skirts they wrap around the bottom to hide all the duct-taped plumbing and rotted-out wood and raccoon colonies and maybe a dead body or two, because who knows what was actually going on under there. I may have flirted with the dark abyss, but I sure as hell did not want to crawl into it to find out what was inside. My life philosophy at the time a laissez-faire mixture of red wine and nicotine clouds and pixels, so I didn’t even care about much of anything, to tell you the truth. In fact, the rent was so cheap at $650 a month that when the landlord originally showed me the property, I immediately said “Where do I sign?” and moved my wife and three-year-old daughter into the place without even so much as a basic cursory inspection, driven mostly by the fact that I was destitute both philosophically and financially, answering phones for a coffee company for like $14 an hour and binge drinking every night. I just wanted a stable roof over my family’s head, a place that wasn't in an apartment complex, a place with a yard, with some level of privacy, a place where I could play video games, drink wine, and blast super loud music while chain-smoking cigarettes outside without someone filing a noise complaint, and this super cheap rundown trailer from the 80s checked all those hedonistic boxes. 

But as it turns out, skipping the cursory inspection was a big mistake, because, as I would come to find out years later, the place was a deathtrap, and I learned this the hard way, or, well, my daughter did, when the roof in her bedroom collapsed.

It’s hard to believe that almost a decade has passed since I first moved into that shithole, because I remember it as if it were yesterday. My daily routine started in medias res, do something with my daughter after work, pour my first glass of wine around 8 p.m., finish my seventh by 2 a.m., pop a few Benadryl to fall asleep, drive to the call center six hours later, repeat. I would drink so much the night before that I was pretty much still wasted the morning after. My skin was always clammy and pale and my eyes were raccoon eyes. They say men between the age of 20 to 30 are in their prime, able to muster almost supernatural levels of strength, persevere through any hardship by sheer force of will, but I spent whatever supernatural strength I had just getting out of bed in the morning with the worst hangovers known to man and then somehow driving five miles through busy morning traffic all without getting into a single car accident despite the fact that I was nodding off behind the wheel the whole time. Half the time, I wouldn’t even remember driving to work, I’d just appear at my desk in the call center, as if I had somehow teleported there, taking calls in this autopilot-like daze. “Thank you for calling Keurig, my name is Forrest. May I have your first and last name, please? Thank you. And your email address? And your coffee maker’s serial number? Thank you again. And you say your coffee maker is short-cupping? I understand. I know that must be frustrating. We’ll have to do some troubleshooting, so please be aware that the needles inside the machine are very sharp, but could you please gather a paperclip and small measuring cup, then we can get started.”

And this worked for me somehow. I reached a certain level of homeostasis. I made around $1,800 a month, $650 of that went to rent, $300 went to utilities, food was paid for by SNAP, a couple hundred went to things for my daughter, and whatever money left over went to Marlboro Lights and Liberty Creek Cabernet Sauvignon, which was the cheapest supermarket swill wine money could buy at the time, at like $8 per 2-liter bottle, which, at 30 proof, was also the most bang for your buck in terms of getting absolutely shitfaced as quickly as possible, outside of just drinking straight liquor, which I never had the stomach for. Back then, when I was 25, I was still a child, singularly focused on myself, and whatever seemingly grown-up big-boy shit I did do was only done to maintain my comfortable homeostasis. I knew I had a drinking problem, but the negative consequences were not severe enough for me to take it seriously, especially since the euphoria after a few glasses of wine was so strong that it felt like I could not live without the stuff, like life would be just a boring slog without my Cabernet. And there was an identity aspect to it as well, because I thought drinking was super cool, and I even thought that having a drinking problem was kind of cool too, like it added character in some way, a sort of tortured-soul aesthetic. When I drank red wine, I felt like some sort of vampire sophisticate. I loved the whole ritual, the orbed glass, the twist of the wine key, the pop of the cork, the glug-glug of the pour, the exotic aroma, all of it. I would hold that first sip in my mouth for like a whole minute, just swishing it around in there like a mouthful of blood. And after a few sips, I would go outside and sit on the small uncovered wooden steps that functioned as my porch, to smoke cigarettes and listen to super loud music, bringing my orbed glass along with me, because music just hits different and cigarettes just taste better when you’re wasted, and that’s a fact.

