OR…
What we talk about when we talk about “vibes”
Remember when I said I would keep the long personal essays to a minimum? I lied – just for fun.
Because the last thing I wrote was never intended to be a “David Lynch tribute”, and only became one at the 11th hour under the saddest of circumstances, I still had a whole bunch of thoughts tangentially related to Lynch lying around.
I started exploring those threads, and before I knew it, the Perverts essay had spawned a Twin Peaks sister. Think of them as companion pieces or two sides of the same coin. Much like the last one, this piece is also “about” 17 other things besides just Twin Peaks, but as my dear friend Lily put it in a text the other day:
“The thing is that if you're not making something about everything are you really making it about anything at all?”
You can read these essays in either order – or independently of each other entirely – but I think if you read both you'll see that they’re works in dialogue with each other. This one was originally intended to be at least a little shorter, but as you can see by the estimated read time: they really are twins.
So no long preamble this time. Let’s just get right into it.
Trigger warning: discussion of suicide and suicidal ideation
I am going to describe for you a video that I have watched many times. If you’re anything like me, you have every second of this video memorized. The above meme just recalled the entire thing in your brain.
But in case you’re new:
Angelo Badalamenti is in his house. He is being interviewed for a 2007 documentary called Secrets From Another Place, one of many behind the scenes looks at the creation of Twin Peaks. Angelo sits down in front of a keyboard, the very same old “kinda beat up Fender Rhodes” that he used to compose the themes of Twin Peaks. He is describing how he and David Lynch worked together, specifically telling the story of how the most iconic piece of music from the TV show was written: “And David would sit right over here, right to the right of me. And we would put a little cassette, just about over here on the keyboard; just keeping it recording… David would sit here, and I’d say: ‘well, what do you see David. Just talk to me’”
Angelo begins to tell us what David saw. And he begins to play “Laura Palmer’s Theme”. He plays those low, moody chords – just like he did the day they wrote this music together for the first time. Seer and Interpreter, sitting together at the piano bench.
To start the hyperbole and clichés early, what happens next is one of the most powerful testaments to human creativity I have ever seen or heard. If you somehow have avoided watching this video before: Do yourself a favor and experience the magic for yourself. Whether you’ve never seen the show, or if you’re seen the show and this video countless times. Every time I watch this clip, it’s like it’s new again:
Ok, Angelo. We’re in a dark woods now… and there’s a soft wind blowing through some sycamore trees… and there’s a moon out, and some animal sounds in the background… And you can hear the hoot of an owl. And you’re in the dark woods… just get me into that beautiful darkness, with a soft wind.
And i started playing –
There are two words that have haunted me for a long time as someone writing about and thinking about art. Two love-hate relationships wrapped up in 4 letters that I constantly see on the internet.
Before I can talk about what I think is so special about Twin Peaks – and what is so special about that video of Angelo specifically – I want examine the modern function of these two words:
“Vibe”,
And
“Mood”.
I imagine I’m not alone in this complicated relationship. “Vibe” and “mood” have largely replaced “genre” as the pre-eminent categories by which culture is sorted and the results have been… mixed, at best. In music, this shift away from “genre” was pitched as a rejection of the rigidity and race-based origins inherent to these categories. This double standard of genre has correctly been identified as outdated — the kind of racialized thinking that leads to coining ironic punchline genres like Yacht Rock, Blue-Eyed Soul, and PbR RnB whenever white artists interpolate black influences. Or conversely, the tired trend of music writers calling any black person who sings pretty “RnB” regardless of whether that really makes sense as a descriptor for the music at hand. Nowadays, the more subjective “moods” and “vibes” as well as a new trend of “genre-fluidity”or “post-genre” aim to allow music to transcend these problems… or so some believed.
On an episode of the excellent No Tags Podcast (hello fellow Taginistas), hosts Tom Lea and Chal Ravens interviewed Dr. Robin James — a “philosopher of sound studies” who they cheekily describe as a “Vibes Philosopher” — and she debunked this idea that “vibes” were somehow less racist or immune to the negative influence of pure capitalism. You should listen to the whole conversation or read the transcription if you prefer, but here’s the most relevant part:
Chal Ravens: The idea of vibe is quite central to dance music in particular, and I know that you are a dance music fan. Because it's not just about music – dance music is about the space and the general atmosphere and the people that you bump into, maybe the effect that substances are having on people. There are so many things that create a vibe. We're also living in a sort of vibe-based time – we've just gone through a vibe shift, apparently. A lot of memes are about vibe: no thoughts, just vibes. And I find myself saying it all the time. So when did you first start thinking about vibes as a philosopher?
Robin James: I was really interested in streaming service playlists that were curated on the basis of vibe or mood rather than genre, and the way that people at the streaming services talked about vibe as somehow superior to genre as a category. Because “genre” as we know it today was basically invented by the record industry as a way to sell the same music to different race-based market segments. There was hillbilly music and race music, and it would often be the same song performed in two different styles, sold to two different audience segments. So there's this deep sense, and correct sense, that genre is tied to identity in a really central way in the music industry.
A lot of the thinking around vibe or mood as a musical category is like, classifying people and music by race is bad; vibes don’t do that; therefore, vibes are better. So I was interested in studying how these vibes-based playlists are actually put together. Do they actually transcend things like race and gender? No. [Laughs]
For example, if you look at Spotify's two flagship genreless playlists, Pollen and Lorem. Pollen, if you think about it, kind of says it in the name – pollen is literally male plant DNA, right? And it's very explicitly contrasted to Lorem, which features a lot of indie-based [music] – think Billie Eilish, SZA; kind of softer, more mellow, but more indie. That's definitely oriented at women. Whereas Pollen is more lo-fi hip-hop and features predominantly male artists. Programmers at Spotify claimed that vibes are not as tied to identity as genres are, yet these vibes-based playlists are creating similar race and gender breakdowns that you would see in pop or rock or hip-hop. So that's what first got me interested in this idea of vibe as a musical category.
When used in the context of an algorithmic playlist, “vibe” and “mood” hand over to computers the work of identifying nuances that only humans can comprehend, and as a result can be just as biased or limiting as “genre”, if not more.
When that bug is turned into a feature by growth-obsessed psychopathic leadership, this means that Spotify not only fails to introduce you to new things: but in fact it deliberately makes sure that it DOESN’T play you something it thinks you’d love. That would disrupt the mindless use.
