just words

Reports of my death have not been exaggerated at all, because who actually cares?

I know I haven’t been posting much here lately, and I also know that maybe two people, at most, are wondering why. I’d love to say this is because I’ve been hyper-productive in writing elsewhere, but that would be a great big lie. Between November and now, the hyperactive gray matter of my brain has come up with ideas for two different fantasy novels, loosely inspired by two works of fiction: one, Earthsea, and two, Inuyasha mixed with Arthurian legend for some reason, titled Where Does the Wind Go? and The King of Arcadia respectively. I wrote about a chapter of each before getting distracted and drifting off to some other fleeting idea. Oh, and I also wrote a couple of paragraphs for a short story titled I Am a Cat II, cheaply inspired by Natsume Sōseki’s 1906 novel, I Am a Cat, except mine is set in modern-day United States. So, that’s three projects that will likely go forever unfinished. This is only a glimpse of my chaos. I’m quickly realizing that, without amphetamines, my talents, if you can even call them that, are much better suited to short-form than long-form.

Alas, it’s a constant struggle trying to balance my focus, which is basically nonexistent, and my ideas, which sometimes overflow like a small pond during a great rainstorm. This, as you might imagine, can result in some heavy cognitive dissonance when I have big ideas but little focus, as I’m always beating myself up with shoulder-angel, shoulder-devil shit like, “Shouldn’t you be writing right now?” and “But writing is hard, why not just play video games instead?” And this can be quite paralyzing, but it’s not the real reason I haven’t been posting much.

The truth is, I’m an adult with two kids and a full-time job, and as such, I’ve been busy. But that’s just an excuse really, because I’ve always been busy, yet despite that, in the past, I’ve always made time to write. So what’s different now? Could it be that I’ve lost the will to write? Has the fire gone out? Maybe I’m just getting too old to juggle all of life’s bullshit along with my numerous hobbies? Perhaps it’s just writer’s block? No, I don’t actually believe writer’s block is a thing, writer’s block is just another excuse, covering for a willpower issue more than anything. The truth is that my desire to write, like many things in life, waxes and wanes, and these moon phases are usually correlated with computer games, specifically how much I enjoy the computer game I’m playing at the time.

And it’s been particularly bad lately because, for the last two months, I’ve been playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and I fucking love that game. My two-year-old son loves the game too. “I wanna play Zelda,” he says, “Let’s go find some Koroks in Zelda,” he says, “I wanna climb the towers in Zelda,” he says, with all the cherub-like syllabic mispronunciations that come with toddlerhood. He just sits on my lap, with his own battery-less controller in hand, watching Link climb mountains and fight Moblins and dash through the meadows of Hyrule. He’ll watch me play for hours if I let him, which is crazy considering he’s more hyperactive, mentally, than I am, hardly able to keep focus on anything at all. He just loves Breath of the Wild, and so do I. It’s quite possibly the best computer game ever made, a Ghiblian masterpiece, which is a word I just made up, but you're free to use it, as long as you use it correctly.

I’d tell you all about it, about why I love The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but I’m currently in the process of writing an essay about that very topic right now at this very moment. The essay functions not only as a love letter to the game, but also as a beginner’s primer on Zen ideology, with references to Thich Nhat Hanh’s Peace Is Every Step. The essay attempts to use Zen ideology to analyze the game’s flaws, such as the weapon-breaking thing and the general aimlessness of both the narrative and gameplay, to argue that these supposed flaws, and others, are actually not flaws at all, but instead some of the game’s greatest strengths.

So, if you’re interested in the two Z’s, Zen and Zelda, bookmark oncomputer.games, because that’s where I’m going to upload the essay, which will be called Breath of the Now Now. It should be up in a few weeks, hopefully, if my focus holds.

