crazy mystery catalog #8
12/15/2023
The premise of this newsletter, if there ever was one (besides have a catchphrase and force self to write), is to articulate the ambiguities about my life, and then uncover usually not an answer but more a companion in the mystery within the ephemera I read, hear, consume, or pass by restlessly whether on the road or in spirit. But it’s music that’s been the very backbone—the spinal cord and nervous system and subconscious command center—of my whole life, since I was about twelve and started to notice, and pursue, my need for such specific companions. Noticing that there was something larger than taste, and that was life, perhaps my very own, inside of the songs that I love. That there was a different way of relating than the tedium of explaining myself, which could be a skill to hone as much as it was a kind of airy, leisurely quest to find the people who believed this, too. That gesturing towards those little connections was specific, but not hard, work, and that it was worth something. I still don’t know what, exactly, it’s all worth, but for it to just feel right is about as much sense as I need it to make.
It’s been a nice way to live. Except that, out of desperation or pain, I can quite easily trick myself into inverting that very equation: when something feels wrong, I become obsessed with figuring out a way the wrongness might make sense. I tell myself that because the same variables are at play, it’s the same thing, but it isn’t. “This feels right, which is what makes sense about it,” is not equal to “this doesn’t feel right, so I must make it make sense.” Thing is, the curious parts of me are not naive, but they are, unfortunately, rather gullible and prone to over-intellectualization. The cost of bulletproofing them against this is too high and I just don’t want that steely texture to my life.
This year there was quite a bit of desperation and pain in my atmosphere, and it felt like my creative undertaking, my self-employment—rather than to, as I promised myself, use my severance time to write a book!—to make the bad stuff happening to and around me, past and present, make sense now. Stupidly for me, being the CEO of Pain Analysis Incorporated was both a fake and unpaid job. But the work of it taxed the same muscles as the other thing, the good thing from when I was twelve and I discovered my companions, and it felt at least like some kind of connective figuring out—a more adult version, in which there was a new way to be brave that could find a reason for anything. And so I operated as if understanding someone was enough to save them from themselves, or maybe it was about saving me from them. Now I see that it’s none of my business.
I have nothing to show for this stuff, because there are things I can’t say about situations; only endless rationales with little to no rewards. All there is left to talk about is this quiet, ravaging mania that developed in me from the whiplash between needing to protect myself at any cost, and then, very suddenly, doing the opposite and giving all of myself away, for free. The frantic footwork of my own turbo-diligence, of defending myself against certain exploitations, exhausted me to the point where fire-sale liquidation, a fuck-it newness of self-abandonment sounded not only relaxing, but reasonable. The gravity of others' problems became so personal to me that to rid of their weight would also bring the fall of myself. Once you become skilled at making misery make sense, the threshold between sacrifice and abuse is an easy place to teeter. My legs were tired not because I was busy going anywhere but because I was so spent from staying put where it was wobbly underneath. When I finally got weak, I didn’t care where I’d fall; rest of any kind sounded nice.
Then, at some point in the last few months of the year, I decided upon a different definition of resting, and things started to change. I usually resisted advice to just rest, Dylan, because it just sounded like a whole bunch of people who didn’t get what I was about, yelling at me to lay down, to sit still, to stop moving. But I noticed that my resistance was an immobility of its own; that real resting meant laying down some defenses and reasonings and remembering that the whole point was never to force anything to make sense in the first place. This life I chose was never about becoming the best at explaining anything, especially not pain. It was actually about the very opposite; the point was never needing to explain myself at all.
Meth-Fueled Car Crash at My Best Friend’s Wedding
Ten minutes before the ceremony was scheduled to begin, in which my best friend, the bride, was to be delivered down the aisle on her husband’s childhood horse, a guy on meth was speeding down the country road in front of her farmhouse going 30mph over the limit. His sedan clipped some wedding guests turning left in their CRV as he careened into the South Umpqua, totaling two cars and spooking their two horses in the front yard. I was the one who saw the whole thing out of her second story window, naturally, so I assumed my regular role, which is crash reporter. As the image developed, it became clear that everyone was safe, thank God, and we’d just have to stall for a while as it got resolved by the folks with the proper machinery. Still, it all could’ve been shaped into it meaning something else, a metaphor or an omen or a big punchy headline. Instead, I noticed that everyone around me calmly and wisely decided to just take it for what it was and move on: a dramatic moment with no injuries. The tow truck came, took the damage away, and honked congratulations when my friends walked back down the aisle now married. Then, we all went on and had a great time.
I heard later that, allegedly, the meth guy climbed out of his sinking car, crawled himself onto the riverbank, stood up and and screamed “hell yeah!” as he pumped his fists into the air. This was certainly an interesting perspective on the event. But these days I’m choosing to be more discerning with what inspires me, and to be a little more weary of the man with the most extreme experience, as I realized that I can make anything mean anything and I should be more careful with that. So with this one maybe I’ll go with….hmm…how about “love wins?” Lol. No, I think it’s something about a fight with my family I had a few days later, about our obsessions with our own high-impact collisions and men with extreme experiences and how it’s maybe not the crashes themselves but our obsession with their details that’s stolen us away from the enjoying best days of our lives. It felt like shit to bring it up, but no one died. It was just a dramatic moment with no injuries.
Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s “Behold! Be Held!”