This is why, across genres and audiences, taste is skewing blander and milder. Streaming is rewarding music for “go girl giving us nothing”, for resembling the last song just enough to make sure you stay productive at work but not so much that it makes you think “who made this?” Instead, it plays whatever is least likely to make you look at your phone and see what’s playing. Neither upset nor truly satisfied. Mostly kinda bored.
Make no mistake, I am not a retro-fetishist luddite. I believe in no utopian past that we’ve “lost” and no need to RETVRN. In examples where genuinely Cool shit was rewarded every once in a while (like Post-Nirvana feeding frenzy of the early 90s where bands like the Butthole Surfers were signing to a major label or the similar late 90s independent cinema boom), those brief epochs of Cool also came with exploitative business models and stodgy, past-their-prime gatekeepers who believed stuff like this:
But I also believe – based on anecdotal temperature taking, intuitive feelings, and plenty of actual hard evidence – that we are currently stuck in an era in which the powers that be are less successful at connecting good music with the people who would like it than perhaps ever before. The reason that major labels are desperately chasing Tik Tok artists with “built-in followings” is because they are either too lazy to turn undiscovered talents into stars or have simply forgotten how to do it anymore. Without thriving arts journalism to point them in the right direction or actual personal taste to rely on – and without the pipelines of MTV and magazines to put rockstars directly in front of teenagers – the creative executive class flounders and begs someone else to do their work for them.
I also strongly believe that we have the power to change this status quo.
In every era of music history, it has been true that some large percentage of people engage with culture on a mostly passive basis, letting the radio or tv curate their entertainment for them. Yet lots of current young people, who in past decades would have caught the bug and become superfans, are either being turned into cultural zombies, or channeling ALL of that energy into one artist to unhealthy degrees. I meet people all the time that “don’t know” where to learn about what new music they should listen to, and while I give my recommendations – websites, finding friends who understand what you like, forums, lists – I also feel empathy for why those solutions can feel more difficult to approach when you’ve gotten used to passive consumption habits.
Whenever I open a streaming platform, I experience this now commonly observed “decision paralysis” created by digital media. That feeling where nothing looks like the thing you really want to watch but paradoxically there are also too many things that look "good enough". Staring at a watchlist for 20 minutes and watching none of it before going to bed.
It can be easy to write off people trapped inside the belly of this machine as “incurious” or worse, but for every person who doesn't really care and would have listened to top 40 radio in the past, there are would-be music fans that now merely get by on whatever methadone culture they are offered, with not enough free time to dig for the good stuff. It’s hard to take art seriously in a time when it has been so systematically devalued, but as the DJ / producer Skee Mask put it in a recent RA profile - when you put so much thought and hard work into artistic craft, you have the potential to not only succeed on your own terms but also demonstrate for other people that “There's more potential and possibilities out there." You raise the ceiling for everyone and give the people what they need, without giving into the knee-jerk first instinct of what they think they want.
"Every time people hold their phones [up] with track titles of mine," Müller explained of fans hanging over the booth with requests, "all I think is there are 1,000 tracks that will work better in a club than one of mine which has, like, melancholic pads. I don't even have them on the stick."
What the success of someone like Skee Mask demonstrates, is that if you work hard enough at you craft while also staunchly committing to your values (he was an early innovator in abandoning Spotify altogether and his music is only available on sites like Bandcamp), you can burst the streaming world’s bubble and show artists and fans alike that there are wider worlds and more exciting things to discover out there. That DJing and albums and movies and art of all kinds can be this cool if you broaden your horizons beyond the walled gardens of Spotify and Netflix. Walled gardens that they want you to perceive as representing the entire world.
My own music taste and selection as a DJ got 100x more interesting when I started using Bandcamp and Discord servers to do my digging rather than trying to find needles in the Spotify haystack. Likewise for getting a library card and Criterion channel subscription instead of watching Amazon Prime or Netflix’s selection of movies that only goes as far back as 1973 — erasing entire centuries of American and world cinema from our vision. The problem with treating these services like the whole world is that so much vital history not contained within their walls ceases to exist in our perception, and whatever history these services maintain can disappear at a moment’s notice.
Part of the problem is that we are relying on algorithms and hard data to “tell us what people want”, but the rot goes deeper than that. Not only is Spotify’s “don’t rock the boat” algorithm rewarding bland music that sounds like it was made with AI, but Spotify is also commissioning AI music themselves and calling it “perfect fit content”. “Content” that is then guzzled down throats and fed into our matrix pods through tubes labeled things like “Big Mood”, “Chill Mix”, “IRL Angel”, and “my life is a movie” – all interspersed with just enough real artists to make it seem believable as “curation”. It’s bad enough that artists are paid fractions of fractions of pennies while cheaper to license “content” like audiobooks and podcasts are prioritized, but on top of that they also have to compete with a flood of music no one will ever remember making or even listening to. Ghost songs without a soul attached. It can feel completely hopeless trying to stand out as signals in this sea of noise. Thus, struggling artists strive to create art like robots to impress their robot bosses; sanding down all edges in order to please the sacred math.
This is not a crackpot conspiracy, this is literally what streaming executives talk about as the explicit goal of their enterprise – to have “listening to Spotify” replace “listening to music” the way “Kleenex” became the word for things we blow our nose with or “watching Netflix” replaced “watching TV”. You can see the knock-on effect everywhere you look in our streaming-dominated musical landscape: where Benson Boone is billed insanely high on the Coachella lineup and doing backflips at the Grammys, nominated alongside other artists like Raye who (credit to The Watch’s Andy Greenwald for this burn) sound like what the algorithm plays after the Amy Winehouse song you really like.
So when this placeholder anti-culture is combined with the hollowing out and intentional knee-capping of a press that could serve to educate, this leads to an environment where kids – who are still receptive to cool shit – only hear the good stuff if it happens to fall into their lap via robot assistants that are wrong 80%-90% of the time. An environment where those same kids say they can’t swap Tik Tok out for youtube or other music discovery platforms because they “don’t know what to look up”. Human recommendations have been replaced by lifeless alien walls that we talk at with no response. Mirrors and placebos. Simulacrum and simulation.
You can call this baseless speculation or cherry picking for confirmation bias, but I know this is happening because it has happened to me. Despite being someone who is probably in the top 1% of how much a person can irrationally care about what music they choose to listen to, I feel streaming leech away at my enjoyment of art. No matter how much work I do to try to deliberately curate my experience within these apps, there’s something about all this digital ephemerality that makes me feel discontent and disconnected.