That’s another thing I’ve been doing: rebuilding oncomputer.games. A good friend and I built this site back in April 2023. The original idea was to release nostalgia-focused essays on video games, which we resolved to exclusively call “computer games,” because that’s what grandma used to call video games back in the day when it was a bright summer day and you were holed up in your room playing Chrono Cross or whatever: “STOP PLAYING THOSE DAMN COMPUTER GAMES AND GO OUTSIDE.” The first essay was a review I wrote on Final Fantasy XII, which you can still read but is about 5,000 words too long and so dry that I wouldn’t recommend it. But after that essay, oncomputer.games veered into more bizarre territory, merging philosophy, history, personal stories, and even tanuki lore with computer games. Between my friend and me, we wrote about 23 long-form essays before it all got too competitive, and we basically ended up wanting to rip each other’s heads off; and by the end of 2023, some nasty words were exchanged via text message, at which point my friend deleted all his stuff from the site and didn’t speak to me for over a year. And I wrote about this exact situation in some detail in the essay/short story titled I, SEPHIROTH, which can be read on the site, so I won’t get into all that here.

In December 2024, my friend and I got back in touch and mended the grievous psychic wound, but for about a year there, I imagine we were both stewing in envy and denial and angst, at least I was. I let the oncomputer.games domain name lapse, and the site fell into obscurity, but I kept writing oncomputer.games-style essays for a while, posting them on a different site, howdoyouspell.cool, and then eventually on Substack, and then eventually on Dreamwidth. 

About a month ago, however, I realized that my desire to write was waning a bit, and I started thinking back to those oncomputer.games days, about how much I was writing back then, even though most of my writing was pretty bad, and I realized something: the competition between my friend and me motivated me, drove me to write when I otherwise would not have written, and I started to miss those days. I thought to myself, if I could temper that competitive spirit with some self-awareness, and use it all in a friendly way, perhaps that will drive me to write more, and frankly oncomputer.games was just cool as fuck, if I do say so myself. So I texted my friend out of the blue and said, “Hey, let’s do oncomputer.games again,” and surprisingly he had been thinking the same thing, and so immediately he said YES.

They say never to lease an apartment or start a business with your best friend, or at least I think they do, and I know this to be true from firsthand experience, but I hvae awlays had a hrad tmie wtih teh wohle leanring tihng. I guess we’ll see how long this lasts before we're both dead or dying.

But so and anyway, about a week ago, I renewed the oncomputer.games domain name, spent several hours on the Wayback Machine copying my friend’s old deleted essays, reposting those deleted essays and backdating them to their original post dates, and then I uploaded all my own OCG-style stuff that wasn’t originally posted on OCG to OCG, and now I’m working on an essay titled Breath of the Now Now. And I have ideas for other stuff too, like an essay about The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time titled “Pulling the Master Sword,” recounting carefree events from my childhood, pre-“pulling the Master Sword,” and comparing them to my responsibility-ridden adulthood, post-“pulling the Master Sword,” and another one using Chrono Cross to argue for and against determinism and free will. Knowing me, both of these essays will probably end up not happening at all now, now that I’ve loosely committed to them here, but we’ll see.

So yeah. That’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve also been reading I Am a Cat, which is a classic Japanese novel told from the perspective of a cat with no name that satirizes human behavior, and I’ve been listening to the band Ivy a lot, particularly their album Apartment Life, and I’ve just recently been listening to Gorillaz’s new album The Mountain, which has this one song, “Orange County,” that’s one of the catchiest songs in the universe, so maybe you shouldn’t give that one a listen unless you want the little whistle melody stuck in your head for days.

Anyway. I think, going forward, with my focus for the time being on writing long-form essays for oncomputer.games, I’ll use this space to write more general “what’s going on in my life” journal entries, like an old LiveJournal from the early 2000s or something, and occasionally I may post essays or short stories that wouldn’t fit on oncomputer.games here.

But actually who knows. My mind could change tomorrow. I have recently given up trying to wrangle the old gray matter, instead just going where it wants to take me, with the flow, as they say. When it comes to hobbies and other activities meant to be fun, I’ve found that forcing myself to do something contrary to my immediate whimsy makes those things not very fun at all, and after a long day of adulting or whatever, what I really want is simply to relax and enjoy myself, within reason.

It may be a little hedonistic, but right now, with where my head’s at, and with all the crazy shit that’s going on in the world, I think a little bit of hedonism won’t hurt.

