September-December 2025, still updating.
You stop in a pizza shop to buy water, and the only other customer is a boy about your age doing the same thing for the same reason. You make blue-to-green eye contact as you leave. The studio is kind of far from your apartment, but you maintain the separation of church and state. It’s a Greek neighborhood. You have to walk by a big sign with a name very close to someone else’s, both from one of the earliest verbs you learned the year you studied Ancient Greek, something something nominative determinism. Your time slot isn’t for half an hour. You get coffee with L and H and drink it standing under the awning. ”Outside the natural world was enjoying a moment of total strength.” The rain rushes your back like the tide. You’re wearing a blue USA tank from the Target little boys’ section and infamous jean shorts. Practice is good and you do a fun dual vocals thing with H. You located where you should start getting intense but you need to figure out what lyrics to change. Some would say not to change any. You rip out a blank page from your passport for H to write down a song structure in liquid eyeliner on the porch.
parallel lines meet at infinity
At one time I experimentally ruined my life repeating the hypothesis ”If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth.” Whose truth? How much of it? I know perfectly well there are sentences that split timelines.
[Silence.] I heard you singing.
I know this isn’t true, but it’s true sometimes. Hate is to love what anger is to sadness. Call it by its proper name.
On the N train to Queens. Above ground. It looks like thunder and you are carrying an unusually heavy electric bass from 1986. Your spirit is good. You did not sleep until 5 a.m. It’s 2:57 when the rain drops hard and it takes thirty seconds to change the world.
I was killing guys like you when I was 12.
”If the world ends now no one will see my autobiography.” The sheet is streaked with a little old blood and leaf debris and I’m using a friend’s tshirt as a pillowcase. When I wake up I am cocooned in the residual calmness only accessed by recent unconsciousness. Nervous system user settings. Twice in the past week I slept in other people’s beds like a kid too old to be sneaking into their parents’ room. Sometimes I wake up and my body still thinks it should be holding -, which presents a whole range of things to say but is mostly a good reason to get up. I really like all my friends’ current living situations. *** has a small bedroll under the sheltering towers of audio gear and analog stacks in ****'s spare room. Yesterday I woke up to slanted light + radiator hiss + kitchen chatter. I love listening to people speak languages I don’t understand and wasn’t sure how to make my presence known. ”neither of us give a fuck. it’s Ryan”. I tell Theo that I’m wildly oscillating between wanting to die and feeling pretty good and he says that’s kind of the best way to live.
Over what?
I don’t know, I was a kid.
Did you want me to change you?
(from a floating circus in the east river, waiting for the ambulance to arrive) The captain is resurrected, but not as a captain...Um...as a creature that transcends your imagination, and rises into the heavens by her hair, and swings and dances and the music rises- and-
”This is my favorite car that I fit inside.”
”It’s a good way to get acquainted with yourself.”
So when you tell me it was wrong to lie
I retort that it was wrong to boil my blood to keep your heart warm
how extreme can you get without collapsing confederated reality?
on the 18th I will be older than I ever thought possible for the sixth and third times in a row
”This is the first law of any beauty. Gravity.”
The saddest times in my life have been the ones with the least music. The best and worst have been the ones with the most.
I want a better abbreviation.
”a song is the closest you can get to a drone strike.”
walking it off in the wrong direction
”His position cannot be comprehended. It is an inhuman generosity. A generosity that would overthrow the world if it was embraced because nothing would weather that compassion.”
”The weirdest thing was my erectile dysfunction was somehow connected to the National Rifle Association.”
I recite middle names. Waiting for the MRI results I make sure I remember my birthday, the date, my phone number. I spell chrysanthemum. There’s blood in my hair.
Would you like to see the Wikipedia screenshots I took while you were getting your head stapled together?
Baby, you should be ashamed
You should be shame’s only daughter
And there’s footage that will prove us both wrong
Have a glass of champagne. Does wonders for extremism.
My love for you is ninety-eight percent pure
Someone needs to slap the shit out of me but anyone who would oblige is either too nice to go through with it or horny about it (not now please).
oh, did your parents raise you to be a gentleman? Yes. Me too. I’m not a man, but I still want to be a good one.
Blueballed by the rapture
[tape whirl blasts the speakers] ”What you people in the backseat don’t understand is that this is the greatest song ever written.”
”Don’t condescend to the backseat.”
I can learn to love the bomb but I will never understand it
For the past 48 hours I have been unwilling to provide my body with things like food or toothpaste or water.
notes from the madison st listening party: ”why is it epic”
I like Twin Peaks!
”I’m the arbiter of change. I’m the arbiter bro.”
character paradoxes
”I fuck as though it’s a matter of life and death.”
there is a time to every purpose under heaven
”What are you gonna do about it? Nothing, cause I’m God slash The Narrator.”
Sometimes I think about doing things you would never forgive me for, just to force any resolution at all.
Some songs are portals but I couldn’t tell you which ones. It probably wouldn’t work for you. It’s very personal.