Spotify is not a “music” company, it’s barely a “tech” company (if it is one, it’s a pretty shit tech product at best). Spotify is best understood as an advertising company, advertising you the idea of music, or simply “audio”, for a monthly fee. It is a placeholder. An IOU check, that lets you feel like you’ve skimmed the surface of “everything” without having anything that is actually yours to own.
It’s something that Jeremy Larson articulated well in his essay “The Woes Of Being Addicted to a Streaming Service”:
“Even though it has all the music I’ve ever wanted, none of it feels necessarily rewarding, emotional, or personal. I pay a nominal fee for this privilege, knowing that essentially none of it will reach the artists I am listening to. I have unfettered access to an abundance of songs I genuinely love, along with an abundance of great songs I’ve never heard before, but I can’t shake the eerie feeling that the options before me are almost too perfect. I have personalized my experience enough to feel like this is my music, but I know that’s not really true—it’s simply a fabricated reality meant to replace the random contours of life outside the app.”
In conclusion, Steve Albini was right about everything. Streaming services are not your friend. Mastercard is not your ally. Mood Machine by Liz Pelly in stores now. Etc.
Yet despite all of this Spotify-induced worrying, I also worry about throwing the baby out with the bathwater in deleting these co-opted words from our lexicon. “Vibe”. “Mood”. “Energy”. “Feeling”. Things that can be dismissed as hippy-dippy nonsense or just words trying to communicate the ineffable. If not worse in the hands of new age grifters or tech companies.
These words have been perverted beyond meaning, but I’m not gonna break down etymology today. Instead, I want to talk about what these words have become a corny and ill-defined placeholder for, and what we’re actually talking about when we talk about “Vibe”.
I want to attempt to talk about the feelings that I will never be able to properly articulate.
Because I’m me, the episode of the podcast Bandsplain in which host Yasi Salek and guest Meaghan Garvey discuss the music of Mazzy Star was a monumental event in my life (a pathetic sentence to type out, but it’s true). I said at the time that this episode was my Super Bowl, and I’ll say it again: this podcast was like listening to my two remaining braincells give a 3-hour press conference. I said “soooooo true” out loud to no one in particular at least 20 times. I felt Seen.
Despite frequently saying she doesn’t “know anything” (to refer to her lack of technical knowledge or music theory), Yasi is constantly making insightful points that make me think about my favorite artists in new ways – while also providing mountains of incredible research. And Meaghan is not just my favorite music writer, she’s one of my favorite writers full-stop. I almost hesitated writing more about Lynch after how hard she crushed this ode to Lynch’s Cigarette Cinema — a piece that tells a heartbreaking story through ellipsis and observed detail. Every time I read Meaghan it’s a humbling experience, and she doesn’t even need to be writing about my faves like David Lynch or Ethel Cain to knock me on my ass. She has made me cry reading profiles on artists like NBA Youngboy whose music I had no prior relationship to. As Yasi put it, if Meaghan “had a 400 page document [she] wrote about dust mites, I would be like ‘send it over, babe.’”
In the episode, they discuss the “eerie and unresolved” music of Mazzy Star in a way that I found incredibly refreshing. After spending ample time on the band’s formation and lore, along with hot gossip like Hope Sandoval dating Anthony Kiedis, the real “molten core” of the conversation that stuck with me was an idea the two of them tried to get at about what makes Mazzy Star so emotionally affecting, while also laying out why this stuff is so hard to describe.
It begins to crystallize when Yasi quotes a French music writer asking Mazzy Star the question “why are all your songs sad?”, and then reads back Hope’s answer:
“Not all our songs are sad, the ones that are because we felt that way at the time”, also noting that they sometimes write “happy” songs that make people sad for reasons she cannot explain. Her bandmate David rejects the question of whether Mazzy Star is happy or sad altogether: “I don’t care. We don't make music to be understood or misunderstood, our songs are just to be felt.”
As they try to define this sense of mystery, Meaghan gets on her soapbox:
“so much music writing – so much everything really – puts emphasis on the hero’s journey of a work of art, or like the personal narrative, the identity or whatever. And that’s all well and good but like isn’t there more to art than that? That can’t be so literally translated and is intangible. This is where we enter the realm of feeling and intuition –”
Yasi interrupts to suggest “the Feminine” and Meaghan excitedly yells back:
“and VIBES, and fucking VIBES. Things that can’t be translated into rational terms, and that’s where the magic is. The power of Mazzy Star is that they’re so staunchly positioned in this irrational world of feeling, and just refuse to translate it to the logical world”.
It’s easy to pick apart a band’s technique and musical style or parse their lyrics and personal history for clues of “meaning” – and I am not suggesting this practice has no value. I am deeply interested in form and technique and craft myself, and people can’t help but want to learn about the artists behind the art that they love. But what about the emotion the piece itself gives you, what about the lump that magically appears in your throat the second you hear Hope sing the lyric “I want to hold the hand inside you” on “Fade Into You”? What about that slide guitar and what it can do to your heartstrings? What about feelings that we have no words to describe?
In my humble opinion, a music writer’s job is to attempt to bridge this divide between feeling and understanding. To be able to inform those already tapped into technique and history about an artist’s soul and to guide those who already connect to the music with their heart context and knowledge in which to place their big feelings. To bridge the worlds of left brain and right brain, feminine and masculine, intuition and rationality. Poetry and science.
“Recorded music is a statue of a waterfall”
“A poem only barely says the thing halfway”
Phil Elverum (Mount Eerie) - Night Palace
“Words can’t really express everything a person feels. It’s like they’re too… feeble”
Andrei Tarkovski, Mirror
When my dad – a guy who watched some of Twin Peaks when it aired but is in no way, shape, or form a “David Lynch guy” – saw the many people who paid tribute to David Lynch upon his passing, he told me he liked reading the obituaries but sheepishly complained about how many “clichés” these writers all used in describing his work.
He was fair to point this out, but unfortunately for him – as often happens for members of my family – the had activated a trap card and prompted a classic Jackie rant™:
Forget “irony” and “sincerity” for a second; I think we are in an epidemic of postmodernist bullshit. I think that we are so hung up on subversion of “tropes” and chasing “meta”, “winking”, and “self-aware” that we have forgotten to say anything at all. I think that we run so far away from “cliché”, “hyperbole”, and anything “corny” that we constantly signal to the audience that it’s safe to not take this seriously. We encourage them to do so.
I’m still a sucker for some Charlie Kaufman self-reflexive cleverness and meta storytelling when it’s done well; but “clichés” – defined as “a phrase or opinion that is overused and betrays a lack of original thought” – are often done a great disservice by their worst examples. We have spent so much time talking and thinking about “storytelling” that we have stopped telling stories.
