Filed under: Music, Musings, S/Alexander | Tags: death, friends, keane, somewhere only we know
Oh simple thing, where have you gone
I’m getting old and I need something to rely on
So tell me when you’re gonna let me in
I’m getting tired and I need somewhere to begin
- Keane, “Somewhere Only We Know”
Time keeps marching forward. The day after my mother died, I remember laying on her bed with the dog. I had come home from the hospital the day before and fallen asleep in the bedroom where my mother had spent the last five years of her life confined. I could still smell her on the sheets, on the pillows. The cup beside her bed had a layer of water at the top from where the ice had melted in her sweet tea. Her computer chair was piled high with papers and yellow legal pads. Her ash tray was overflowing with cigarette butts, because towards the end her hand shook too badly for her to finish an entire cigarette in one sitting. But, most of all, I remember that the television in her room was still on. I remember hearing about Obama and the deficit and the Tea Party movement and a million other news stories that did nothing more than confirm for me that the world had kept turning. Somehow, people had gotten out of bed. Somehow, people had gone to work or dropped their kids off at daycare or gone shopping or a thousand other things that had nothing to do with the grief I was feeling. My mother was dead, why wasn’t that on the news?
But time soldiers on.
This week was the three-month anniversary, and the shock and grief of it all has, for the most part, passed. I know now that I am strong enough to do it on my own, even if I don’t believe that any twenty-three year old should have to do it that way. I am an adult, and while I am still young, experience has made me old. I know enough to get myself out of most situations. But there are still moments when my carefully constructed house of cards begins to sway and I start to panic, thinking that everything I’ve built is about to collapse, and I realize that – in the grand scheme of things – I have very few people I could call for help.
That is not to deride or dismiss my friends. I have a lot of them, and they are caring, smart, funny people. They are capable, and I imagine that they are going to do amazing things with their lives. But, with the odd exception, my friends and I have led radically different lives. They feel younger than me – less jaded, more hopeful for the future. They lack a certain amount of lived experience. Ask them to go shopping or explain a primary source or about a relationship, and they are amazing. But ask them the best place to bounce a check in order to get the $25 cash back (non-chain grocery stores) – or how long it would take for that check to post to your account (2-3 business days) – and they are stupefied. None of my friends know that the power company cannot disconnect your power, no matter how late your bill is, so long as you have a medical necessity for keeping the power on. This isn’t something I judge them for, and I wish I had grown up in a house where I didn’t know that the best way to steal from a grocery store was through the self-check out line, or that PayDay Loan places don’t check your credit report when you apply for a loan, and that the maximum loan amount in the state of California is $300. When you are staring down the barrel of a gun, and you need someone to pick up the phone at 1:21am on an idle Tuesday night, you don’t call your friends – you call your mother. When financial aid is trying to screw you over and you don’t remember if you had to file taxes or not and the Bank is trying to take money out of your account and the landlords are upset that you’re a smoker and the car is making a fucked up noise and you have to choose between buying $536 worth of books for school or buying groceries – you don’t want to call your friends; you want to call your mother.
But I can’t.
My mother has been dead for three months now, and I have never felt older in my life. Why have I not gone gray? Why don’t I have wrinkles yet? Why isn’t this aging, which feel so all encompassing, not visible to anyone other than me? “I’m getting old, and I need something to rely on.” It is a simple line from a song released years and years ago, but it gets me every time. That line, that one expression of defeated hope, of silent prayers expressed, of genuine hurt and need is enough to send me over the edge. From the first moment I heard the song, I have always teared up at that line. “I’m getting old, and I need something to rely on.” It has meant different things at different moments in my life. It was about my fear of being single. It was about my lack of close friends. It was about a forgotten birthday. It was about every unmet or failed expectation. And while none of these are wrong, I think what I think about it today is closer to the truth. It is about the sinking feeling that comes when you feel time moving on without you; when every thing and every one is changing, and you witness it only from a distance. I am getting older; every day, every minute, every second I feel myself aging. Not just my body, but my spirit. “I’m getting old and I need something to rely on.” I feel myself getting weary. Every set back, every hussle, every lie I have to tell myself only adds to the weight on my shoulders; I’m slouching towards something that I’m sure I’ll ever get to.