Stephen Thomas Erlewine, who reviewed the album Swoon by Silversun Pickups over at Allmusic.com, gave the album four out of five stars but really didn't have anything nice to say about it or the band themselves. Specifically, he wrote:

“Silversun Pickups avoid unpleasantness to such a great extent on Swoon that they rarely shift tempos or dynamics. They merely wallow in washes of sound, deriving equally from guitars and whispered vocals, never pushing forward, never achieving any sense of momentum, just glimmering in the sunlight. It's pleasant enough, particularly when the breathy vocals fade away to leave behind cascades of guitars, but even at its best, it's nothing more than an approximation of Smashing Pumpkins at their peak, with all the interesting parts stripped away.”

I totally disagree with this, and the second track on the album, “The Royal We,” totally proves me correct, for it is transcendental noise of the highest order. It’s got ugliness. It’s got tempo changes. It’s got loud fuzz and shimmering guitars and vocals that sound like sex. It’s got shifting dynamics. It’s got lyrics about drug addiction and overdosing. It’s got forward-pushing. It’s got momentum. It’s got all the stuff Stephen says it does not have. It starts with Silversun’s signature androgynous vocals, goes into a pumping cello-like guitar chug, layers in washes of feedback-laden fuzz, all while asking the listener, “How many times do you want to die?” over and over. But none of this really reaches the level of transcendental noise; that doesn’t happen until the second half. The thing about “The Royal We” is that it’s almost like two different songs. At the two-minute mark, the tempo shifts completely, which is something Stephen claims the band doesn't do, and then the song becomes something else entirely. Supposedly the song is about drug addiction, and the structure of the song is supposed to mirror a withdrawal-to-next-hit cycle, and it does this very well, because the beginning of the song is aggressive, nervous, impatient, “look over your shoulder,” then at 2:11, it’s like you just took a hit of whatever your drug of choice is: the song abruptly slows down, the guitars get dreamy, and it enters a second chorus, ending with the great, almost sing-song line of “That’s when we fell in love, but not the first time,” at which point the music feels like a tunnel of noise or a rush of blood to the head, like you just shot up heroin or something, then it suddenly shifts back to a leitmotif from earlier in the song, weaving the original verses and first chorus into the structure of the second half of the music, which again is like an entirely different song in and of itself. Then it shifts back to the second chorus again, the “That’s when we fell in love, but not the first time” part, but now the singer is literally shouting this at you for some reason, and the distortion is turned up to like a thousand, and then the druggy tunnel noise comes in again on top of it all as if you’re having an overdose or something, and then you die, figuratively. The way it drops sections, then brings them back, then drops them again, and then pulls back even older sections to top it all off is, in my opinion, genius songwriting. And the song isn’t good just because the structure is genius; it’s also catchy, melodic in a weird way, and super energizing. It’s a car song for sure, meaning you should listen to it while you’re driving because it just chugs along at this incredible motor-like pace even when it’s doing all the slow druggy stuff. The song asks, “How many times do you want to die?” And I guess I want to die over and over again because I have listened to it 55 times this week as of writing this, according to my Last.fm profile.

But “The Royal We” wasn't actually what I wanted to talk about with this entry. I actually don’t like describing music with the written word. I end up using the same phrases and adjectives and whatnot for every damn song. Maybe I just need to build up my vocabulary, learn some music theory or something. I’m not sure. I suspect that music and writing, being two of the great human arts, can only be truly captured through themselves. Writing can never be music, music can never be writing, and neither can hope to fully convey the greatness of the other. That’s my theory, or maybe my excuse.

Anyway. I wanted to kind of talk about Silversun Pickups, as I've been listening to this band since at least 2006, and I have some nostalgic memories linked to their music that I'd like to try to capture here, stuff involving Chuck E. Cheese and basically stealing a kid’s GameCube so that I could play The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess the day it came out.