After my daughter went to bed, I would sit myself down at my computer desk with a glass of red and boot up a video game. I would play Final Fantasy XI or The Elder Scrolls Online or some other life-suck type game, just getting totally fucked up and lost in those virtual worlds. Eventually, I started joining a Discord server with my old friends from high school, which only made my drinking worse, as we’d all drink and get fucked up together. A sort of digital drinking culture evolved, to the point that, for a few years there, we would be in that Discord server every night, drinking to the point of blurred vision and slurred speech, playing our preferred game of the week, be it Monster Hunter World, Tekken 7, Risk of Rain, Counter-Strike: Source, Diablo III,  King of Fighters XIII, or whatever, just yelling and laughing and trolling the shit out of each other, sometimes to the point of bitter rivalries, weeks-long feuds, all settled with our preferred choice of alcoholic beverage and controller. There was a real sense of community there, built on old friendships and video games and, most importantly, alcohol, because it was weird when someone wasn’t drinking while everyone else was, like you couldn’t connect on the same existential plane or something if you weren’t basically blackout drunk. It was the same sort of peer pressure you might experience in high school, just carried over unspoken into adulthood.

Between rounds of whatever we were playing at the time, I would step outside and smoke a cigarette or two, making sure to bring my wine glass along with me, because after I got my first taste of blood, I could not stop. The moment I could no longer taste the aftertaste of that bittersweet earthy red, something like anxious dread would creep in, a persistent fear that the night would end, that the euphoria would fade, unless I kept drinking, so I would drink and drink and drink, a crimson tide flowing down my esophagus every minute of the night, even when I was outside smoking. And to make my outside-smoking excursions more entertaining, I would play music from my phone’s speakers, and I would literally dance and sway out there in my front yard, sometimes singing at the top of my lungs. 

This is the night of the expanding man
I take one last drag as I approach the stand
I cried when I wrote this song
Sue me if I play too long
This brother is free
I'll be what I want to be

Back then, my favorite band was Steely Dan. It all started when I heard the song “Peg” on the radio one day. I had heard the song before but never really paid much attention to it until one day, when the stars aligned, when it came on the classic rock station and I happened to be in just the right mood. The song resonated with me. The downtown strut of the electric piano, the intricate bounce of the bassline, the bitter darkness hidden within the joyful melody, that rich baritone background vocal by Michael McDonald, all the crazy guitar shit going on that you don’t even notice without specifically listening for it. It’s just a fantastic song, one of the greatest pop tunes ever written. It got me obsessed with Steely Dan, head over heels for their whole dark-irony-hidden-behind-layers-of-smooth-jazz sound. They had that whole anti-hipster thing going on too, which aligned well with my own anti-hip contrarian attitude. Of course, being an anti-hipster is actually just another flavor of being a hipster, perhaps the worst kind, but that didn’t stop me from going through Steely Dan’s entire discography, repeat listening to each album, falling in love with songs like “Only a Fool Would Say That,” “Bodhisattva,” “Rose Darling,” “Kid Charlemagne,” “Gaucho,” and “Your Gold Teeth II,” which, if you’ve been rolling your eyes at the Steely Dan stuff thus far, is probably the song you should listen to because it’s just straight-up poetic and beautiful, one of their few uplifting songs, musically transcendent almost, so much so that if you don’t like it, then there’s a good chance you just don’t like music, period. But back then, “Your Gold Teeth II” wasn’t my favorite song by them. My favorite song was actually “Deacon Blues,” a song that sounds like the inside of a smoky underworld dive bar, a place where the tragically hip and the perpetually misunderstood come together to drink their lives away.

Learn to work the saxophone
I play just what I feel
Drink Scotch whiskey all night long
And die behind the wheel

Back then, Steely Dan was my band, and “Deacon Blues” was my song. I identified with that song. I wanted to live inside that song. I saw myself as the protagonist of that song, the tragic hero, the misunderstood artist, playing exactly what he feels, drinking all night long, maybe one day dying behind the wheel, because who cares, nothing really matters, the universe is all chaos and jazz, no one even asked to be here, we’re all just specks of stardust, a flash in the cosmic scheme of things.

So call me Deacon Blues.

And alcohol was my one true love, my muse. It got to the point where, if alcohol wasn’t in my bloodstream, I wasn’t really there, in the present. During the daylight hours, when I wouldn’t drink, I would spend time with my daughter, take her to the playground, the indoor kids’ places, even play dolls on the floor of her small 10x10 trailer park bedroom, but I was never really there. I mean, my physical body was there, but my soul was not. It was someplace else entirely. I was pretending. I went through the motions because I felt like I had to, out of some persistent feeling of guilt, but my heart was never really in it. Every moment I spent with her, I was counting down the seconds until my first glass of wine. The daylight hours were just an excruciatingly long prelude to getting wasted, hammered, shitfaced, sloshed, just absolutely ossified. These were my priorities. I was a child pretending to be a father, a shell of a parent. I would constantly tell my daughter that I loved her as a way to sort of compensate for my parental absenteeism, as if cheap words could ever make up for shit parenting. But whenever she would have trouble falling asleep, making me late to my first glass of wine, I would suddenly become a harsh disciplinarian, not because I thought it was an effective way to discipline a child, but because I would become frustrated and short-tempered without wine, sometimes shouting orders at the girl like I was an army drill instructor or something. “THAT WAS THE LAST STORY. GET IN BED. PUT YOUR DAMN TOYS AWAY. CLOSE YOUR EYES. IT’S BEDTIME. DON’T MAKE ME TELL YOU AGAIN.” And this was usually followed by some pathetic apology and cheap I-love-you.