The other day while driving up the hill outside Ventura where the 101 breaks away from the ocean, I noticed I was happy in a way that didn’t feel like I was dying. Any other time I was happy this year it felt like I was clubbed in the abdomen by a crowbar. It was like in order to register joy at all, I had to feel bludgeoned by it; it had to bust me open and splat my guts out to count, even as this way of feeling left me bleeding out the very stuff that keeps me alive. Thank God for that one day I began to wonder, “why was it taking me so long to recover from things that are supposed to be good?” What I thought was a picture of real, authentic living looks more like a medical emergency to me now.
In this realization’s wake, I imagined there must be a better way for me to be opened up than by bludgeon, and I listened to this song a bunch because it seemed like it offered some ideas, and reminded me of the thing I said earlier, about music being larger than taste.
Talking About Wine and Being Drunk in Northern Italy
At Orsi, a biodynamic farm and winery in the hills outside Bologna, Federico Orsi makes wine using several methods I was familiar with, and one that I had never heard of before, which he calls “perpetual wine.” So, there’s one big tank into which, for several years, he has added juice from all different vintages, varietals, and vineyards, to continuously ferment in the same vessel. You get a bottle and the exact composition of what you’re drinking is a mystery. This is in contrast to most winemaking, in which wine is made from a crop almost always from a single year, and often a single varietal and/or from a single vineyard, or is an intentionally measured blend. The typical idea is that you get the purest expression of the grape, of the place, of the year it was harvested, etc., because it’s fermented in its own isolation. But in the perpetual tank, there’s nearly a decade of composite juice sourced from all over his vineyards, all different crops, whose staggered timelines intertwine in the vessel as they age and combine essences—there is no vintage, just monthly bottlings. It captivated me, because it was a total diffusion of the tactics you learn about how to interpret wine. It’s quite literally a wine of loosened time, one that’s always adjusting itself, and its tank never fully emptied. So you just drink it and taste not a high-res snapshot, but the ambiance of a place, the tenor of a time.
I was straight up drunk and having an incredible day and I was thinking a lot, having a generously kind and exploratory discussion slash vineyard adventure with my new sommelier friend, who easily could’ve written me off but entertained all of my non-expert (though experienced) perceptions. It was moving to me to find a new vessel for a metaphor, and to understand that this wine was not crafted, like most, towards explaining or proving to me what it was; it wasn’t one grape, from one slope, from one year with particular conditions, from which you would compare and contrast it to the others. It was juice being itself, which is many different things, all while morphing and aging like a person receiving new inputs over their life. It also wasn’t expensive and I took two bottles home in my suitcase.
I do like drinking wine like a regular guy, for taste and for fun and with not all that much thinking involved, but I often abandon the part of myself that has the lens to spot the little angels of connection weaving threads between the labor of farming, the intuition of creative production, and the pleasure of drinking, just like I do in music and other art that attracts me, just because back in California, the wine scene is either cliquey and obscure, or monied out and missing the point. It makes me kind of sad, because wine is supposed to be like folk music, and that’s why I like to understand this abstract thing that makes me happy in the same way I do a song.
Lesley Duncan’s “Broken Old Doll”
“Nothing can harm me, if seen through a lifetime.”
After all of my realizations around bludgeoning, the idea of love as glue, and the other idea of being adorable even while broken, sounded refreshingly simple.
MJ Lenderman & Wednesday’s “My Voice is A Little Horse”
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Last weekend I got to hear Karly and Jake from Wednesday/MJ Lenderman do an unplugged version of “My Voice is A Little Horse” a couple of times. It’s a song I’d only listened to passively before, and hearing it acoustically was like hearing a whole new thing. I almost don’t want to say I was struck, because that makes me think of crowbars, except that’s what I was. After all, the song evokes that kind of thing: “it almost kills me, and it purges nothing.”
What’s there, though, in the faint and knowing chorus, under the heavy dust of waiting for the worst to manifest itself, is a bit of rough freedom, a voice that has legs, small but muscley: “my voice is a little horse, galloping wild through the woods.”
About five years ago I wrote down a Lauren Berlant quote on a piece of Chateau Marmont stationary that I procured through an act of the undermentioned “acrid sex,” which, not long after I hung it up at my desk, got rat nibbles all along the edges because at the time my office was a backyard TuffShed that they apparently snuck into at night. The quote was this:
“I’ll coast in awkward transit, family meals, and acrid sex to get next to a freedom. I’ll fling myself at ordinary monsters if in the crevasse of the mistake I get next to a freedom. We bear each other hoping to breathe in each other’s freedom.”
Two offices later and I’ve still put it where I can see it every day, even as it begins to feel like a vestige of an uncomfortably recent me. At the time, it felt like an uncanny prescription for the kind of bravery I had: unafraid of the rancid or the rigid, feeling like the naked truth was wedged somewhere between the two and that it was probably perverted. This is how I lived for the last many years, confusing connection with the flinging and the monsters and the meals, and I did feel as if I was close to another’s freedom, absolutely. Another’s freedom.
I’m now fantasizing about cutting bravery loose. I can admit that I wanted to know about pain because it made me feel big, but it was actually more like a swelling that left me stuck. I forgot that the other times when I was free, when galloping was an option, I was precisely because I was small and rough around the edges.
Perhaps I wanted to know about The Worst for so long, because if goodness was infinite, it was probably an ouroboros. As long as I was intimate with the very tip of The Worst, I’d be as close as I could ever be to The Best. Inside of its mouth.
But given I have the choice, which would I rather be? A snake eating its own tail for eternity…or a little horse galloping free in the woods, for now?
merry Christmas :-)
Reading this was a beautiful journey I never wanted to end