Characterizing my pop culture habits involves characterizing the people I am spending time with. It’s always been this way.
2013 –
This was me hanging on while everything I’d known previously crumbled around me. My friend circles, my life path, my family, my kid friends. 2013 was a fucking terrible year. Let’s get a beer and I’ll talk to you about it sometime.
That being said, it was also a freakishly magical year. I started a farm. There’s another place to read about that. But it was hard, and beautiful, and totally surreal, and now I have a business and a career and a lifestyle that is starting to reflect what I want in this world. It’s such a blessing, and a challenge, and I never stop waking up amazed at what is growing around me.
I moved home and was living in my childhood bedroom. I was getting ditched by someone I thought would be a co-pilot on this venture (someone who could sight-read piano music but also only wanted to listen to Robyn and, well, ugh), and then seeing a guy who really, really loved the Dead. Do I need to say that I spent a lot of that year smoking pot?
I listened to the Mountain Goats when I was by myself and listened to nothing else in the meantime. I went to California and saw John Darnielle on an airport platform and almost jumped off the transit bus in my excitement. I explored the world of the Craigslist casual encounter. I saw Francesca Lia Block read in Studio City, and she signed a book for my friend, Sara, which had a post-it note on the inside cover that read “To Sarah” when we opened it. Someone I used to really love died unexpectedly and I started to re-believe in ghosts and earth-magic – thoughts and feelings I’d extinguished when I went off to college to start a new, extroverted life.
I worked at a health food store where the owner would tip me in drugs and we listened to the Cure and Bowie and some old punk mix CDs he’d make in a stupor while his wife was dying of cancer. I worked on a dairy owned and managed by Pennsylvania conservatives who hated Obama more vehemently than anyone I’d met before, and we jumped between the local classic rock station and the local country station. I had a casette player in my first pick-up truck, and nothing else. I listened to the Stand By Me soundtrack, the radio, and a Billy Idol greatest hits that has since disappeared.
One of my last really sturdy moments from this time period, besides the redemption of two weeks on the West Coast, wandering and camping and Joshua Tree and spending time with my sister, was a college friend wedding where I got hammered and danced with my old friends. Two of us almost got arrested in my dad’s pickup truck, and a lot of pizza was eaten. We screamed the Downtown Struts as it blew through the stereo.
2014 –
Things settled, a little. I jumped head-first into a world of metaphysics with some new adult friends. I meditated more.
I spent a lot of time contemplating things, and probably being generally insufferable and unaware to the people around me.
I listened to this a lot at night.
I met someone who played guitar and talked to strangers and made me completely unafraid of walking up to people I didn’t know. He was a mess – living in a bedbug flat with no mattress – but he gave me Cloud Atlas, and he gave me the thought of music back A good friend – someone I’d gone to shows with and shot guns with and spent a lot of time drinking with – installed a CD player in my truck so I wouldn’t go mad.
I got the Killers back, and the Hold Steady, and the Goats. I tried to care about the Mars Volta more, and new Coheed, but it never stuck. I started hanging out at house shows and at Ortlieb’s and Bourbon and Branch, and I fell hard for Mo Lowda and the Humble.
I was in Philly twice a week, cleaning up a lot in Northeast Philly with one of the best friends I’d thought I’d lost, and burning out with 4am drive times out of the city to get back to work. My carbon footprint here was inexcusable, but I made friends with baristas and stand customers and had dinner with random people I walked into sushi places with.
I went to New York to see an old acquaintance play in his band, PigPen Theatre Company. I cried. I loved it. Live music has always made me cry, but it had been awhile.
And after I moved into my own house, into a sleeping bag in my living room as we ripped and painted, I would fall asleep at night with Cloud Atlas or Men Who Stare at Goats on repeat on my laptop, because I was terrified of being there alone. I would paint the walls for as long as possible, listening to Vampire Weekend’s Modern Vampires of the City and singing “Hannah Hunt” over and over again at the top of my lungs.
2015 – Things fell apart and came back together. The farm continued to grow. Halfway through this year I realized I could not sustain this way, and cut one, than both of the Philly markets.
I went to a friend’s wedding in Port Jervis, back where I was a farm intern, and slept in the back of my truck in a cemetery parking lot. We danced in the rain, and I was excited for a new season to begin.