When my wife would confront me about the shouting, I would justify my outbursts by espousing some rigid parenting philosophy that I didn’t actually believe in. “Kids need discipline. There’s a certain level of fear that must be maintained. This is the way of the world, just look at countries, states, governments, they all maintain order through fear. This is just reality. Laws exist for a reason. My shouting functions as a deterrent to bad behavior, in the same way that the threat of jail functions as a deterrent to crime. What do you really think the world would be like without laws? Do you really think it would be a better place? Honestly? Don’t be naive.” And then I would pour the first of many glasses of wine and disappear into my office, feeling guilty for a whole ten seconds before my blood alcohol levels spiked, at which point I would ride the crimson tide, waves of drunken euphoria, without a care in the world. And this is how it went, night after night.

And it was on one of these nights that the roof caved in.

It had been raining all throughout the week, so it was a damp Friday night. I read my daughter a short story, cleaned up her Legos and Bratz dolls and stuffed animals, tucked her into her cheap Minnie Mouse toddler bed, kissed her on the head, told her that I loved her, apologized for shouting, turned off the lights, shut the bedroom door behind me, poured my first glass of red, logged into the Discord server, and started my whole hedonistic routine. I drank and smoked and listened to Steely Dan for hours and hours. And by the time I got ready for bed, which was around three in the morning, I had drunk so much that my head felt like it was being repeatedly hit with a hammer underwater, and my stomach was one of those bubbling lava pits you see in video games. I had lost control, failed to pace myself, as I often did. I was hunched over the toilet at three in the morning, vomiting up a crimson tide. The inside of the bowl looked like the scene of some grisly murder. After about an hour of throwing up, through sheer force of will, I picked myself up, stumbled to bed, and fell face first on the mattress, passing out.

When I woke up, my head was pounding something fierce, my chest was burning, and it was still dark outside. My wife was shouting something from the foot of the bed. I didn't want to get up, but it seemed serious, so I used some of that supernatural strength young men supposedly have and rolled myself out of bed. My wife was gesticulating, frantically explaining something that I could not comprehend in the moment, and then she grabbed my wrist and pulled me into the living room. It was dark, and our daughter was sitting there on the couch, hands in her dark hair, sobbing. My wits were slowly coming back, so I walked up to my daughter, put a hand on her shoulder, and tried to comfort her, but she wouldn’t calm down. Then my wife said something like, “It’s her bedroom. The roof. The roof fell through. She was in there for hours.” And I could not believe it. So I rushed to my daughter’s bedroom to see for myself.

It was dark in there, and there was a draft, and there was a heaviness in the air. I started coughing, covering my mouth. Then I turned the light on, saw the pile of rotted wood right by the Minnie Mouse bed, the bed itself covered in a thick layer of gray and brown. There were clouds of dust hovering throughout the room, obscuring the Disney pinups and galaxies of glow-in-the-dark ceiling stars. I looked up, and that’s when I saw it, a huge gaping hole, pieces of ceiling and wood jutting out all around the wound, just dangling there, still in the process of collapse. My wife said something from behind me. “I told you this place was a deathtrap.” So I turned to my wife, asked her when this happened, and she said it must have happened hours ago, according to our daughter, so it must have happened when I was awake in the office. She said our daughter was paralyzed with fear, that she couldn't move, that she had just stayed there in bed, under the covers, for who knows how long, frozen with fear, calling out for help. My wife asked if I had heard anything, if I had heard the crash, if I had heard our daughter calling out. I told her that I hadn't heard a thing. She glared at me with something like disgust in her eyes.

I remember just standing in that broken room, thinking it was a symbol of some kind, of neglect, of carelessness, of dysfunction. I had no words. My eyes were like super moons, and my body had taken on some sort of heinous gravity. I imagined our daughter, under the covers, eyes closed tight, her little body trembling, fearing for her life, believing some monster had crawled out of the ceiling and was about to eat her. I imagined her calling out for mommy, for daddy, for God, for anyone, to come help, how her cries went unanswered solely because I was too drunk to hear them.

