This song almost made it into the summer rotation, but it just wasn’t anywhere near coquette enough for the occasion. It exists, instead, here, in the early fall, when the breeze can still feel like summer, the sun still warms like August, and hope still kindles as if it has some sort of business being here. This is ‘Daytona Sand’ by Orville Peck – and it’s less about the message and lyrics than it is about the atmosphere and music; it makes me want to hastily pack a bag, hop in the car, drive somewhere – anywhere – and fuck all the way off. That’s the current frame of my mind – and it’s not good.
Buddy, we got major blues
Another suitcase in your hand
I hope you brought your walking shoes
‘Cause it’s quite a ways, from what I understand
Something’s not right. I feel it in the agitated way the slightest bothers set me off, how they bring tears to my eyes out of sheer frustration and exasperation. I’m usually good, at this point in my life, about not reaching exasperation; lately that’s been my baseline. If you start out there, it will only and always end badly. That’s where the sirens come in, that’s where blood is spilt, that’s where you cross the lines you can’t uncross.
It’s in the unreasonable annoyance I feel for every small petty setback, every mistake the world makes, and my reactions, blown entirely out of proportion for what is remotely appropriate, are telling me that something is wrong.
I’m not mad, for what it’s worth…
This is something that has been building over the years – all of the years – and it goes back decades. Decades of holding my tongue and holding it all in – and as much as I may have seemed to reveal in these pages, there is simply more that has happened than can ever be put forth here or anywhere. The great burdens of our histories are what we carry with us every day, mostly in silence and quiet, and it’s very difficult to genuinely drop it and let it go. The more evolved and well-adjusted may get it all out as it comes up, wisely letting out steam in little puffs along the way. Those of us who try to be strong or stoic or simply fucking stupid try to keep it bottled up until it passes – knowing full well it will never pass until addressed, acknowledged, and, dream of dreams, reconciled.
So I look back, all the way back, even further back than this photo I found in a trove of photo albums that recently came back into my possession; my mother can’t store them anymore, her home being too filled with my brother’s stuff. They’re mostly pictures of me in my vain years, when I was channeling Norma Desmond and Madonna and playing around with friends who embraced me unconditionally – the friends you turn to when your family refuses to understand. In binders meticulously labeled by month and year, I open the pages and travel back in time, and most of it pales in comparison to how I so vividly remember it. I should probably just burn them – a bonfire of the vanity – or toss a few in the garbage bin every week until they’ve all disappeared: an attempt at eradicating the past, because I’m tired of remembering.
I’m getting tired of this earth
But they say some stones are better left unturned…