Something I’m not sure I can get to by myself.
S/Alexander
Filed under: Music, S/Alexander | Tags: aloe blacc, loving you is killing me, Music
If you remember, I already had a blog post featuring the immensely talented Aloe Blacc. It’s ridiculous how good this man’s music is, and how retro-yet-modern the melodies, composition, and structure of the songs are. I could rave, but chances are you’ve already clicked play on the video above and heard it for yourself. This is just a rough cut, so imagine how the studio version is going to wound.
[kudos to Cafe Maroon for the introduction]
S/Alexander
Filed under: Music, S/Alexander | Tags: avriel epps, be cool, cook classics, foals, kimbra, love get outta my way, monarchy, Music, music to live by, new music, settle down, spanish sahara, the london contemporary orchestra
Whether you are into minimalist back beats, startling dance tracks, or sonic therapy; this post has what you need.
Check out the music below, and don’t forget to follow me on Twitter.
Kimbra – Settle Down
Monarchy – Love Get Outta My Way
Foals – “Spanish Sahara” (with The London Contemporary Orchestra)
Be Cool ft. Avriel Epps (prod. Cook Classics) by OldAirportRoad
S/Alexander
Filed under: Music, S/Alexander | Tags: billionaie, neon hitch, sia, snoop dogg, travie mccoy, travis mccoy
Welcome to 2011. What? You thought it was 2010? Naw, I’m giving you a brief glimpse into the future of pop music – and, for those interested, it is NOT from the United States. Neon Hitch is fierce, fabulous, and British. She is also well on her way to being unstoppable. Besides being pretty, the woman was raised a gypsies, and spent her childhood performing as a trapeze artist. At 16 she quit the circus and took off the “find herself.” What she found was a gorgeous, raspy voice. You probably can guess the rest of this story (MySpace, discovered by American Idol judge, signed to a record deal, opened for a big name artist, etc…) The point you need to take home is that Neon Hitch is the future, and you heard it first on Old Airport Road.
Neon Hitch – Drop It Like It’s Hot by OldAirportRoad
Neon Hitch – “Billionaire (Who Fuckin’ Cares)
Neon Hitch – Cooler Than Me (Sia vs. Mike Posner)
S/Alexander
When I was fifteen I went on a church camp outing to the caves in Virgina.
The tour guide gave each of us harnesses and headlamps before leading us through the cave’s labyrinth. Eventually we reached an enormous cavern, and the leader of the group had us sit on the cave’s damp rocks. He then asked us to turn off our headlamps. In the pitch black the leader asked us to stick out our hands and wiggle them in front of our face for twenty seconds. Afterward, after we turned on our headlamps, he asked the group to raise our hands if we had been able to see our hands in front of our faces. When the vast majority of the group, myself included, raised our hands the leader laughed at us. He claimed that the dark of the cavern was so pervasive that it was impossible for us to have seen our hands, and that the shock of the darkness had tricked our minds into believing we could still see them. He then had us stand up, our backsides wet from the sides of cave, and he led us to the back exit from the cavern.
There, barely visible with my headlamp, was the crevice that would lead us back to the main trail and out of the cave. He wanted us to squeeze ourselves through the crack in the walls and head back to the tour bus.
As each of my camp friends easily slid between the space, I started to panic. I was not skinny. I was not athletic. I have never, in my life, been described as flexible. I positioned myself at the back of the cavern and waited as they each crawled through the space until eventually the only people remaining were the instructor, a camp counselor, and myself. I remember pleading with the tour guide to take me back the way we came in, but they insisted that I attempt to squeeze through. My friends on the other side, poking their head through the walls, promised to help me as much as they could. Sensing that it would be worse for me to make a scene, I made a go for it. The camp counselor supporting me as I rotated onto my side and my friends grabbing my feet and pulling me through. The headlamp fell and busted on the cavern side of the crack, and the rocks on either side lifted my shirt and scratched my stomach and back to the point where I began to bleed. I was uncomfortable and in pain, but, worst of all for a fifteen year old, I was embarrassed. No one else had had to go through this indignity, just me. Just the poor little fat kid.
Kate Moss once quipped to a reporter that “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.”