Everything is a Deadpool deconstruction, like the obnoxious parts of the French new wave and bottom of the barrel American blockbuster slop had an ugly baby. PR-tinged music writing lazily connects personal story to didactic instagram caption as lyrics songwriting. Characters announce their actions with clunky dialogue so that you don’t have to look up from your multitasking to see the muddy lighting that was intentionally chosen so that other people can watch on their phones. Everything is Told, and not Shown.
[side-note: you can read a lot more about how streaming is also ruining movies in Will Tavin’s incisive essay Casual Viewing].
Not all clichés and tropes are built the same - they are often well-worn crutches abused by lazy writers, sometimes betraying regressive or overly simplistic views of the world. But some clichés are only guilty of being our agreed upon placeholders, vessels in service of some higher purpose. They exist because life is so strange and so vast that we have tasked single words or phrases to represent incredibly complex concepts.
Sometimes feelings are more than we can describe in language.
Yet we still must pick one unfortunate phrase to try to bear that massive burden. As few as four letters are all given to contain a concept like “love”, or “hate”. These words can be abused and overused such that their meaning becomes mushy and corrupted. Exploited and ignored.
Words like “God”, or “Life”, or “Death”.
“Soul”, and “Poetry”, and “Mystery”
“Loss”, “Trauma”, “Regret”
“Melancholy”, “Ethereal”, “Cinematic”
“Mise en scène”, “Je ne sais quoi”, “Fucking VIBES”
Even the word “ineffable” is itself a series of letters given the Sisyphean task of trying to define the very idea of not having words for something.
Clichés exist because on some deep elemental level they are true, or true enough to communicate something real that we otherwise struggle to pin down. They become trite or corny only when we take that truth for granted. Things like “love conquers all”. “Do unto others”. “The heart wants what it wants”.
Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE opaque meaning and dense poeticism, but I also appreciate when an artist is able to push a so-called cliché so far that it becomes a plain, easily understood truth. As I said in my 2024 albums recap, the thing I loved so much about the Cure’s comeback record was the way it doubled down on the same melancholy song Robert Smith has been singing his whole career; only this time with even more feeling. Saying something simple but true in such an unguarded, non-poetic way that you can’t believe it isn’t some tired old saying or forgotten folk song.
Robert Smith knows writers who use subtext and they’re all cowards:
Promise you'll be with me in the end
Say we’ll be together and that you won't forget
However far away
(However far away)
You will remember me in time
…
I know, I know
That my world has grown old
And nothing is forever
I know, I know
That my world has grown old
But it really doesn't matter
If you say we'll be together
If you promise you'll be with me in the end
A thing that I love in all mediums is when you can observe a talented young artist bumping up against the limits of their own abilities or experience. A directorial debut with things to learn but an exciting vision that they’re working out the kinks of. A singer who doesn’t yet know how to fully wield their instrument, in part because of its great strength. Like a superhero awkwardly learning to use their powers.
But what thrills me even more is when an artist can be seen hitting their head on the ceiling of an entire medium, trying to reach past the capabilities of art itself. Watching in real time as artists struggle to communicate things that can never be communicated, pushing the form to a breaking point and risking embarrassment or failure in the process. They strive for maximalism in an attempt to cross that isolating threshold of consciousness, in hopes of getting someone else to really, fully understand these huge emotions they are drowning in.
Sometimes, they experience a pain so great that art itself buckles under the weight of trying to express it.
Whether a master at the peak of their craft or a novice completely without it - artists often fall and stumble as they try to hold onto the heaviest feelings imaginable. Sometimes, in the eye of the beholder, the falling and stumbling itself becomes the art.
In the artist’s desperation, clichés become the feeble messenger for truth.
But there is still only so much that art can say. Sometimes words are not enough. Sometimes art is not enough. Sometimes love is not enough.
There are things about ourselves and our inner lives that we will never be able to explain to other people.
One of the most consequential movie-watching experiences of my life thus far was my first viewing of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia. I had already seen every other P.T.A. movie (this was before the release of Licorice Pizza) and I had saved this one for last, knowing it as the ultra-heavy and ultra-long emotional opus that almost derailed his career. This first viewing happened to take place just before I came out as trans – a “very strange time in my life” indeed. So you can probably imagine what happened when this already emotionally fragile PTA stan had Magnolia dropped on them like an atom bomb.
Magnolia is a speedball. I don’t just say this because the set of this movie is what spawns the now infamous Fiona Apple story about an “excruciating” night with her then boyfriend that caused her to quit hard substances (“Every addict should just get locked in a private movie theatre with Q.T. and P.T.A. on coke, and they’ll never want to do it again.”). I call it that because the movie’s first 90 minutes of go-go-go setup downshifts in its second half and attempts to deliver as big of a downer wallop of emotion as humanly possible. The whiplash feels like it’s going to kill you.
The movie starts with 3 scoops too much prologue (gee, wonder where I got that from) before literal dozens of characters and plot threads are introduced across an hour or so of runtime that I would describe as “coked-out wunderkind cranking a big dial labeled ‘MOVIE’ so hard that the lever snaps”. I was already preparing my “it’s a bit too much but good effort” type letterboxd reaction and placing it towards the bottom tier of P.T.A. movies in my head. I thought he had bitten off more than he could chew, dumping his entire therapy notebook into every messed-up character. While he *was* sorta pulling it all off, the collective effect was still making me a bit queasy.
Then, all of a sudden – sometime in the middle act, the movie goes sideways. Uppers to downers. The polarity inverts. You are transported.
Like a car that hits the brakes a second too late, the movie crashes out way earlier than you expect its typical rise and fall narrative to resolve. The viewer’s forward momentum from this tonal crash sends them floating into space. As these already rock bottom characters are about to get even rock bottom-er, I find myself in a trance-like state. I sense an emotional tidal wave about to wash over me. I am frozen.
P.T.A. was not even 30 years old when he directed this movie, but he clearly had (or was able to channel) a well of traumas, guilts and regrets usually reserved for a man much older. Fittingly, its most powerful scene comes from a man on his literal deathbed.
This scene uses the same hypnosis-like trick he pulls off in The Master’s famous “processing” scene - having us hone in on a long, isolated scene of pure acting performance with minimal camera movement or cuts to lull us into a trance. Once the viewer becomes totally locked in to a simple monologue, without any flash or style to remind you that you’re watching a movie, he hard cuts to other scenes and characters. The editing begins to cue up images from the rest of its tragic plotlines like an orchestra conductor.