My wife said something like, “This place is unlivable. I’m going to file a lawsuit.” And then she pulled out her phone and started fiddling with it. “We’re going to need pictures. Let me take a picture.”

But I stopped her, told her to let me do it, so she gave me her phone. I walked further into the room to get a better look at the hole, but I was too afraid to go directly underneath it, so instead I booted up the phone’s camera app, turned the flash on, stretched my phone-arm, positioning the phone under the hole, and snapped a picture. And that’s when I saw it.

( Photograph #1 )

Apparently, there was a hole in the top roof, and a family of raccoons had been living up there in the attic-like space between the ceiling and the roof itself. The hole must have been pretty old, judging by the water damage and amount of mold shown in the picture. So I figured that, due to the accumulated rain water and who-knows-how-many raccoons, the ceiling just couldn’t hold anymore, finally collapsing under the weight of it all. And I figured that the raccoon in the picture must have been the matriarch of the family, who must have gotten out of there before the ceiling fell through. But, eyes wide and mouth agape at possibly the craziest picture I had ever taken in my life, I wondered why the mother raccoon was looking down into the room, like what could she have possibly been looking for?

That’s when my parenting instincts kicked in. The mother raccoon must have been looking for one of her babies, one of her little kits, who must have fallen through the ceiling. So I scoured the bedroom, looking for raccoons. And it only took me about five minutes to find one, a little baby raccoon, hidden underneath a pile of toys in the corner of the room, curled up in a little pink bowl.

( Photograph #2 )

The kit’s eyes were closed tight, and she was shivering a little bit. There was a pinkish bulge on one of her legs, like an injury of some sort, maybe from the fall. I knew she couldn't have landed in the bowl itself, as the bowl was on the other side of the room, so I figured that she must have crawled across the room after falling through the ceiling, and when she found a place to hide, she just curled up there and waited for mommy and daddy to come rescue her. But mommy and daddy never came, just me. And, luckily for that little kit, I love raccoons. But when I was holding that pink bowl in my hand, looking down at that injured baby raccoon, seeing it all helpless and afraid, I didn’t really see a raccoon at all, I saw my daughter.

My wife wouldn’t let us keep the baby raccoon, even though I wanted to. So, later that day, I put the kit in a box stuffed with towels and put the box outside, at the treeline of the woods near my trailer, hoping that mom would return, take her baby back home, wherever home was for them. But hours passed, and mom never showed up, so I got worried about the little kit, worried that she might starve, that she might succumb to her injuries, so my daughter and I took the baby raccoon to the local animal hospital, but they told us that they couldn’t take wild animals, that they didn’t have the proper permits or something. So we left that animal hospital dejected and confused, having no idea what to do with the little kit. I remember just sitting there in my car, head still pounding from the night before, coming up totally blank on what to do next.

But after about five minutes, a young woman walked up to my car and signaled me to roll down the window. “We’ll take the raccoon, but you’ll need to sneak it into the back. Drive around.”

So I turned the key, revved the engine, and started driving around to the backside of the animal hospital. The car’s stereo connected to my phone automatically via Bluetooth, playing the last song I was listening to the night before, which just happened to be “Deacon Blues.” And when I got to the backside of the animal shelter, I left the car running in park, told my daughter to wait, and carried the box with the baby raccoon in it to the back door, where the same young woman from before smiled at me, took the box from my hands, and said, “Don’t worry, she’ll be fine, we’ll take care of her.” And I was left feeling a little sad, because for some reason I knew that I would never see that baby raccoon again.

“Deacon Blues” was still playing when I got back into the car. It was on the chorus, so before I buckled my seatbelt and put the car in reverse, I paused to savor that dark, jazzy sound.

They got a name for the winners in the world
I want a name when I lose
They call Alabama the Crimson Tide
Call me Deacon Blues

But this was not the song I knew. It was different. It was an entirely new song, with an entirely new meaning. I started thinking to myself, the protagonist of this song, he’s not some tortured-soul romantic, some hip idealist, some sort of tragic hero rebelling against the tides of a dark, unfair world. He’s not any of those things.

He’s just some fucking alcoholic loser.

So call me Deacon Blues.

We live in a digital, on-demand world in which literally all media is available at our fingertips, whenever and wherever we want. We’re always online, all the time. We click the links and swipe the phones and talk into our little WiFi-connected devices, “Hey Google, play ‘Lo Boob Oscillator’ by Stereolab,” and the machine obliges us, providing whatever the hell we want, as long as we pay our monthly tributes, which are increasing month to month at crazy, exponential rates.