I wouldn’t know, but I can imagine. While I may have lost more than thirty pounds since Freshman year of college, I am never going to be ripped. I am never going to be cut. I am never going to be the boy in the bar casually dressed in the muscle-t, and I still not okay with that idea. Twenty-three years of living on this planet, and more than eight years since I left the caves in Virginia covered in scratches, bleeding, and embarrassed as Hell, I still occasionally see myself as the poor little fat kid. It has become the loudest voice in the back of my head during moments of turmoil or unmet expectations. More than a decade of diets and treadmills and ellipticals, as well as a three-day experiment as a bulimic, has left me with the knowledge that I am, and will probably always be, fat.
For the most part, my weight hasn’t stopped me from doing whatever I put my mind towards. I have amassed a close group of friends who are supportive and wonderful, even if they are all skinny and gorgeous. I have gotten scholarships and fell in and out of love. My weight didn’t stop me from dancing atop the spiral staircase during parties at Brown, nor did it stop me from hoisting boys up against a wall and slow-grinding the night away. But that success can’t always beat the voice in the back of my head; the voice which questions whether or not everything would have been different, better if I were twenty, thirty, fifty pounds lighter. Did he not call me because he lost my number, or because he thought I was too fat to take seriously as a potential boyfriend? Did they not ask me to go with them because they didn’t think I was skinny enough, cute enough to meet their friends and family? When you’ve spent an entire morning trying to find an outfit in your closet that doesn’t make you feel like a beached whale, it’s easy to imagine that all of life’s troubles could be solves by a smaller waist or a six-pack. When you are stranded in the dressing room for ten minutes trying to get the largest jean size the store carries to fit over your hips, the defeat is enough to leave you crippled. I don’t even allow my friends to see the photographs of me on Facebook that I have left de-tagged, and at parties it is easier to just avoid the camera rather than specifically explain the angle and direction the camera should face when pointed in my direction. There is constant need on my part to stage manage my weight at every opportunity.
I don’t wear sweatpants in public because they make my ass look massive. I have never worn a t-shirt outside my house, because there isn’t enough structure in the fabric to hide my stomach or flabby pecs. I don’t wear sweatshirts because I don’t want to be THAT fat person who couldn’t be bothered to put together a decent outfit. It was only recently that I stopped slouching, a horrible habit that I thought hid my weight a bit better when I was in high school. I quit going to the gym in January because my personal trainer forced me to work out in the mornings, at peak hours, in front of all the hard bodied wannabe actresses and actors – and I couldn’t stand struggling that hard in front of people who were (in my mind) so obviously judging. Last week my friends and I went to Malibu. While they pealed off their clothes – exposing cute bathing suits which revealed their asses, thighs, and stomachs – I stayed dressed in a pair of khaki cut off shorts and a Banana Republic button-up. Looking at the men on the beach, with their perfect tans, visible abs, and muscled arms, I couldn’t step outside of myself long enough to loosen anything other than the top button of my shirt. This, of course, doesn’t touch upon the bedroom – and all the anxieties that come with being bigger than the person you’re fucking/getting fucked by.
All of this is for naught, and I know this. The people that love me, that care about me as a friend and confidant, don’t care about my size or weight. But I do it anyway, because I care about it – because I care too much about it – because I know that all it takes is one argument or incident for my weight to be flung at me. Even at my age I still try and make some joke or clever quip about my weight in order to diffuse the (admittedly) non-existent tension I feel over the subject. It’s stereotypical and its trite and I don’t doubt that most people see right past it – but old defense mechanisms are hard to kill. Last year, someone, speaking to a good friend of mine, called me “mean and delusional,” and then proclaimed that he was so much better looking, referring to me as an “ugly, fat motherfucker.” In Middle School, the only slur I heard more often then faggot or nigger was “fat,” and it was the latter which impacted my self-esteem the most. Fat-ass. Lardo. Bitch-tits. Growing up is hard enough without knowing that any failure to conform on your part will open you up to these words – these hateful, mean words. My response was to shut down. I stopped responding. I was the “Ice-Man,” and I perpetrated the falsehood that none of it could effect me – that I was above the insults, all the while feeling the sting of every word, every glance, and every insult – real or imagined.
