01. Michael’s Opening - J Spaceman
02. Ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space - Spiritualized
03. Dirty Water - The Jesus and Mary Chain
04. Big Sky - The Kinks
05. Birdsong - Adam Franklin
06. Angel Bell - Joe Hisaishi
07. Try to Sleep - Low
08. Speedy Marie - Frank Black
09. Phantasies - Stephen Malkmus
10. Tomorrow Never Comes - Lee Ranaldo
11. Get On The Floor - The Promise Ring
12. (Manifest) - The Weakerthans
13. Paris Beach - J Spaceman

I remember a flurry of snapshots from never-ending evenings in the throes of various poisonous activities, but cannot for the life of me seem to remember a single thing my wife has ever said to me. Add to that, every time I blink, my daughter is another year older. Suddenly my hair is greying at an exponential rate and all the doctors and therapists I see are much younger than me. I do not feel the way I thought other people might feel when I was much younger and imagined the kinds of things they might say to one another. I feel far more broken than I ever thought possible, and yet I’d rather be swimming in the thick of it with my eyes open than continue on my previous path of blissful ignorance. At least that’s what I tell myself every time I ponder that particular conundrum. Anyway… I suppose the point of it all for me is this: Despite the horrors of daily living, the constant fuck ups on my part, and the ever present existential dread, I am incredibly grateful for my experience as a human here on planet earth. I’ve had quite an adventure, living what almost seems like several different lives at once. And yet, at each point along the way, I pretty much hated everything about myself. I thought I had put that ugly voice to bed a million years ago, but I’m afraid it appears I did not fully succeed in my intended task.

And so the struggle continues…
-Justin.

You ever get the feeling that you work ten times as hard as the rest of humanity just to simply keep up, and find the results of your emotional and physical labor are minimal at best? I used to think I was the most unintelligent human on planet earth because very little of this experience made any sense to me, and I could not seem to remember a goddamn thing. I spent so much time memorizing behavior in the hope that I could simply document and move on, never having to think about it again. I could just use an equation for this or an equation for that, and free up what little space there was in my brain for creative endeavors. Unfortunately this approach to human interaction resulted in a total and complete lack of being present. Suffice to say it’s a lot harder to learn how to be human as a middle aged man than I imagine it would have been to do so as a kid.

Then again, maybe I’ve just been comparing myself to an unrealistic way of being… for someone like me. Because it turns out, I’m officially intelligent (according to modern scientific and psychological methods doctors use to determine this kind of shit), and although learning this has alleviated some of my former anxieties, it has most definitely introduced a whole other set of brand new anxieties and an unfathomable array of questions to ponder.

Oh, how fun it is to learn and grow.

Perfectionism is an unattainable goal. I used to think I used it as a kind of constantly moving goalpost in order to push myself further than I normally would, had there been no goalpost to aim for. But it turns out I was always just setting myself up for failure of the forever kind. It’s funny how no matter what age you are, you always seem to think you know “what’s going on.” But I’ve recently noticed that even things I once thought immovable have begun to shift. It’s as if I’d been some kind of somnambulistic magician my whole life, and had never realized I’d been duping myself with my own carefully crafted slight of hand for decades.

Or something like that.

If ever you’ve felt like you didn’t understand why humans acted the way they did in certain situations toward you, perhaps it could be that they saw something in you they didn’t like or understand, but weren’t able to properly articulate. Or maybe they were just assholes. Regardless, it has been a wonderful experience to have had so many of you teach me about myself through messages about how you’ve related to what I’ve said. Connection with likeminded individuals sure beats spending all that time in an isolation chamber.

One can get exhausted when constantly vacillating between extremes. The current and overwhelming trend of fitting everything into a cute little binary birthday box with a pretty white bow on top doesn’t lend itself to any bit of grey relief. Sometimes it feels like you don’t belong anywhere, which is really discombobulating if at one point in time you felt like you belonged anywhere you god damn wanted to. If the last few years have taught me anything, it’s that as much as I thought I was aware of, concerning how much I didn’t know about things, the truth is that there is so much more I do not know than I originally postulated. Was that even a sentence? Regardless, to most of us, what we do not know is a truly unfathomable amount of shit. So I’m choosing to start over. Again. But not like reinventing myself between every grade of high school in the hopes of finding a place to belong. More like allowing myself to sit amid the chaos while listening to my body as it slowly reveals a more accurate me to itself.

At a certain point you may come to realize that everything you currently think is based on not only your experience of the past, but your interpretation of it as well. And along the way you’ve most definitely lost bits of information you had previously gathered, for various reasons, only to fill in the blanks with whatever happens to be within reach at the time. If you can accept the fact that accuracy in this particular department is almost assuredly not possible, then you’re closer to discovering a more deeper truth. But you’re further away from ever being able to understand it as such, because understanding itself has practically become a different language overnight. Well, I’ve been to this place. I’ve tasted its spoils. And the only bit of solace I’ve found has come to me in the form of trusting my own intuition, regardless of what I think I know. Then again, we all really seemed to get into Animal Crossing for a while there, so what the fuck do I know?

I spent a good deal of the last year in pain, stuck in bed, unable to move. I eventually had to relearn to do things that I used to take for granted. In all this, it occurred to me that I tend to focus on and talk an awful lot about myself. Sometimes I even go into interview mode when merely having a conversation with someone. It’s not pretty. So in an attempt to let you in on my thought process surrounding the songs of AAOM without having to vomit in your ear all day, I’ve devised a handful of ways to let others speak for me.