Mirror
8/26/2024
Don't look at yourself for too long.
You start to look different. Distorted.
What's left of you is fractured and skewed.
Sometimes I feel pretty.
Try to remember that feeling.
The laundromat dried me out today. It was packed, the AC was broken, and the roaches were crawling out of the walls, finding any basket they could hitch a ride home in.
I overheard two guys next to me talking in spanish. The conversation got pretty deep. The two strangers didn't even know each other, but it somehow led to one of them telling the other that their dad was murdered when they were two.
Afterward, I went to grab cat food and a new blanket. I have been so bored lately, but I can't really do much with this heat. It's September at least, so let's hope for less humid days.
Don't look at yourself for too long.
You start to look different. Distorted.
What's left of you is fractured and skewed.
Sometimes I feel pretty.
Try to remember that feeling.
Welp. My tablet has been causing issues... I can still draw on it but, the shortcut keys are messed up and keep activating to the point I can't use my computer until I unplug my tablet. I'll have to save up for a new one.
In other news I sent over my film to be developed (exciting!). I'm also trying to save up to develop at home. So now I'm kind of in that waiting around phase.
I've wanted to share a song I recorded back in January. When I had Covid it seriously fucked me up. My throat felt like I was swallowing glass. I couldn't even tell if I was awake most of the time. I even fainted in the bathroom, hitting my head on the floor. When I recovered, for months I couldn't remember much of anything. I was even having trouble remembering names of people I knew. It was terrifying. I think my brain is better now. Things came back to me. So I wrote this song...
Here is Remember.
I recorded and mixed this, the drums are just fpc drums on FL studio. I think for the bass I recorded my guitar.
Found a really cool documentary about one of my favortie artists Bob Vielma!
I wanna gush about how cool Brett Koehn edited this video and how much Shinobu and Fuss mean to me, but I'm so exhausted...
Please watch this!
It's not fair, time travel only works when I get lost listening to a song.
I want to listen to this song again.
I'll put it on repeat.
Breaks almost over.
I'm so tired, I could sleep for a day.
I could do anything but go back inside.
It's that time of the year again when I start to think my house will finally collapse onto me.
The cracks are starting to expand. It's leaky, Its scary, and I live in THE hurricane state.
Do I fade away instantly when it all crumbles? Do my neighbors find me as nothing but a snack for the birds?
I hope the droppings eventually bloom into some flowers or something.
I should bitch at my landlord more to fix this. I got model kits to build, and Elden Ring to play this weekend.
Lately the sun has been so bright; I can barely see the end of the streets when I bike.
I try to chase it. That light. Just hoping it leads to something better. Anything.
Instead, I'm always greeted by cracks, potholes, and a car that wants to kill me.
If I bike far enough, eventually I'll reach the lake away from everything. Surrounded by a blanket of trees, taller than I could ever be.
Suddenly. Peace.
Until I have to return.
I've been forgetting to draw after work recently. I'm not honestly sure why. I've just been kind of going home watching Street Fighter 6 streams.
I got asked recently why I draw ghosts so much. It's a good question...They're simply just so easy to draw. I'm sure there is more than that... but I don't really think about it. I just draw them. I've always adored the concept of ghosts and how differently you can interpret them. It's very loose and interchangeable. If you asked me if I believed in them, I wouldn't know if I could answer that with certainty. I don't think I do, it'd just be too tragic to never die. Can you imagine being bound to this world even after death? (In a ghost voice) hell noOOooOOOoOOOo.
When I was young we had a school trip to St. Augustine. I was really hyped for it. I didn't really know what was gonna be there, I just was glad I didn't have to be in class for a day. It was a painfully long bus ride. I remember the seats felt so cramped. It felt like every student was going. The day before the trip a friend and I were hanging out around our neighborhood. There was this one house that looked empty. I don't know what it was but something made us stop there and look at the windows. Maybe it was the tall grass obscuring the house, or the way some of the windows didn't have curtains and all you could see was a formless void inside barely lit by the sunlight. The house was for sure abandoned, you could tell by the furniture left outside. It was inviting us to explore it. Before I could even get close to the entrance I remember being stopped by my friend as they pointed towards the window and we saw what looked like a ghostly figure. Two dark eyes and its mouth wide open. We ran. (I tried drawing it for the post. It looked kind of like this.) The next day was the trip, I'd just about forgotten about the events that preceded the day before. I was just so damn happy to have some fun. My friend must have felt the exact same way until we reached the gift shop. The gift shop had tons of goods, and I had a couple of dollars for some snacks. There was, however, a book about the ghosts that haunt the local spots in St. Augustine. I flipped through it in curiosity just to be shocked by what I saw. One of the ghosts in this book looked exactly like the one we saw the day before. When I showed my friend, we were both just silent.
I think about that day a lot. I know it for the most part, it was just a huge coincidence. My memory probably altered what I thought I saw in the book, but it's such a cool story to tell. I do have plenty of more bizarre encounters to tell. But those are actually real and dangerous, and they scare me way more than a ghost could ever.
Death is not something meaningless to me. It's the eternal sleep we all deserve. Our tired bodies, exhausted from the destruction of our species, and the animals we bring down with it.