It was far worse and far more beautiful
Sprawled out on the bench, way back when I was working at the gallery, they told me our worst enemies are people who think exactly like us. Neither half of this statement is strictly true. ”Why does it have to be legitimate? Why can’t it just be a great record?” ”Because, then what would we have to argue about?”
stone in the time stream
These difficult questions tell me a joke
(you don’t have one for everything, you know)
”Being around kids has convinced me that there is something...noble and just about making pop music.” -Theo
At W 4th st, V says three things with mounting trepidation that make me spit out my gatorade and hug her after I finish laughing
Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the war room!
God is a word/And the argument ends there
Prehistoric tragedies
I’m losing all kinds of bodily fluids tonight/My email’s geotargeted by wanderu bus subject lines
3:06 unless you both feel like making a huge mistake but I don’t think so?
3:06 And also she is in Boston
3:07 I literally always want to make a huge mistake
3:07 No I was gonna say
3:07 If it were me I’d make a huge mistake
please please please don’t be right about this
THINGS I LEARNED THIS WEEK
Harmonicas come in different scales.
You have to vote in your neighborhood. You cannot vote in Queens.
Don’t wear high tops to the freight yard.
Isy’s new old car is an absolute beaut.
OCD is gay and I can cook raw meat by myself.
I’m a person who loves music before I’m a musician. Skill doesn’t factor into this. And I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing.
Negative space saves the world.
The couch is long and leopard print and impossible upon closer inspection. There is no obvious way to fit it in or out of the room, suggesting the apartment (built 1930) may have been erected around it. The real wood moulding on the doors and windows is redundantly painted the color of wood, and the room is divided in half by utilitarian gray floor-to-ceiling curtains, after which it becomes a Bay Area transplant’s bedroom. On the bookcase: The Sluts by Dennis Cooper (not sure he actually read it), lots of Murakami, Cannabis and Spirituality. There is no record player. There is a single, plastic-sleeved album, and it’s Wallsocket by underscores. The door in the back is shimmering: half of the streamers lay on the floor, glinting like the open eyes of something recently dead. Metallic blue balloons and solo cups shift like weeping angels. For the past week, it’s held stasis as a party that never happened. I rotate deli coffee, soda, apple flavor New Amsterdam, and Saves The Day acoustic demos. Ari and I sneak off set to buy fancy cider tall boys. The snow machine is enthusiastically exhausted before we get the final take.
quiet sad secret stupid New York
gratuitous sax and senseless violins
I don’t know if killing yourself can be someone else’s fault, but I believe that not killing yourself can be.
dry heaving outside The Lot
(walking south from Tompkins)
I’m not used to writing with other people- actually I’d never written with anyone before.
Yeah, me neither till just now.
the best of all possible words (microscopic credit in the liner note fine print)
I lost my wallet last night fighting with a tree (I was really drunk) and then I woke up and the tree a was a circle -boy from nashville
texts from the blue hurt the people on their phones
”If your girlfriend is also your dog and your daughter, then you’re putting her up for adoption and abandoning her as well as breaking up with her.”
inafoxhole
Sex for Beginners
”There ain’t nothing in this world that’ll make me feel like more or less than I am.” -Jonny
and I wish I could say the same
In a dark room, I still cover my eyes.
uninvented animal (me and david)
Sunday dress at the end of the world
I saw the planets moving in
Gag and destroy me bay-bee
”The U.N. has designated today as World Television Day, which brings to mind the next song...which I wrote with Tom Verlaine.”
I’m sitting on the floor in a room full of film equipment in boxes that look like rifle cases.
I don’t wanna see you decimate your memories
”It is finished is one of the seven last phrases of Jesus.
It isn’t is always just on the other side.”
karass
I’m dumbfounded by not dying here, surrounded on all sides by years and years of being alone
He’s got a blockchain 5 miles long
angels rush in like molecular diffusion
Bending my wants with my rights
Are my friends still half right
And should I keep them separate from me
candle flame in a still room
take it as it comes
A song shouldn’t be a show trial
unoriginal sin
”You play a sad and dangerous game that never ends. I play a torturous and self indulgent game that never truly starts maybe.”
”i really wish you would stop using your body ’ironically’.”
gates of horn and gates of ivory
no holds barred only cafes
”Hey, have gun, will travel.”
STAY IN LOVE
You’ll turn into something
You should turn into something
at the mercy of cultural metaphors. special extinct feelings found in late republic lyric poets.
if no man is an island, girls must be Pangaea
Elliptical pop
That’s true courage, buddy
I unlock my bike so we can ride down the hill together and it makes me happy, even though this thing is way too heavy to carry on the aboveground train. I chain it at Palmetto (feminine conj.). I like that there are two, like my own street doubled in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Not touching/ but joined in astonishment as two cuts lie parallel in the same flesh. Closed circuits of information. Unlikely handwriting on unlikelier notebooks. I’m trying to tell you everything, abbreviated.
A computer is a Lite-Bright for bad fucking ideas.