The grey skies of January continue, the moon is in its first quarter, and the sun goes down at 5:25pm on this gloomy Sunday.
Today I spent an hour in the corner of a shopping mall, borrowing the internet of a fast-fashion shop that closed at noon because too many of its workers had the plague. I leaned against an artificial tree, still recovering from the chipper mayhem of the Apple store, where I’d just exchanged some old hardware for their smallest telephone (which they might discontinue).
I want my phone to have less influence in my life, for it to feel like a tool rather than a devious magnet. Owning one with a smaller physical presence seems like a sensible move.
Crouched at the foot of the artificial tree, I waited for my tiny new device to sort itself out and set itself up. Seventeen minutes remained as the progress bar inched across the screen, restoring my life from god only knew. I grew antsy during these long minutes of being genuinely off the grid. I was not just euphemistically in Focus Mode or Do Not Disturb—no, I was truly unreachable for the first time in ages. I felt like a negligent citizen as I imagined the critical messages I might be missing: breaking news and urgent work requests, perhaps an offer of cash and prizes—or loved ones having medical events.
Beneath this junkie craving for fresh data, a new thought arrived with the force of revelation: Why set up my phone at all? The idea left me woozy with fantasies of a spartan, monastic life beyond the network. But I needed to get my phone running because I had no idea how to find my way home from the shopping mall.
When I finally reconnected to the grid, there was no new information waiting for me except a spam message offering to make me a custom logo for $10.
Temperatures in the thirties and everything is coated grey. I scan the forecast for snowflake icons, but no luck yet. I’m craving a good snowstorm like a favorite food.
This morning I came across a koan: When I breathe in, the universe is breathing out. When I breathe out, the universe is breathing in. At the time, this sounded incredibly necessary and profound. But looking at these words on the page now, I recoil. Why is the vocabulary of spirituality so tacky? Maybe because it’s dealing with vapor and there’s no room for concrete detail.
Last night I dreamt tangled, deeply plotted dreams about rotted airplanes, teeth in the street, and a gigantic man who knelt down to tell me he was raised by a mountain and that I did not understand how to live. I asked him if I could bum a cigarette and he tossed me into the sea. I swam into the dark until I was rescued by an inflatable child who cried like a ticking clock.
I woke up wondering if I would live my life any differently if I measured my age in days or hours instead of years.
Sunset at 5:23pm with temperatures deep below freezing. At a meeting in a church basement, I admired a large wooden cross before a bank of filing cabinets and contemplated the two-thousand-year collision of metaphysics and paperwork that led to this moment.
Outside, an airplane engine grinds overhead. Telephone screens glow in the night like devotional candles. I once heard a woman say, “I refuse to believe in a god of confusion.” I often think about her voice, small and hushed, a desire addressed to nobody in particular. Perhaps it’s the greatest desire of all, to believe there’s some sense to all of this.
My father died six years ago today. It still feels like it’s only been a year or two, maybe three. Time gets funny when you start losing people. More dates and sometimes even entire seasons become associated with a loved one’s final days, the ambient quarrels or tiny grudges that you’d give anything to feel again.
Maybe some people structure their histories in terms of accomplishments or presidencies. My timeline is organized by loss, something I only notice when confronted with personal and cultural trivia: When did I go to China? What year did Ex Machina come out? I find myself riffling through the years between when my mother’s liver failed (2009) and when I drove like hell to make it to my grandfather’s bedside but got the news in a strip mall parking lot (2011) and when my father died of septic shock (2016), just weeks after getting his new liver (2015). So much hope, suddenly gone.
I once visited a therapist who said these were traumatic losses because they were sudden and unexpected, which implies if the circumstances were different, I might have been prepared. I did not return to therapy. Maybe I should give it another try. Perhaps it’s abnormal to organize my sense of time around my dead. Or maybe everyone does this, and it’s simply the price of getting older—the cost of loving and being loved. After losing my parents, a sensation of freefall appeared, and it’s still with me now: the slight flutter in the belly, the sense of being untethered from the world. So I like my way of understanding time because it keeps everyone close to me.
Last year I did not think about my father’s death on January 6. I was busy wondering if our government might fall. Only now does it occur to me these dates are shared, that I’ll see this date advertised in retrospectives and commemorations for years to come. Live long enough and maybe it’s inevitable that personal and public damage will collide.
Forty degrees with gusty winds. The sun goes down at 5:21pm tonight. I’ve been spending my mornings at the local library, a dramatic new glass building with angled struts, and it feels like I’m on a spaceship in a mid-budget space opera where there’s a glitch with the hyper-sleep.
And I’m so tired these days. I’ve been setting my alarm so I can arrive when the library opens and snag a study room even though the place stays mostly empty until noon. A young woman studies for medical school. In the far corner, an elderly man sighs over a big dusty book about trees. And I’m hunched over my notepad, trying to make a go of it, this writing thing. The twenty-first draft of my novel is coming along slowly and painfully. But it’s coming.
Nobody’s sure what they should be doing, plague-wise. Uncertainty hangs in the air alongside the virus. We’re still vaporizing each other with our voices. Our breath. But they say it’s mild now, mostly upper respiratory. But it’s still sweeping the nation and disrupting public life. They’re still making alarming charts. No matter how this shakes out, uncertainty is here to stay, and how do you learn to live with that? Meanwhile, I’m keeping an eye on the statistics again, wondering if we’ll go to London next month.
