Impressions

[W]hen you are young, you think you can predict the likely pains and bleaknesses that age might bring. You imagine yourself being lonely, divorced, widowed; children growing away from you, friends dying. You imagine the loss of status, the loss of desire – and desirability. You may go further and consider your own approaching death, which, despite what company you may muster, can only be faced alone. But all this is looking ahead. What you fail to do is look ahead, and then imagine yourself looking back from the future point. Learning the new emotions that time brings. Discovering, for example, that as the witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. Even if you have assiduously kept records – in words, sound, pictures – you may find that you have attended to the wrong kind of record-keeping. What was the line Adrian used to quote? 'History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.

Many songs describe feeling like a stranger in a place you used to belong.

So much of who we are—so much of who our friends, family, and neighbors are—is shaped by the push and pull of forces that are blind, random, predetermined, and far beyond any of our individual control.

In astronomy, “redshift” refers to the way that wavelengths of light stretch over time, and appear redder as objects move away from us in our ever-expanding universe. (Here’s a visualizer from NASA). I first learned about this in a college class, and I’ve never quite shaken the sensation that, with each passing second, the farthest fringes of the observable universe are sliding irrevocably into darkness.

In America, “redshift” refers to a far more immediate slide into darkness.

I feel tugged between these two poles moving through the verses of this song: between the cosmic and the terrestrial, between the abstract and the material. I am occasionally paralyzed, dumbstruck by the notion that we are not beings moving through the our lives, but rather that the universe is a thing that moves through us.

But… down here on earth, when we’re lucky, able, and clear-headed enough to recognize a choice between fear and love, we have to choose the latter.

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Notes

• Eno Amoebo outro with the plucky things?
• Everything gets bigger as the song goes away. Reverb increases, room size.
• "Their love of god is based on their satisfaction with the status quo" - Ted Chiang, Hell is the Absence of God
• Cracked Windshield, Hiss Golden Messenger (light organ drone)

• Many of Trump’s Supporters Never Left Their Hometowns How nostalgia for white Christian America drove so many Americans to vote for Trump

  Guitar

  Standard Tuning, Capo 3
  

32000x x3221x/x322p01x 32000x x3221x/x322p01x 02203x x3505 35040x 3320 x002h4p2p0 3200 332

x3503x x3505x 35540x x3503x x3505x 02200 xx023/xx02h4p2p03 x3503x x3505x 35540x xx023/xx02h4p2p03 330h201

Lyric Scrapsp

1.8.14 - white water tower that white water tower is the first thing you see rising over cornfields driving over roadkill on potholed streets

sightsee through the scenery of every scene you were in

there are televisions shouting out on every floor of this house into empty rooms

and he’s scoffing in the basement “the democrats are at it again” said “i’m not worried for my life but the world I’m gonna leave you with”

6.25.16 And boys faking southern drawls and rebel flag decals

6.30.16 Maybe if you're lucky you will live to regret the idiot you are today

7.15.16 red as anger. not wanting to become angry. not wanting to be hateful

7.28.16 undeserved cynics

7.31.17 faking a drawl

8.3.16

MilitaryMarchDrum

TATtattatTATtattatTATtattatTATTATTATTAT

8.31.16 the obsession with transition negates a basic truth about writing, a magical truth. you can get anywhere from anywhere, always and almost instantly. the gap between sentences is sometimes a pause for breath and sometimes an echoing void. and if you can get anywhere form anywhere you can start anywhere and end anywhere. there is no single necessary order.” - klinkenbourg, p26

10.6.16 song about not feeling like you belong anywhere, not home, not where you live. "and at that point where we either act or do not act most of us are still" didion.

10.22.16 not that you don’t but that you could’ve belonged here

11.16-29.16 11.16-18,21-23,28-29.16

silence echoes here forever it’s the 42nd parallel but half of this bar talks like it’s from somewhere else with a fake southern drawl sounds like a twisted AM dial sliding through to get a beer i’ll stick around a little while but i don’t wanna be long here

they’re flying the rebel flag in michigan they’re born with the right grandkids of militia men bred for a fight i hear these villains play the victim and though they’re falling on deaf ears those same words sounded different when i still belonged here those same words sounded different when i still belonged here

coming home each christmas i bit my tongue till it bled my closest grew distant as their blue blood turned red now i recognize my strangeness it's too late to draw them near it’s too late for _ _ they don’t belong here

[if it never leaves you you can’t miss it at all] but i left for reasons i cannot recall now i’m _ _ as a stranger cuz i recognize the fear maybe if i’d stayed i still would belong here if i would’ve stayed i still would belong here

the astronomers have measured the ongoing loss everything grows redder until it goes dark they’re frantic in their seeking as the heavens disappear i think i know their secret we have to belong here

so here’s to every nowhere village to the dark between stars to the places god no longer visits but sends his regards if... x if... i don't want to belong here if... i don't want to belong here

1.30.17 what if everything gets further away over the course of the recording?

reverb increased?

room gets bigger

3.15.17 the arrogance of inherited power.

3.7.18 i’ll be restless in my searching as heaven disappears

3.27.19 pulled me from their sphere

6.12.19 this sphere

okay if it blends together.