At the exact moment that the old man stops beating around the bush and starts confessing his sins, when you’re hanging on his raspy words so intently that you forget you’re watching a movie, the teleportation happens. It silently cuts to a car pulling up a rainy driveway. Like the movie itself can’t bear to watch him say what he says next.
Legendary actor Jason Robards will die in less than a year. Right now, with tubes in his nose, he plays a character who is also on death’s door. It is his final on-screen performance.
He is about to tell us about “regret”:
I loved her so. She knew what I did. She knew all the fucking stupid things I’ve done.
But the love… was stronger than anything you can think of.
It's a long way to go… with no punch
Love, love, love
What did I do?
As Robards howls and moans, trying to express emotions so huge it’s like the world cannot contain them, the movie gives us no sweeping orchestral score to help communicate what he is feeling. There is no need.
When I watched this scene for the first time, I was not watching a movie, I was not listening to an actor give a monologue. I was not watching this car pull up a rainy driveway, I was the car. I was the people getting out of the car and I was the car and I was the rain falling in the night sky. I was the sadness and longing on their faces.
I was there and it was all around me.
While watching Magnolia for the first time, somewhere in between my “I don’t know about all this” initial reaction and me coming to the conclusion that this movie is a 5-star masterpiece, I began crying. Not just at the “regret” scene – a feeling I knew way too well by the young age of 23 – or at any scene in particular. I began to cry more than I had ever cried watching a movie before; the floodgates opened in such a way that they didn't stop until long after the film was over.
The complete and utter vulnerability, captured best in performances like John C. Reily and Melora Walters, struck a chord deep inside me. Much like the characters in the story, I once was lost but now am … a different kind of lost. There is no hero’s journey and there is no catharsis: only true and utter heartbreak.
I cried until my tear ducts ran dry.
I do not subscribe to the idea of art needing to aspire to be “perfect”. I hold art to a high standard, and care probably way too much about the role of criticism and discourse in separating wheat from chaff, but at the end of the day if you like something you can rate it however you like. Every movie can be argued as “flawed” if an element bumped for you personally, and so rather than debating “perfection” like a scorecard I instead think about it this way: a 5-star movie or album is a piece of art for which whatever flaws may exist for other people either don’t affect your enjoyment at all or are completely outweighed and overwhelmed by what it does well.
Magnolia is the perfect test case for this theory in action: why would I bother deducting “points” or “stars” for the fact that this movie took an hour or so to adjust to before paying out like a slot machine and delivering about as much emotion as I’ve ever felt watching a film? It taught me more about myself and the world around me. That’s good enough to warrant 5-stars to me.
The other thing that Magnolia makes me think about (and I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who has ever made this connection) is Farrah Abraham’s album My Teenage Dream Ended. If you want the full Farrah story and more discussion of her music, my best recommendation is the episode of the lovely Hot Singles podcast hosted by my friends Alexis and Boo – but I’ll try to give you the truncated version to explain what I’m on about:
Former star of reality shows like 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom, Farrah Abraham was desperate to make music. Not because she was cynically chasing fame or fortune, but because she had a deep lingering sadness, something that she needed to redirect into art. Even in world as exploitative and traumatizing as teen pregnancy and reality TV, her story is fucking bleak. To avoid getting too exploitative myself, I’m only going to give a few lines from wikipedia to give you the gist:
News of her pregnancy caused issues between her and her mother, Debra Danielsen, with Danielsen calling her daughter a whore and preventing her from obtaining an abortion; being pregnant, Abraham was forced to discontinue her cheerleading. Furthermore, during filming, Derek Underwood, the father of her child, died in a car accident. Abraham gave birth to the couple's daughter, Sophia Laurent Abraham, on February 23, 2009.
So with unthinkable, unbearable tragedy on her mind, Farrah wanted to sing about what she was feeling. With no other ideas of who to ask for help or where to start, Farrah befriended an audio mixing engineer on the set of one of her reality shows. Despite his limited experience producing music, he agreed to work on what eventually became My Teenage Dream Ended in 2012:
This bizarre and tragic origin story, combined with a strangely chosen aesthetic palette and good timing, turned My Teenage Dream Ended into an “outsider art” fascination, reclaimed by those deeply moved by its unorthodox poetry and ridiculed by those who couldn’t handle its staring-directly-into the-sun quality. This album, which shares a name with her autobiography released around the same time, depicts a friction between her lack of technical refinement and the unthinkably awful feelings that she needed to let out somehow. But from the first lyrics, on a track titled “The Phone Call That Changed My Life” it’s clear that this head-on collision between grief and ability is one Farrah is completely self-aware of:
I can only put so much in a song
I know no situation is ever the same
Cut off oxygen to my brain
The anxiety fills my veins
My prayer has failed
My worst thoughts have won, won, won
My words are few
Just don't cry or laughter (laughter, laughter, laughter)
From tinymixtapes: What is outsider art outside of? Farrah Abraham’s My Teenage Dream Ended lays bare this question in making manifest the fact that, in the postmodern era, there is no outside. We are all trapped in socio-political systems that resist the possibility of imagining an alternative, but we’re also trapped with our Selves and, worse, doomed to reflect perpetually upon our own Self, the secular reincarnation of the soul. But as we grasp for this Self, it fractures, proves itself unstable, unsatisfactory, made up of fragments of self-help cliché and half-remembered earworms. And as we seek to merge the evanescence of mandated “flexibility” and “innovation” with the coalescence demanded by “actualization” and “validation,” we have no place to rest, existing in a state of perpetual anxiety. All that is solid melts into air, but we are now chasing the evaporated phantoms themselves.
Magnolia and Twin Peaks are both melodramas pushed beyond parody to maximal extremes, while also not being “camp” at all. Rather than satirizing heart-on-sleeve Howard Hawks weepies, these sincere works stare down the most difficult and painful things lurking out there in the woods – the darkest and deepest feelings inside our soul – and attempt to render them with no eye towards gritty “realism”. Both directors keep telling their actors to go bigger and bigger with their performances, because there is no performance “too big” to capture something like the pain of a mother burying her child. There is no artistic "heightening" that can appropriately capture what can be felt inside the soul when something like that happens. No scream too agonizing to “over-act” the sorrow.