But the question is, with so much access to all this stuff, do we really appreciate any of it?

I don't mean, like, “oh, this new single on Spotify is pretty good, on to the next one,” or “I can't wait to binge this new show on Netflix, then totally forget about it in a week,” or “I downloaded every Super Nintendo game ever made from CoolRom.com, and now I play them for a few minutes on my phone before switching to the next one.” I mean, instead, like, becoming so obsessed with The Strokes’ Is This It that you memorize the lyrics of each song because it’s one of the few albums you actually own, or watching Cowboy Bebop on DVD so much that it becomes like a core part of your essence, or spending months playing Final Fantasy VIII that, sometimes, when no one is around, you pretend that you're Squall Leonhart casting Meltdown or something.

All this might seem oddly specific, but it has a point. What I'm trying to get at is, I haven't been absorbed in a piece of media in, like, forever. And I think that, maybe, it's because there's just way too much media available now, so much so that all of it has become like junk food, momentarily pleasing but lacking any real, long-term value whatsoever. I used to become emotionally invested in the things I like, now it’s as if I’m constantly on the prowl for something to become emotionally invested in, but never quite getting there. It feels as if I’ve bartered my soul for convenience, and now the media overload, combined with my inherent attention deficit, wreaks havoc on my brain, and I just can’t focus on anything at all anymore.

That's why, a few months ago, I went analog. I bought a Walkman, an old Sony stereo, and I started collecting cassettes.

Well, that’s not the only reason I started collecting cassettes, if I’m being honest. Initially, it started like all these things do, to be cool, because I’m low-key kind of an insufferable hipster, contrarian to the core. I wanted to buck modern trends. I wanted to be different. I thought it would be cool to listen to music on cassette, like I was back in the ‘80s or something. But, lo and behold, through my insufferable contrarianism, I quickly found that, with cassettes, I’m pretty much forced to pay attention to the music I listen to now. So I guess being contrary all the time has its benefits, sometimes.

Before cassettes, I had been listening to a minute or two of my favorite songs on Spotify before being almost demonically compelled to swipe to something else, and I would do that constantly, hardly ever listening to music in full, let alone entire albums. It’s crazy how an artist can spend weeks, months, writing and recording a song, only for it to be consumed then forgotten about in minutes. It’s almost disrespectful, in a way. But now, with cassettes, I’m forced to pay attention. I have to put real effort into picking out music, and when I want to find new music, I have to actively research artists similar to the ones I already like, usually on allmusic.com, then I have to purchase the tape from a record store or order it online and wait for it to be delivered, and then, to actually listen to the tape, I have to go into my drawer with all my tapes, take out the one I want to play, put it into a mechanical device that uses literal belts, rewind the thing, and then hit play, and if I want to go back to a certain song, I have to put in real, physical effort to get up, go to the tape player, rewind the tape to just the right spot, which takes some trial and error, and then hit play again, and because I have a limited collection of cassettes, and acquiring new ones takes time, I’m forced to spend a week or two with each new cassette I purchase, which has, in turn, forced me to appreciate the music far more than I used to.

This whole cassette-tape ritual requires serious deliberation and real effort, whereas online music services require none of that stuff. In fact, online music services seem designed in such a way as to deliberately encourage users to shuffle around as much as possible, to facilitate clicks, which in turn generates revenue, and the end user gets nothing out of it except barely remembered songs and this uncanny feeling that something is missing, like if you just click around a little bit more, you might find something that hits immediately and consumes you, like it used to back in the day, but that never happens, and all the while, Spotify is making bank, paying the musicians barely anything. It’s diabolical, almost, it really is.

And yes, there is an element of materialism to collecting a bunch of plastic tapes and hoarding them in a case or drawer or whatever, but that’s kind of unavoidable, and not really the point. In this instance, it’s not actually materialism at all, it’s humanism and borderline asceticism. It’s about depriving yourself of everything-all-at-once and, instead, focusing only on the things you truly care about, and cassettes pretty much force this on you, which is why they’re such a powerful medium.

This wasn’t intended to be a rant against the online music industry, it was actually intended to be more of a public service announcement. A shout into the digital void, if you will, to let you know that, if you ever feel like something is missing, like you’re just clicking around aimlessly, totally lacking focus, emotionally detached from the things you once cared about, then maybe it’s time to disconnect, maybe it’s time you thought about getting into cassettes.

Maybe it's time to become an analog boy, or girl, or whatever, in a digital world.

( Anyway, here's a list of all the cassettes I've collected thus far, in order of being acquired... )