Still, you must live. You must live a life full of meaning and friendship.
That big sleep will be all the more worth it.
Well... I'm on the last leg of my Twenties. Next year I'll be the big 3 0. Have I done much with my now 29 years of experience? I'd like to think so.
I still feel like nothing's really changed. Except for back pain, the bladder problems, the cost of life — heh. I guess things really have changed.
I still got my friends though. We don't hang out as much as we'd like, but we still keep in touch. We still play games together whenever we can. We're still figuring out life, but now we're at the point where things are finally 'slowing' down. Puzzle pieces are falling into place. Even if we're still just blindly walking one foot forward at a time.
It's really hard for me to think where the hell I'm gonna be in the next five to ten-- hell two years. I don't really see a future anymore. I don't mean that in a morbid or nihilistic sense. I just honestly don't know what's going to happen anymore. I'm happy right now. Comfortable. But I'm always asking myself how long will this last?
Then again, I felt this way when I was just turning 21. I was working this really awful job. It involved cleaning alot of clothes smothered in blood, scum, and expired food. After the linen was clean, I'd be sent to cart duty. I would often wipe down these carts and see these globs of blood and shit and just think "Is this really gonna be the rest of my life?"
Luckily, It wasn't. One day I just left.
I realized its okay to just leave shit behind when its destroying you mentally. Things always manage to kind of figure themselves out. And they did.
I think I lost what the point of this post was supposed to be. We old people like to go off about the good ol days...
Happy Birthday to me, and hopefully I'll figure things out when I turn 39.
I went to the local music store after work today. There are two things I really suck at.
Lucky for me though, they Re-string for free as long as you buy the strings. My acoustic guitar was a wreck.
It really needed some care. I haven't really touched it since the string broke on me. It's just been sitting
around as my fancy Mexican tele steals all the attention. You don't really notice the wear and tear your guitar goes through
until you bring it into a shop filled with shiny new guitars.
Theres no dust plastered on the crevices you can't reach. No scratches from all the countless times you strummed. They're all just perfect.
I don't think anyone has the time or money to polish their instrument like that. Yet I still apologized when I handed my dirty, gunky guitar.
The man who restrung my guitar didn't even make a comment. He was just happy to help. He even complimented the wood my guitar had.
He said it would bring a brighter tone with the strings I picked out. He told me it'd take a bit, and to feel free to try out the guitars on the walls.
Gulp.
Listen. I can play guitar... But I CAN'T play guitar.
I cannot noodle around and make pretty sounds like the other customers around me can... But there was a really cool guitar there... So I couldn't resist.
I took it to the farthest corner and played it real quietly to myself. I didn't want anyone to hear me. Not that anyone would really care. I just didn't want to be a bother.
I think it's been about four years since I bought my first guitar. Maybe it was five...? I'm not really sure. I got it from the pawnshop.
It sounded amazing. I purchased it as sort of a late gift to the child I once was. He always wanted to play an instrument
(specifically the drums... :> but as an adult with roommates. You have to compromise somewhere.) It took me
about a year to really learn the language of music and guitar. I watched tutorials on youtube, but got bored. REALLY REALLY BORED...
It was really hard to focus on something I just couldn't really grasp. It was all too alien to me, and everyone had their own mythos
and rules on what it is to be a guitarist. so I decided to learn my own way. I watched tons of live performances of my favorite bands.
I watched where their fingers landed, how they held their guitar, and how much of the song was barre chords. Now that was fun. Combining that
with all the boring stuff made practicing guitar very fun. I was learning the literature while also seeing the rules being bent by the live
preformances.
After about of year of that, it was my turn to create something. I listened to so many of my influences during the writing process.
I knew what I wanted to make, even though I struggled to write it down. I used a program called tabIt. It was recommended by the main
composer of the band Invalids. It's a nifty program that turns your tablature into MIDI files so you can hear what you're writing.
To be honest though, I only used it once. I found just recording riffs on my phone to be much easier since inspiration would hit me randomly.
Speaking of the recording process... Actually. Let's not do that right now. (Maybe in a future post or something. Just know it was a PROCESS.)
My first song I dubbed "wardrobe" was something I was really proud of. In retrospect, I noticed it was sort of a rip-off of the Kudrow song
"Brooklyn pool". I didn't do it on purpose. In fact, I didn't even notice I was subconsciously making it that way until just a few months ago.
I think I was just really digging that song so much that I wanted to make a sequel. I was very proud of that song when I first made it. I even made a cool little solo for it.
Could I listen to it now and share the same feeling? Probably not... but thats okay. That's just the curse of the artist. I hear every mistake
in that song. The lyrics are terrible. I only added them last minute due to the fact that I didn't think my friends would listen to an
instrumental. It was my first song, and I'll cherish every little piece about it. It is the first step in learning how to make more songs.
Embrace your mistakes, embrace your first songs.
Now I'll share that song with you guys..........
Sike.
Instead, I'll just show you a more recent song I made that I do like. You can find that first song yourself. Just don't talk to me about it.
Here is Thursday.
Bass was done by a good friend of mine Jason. Thanks Jason.