Despite the reality that Farrah Abraham is less technically skilled at making music than David Lynch and PTA are as filmmakers, My Teenage Dream Ended manages to express a pain just as visceral as anything you’ll find in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me or Magnolia. In all three cases: these are artists trying nobly to depict the impossible, attempting to imagine the unimaginable. Exploring — but never fully answering — the questions we must live with forever:
Who am I? Who do I want to be? Where do I belong? What do I want to do with my life? How do I be a good person? Why am I here?
What happened to me?
Where does Evil come from? What am I so afraid of? Why do bad things happen to me? Will bad things keep happening forever? Do I deserve it?
“Why are there people like Frank? Why is there so much trouble in this world?”
And why is it raining frogs?
“I don’t know what I’m doing. I don't know how to do this. I do things, and I fuck up. I fucked up. Can you forgive me?”
I love Twin Peaks. I love Twin Peaks in ways that I have never loved anything before in my life.
As I attest in the Perverts manifesto, finally watching all of Twin Peaks has provided a huge missing piece to understanding myself and my relationship to art. What I love most about it and why I want to make it myself.
It is the thing that made me realize why I have searched so desperately for a certain, specific kind of art that reflects how I feel: because I have my own creative vision that is dying to be set free. I have dreams that live only in my heart, dreams that hopefully I can bring to life someday. Something ineffable that I’ve always been chasing, something only partially expressed halfway in bits and pieces of other artists’ work. Something I try to capture every time I take a picture of the sky.
Twin Peaks is not the single piece of art that was made for me specifically, perfectly tailored to my interests. It’s simply the last domino to fall in the process of making me believe that I could create worlds of my own. That I could tell the story I’ve always been longing to see and hear and feel.
Many years before I was introduced to this wonderful television show and the movie (plus The Return, which is neither TV show nor movie but instead a secret third greatest thing ever made) my first introduction to the music of Twin Peaks was not episode one season one or anything from the show itself. It was a DJ mix.
In case you’re not familiar, the BBC hosts a radio show called “The Essential Mix” that regularly invites artists to tell their story in the form of a 2 hour mix; challenging them to play the songs that define and inspire their own work. Every year they also vote on a best Essential Mix of the year, and in 2012 the winner was open format mix by the musician Nicolas Jaar. The very first track of this unconventional DJ mix wasn’t really a “track” at all - it’s the audio of the youtube video I described at the top of this essay. It is the sound of Angelo and his old beat-up Fender Rhodes.
Before “oh angelo!” fully became a meme, before I had seen this video 100 times, this was my introduction to the world of Twin Peaks: a sample of Angelo’s voice and the sound of him playing “Laura Palmer’s Theme”. Narrating the act of creation while we are also immersed in that creation itself. After the famous key change, as the theme begins falling back down to its resting position, Jaar begins layering another song over the track – juxtaposing Badalamenti’s theme with a menacing violin that adds further depth to the moody chords. The transition out of this intro is seamless. It totally broke my brain at the time, and even now, I find myself still wondering how he came up with it.
This mix truly revolutionized what I thought a “DJ mix” was and could be, opening my mind to the pseudo-narrative storytelling it could conjure by combining existing music and samples into something entirely new. Along with similar mixes such the “Depressive Danny’s Witches Borscht” mixtapes made by Oneohtrix Point Never, this essential mix was the initial germ of inspiration that eventually led to a concept of my own.
For my entry in Moods – a mix series that highlights dance music DJs and invites them to curate a mix of all their non-dance music influences – I spent entirely too much time crafting a deeply personal 2.5 hour medley of music, film audio, interviews, and other samples. It’s about as close as you can get to hearing what it sounds like inside my brain (at least for now), a “radio show beamed directly from the creator’s own subconsciousness.”
Throughout the mix I juxtapose music that I love with the words of some of my favorite artists talking about themselves or their creative process – never directly pairing an interview subject with their own music as to be too on the nose. Starting with an interview clip of Radiohead from their sarcastically titled documentary Meeting People Is Easy, the influence of Nico’s essential mix is immediately obvious if you know to look for it. As an homage to that source inspiration, there’s one moment in particular where I paired an audio recording of David Lynch describing how an idea forms over a song made by Jaar himself.
Other voices that can be heard in the mix include Madlib, Joey Jordison from Slipknot, Frank Ocean, Mimi and Alan from Low, MF Doom, synth music innovator Suzzane Ciani , and anonymous UK ravers being interviewed after a party called Fantazia on New Years Eve 1993 from a clip titled “Old School Ravers - The Morning After The Night Before”. You can also hear dialogue from some of my all time favorite movies including New Rose Hotel, Spring Breakers, The Matrix Revolutions, Eden, The Beach Bum, and of course Jackie Brown (the titular Jacqueline / Jackie who inspired my own name). I even sampled (with her permission) some of the interview audio from my Ethel Cain cover story.
What I love about pairing interview snippets and movie samples with music is the way that the tonality of the music inflects whatever is being said in the conversation with new layers of emotion. Or it simply brings existing emotions in the original sample to the forefront of perception. The first time I explored this idea for myself was on another early DJ mix, in which I layered an excerpt from a John Coltrane interview with a deep house tune from Chaos In The CBD (a little basic, sure, but I think it still holds up surprisingly well). What blew me away so much was the fact that – with practically no chopping or editing the interview clip itself – the progression of the music seemed to be perfectly sync with these words from another artist, spoken decades earlier. I barely had to do any work to get them to start talking to each other, as if the music had been written specifically to soundtrack what Coltrane was saying. Even though I knew that was impossible.
Through this discovery, I suddenly saw DJing as much more than a party trick or vehicle for acquiring attention; it became a way to put the past, present, and future in dialogue with each other. A way to weave different thoughts, ideas, and feelings into sounds that were all undeniably Me, despite the collage-like process.
Why it took me another decade and a half from first hearing the essential mix for me to finally watch Twin Peaks is as much a mystery to me as it probably is to you (lead suspects in the case are my ADHD and my general aversion to television as a medium), but the fact that this video and by extension Angelo’s music left such an impression on me long before I had seen the show itself says a lot about the power of really good music to communicate feelings that transcend traditional narrative.
I didn’t need to know who Laura Palmer was or what the character had been through to feel the pain and mystery and darkness shrouding “Laura Palmer’s Theme”. But now that I have experienced Twin Peaks, I have been trained like Pavlov’s dog to cry on command any time I hear this music. Every single time Angelo starts building towards that famous key change, as David instructs him to “reach some sort of climax”, I can go from stone-faced to full-on sobbing faster than a sports car can go from 0-60. When Lynch died, I waited a good 72 hours or so before torturing myself by listening to this piece of music. I somehow cried even more than I was expecting to.