First, it must be noted, I was an incredibly late bloomer. I watched Blue’s Clues and lied about it to other kids until I was like 13. I had a Blue’s Clues game for my Mac back then, with the discs hidden in my closet, and one time during a sleepover a kid found it and ridiculed me harshly; I'm not bitter about this, it's just something that happened, to give you an example. I didn't get my driver's license until I was 18. And I hung on to Chuck E. Cheese until I was 16, making my grandma Susu drive me and my two good friends, Miles and Matt, to the pizza-arcade combo every winter and summer break when I visited her. I guess my thought process at that age was, since I had had some great times at Chuck E. Cheese as a younger kid, I would try to recreate some of that old magic as an older kid. I hung on to childhood for as long as the world would let me. And this is something I still do now: obsessively try to recreate feelings and situations long past, usually through video games and music and mood lighting. This is one of my core traits. I'm a nostalgic idiot, always have been, even during those peak nostalgia-forming years when you don’t really need to be. I just was. I started pining for the old days like ten years early. And Miles and Matt would indulge me; maybe they were nostalgic idiots too, as they always entertained my childish late-bloomer inclinations. But it should also be noted that I was a bit of a weird late bloomer, because between hiding Blue’s Clues discs and trips to Chuck E. Cheese, I was smoking cigarettes and having sex and doing all that dumb shit teenagers do, meaning I was not immune to the typical trappings of rebellious youth. I was very concerned about image and being “cool” on what I thought were my own terms, but there was always this background feeling of shame, hence why I’d do things like hide the Blue’s Clues discs. Despite the fact that I would tell myself and those around me that I didn’t care what people thought of me, I did in fact care about what people thought of me. I cared very, very much, although I tried hard not to, often to my own detriment, as I was very aloof and standoffish back then. Which is not super important here. What is important, however, is the music and the memories.

Back then, in 2006, Silversun Pickups was by no means my favorite band, but I had their album Carnavas on CD, and I loved the hell out of that album. Between the years 2006 and 2008, that album was a staple of car rides and just in-general hanging out. I used to have one of those black zip-up CD cases, like a CD binder thing, that held about a hundred CDs. Mine had a few band stickers on it, and I had painted the Smashing Pumpkins SP-heart logo thing on the front of it. I remember I would take the discs and album art booklets out of the CD jewel cases and slide them both into the CD binder’s sleeves so that if you were paging through the binder itself you’d only see the booklet with the cool cover art, meaning if you wanted to listen to one of the albums you’d have to dig your fingers behind the booklet a little bit to slide the CD out. I think each page had two sleeves, so if you had the binder fully open you’d see four albums at a time. And I had a lot of cool albums in there, or at least I thought so: I had the whole David Bowie discography in there, a lot of The Cure, all of The Smiths’ stuff, several Smashing Pumpkins records, Synchronicity and Zenyatta Mondatta by The Police, some Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless of course, Silversun Pickups’ Carnavas was in there, a few Cursive albums, and a whole bunch of burned CDs toward the back, because back then I pirated music like a career criminal. That CD binder kind of showcased my ever-evolving musical tastes as a teenager because I got the case from an FYE in the mall when I was like 12 years old and kept it well into my twenties at least. On the first few pages, you had The Cure and some shitty emo bands, which was the kind of stuff I was listening to at 12, and then, as you paged through the binder, the albums got progressively more varied and interesting or whatever. I think I had that CD binder for a little over ten years before it got lost in a move, or maybe I tossed it, I don’t exactly remember. But thinking about it now, it’s a damn shame that I lost it, because that binder is like a sacred relic of my youth, now lost in some landfill somewhere probably. It’s funny how, at a certain point, you look at something and say, “Oh, this thing? I don’t care about this anymore. I’m just going to toss it,” only to find out later that you cared a whole hell of a lot, you just didn’t know it at the time. I’m not trying to justify hoarding, by the way. Materialism is bad for the soul, they say, but in this case, screw that, this is a spiritual matter. I would fucking love to have that CD binder again.

Anyway, that CD binder would sit in the front seat of the car of whichever parental unit was responsible for me at the time back then: if I was back home for school, the case would be in my mom’s car; if I was staying with my grandma Susu during summer or winter break or whatever, it would be in her car; and so on. Back then, I demanded full control of the stereo of whatever car I found myself in, and neither my mom nor my grandma seemed to mind this; in fact, they liked most of my music, except for the heavy, grungier stuff, or anything with screaming, or stuff with audible curse words, but the music I listened to rarely had profanity, so that was never really a problem, and I often played the heavier stuff regardless of their protests, which meant some car rides were full of sighs and sullen looks, but I didn’t care because, one, I was a selfish teenaged brat, and two, I fucking loved music. Still do. I’m always searching for new music.