It’s something that hasn’t gone away.
Even now, in the dark of my bedroom, when nobody in my apartment is awake and the only sound is the sound of my own breathing, I lay in bed and, without the harnesses or headlamps, I conjure an image of myself. I strain and I struggle, just like I did in the cave eight years ago. I panic, certain that, even in the darkness of my own bedroom, I can still see the rolls of fat creeping over the waist of my jeans, the stretch marks crisscrossing my love handles, or the scarred over scratches that come with growing up the poor, little fat kid.
S/Alexander
Filed under: Musings, S/Alexander | Tags: closet, eeyore, phd, sex, summer, USC
Eeyore was not my typical fare.
Alright, that’s a lie. Eeyore may have held none of the physical features of my previous converts, but he was (and still is) closeted – a situation that I am all to familiar with. Our last interaction consisted of him attempting to explain how “flattered” he was that I found him attractive, but that he was “girl crazy” and that I had failed to “convince” him. I am not sure that anyone who feels the need to attest their heterosexuality by proclaiming that they are “girl crazy” is as crazy about the opposite gender as the wish, but that is neither here nor there. He had a girlfriend whom he spent most of our six-week long “courtship” explaining away as inconsequential. She was a child, some eight years younger than him, and the first thing he said to me was that he “had a hard time maintaining relationships.” He was only interested in sex, and that was all he needed. When he wasn’t having sex he was playing computer games - World of Warcraft or Starcraft or whatever other multiplayer game allowed for the creation of a second life. He did karate, smoked his prescription marijuana, and went to heavy metal concerts.
In my mind, all of these characteristics were common traits of the closeted. The younger girlfriend is less likely to question or interrogate anything that may or may not be happening in the bedroom (and Eeyore made it clear during one of our extended smoking breaks that he was into some very kinky shit.) The focus on sexual release, regardless of the individual was a clear invitation for me to pursue, and the kinky sexual traits suggested that he held no real aversion for the deviant sodomitical behaviour I was planning in my head. Hell, even the gamer persona was less about the game, in my mind, and more about the appropriation of an alternative persona – a clear indiciation of some disatisfaction with his own life. All the signals were there, and his intense focus on our friendship made me suspect that he was more than interested.
But as I already mentioned; I was apparently wrong.
What makes this post different than the one’s that I’ve written about the Toddler or the Anonymous Gay Sex Addict, or even the married man I hooked up with the alleyway beside the bar, is that there was never a moment of physical intimacy. He and I never so much as kissed, let alone held hands. I honestly can’t remember if we ever touched at all, except for a few moments of “dap” at the end of a conversation. There was no grand moment of revelation with Eeyore – he never dropped the facade and allowed me entrance into what lay underneath. There was no moment of actual or metaphysical penetration. He didn’t break my heart – or come anywhere close to getting through the barriers I had erected to protect it. There was only the thinly-veiled possibility of sex; the thrill that accompanies the chase – and that is what makes this blog harder to write than the others.
We met during a summer program which kept me trapped in a room once-a-week for nine hours with other PhD candidates from different departments. Eeyore was not the most attractive man in the room, although he was most definitely attractive. He was not the tallest or most outspoken or even the man with the most questionable sexuality. But looking at him from across the conference table there was something in his carriage and demeanor that suggested something dark and twisty, and I am someone who is perpetually drawn to the emotionally damaged. He had the far-away gaze of someone who had seen something horrific, experienced something unspeakable, and lived to tell the tale. His cavalier attitude was simultaneously enthralling and infuriating. Nothing drew his attention. Nothing pulled him, even for a moment, outside of his doom-and-gloom attitude. His fatalist attitude was appealing and, coming right after the death of my mother, was something that I desperately needed. The idea of something easy and uncomplicated was not an option. I needed a distraction, a challenge. In Eeyore I found someone as detached and diffuse as I imagined myself to be.