"Laura Palmer's Theme" is not merely heartbreaking music. It is the sound of heartbreak itself.
I don’t want to start talking about scenes and plots and themes of Twin Peaks; if I open that can of worms we will be here all night. Not to mention the fact that I don’t want to give anyone the roadmap to later accuse me of stealing all my ideas from this show when I try to make own art and hopefully avoid jacking David Lynch’s swag too directly in the process. If you want to read some way too personal writing about Fire Walk With Me you can do that here - with the caveat once again that me relating to Laura Palmer is not a cry for help in a LITERAL 1-1 sense nor a confession of anything in particular. Just a story about the scariest thing that’s ever happened to me and some feelings I have about being a woman.
What I want to close with is with Angelo, and with David. Two people we’ve lost whose creativity can never be re-summoned. Yet when we watch the video back, and we listen to Angelo recall David’s words and play those notes, we can go back to Twin Peaks. The town that does and doesn’t exist. We are there and it is all around us.
Throughout this piece, I chose not to use stills taken directly from the show. Instead I pulled from a photographer on reddit who goes by u/SomaHoliday_ - one of many people who make pilgrimages to the fake, real town of Twin Peaks. To see the sights. To pay their respects.
What the show calls “Twin Peaks” was filmed on location in adjacent Washington towns North Bend and Snoqualmie. What’s amazing about this place is – as you can see from these photos – hardly any “set dressing” or “movie magic” was done to make the town of Twin Peaks feel as simultaneously picturesque and recognizably ordinary as it does on the show. The double RR diner and the hotel overlooking the massive falls are still there. You can still get cherry pie and coffee. It is both a fantasy and one of the most “real” small towns ever depicted in fiction. There are people living there today who saw it on the TV show first and ran to claim a piece of it for themselves.
The Palmer house is also still there, and still irrationally spooky to look at. Even if you know that the real woman who lives inside it is an angel sent from heaven. It’s impossible to love this show and not feel a chill go down your spine when you see this house and remember what happened inside it. Even if you tell yourself it’s “just a movie”.
Lynch gets so much (rightful) praise for his strength as a surrealist and weaver of dreams, but as The Straight Story fans will tell you, he’s just as remarkable of an observer of everyday life. Someone with an ability to make the mundane feel mystical. When he set foot in the real town(s) and imagined his vision of the fictional Twin Peaks, Washington, he must have walked around like Dale Cooper: totally in awe of everything about this place. Witnessing every detail of his surroundings like a tiny miracle of god. The chirping birds and industrial saw blades of the show’s serene opening. Every cup of coffee and pine tree and plate of cherry pie. Until you get to the Black Lodge, he barely had to “invent” anything. He just took in the world as he saw it, and tried to show it to us the same way. Even the show’s entrance to hell exists “above an abandoned convenience store”.
This is why, when someone like u/SomaHoliday_ takes their camera to the real towns that the show filmed in, it’s not all that difficult to capture the “Twin Peaks vibes” that inspired the show all those years ago. Those “vibes” are still there. They’re a real, almost tangible thing in the air that you can feel even through a photo or video. A sense of mystery that still lurks in those woods. You can still hear the hoot of an owl. You can still feel a soft wind blowing through some sycamore trees. He just bottled that ineffable thing into a piece of art that you can own and you can cherish. A place you can visit. Something you can feel.
I also do not want to fully open the can of worms that is David Lynch quotes, because – as I’m sure you either already knew or learned when he passed – the guy has said 1 million different insightful, funny, wonderful things, and it’s a delight to read any of them while doing your own personal David Lynch impression. It’s even more fun to imagine David Lynch yelling (only a bit louder than usual) as his hearing-impaired Twin Peaks character Gordon Cole and have him say literally anything at all.
So I’m going to limit myself to exactly three quotes:
The first is one that Joshua Minsoo Kim shared at the time of his passing. Something that truly changed how I think about the idea of screenwriting, and ideas in general. I will agree with him that is is “One of the most important pieces of writing advice I’ve ever read”:
The thing that makes that video so powerful, is that the directions from David that Angelo relays to us second-hand are so simple. Unadorned with extra adjectives or flowery metaphors. He just tells Angelo what to picture. He describes what he sees in his head, just enough to recall the idea in full. He writes only the words he needs to remember, and as a result they made a piece of music that recalls the entire feeling every time you hear it play.
Angelo, that’s great, that’s a good mood – but can you play it slower?
That’s it, that’s a good tempo. Just keep going, slow like that. Just keep that going for a while
Ok Angelo, now we gotta make a change. Because, from behind a tree, in the back of the woods, there’s this very lonely girl. Her name is Laura Palmer… and it’s very sad… get something that matches her
Oh that’s it. That’s very beautiful. I can see her. And she’s walking… towards the camera. And she’s coming closer… just keep building it, and building it… now reach some sort of climax
Oh that's it!!! Oh that’s so beautiful. Angelo… oh that’s tearing my heart out. I love that, just keep that going.
Now… she’s starting to leave. So fall down… keep falling… keep falling.
Now go back into the dark woods.
It’s both hard to imagine and easy to believe that this piece of music was entirely improvised in one take – with David only instructing Angelo to play faster or slower and when to rise and fall. Especially because, in an additional twist (the kind of thing that could make a person believe in higher powers): when Angelo took that original cassette recording and turned it into the final version of the theme you hear on the television show, he discovered a miracle. When you plot the notes as midi notation: the vision that David spoke into being and Angelo’s instincts as a musician combined to form two mountains. Twin Peaks.
According to Angelo, when he called Lynch to tell him about this magical serendipity, Lynch yelled back over the phone: (quote number #2) “IT’S COSMIC!!!!!!!”
The third and final quote from Lynch that I’ll share today is from a documentary on the Beatles. After describing his experience at the very first Beatles show in the US — which was held at a venue that usually hosted boxing matches — he gives a short but sweet thesis on why music is important. Why it can make legions of people scream at the top of their lungs in excitement. So much that it shook the entire building.
Music is…. One of the most fantastic things. Almost like fire, and water, and air [laughs] it’s like… it’s like a thing. And it does… so much. It does a thing for the intellect, it does a thing for the emotions. And a certain kind of music… can swell the heart, until it almost bursts. Tears of happiness flow out of your eyes! You can’t believe the beauty that comes. And it comes from these... notes.