Back in the mid-2000s, finding new music wasn’t so different from how it is today, though honestly, it might have been better back then. Sure, you didn’t have music streaming services, but you did have Google Search, Wikipedia, Apple iTunes, Blogspot, The Pirate Bay, and a handful of encyclopedic sites dedicated solely to music, like Allmusic.com, a website that has been around for a long, long time. I’ve been browsing Allmusic.com since at least high school, but the site is even older than that, with it first going live in 1994. I remember, during computer lab or whatever, instead of doing schoolwork, I would just go to Allmusic.com, pull up my favorite band’s page, then go through each band listed under the “Related Artists” tab, all to find new music. I would pick new bands to listen to based on a few different factors, most of which superficial as hell. Do I like the band name? Do I like the album art? Are the people in the band attractive, unique, or cool-looking in some way? How obscure is this band? And so on. Once I found a band that seemed interesting, I would decide which album to listen to either by cover art or by the Allmusic rating, then I’d do a Google search that looked something like this: “‘Silversun Pickups’ ‘Carnavas’ ‘Download’ ‘Blogspot,’” and nine times out of ten, I would instantly find a zipped version of the entire album. Because back then, in the mid-2000s, Blogspot was a prime source of free music, probably the best source actually, at least for people in the know. I mean, you could use The Pirate Bay too, to download an entire band’s discography all at once, which was something I did quite often, but you couldn’t find some of the more obscure stuff on The Pirate Bay; for that, you needed to browse Blogspots dedicated to niche music scenes run by hardcore fans. Back then I even created my own Blogspot for music downloads, which you can find on the Wayback Machine, but it was eventually removed from the platform for promoting piracy. I guess at some point in the last decade or so Blogspot cracked down. Back then, I didn’t think too much about the morality of pirating and sharing music online; I just did it because I loved music and wanted to listen to as much music as possible. The thought that musicians needed money or whatever never really occurred to me, for I lived a very privileged white-person life, but I did make it a point to buy physical copies of albums I enjoyed, not for ethical reasons though, but because owning a physical copy made me feel less like a poser and more like a true fan; plus, having the original album booklet and CD to slip into my binder was infinitely cooler than an ugly Memorex CD-R with the band and album name poorly scribbled in Sharpie. The whole process of finding new music back then was exciting and fun for me; it felt different from how discovering new music feels today for some reason. I think finding new music back then actually felt more meaningful because today these streaming services just push new stuff to you constantly without you having to put in any real effort; new singles come out, you listen to them once, you move on to the next one, whereas back in the mid-2000s, you had to put in real effort to download a song, and because of that, you also spent more time with that song, giving you more time to appreciate it. I realize I sound like an old man in a rocking chair smoking a pipe going “back in my day” between fits of coughing or whatever. But back in my day, if I found an album that I really liked, I would listen to it for months, to the point that it colored that whole epoch of my life in the hindsight of my mind’s eye. But nowadays, I’m more inclined to just hit “next,” because there’s seemingly infinite music at my fingertips and I might be missing out if I don’t go go go. I think the easier something is to acquire, the less you might appreciate it. As a society, we seem to conflate instant gratification with instant satisfaction, but these two things are actually inversely related: the faster the gratification, the weaker and more fleeting the satisfaction. The music industry today does not understand this; they are only concerned with clicks and profits. They don’t even care if you actually listen to the music or use the product or whatever, as long as you click and maybe view an ad or two. So basically: Reject modernity, return to Blogspot and physical CDs and MP3 players and stuff, for your very soul may be at stake.

Anyway. 