We spent weeks talking. Clever anecdotes and carefully timed text messages became the norm of our relationship. We G-chatted about which girls he thought was attractive, always with a wink-wink towards whatever was bubbling below the surface of our interaction. He would text me at 2pm, telling me that he had just woken up for the day – and asking what I had been up to. I would text him late at night, certain that he was the only one in my phonebook up at 3am on an idle Wednesday night. Our insomnia meshed in creative and interesting ways, and I couldn’t help but remember the winter I had spent with Blaine, and how much our bonding centered around this fact. Our entire interaction was filled with a sexual subtext that would never have been admissible in court of law, but only further proved my suspicions. Eventually, I began pushing for an invite to his place, or for him to come back with me to mine. He rejected every attempt, but I realized quickly that our game would never progress pass the digital realm unless I got him alone. Only then would I be able to break through his closet door and close the deal. The challenge of it all had made him interesting, but the game had begun to bore me. I’m twenty-three years old, and I don’t have the stamina for these cat-and-mouse games with men of questionable sexuality – - – at least, not the stamina I used to have. It was only after much cajoling that I convinced him to join me and my friends for an episode of True Blood and a smoke.
It wasn’t long though before we were both alone in my apartment.
“I should probably get home and do a bit of work,” he said. “That is, unless you can think of something more interesting for us to do.”
This was it. This was the moment. The sad, lonely boy had opened his closet door just wide enough for me to walk inside. Standing in my living room, his comment had squarely placed the ball in my court. This had happened before, and there is no clever innuendo with which to respond to this sort of provocation. My choices were limited. I could move forward and accept his comment as an invitation to play – which opened me up to being rejected. Or, I could shut it down. Standing in my kitchen, I looked at him through the hazy eyes of someone who had smoked a bit too much weed and knew it. The script for this encounter had already been written. I should put my glass of water on the counter, and saunter towards him. In my best Lauren Bacall voice I should have asked him, “What do have in mind?” while slowly reaching down to the crotch of his jeans. He had opened the door to his closet, and the only thing left for me to do was to crawl inside it with him.
But I stumbled over myself. Looking at him, with all of his issues and problems, I realized that I didn’t want to put myself out there for him – not like this. I didn’t want some marijuana-fueled hook-up in my apartment with a guy who wouldn’t even admit his attraction for me. I didn’t want the possibility of rejection. I wanted someone who wanted me enough to be open about it, sans games and innuendo. Eeyore would never be able to give that to me, and standing in my apartment I recognized that as much as I wanted him – I wouldn’t degrade myself for him. I liked him; but I liked myself more.
Instead, I quipped that I had left my Parcheesi in Providence, and he begrudgingly walked towards the door. He lingered in my doorway for a bit, postulating as to whether or not he was too high to drive the six minutes it would take for him to get home. I offered him my couch, but it was clear this was done as a customary gesture and not a real invitation. The moment had passed. I had drawn my line in the sand, and I knew Eeyore enough to know that he would never take the extra step of admitting that anything was there besides friendship. The texts he sent me a week ago only served to prove this.
He wasn’t going to come out for me. He wasn’t going to do anything for me. I hadn’t “convinced” him yet.
The subtext suggesting that I never could.
S/Alexander
“And in the spring, I shed my skin / And it blows away with the changing wind”
- Florence + The Machines, “Rabbit Heart”
I can’t cry in open spaces. I don’t know where it came from; this aversion to public displays of emotion. Perhaps it is because I didn’t come from a crying family, at least not until the last few years. When things got rocky growing up, and life was kicking our ass, there didn’t seem much use in crying. There were things that needed to be done. There were calls that needed to be made and reservations that had be canceled and bill collectors that had to be cajoled. This ability to push emotion to the back burner and deal with the immediate crisis has always been my greatest skill. Joan Didion once wrote that her migraine headaches never came during moments of impending doom. Tell her that her husband was leaving her, the democracy was failing, and that her house was on fire and she wouldn’t get a migraine. But on those days when the phone rang too much and deadlines began to pile atop one another, and carelessness forced her to retrace her steps because she had misplaced her keys or wallet her headaches would appear. The banalities associated with everyday life was what brought on her headaches, which is how I feel about my tears. They will never come in the moment of a crisis, only afterward.