The great irony of ever trying to write anything about music – especially anything this long-winded – is that music’s strongest attribute is how it can transcend things like time, space, and words especially. Lyrics only exist to anchor down our feelings, to give us something to hold on to. They exist to help us remember. Why I love electronic music, ambient music, film scores, and jazz is that there is no word-based meaning to be found. Only intuitive feelings. Moods. Vibes. What I get out of an instrumental album is deeply personal, with only album artwork and track titles to guide me in what sort of images I’m supposed to conjure. Words can only communicate so much.
In my own DJing library, I sort tracks by both “vibes” and “moods” as well as more rigid definition-based genres. Limiting myself to thinking about my library in only existing genre definitions makes it harder to jump around and creatively weave my library together into new arrangements, but if I go the opposite way and ONLY commit to wishy-washy "vibes" playlists my shit will get messy real quick. By balancing both approaches — maintaining playlists with titles like “inspector gadget type beat” and other ones with rigidly maintained genre focuses — I’m able to most effectively toggle between ways of thinking about music and always know what I’m reaching for and why at any given moment as I try to curate on the spot.
Genre has a valuable purpose to critic and fan alike - as my friend Miranda Reinert eloquently laid out in an essay titled “on tiktok midwest emo + the way we talk about music”:
Genre wars of what is Real Emo or whatever are stupid. There's no real reason to do it, but I do think there is a lot of value in being able to effectively and efficiently communicate about music. Just like there is practical value in knowing the difference between Modern and Contemporary art and the movements therein, there is practical value in being able to articulate what music you like. Genre discussions are too often concerned about how artists consider themselves when the real value in genre descriptor is the way it acts as a means of practical communication.
We can’t just feel around in the dark in order to create great art or great writing. Some amount of knowledge, craft, and skill is important. Shared tenets and rules and agreements can help us to collectively pursue artistic excellence.
In order to make this magic happen, Angelo needed to possess not only the experience as an improviser and composer necessary to play what David envisioned, but also the subtlety and control of his instrument to play it with the depth of feeling you hear in the youtube video. There are lots of really cute videos on Instagram of people playing "Laura Palmer’s Theme" while their pets sit on their lap (and I will watch every single one of them you send me), but when you hear someone else play “Laura Palmer’s Theme” – even if they do a pretty good job – it really illustrates what a gift Angelo has. To be able to communicate so much with just the nuances of the way his fingers touch the keys.
Yet there are countless equally talented musicians who could have never mustered the inspiration or soul – or whatever you want to call it – that allowed Angelo to write “Laura Palmer’s Theme”. Even if those other musicians had David Lynch sitting next to them to help them dream it up. To be able to just SUMMON that emotion, like it came from another place entirely. Like it was a spirit the two of them conjured into being. It makes you believe that somehow this song has always existed, and Angelo merely pulled it into our dimension.
It is as definitive of a "proof" as I can imagine that there is some kind of world that exists beyond our own. That there’s something else.
At the end of the day, art exists for us to live our lives alongside it. To serve as a mirror and guide as we go through “this thing called life”. The reason I wanted to write about any of this, besides my sincere love of Twin Peaks and a desire to pay tribute to Lynch, is because I believe that art really, truly matters – beyond the simple fact that it matters to me. I believe that art has an important role to play in humanity’s survival, and that its degradation and exploitation is a large part of our collective spiritual sickness.
The instinct of the tech world to hand everything over to machines trained on our cruelest, base instincts in the name of “common sense” has already ruined art – and now it stands to ruin this entire country as those same tech losers take over. The things that can save us, like Love, come from this realm of art and feeling. Not from cold hearted “rationality”, often a trojan horse that disguises irrational anger and hate.
Art is an exchange of humanity: our human frailty and weaknesses are literally the engine that makes it go. Thus, I never worry that AI art will render real art “extinct”. Especially when the people who push AI fail to grasp the inherent value of the thing we already have. Why art has lasted as a human tradition for centuries and millennia before “disruptors” came in and “fixed” everything. Only humans can make art because art is about us, the people experiencing it.
In the Mazzy Star Bandsplain episode, immediately after the Meaghan quote about “fucking VIBES”, Yasi makes this point with her trademark self-deprecation:
“This is like, a fucking simpleton statement, but art is for us to project our own hero’s journey on to. Like I’m the fucking main character. I said it about Pavement and I’ll say it about everything. I don’t care what fucking Stephen Malkmus was writing about, this song is about me and my ex-boyfriend! You know what I mean?”
So with that in mind, let’s take things back to the personal one more time.
This week, there have been so many anti-trans executive orders passed by our president that I have genuinely lost count. My country is actively trying to kill me.
My country is trying to make me feel so bad that I'll want to do it myself.
There is a dizzying, mind-bending disorientation that comes along with experiencing this kind of fear and grief and stunned disbelief all at once. Even if I knew it was coming.
The reason I wanted to write about feelings that are beyond what words can express is because I am all out of words to describe how I feel lately. I have no more metaphors or images to communicate with.
As Phil Elverum put it in the crushing opening track of his album, A Crow Looked At Me:
Death is real
Someone's there and then they're not
And it's not for singing about
It's not for making into art
When real death enters the house
All poetry is dumb
What poetry can be derived from children being deprived of necessary medication? What catharsis or meaning or wisdom or truth can be taken from the following news story?
A patient at Syracuse VA Medical Center died by an apparent suicide outside the top of the hospital’s parking garage Monday.
Witnesses said the person was wrapped in a body-length transgender pride flag
Some things are beyond the powers of art to redeem. Some scars we must live with forever. Some wounds never heal.
Even though I believe that I personally will be strong enough (and privileged enough) to pull through this darkness, It is truly impossible for me to describe for you how heartbreaking it is to think about all the other scared trans people in this country right now. To try to wrap my mind around what it would have been like if this had happened right as I was coming out, or before I had found the courage. How it almost certainly would have pushed me further into the closet.
How would I be processing any of this? How would I have handled this news had I not spent the last 5 years clawing a sense of self back from the abyss? Would I even still be alive?
I have no answers to these questions.
I have no more words.
My worst thoughts have won, won, won.
But I am not going to die, at least not yet.
I am going to live. I am going to laugh and cry and create. I will make something that can be experienced long after I am gone.
I am going to listen to songs that swell my heart, until it almost bursts. I am going to meditate and breathe deeply. I will allow the world to reveal itself to me. I am going to listen to “Laura Palmer’s Theme” and imagine myself in those dark woods. Like I am there, and it is all around me.
I will allow myself to love. I will allow myself to feel, even when it hurts. I will believe in something and stand for something, even if you think that’s “corny”.
I am going to write to remember.