The guitar player waltzed out of the scene and I met a local, single dad. He was not interested in my music. He listened to the Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat when he wanted to wax nostalgic, and he listened to ’80s music the rest of the time. We would drive to Easton to a smokers bar when an ’80s DJ played, and I would slowly drink a couple beers while he danced in his white, tight pants with groups of grunge kids. The Lehigh Valley is an odd place. Never had or have I consumed so much Madonna.
But he read. We read Stephen King and in the evenings he’d read James Howard Kunstler books out loud in bed, and we’d wind ourselves up about the dystopian future and unstainability mounting around us. I read Sex at Dawn and dreamed about polyamory as a real method of relationship.
And he watched movies. All movies. I got my first real love of the Marvel trends from him (though he would critique the movies against his memories of the comics and then fall asleep in the theater), and I watched everything from The Bridges of Madison County to Weird Science.
I want to say I listened to music this year. But I didn’t. Not really. I went to one Mountains Goat show. I had a new friend working at the farm next door who would keep me level, but otherwise I was just, again, smoking a lot of pot and fretting about the end of the world.
I went backpacking in Costa Rica for five weeks. I saw the first new Star Wars movie in a movie theater in the biggest mall in Central America, alone, and I met a lot of European and Israeli kids. I kissed a hostel worker and got even braver about being alone. None of us talked about music.
2016 – I went to my first festival. My boyfriend’s friends were veterans of Burn festivals, and I submitted a proposal for an art grant and spent the weekend learning about dance tents with my 40-foot herb labyrinth in tow. People loved it. I loved it. I was shy and nervous and not as STAND-OUT as some of the folks at these things, but I had fun. And I danced. I didn’t realize I had missed dancing until I was there.
His kids loved radio pop. After we split up, I took his daughter to see Idina Menzel because I wanted to go, and I cried through most of the set. Those Rent songs just get me so hard.
I saw Rogue One in theaters. And then I saw it again. And again. And again. It had been years since something like that grabbed me at the movies – since Lord of the Rings, to be honest – and it grabbed me hard. I got comfortable going to the movies by myself again (something I started to do in 2013).
I want to say I started to listen to music again. But I didn’t. Not here. Not yet.
2017 – I saw Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume Two four times, three by myself. I started working in the field while listening to the movie soundtracks, and it made me happier than anything had in years.
I opened a store. It was hard and challenging, but it was the right thing. Someone I had been imagining (in this very space), since 2013.
I met new friends. Some of them even listened to music. I started to breathe, a little.
I went on a date with a boy who didn’t care so much about music, but could quote the Lord of the Rings movies the way I could, who also thought Interstellar was one of the best movies of our lifetime, and who watched anime. He also grew plants. He didn’t mind my music, or that I wanted to go out and see people when he wanted to play video games. He built me a safe space.
2018 – The store grew into a store. I grew into a person who could see my friends again. My friends grew with my customer base, with my growing extroverted goals, with my calming of my manic farm stature. I got ordained on the Internet and officiated the wedding of two of my best friends – one of whom got me to care about music in the first place, back when we were teenagers.
The boyfriend came with, and we spent the drive to Georgia and back talking instead of listening to music. Playing as fake radio djs, talking about growing up. We watch Sword Art Online and Marvel movies and Sherlock and cooking shows, and LOTR or Community marathons whenever one of us is having a bad day. We argue about the irrelevance of linear time in Arrival versus Interstellar, and he’s still wrong, but it’s the only time we’ve really argued about anything. I think that’s a pretty reasonable track record.
I saw the Hold Steady with old friends and woke up on a couch, wondering why I had spent so much time away.
https://holdsteady.bandcamp.com/album/live-in-philadelphia-7-26-18
2019 – And here we are.
A friend asked my opinion of his Top 5 emo bands in the last five years, and I had to dive into some subreddits to investigate further. I’d heard of none of the bands on the list, and only two of the bands in the threads. I really loved the yelling harmonies in The Yunahon Mixtape – it reminded me of all the things I loved about that first Brand New album, so many years ago. I’m not sure how I feel about Goodness by The Hotelier. A little whiny for my tastes, maybe. But I have a list of about 20 bands to get through, and there’s snow all around, and I couldn’t be more excited.
The Garbage Man and the Ambulance 