It was during that winter of 2006, when I was staying with Susu, that I was really big into Silversun Pickups’ album Carnavas. That album sort of colored that whole period for me. I must have been around 16 years old, I think. Susu drove this tan BMW that my mom had bought for her, and Carnavas never left that BMW’s CD slot. I had first heard Silversun Pickups on the radio earlier that year. The single “Lazy Eye” got heavy play on Top 100 rock radio throughout the year, which, in hindsight, is kind of surprising because it’s not the sort of song you’d typically hear on popular radio; it sounds sort of like The Smashing Pumpkins circa Siamese Dream mixed with the dreaminess of Slowdive’s Souvlaki or something, both of which, at the time, were albums I really enjoyed, which is probably why the song appealed to me. The song was pretty popular back then, I think they even included it in one of those Rock Band games or whatever. It starts softly with a pretty simple guitar line that has this little twang to it, then the drums kick in, then the vocals, which are androgynous and airy and nasally and weird, and it stays soft for a bit until eventually it gets into all this fuzzy guitar stuff before just exploding with anger for some reason, with the singer just screaming suddenly like you just cut him in line at the DMV or something, and the guitars turn up the distortion and scream right along with him; all this happens while a druggy noise-tunnel effect is going on, which I think is created in true shoegaze fashion using amp feedback fed through weird pedals, and this persists until the very end of the song, which ends almost exactly the same way it started, with that same simple twangy guitar line. The song is actually a lot like “The Royal We,” just more melodic and less structurally interesting. The first time I heard “Lazy Eye,” I wasn’t very impressed with it until it exploded; the contrast between the pretty and the ugly caught my attention, at which point I was like, “Yeah, OK, I get this. I’m down.” And so then I immediately bought the album and slid it into an empty sleeve in my CD binder, which, back in December 2006, was in Susu’s old BMW.

The car wasn’t old for its time, though. It was actually one of those newer BMWs. I think it was actually a 2006 BMW Series 5, and it was this tannish beige color. In my memory, it has a matte finish, but I know that couldn’t have been right. I remember the inside of the car smelled weird, like mustard almost, because despite being a healthy older lady who looked far younger than she actually was to the point where most people thought she was my mom, Susu was always going to KFC and keeping the sealed plastic mustard cups for some reason, stashing them in the car’s glove compartment alongside those plastic silverware packets and piles upon piles of KFC napkins, which she said she kept “just in case I need them some day,” but I’m pretty sure she never needed them some day, because all that stuff just kept piling up. On the dash, there was this pug dog bobblehead; she had put some of that double-sided tape on the bottom of it so it wouldn’t slide off while the car was moving. I think she actually got the dog from KFC, or maybe it was Burger King; it was a Men in Black II Kid’s Meal toy. It had a tan body and a massive wrinkled head with these great big bug eyes, and it was sticking its tongue out at me.

Whenever I rode in Susu’s car, I would imagine that pug bobbing his head to the music I was listening to, and back in 2006, during winter break, I was listening to Carnavas. I remember riding in the passenger seat, Miles and Matt in the back, Susu up front driving us to Chuck E. Cheese. The lines on the interstate blurred together, the trees were streaks of green, and the sun set orange and pink on the horizon like a distant forest fire. The song “Melatonin” was playing, so the inside of the car was like a shimmering sea of adolescent distortion. I remember Matt saying, “Is this The Smashing Pumpkins?” and I said, “No, this is Silversun Pickups,” and Miles said, “Same initials,” and I said, “Yeah, I didn’t realize that, cool,” and Susu said, “Can you please turn it down?” but I didn’t turn it down because we were now arriving at Chuck E. Cheese.

I don’t really remember what we used to do at Chuck E. Cheese when we were all 16 years old and didn’t really belong there. I remember the general stuff, like the pizza, which I actually enjoyed despite its cardboard consistency, and I remember the arcade area, filled with children who stood up at my thighs because at 16 I was 6’1”. The arcades back then had like three types of games: the big mechanical Rube Goldberg-like machines that you insert tokens into at just the right time so that they slide down the rail in such a way that they end up in the hole that rewards the highest amount of tickets; the sit-down shooters with two big plastic guns where you and a friend sit down and blast zombies or dinosaurs or whatever on a big screen in front of you using said plastic guns, which were usually orange for some reason; and then the skee-ball ones that give you like ten brown balls to roll up an incline into numbered holes, but I would just climb up the incline and put the balls in the best holes because why the hell not. I remember one of the Rube Goldberg-like games kept shouting STEP UP AND PLAY SIDEWINDER in a funny western-cowboy accent, and that one had a brown ball that you had to navigate across a bridge using a single handle without letting the ball fall off the side. And I remember this Simpson’s-themed one that you just put tokens into at the right time and they’d slide down a ramp into one of many holes on a revolving prize-wheel-like thing, with each hole giving a different number of tickets, and I remember getting so good at this one that I could time it perfectly to get the token into the best hole each time, and the thing would just spit out strips and strips of those perforated ticket strips, so many that some smaller kids would come up to me and be like, “Hey mister, can I get some of those tickets?” and sometimes I would give them some, sometimes I wouldn’t, depending on how I was feeling that day. I was always getting a bunch of tickets. Miles was too. But I don’t recall us ever exchanging them for anything. I guess that was never really the point.

