I'm in New Zealand where I've been for the last eleven days. (Six more to go.) Sleep has been readjusting, slowly.
Most nights around 1AM, I still keep staring at the ceiling in the dark in a kind of circadian relapse before falling back into weird dreams again on the other side. We've all been here.
Late night thought 1:
The purity of trapped time. Of hours sitting in airport chairs, airplane seats, hotel lobbies. Unable to convince myself I should be doing something else around the house or in the yard, because I'm effectively trapped. Relinquished of duties. A guiltlessness for idle hands - read the book I never make time for. Watch the movie that's been in the download queue for six months. Am I in trapped time at 1AM? (I should be sleeping.)
Late night thought 2:
The mailman comes at four in the morning yesterday on the other side of the world. The doorbell app on my phone chimes, hinting at the social media within whose hideousness has inflamed everyone’s Main Character Syndrome (including my own). An ocean of infinite churning conversation, people announcing their comings and goings in emerging internet dialects. (Did a thing. Finna. V sus. Honey, wake up. New reply-slang just dropped.)
Late night thought 3:
Down the rabbit hole with Fred Astaire. A late-night blue-light binge against my better judgement. But grey matter that thinks it's starving needs fed. Wikipedia says Fred worked his ass off on his dancing and didn't party with the rest of Hollywood. He loved his lawfully wedded sweetheart, played the drums and learned how to skateboard instead. (Another person who would be in the League of Good Dudes would be Dee Snider.)
Late night thought 4:
Down the rabbit hole with trummerfilms. Und über uns der Himmel, Film ohne Titel, In jenen Tagen. Life among the rubble and the aesthetics of desolation, statelessness and despair. But also a new beginning? Some fevers need to break (hard) before things can get better. (Wonder what a trummerfilm would look like today.)
Late night thought 5:
Matthew Sweet's recent stroke seems to have left him extremely physically compromised. I've never been much of a MS fan, but his most recent statement is gutting:
I’ve lived through the day where I realized I may never play guitar again, I’ve lived through the day where I realized I may never draw a straight line again or enjoy the pasttime that developed over just the last year of my life, painting with fountain pens and coloring with dip pens and ink.
I understand now what it means to need to reinvent oneself, when the self you knew before is gone, you have no other choice, you either quit or you keep going and so I feel I must keep going, and I feel a great burden to do so with such incredible support that you, many of whom I do not know, have given me.
I must just say thank you to you for giving me this help. This hope I cannot feel whether I could have had on my own. I will try to make music. I will try to. I will try to make art. I will try to express myself, because that is all I have ever known and all that has ever brought me joy, throughout a life filled with more sadness than anyone could know what to do with, than any of us know what to do with, and that’s life.
May you all today find a glimmer of hope and love and a future to strive toward the way you have helped me find it, every one of you.
This is what keeps me up at night - that it's a matter of time now, and I'll be incapacitated before I get everything out. But that's how it always is, isn't it? There's so much more to do, and you always seem to have one more in you.
Godspeed, Matthew Sweet.
Life is what happens in the space between things.
A gasp between two sleeps.
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Substack coming soon...
What I’m reading: Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich (Harald Jähner)
What I'm listening to: My Brutal Life (The Black Dog)
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