Slow burners
on relocating the self and cosmic familiarity
I got off work and raced downtown and by raced I mean crawled in evening rush hour traffic. Somehow by the grace of the parking gods, I found a spot right away. I sat there decompressing and listening to songs I heard at work that I had never heard before. Then Katie pulled up next to me and threw some tacos in my window. She went to go park her car and I inhaled them because I was so hungry and felt like I was in a rush even though we had plenty of time.
Where does the sense of urgency I constantly feel come from? The longer I live here, the more I feel that part of me sloughing off. I started relieving the pressure that builds from expectations by asking questions. Why do I feel like I need to write an essay every week? Who am I doing this for? Nothing matters! I say that in a way that is meant to liberate. I feel myself rewiring my brain as I make more of an effort to listen to albums I’ve never listened to during those long minutes spent crawling down the freeway. I don’t skip the songs that don’t hit because not everything has to hit right away. Some things are a slow burn. They have to be. Could you imagine actually having to absorb everything at the same speed, all at once? You’d die.
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I’ve been enjoying going to Echo Park Lake and lying on my stomach in the grass as a way to orient my gut with the earth. I am trying to live life more sensually. Not in a sexual way, just in a way that is tuned in to subtle details. Like the things Adrianne Lenker sings about––filling up the sink with dishes and letting them air dry, waiting for the wind's permission. I’ve always been curious about the songs that are stuck in my head when I wake up in the morning, so I started keeping a list. ‘Opaline’ is a repeat offender. Sometimes it’s a song I was listening to the day before, other times it was mined by whatever force summons memories I didn’t know I still had. Either way, I’m committing myself to an ongoing, lifelong project and that feels good.
Ty sent me a mix of his Favorite Songs of All Time Vol. 1, another ongoing, lifelong project, starting with a Sparklehorse song. The next day a different Sparklehorse song came on at work. I put ‘You Have Been Disconnected’ on my mix of My Favorite Songs of All Time, Vol. 1. I relocate myself while adding songs. I’m so relieved to find myself still there, I’m just over here now. I am reminded of when I was a kid, just getting into music and buying 99 cent songs off iTunes or ruining the family computer with Limewire downloads. It wasn’t until recently that I realised I’ve been listening to music with my hands over my ears for the last few years, only hearing muffled versions of songs, very rarely experiencing a new song enough for it to get through in a way that moved me––the way I have always experienced music. I don’t know why. Maybe it was a backwards form of self-preservation.
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It’s been 20 minutes and I’m starting to worry about Katie so I call her. ‘It’s not looking good,’ she says. She pulls up next to me again and I hop in her car. ‘It’s ok we still have plenty of time. They don’t go on until 9.’ We drive around downtown, entering a torturous feedback loop for 30 minutes. Right before reaching the point of desperation (illegally parking in a McDonald’s parking lot) we shimmy into a spot so tight a Topo Chico bottle won’t even fit between the front of her car and the back of the car in front of us. We speed walk to the venue and arrive just in time for Slow Pulp’s first song. The rushing feeling I had for the last hour subsides and I relax into the familiar state of comfort I feel in a crowd at a show.
Brandon finds us at the bar and takes us up to the balcony. The three of us watch Slow Pulp together and I feel a sense of pride for my friends who have been working so hard for so long on the thing they are so passionate about. It feels like a million years have passed since the first time we met in a hot, sweaty basement in Madison, Wisconsin but our relationships with each other remain timeless. Whatever that sensation is, it’s one of my favorites. It’s an internal feeling of home. It’s home in people. I am continually baffled by the sensation of meeting someone new and feeling like I have known them forever. It doesn’t happen often but when it does, I listen. It’s a feeling of familiarity that goes beyond the actual definition of familiarity. Like cosmic familiarity or something you inherit from a past life.
These cosmically familiar people are the ones who leave me curious and energised and all around stoked. They are the ones who placed their hands over mine, gently removing them from my ears when I didn’t even know I was covering them. They are the Real Ones. I ask Chance if we can listen to ‘Monitor’ at some point during our shift. When he queues it up, we swig back Underbergs with a few regulars. I love the way the herbal bitters burn in my mouth, trickling down my throat, my chest, into my stomach. It feels like a healthy burn. A slow burn, nonetheless.
October 2023