During a brief session with my (now former) psychiatrist, he explained to me how this works. He claimed that ADHD was, in actuality, an inability of the brain to send emotional signals to the brain at a normal pace. Apparently, people suffering from ADHD receive emotions such as anger, panic, or fear at a diminished rate due to some (seemingly unknown) mental defect. If a “normal” person’s home was on fire, they might receive a panic signal at a rate of 10 out of 10. However, someone suffering from ADHD would get that signal at a 6 or 7. Because emotions travel slower in the ADHD brain, fear and panic don’t hit me at a noticeable level until much later.
Because of this mental defect, my ability to (re)act to a provocation or incident will never be in question. In fact, more often then not I will respond better in a crisis then a person NOT suffering from ADHD. I was, and still am, the person my friends and family call during an emergency.
Eventually, however, I have the time to process everything that happened, and the gravity of the situation hits me – leaving me paralyzed for brief amounts of time. It is never expected, and it can last anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours to a few days. The best thing I can do is get myself alone and ride out the storm. Because I can’t cry, for whatever reason, in public – this usually necessitates a quick move to an isolated, confined place. My sister calls this place “The Congo.” My friends refer to these feelings as “The Dark and Twisties.” When my best friend came out of the closet, I handled the conversation in the car well. I expressed myself cogently, and when he offered his rationale for keeping me in the dark I somehow managed to keep a straight face. It wasn’t until the drive home that I broke down and cried on the side of the road. Later on, the same friend would send me to my walk-in closet for two hours in a crying jag. When the Toddler destroyed my sense of self, I managed to keep the breakdown at bay until Christmas Break – when I would get home and have the privacy of my own bathroom to cry in. In January, I was pulled over outside Oklahoma City with an expired license and an unpaid parking ticket, in a car that wasn’t registered in my name, and I managed to make it Amarillo, TX before I broke down in shear relief. When my mother was put on her ventilator and my sister started screaming in the waiting room of the ICU – I managed to find a bathroom to cry inside.
I mention this because I woke up in the Congo today; but I couldn’t for the life of me understand which crisis had been averted. Nothing had changed from the day before. My mother was still dead, and the politics and poverty which has accompanied her death are still being dealt with. USC is still claiming that I owe them nearly $200, and are threatening to withhold my stipend check until I pay them their money. Bank of America and I are still fighting over $250 they took out of my account to pay part of my mother’s debt. There is, quite possibly, an injunction being issued in South Carolina against me for a personal loan that I didn’t know existed, let alone authorize. I still have a broken back molar because I can’t afford the dental surgery. This is, of course, on top of the bills that I have pushed into deferment because instead of saving my summer stipend I used the money to cremate my mother, fix my brother’s truck, pay a portion of my sister’s rent, pay the power bill for my cousin, and help my aunt buy herself a car so she could move out of my grandparent’s house. The same problems that existed the night before, the week before, the month before were all still there. Nothing had changed, and yet, I woke up feeling the same crushing weight on my chest that I felt before my sojourns in my car, closet, and bathroom – after a crisis had been diffused.
I’ve experienced this enough times to know that once the tears start there is no way to stop them, that my only choice was to find myself a spot to ride the emotional wave back to shore. So I grabbed my keys and a fresh pack of cigarettes before running down to the parking lot of my building. I cranked up the car and turned on the air conditioner, but before I could light my first cigarette I started to wail. I cried because I found friends, but somehow lost my sister as my confidant and moral center. I cried because I had a job, but had spent the last week wondering if it was for me. I cried because I was no longer alone but the feeling of loneliness hadn’t abated. I cried because I had done my best and it still didn’t seem good enough. I cried my ugliest tears and I screamed and sobbed and lost my breath and somehow still kept going.
—
I stayed in the Congo for about forty-five minutes before escaping. I lit a cigarette, turned off the car, and climbed the twenty-two steps to the apartment.
Nothing had changed, but everything was somehow different.
Nothing had changed, but somehow I was different.
The strife and the tears and the crisis of the last three months were still there, but I was now different because of them. Like the song lyrics at the beginning of this post, the winds had changed for me. This, I felt, was my moment of glorious, painful transformation. It was my own, private Spring. I am still me – I will still love and laugh and lie and cry, but my body is building a new skin for me the dwell within. I am slowly loosening myself from the past, casting my old self into the wind, and I am preparing for something new and scary and entirely self-made. Nothing had changed between last night and today, except everything.
S/Alexander