I remember, after this particular visit to Chuck E. Cheese, we all went to the GameStop in the strip mall nearby. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess had literally just come out for the GameCube. This game was on my radar, but I didn’t have a GameCube anymore, having sold it a few months prior for PlayStation 2 stuff. But I really wanted Twilight Princess, so I bought the game without having a GameCube. Well, Susu bought it for me, with my mom’s credit card. I lived a very white life. I remember Miles was like, “How are you going to play that?” and I was like, “Doesn’t your brother Gavin have a GameCube?” and he was like, “Yeah, but he’s been using it to play Animal Crossing a lot lately,” and I was like, “Yeah, we’ll see about that,” and, about an hour later, there we are, in Gavin’s bedroom, staring at his GameCube. “Can I borrow it?” And Gavin was like, “What for?” And I of course said Twilight Princess. And he’s like, “But you don’t live here.” And I’m like, “I’m here for the next week, I’ll give it back before I leave.” And he’s like, “But I’m playing Animal Crossing.” And I’m like, “You can play Animal Crossing whenever; me, on the other hand, I have a very narrow window in which I can play Twilight Princess, and that window is literally right now and for the next seven days. So why don’t you be a pal and just let me borrow the GameCube?” There was a lot of sighing and eye rolling, but eventually Gavin handed over the GameCube. He was three years younger than Miles and I, and I got the impression that he wanted his brother and his brother’s friends to like him, so he was usually pretty agreeable. But this time he pushed back a bit more than normal, and he was even grumbling as I gathered up his grey GameCube and all the cords and controllers and whatnot and lugged it all out of his room, after which time I immediately went to Susu’s house and started playing.

During that winter break, my hair was messy and my sweaters were too big and I was staying in Susu’s garage and I was on prescription Adderall. Susu had converted the garage into a makeshift bedroom of sorts. I use the word “converted” loosely because the room was not insulated, the garage door could still be opened and closed, a number of bikes and lawn tools were still stored in the corner, all of Susu’s sewing stuff including her sewing machine was in there, and there wasn’t a real bed, just a box spring with a thin mattress on top of it; but I didn’t care about any of that because there was a big gray Magnavox CRT in there, and back then that was all I needed to call a place my home. I had Gavin’s GameCube hooked up to the Magnavox, and my PlayStation 2, too. I also had a CD-player-stereo thing by the fake bed, which I would use to play Carnavas whenever I wasn’t playing Twilight Princess, which I was playing a lot, obsessively in fact. From the moment I got the GameCube hooked up, I was spending upwards of like ten hours per day just playing Twilight Princess, eating only snacks and one big meal a day, usually Spiral Kraft Mac and Cheese that I would make myself in a very specific way because I was, and still am, insanely particular about my food. My hair was messy, my sweaters were too big, and Twilight Princess quickly became one of my favorite games ever; it was like Ocarina of Time, just with more stuff to do. There was this unlockable combat technique called Mortal Draw, with which you could one-shot basically any enemy in the game if you hit the A button right before they attacked you while you had Link standing still with his blade sheathed, and this was like the coolest shit I had ever done in a video game up to that point in my life. By the time the end of winter break came around, I was still playing Twilight Princess, trying to get all the heart pieces. So on the last day, when Susu had to drive me across state back to my mom’s house, I took Gavin’s GameCube with me and never gave it back. I don't know why I did that.

So yeah, that was what I had going on back then: Chuck E. Cheese, CDs, Twilight Princess, Adderall, Kraft Spirals, Messy Hair, Sweaters Too Big, Stealing, and Carnavas by Silversun Pickups.

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... )