Ohio. Tonight the sun sets at 5:20pm, and I’m thinking about my soul. Goodness. What does it mean to be a good person? Sometimes it feels like striving towards an object on the horizon that turns to vapor when we draw near. Maybe we punish ourselves for failing to grasp it, never realizing that striving is what makes us good, even though it’s a familiar platitude: the journey, not the destination, and progress, not perfection, etc. The maddening thing about clichés is they are usually true.
In 1932, John Dewey described goodness as a dynamic, not a state: “Not perfection as a final goal, but the ever-enduring process of perfecting, maturing, refining, is the aim in living. The bad man is the man who, no matter how good he has been, is beginning to deteriorate, to grow less good. The good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has been, is moving to become better. Such a conception makes one severe in judging himself and humane in judging others.”
But is severity necessary? I think of an old friend down in New Orleans, how he’d often say, “When I’m hard on myself, I’m hard on other people.”
How do you reckon with the internet when writing a story that takes place in the present day or near future? Writing about online living feels tacky for some reason, even though it might be the only thing we have left in common.
Many contemporary novels, television shows, and films sidestep the issue by retreating into the ’70s or ’80s. Other stories leap into a decimated future without electricity, let alone email. They depict an offline world in the wake of infrastructural collapse or intergalactic warfare. But maybe there’s no need to be so dramatic. More likely, the internet will soon become so choked with horseshit that it will become increasingly untenable. Perhaps we’ll just walk away. Imagine it: the year is 2030 and we’re laughing at how unhappy our noisy screens made us, all the misunderstandings they caused.
Sunset: 5:19pm. A cloudy day with highs in the low 40s and a few beautiful minutes of blustery snow. I’m reading Bring Up the Bodies, the second installment of Hilary Mantel’s dense portrait of Thomas Cromwell. It’s slow-going for me, but worthwhile for images like this: “Troubled men . . . sidling around the peripheries of their own souls, tapping at the walls: oh, what is that hollow sound?”
If I have a soul, what are its measurements and boundaries? I close my eyes and try to imagine it. Perhaps this is a fool’s errand, a pointless exercise in metaphysical speculation. Then again, there’s the 21st-century joke—or horror—that our search histories might be the most accurate portrait of our souls.
All the little gestures and routines that define me—listening to music, walking, running, meditating, writing, reading, sleep, breathing—can now be quantified via a weirdly persistent army of devices and apps that want to tell me how fast, how long, how far, how often, and how many people.
While I wasn’t paying attention, my life became gamified into metrics and streaks. But turning myself into a scoreboard has led to blinkered thinking, a binary view in which every activity becomes about the accretion of data, not the mystery and mess of life itself. Maybe I’m not meant to know so much about myself.
So I spent the afternoon sidling around the peripheries of my devices, tapping at the delete button.
The first day of the year, and there’s a new supermoon tonight. Maybe this is auspicious. I’d like to believe in some kind of signal or sign that we’re turning the corner here on planet earth. In the meantime, it’s strangely warm here in Ohio with constant rain. The sun sets at 5:19pm.
This morning I lumbered into the park for a run in the heavy rain. I tried my best to feel fresh and brand new for these first hours of the year, but I could still hear the head noise of unsent emails, ignored text messages, unwritten words, and the litany of errands and obligations that come with being a person in the 21st century. Then I rounded the corner and saw an otherworldly mist rising from the pond, and for a moment, I felt a rare stillness. And I realized I’m forever nursing a pointless fantasy: If only I had enough time. Enough space. Enough silence. I can’t stop the world. But occasionally, I get lucky, and I can stop my thoughts.
My new year’s resolution is to write more—and write looser and weirder. And I’m going to work on being kinder, more curious, rather than trading in the cheap currency of cynicism and despair.
I’ve been contemplating this line from The Twilight Zone, rolling it around in my head like a koan: “We love a rose because it will soon be gone. Whoever loved a stone?”
The end of another year, and exhaustion hangs heavy like a fog. We move through virus variants and frightening weather. We reckon with attention hijacking and institutional decay. This doesn’t feel like the future we were promised thirty years ago when Warp released the first installment of its Artificial Intelligence series, back when electronic music eagerly awaited the arrival of a new millennium. Drawing upon the futurism of Kraftwerk, Cybotron, and Derrick May, the promise of better living through technology seeped through the discography of the 1990s: Surfing on Sine Waves. Bytes. Electro-Soma. Dimension Intrusion. And now, looking at my favorite records this year, it strikes me that many of these artists are dismantling and rewiring these templates to better suit our times. Instead of celebrating technology, they’re leaning upon the language of faith.
Lamentations for a decaying future. Layers of grit and grain gradually congeal before blooming into tones that approach something that sounds like grace.
Electronic contrails and drum machine residue. These blurred transmissions from an unknown station conjure the lowlight hiss and mystery of a half-remembered Chain Reaction record from twenty-five years ago. This third installment is the most spectral of the series on Peak Oil. Be sure to check out their more structured releases for the Aught label.
Sleek midnight ambiance fused with a Drexciyan edge. Tracks like “Concatenate II” begin with fragile drift before gathering the ballast of low frequencies and arpeggiated synths that reconfigure and refine the sensibilities of optimistic mid-1990s electronics into a darker and savvier score for the 21st century.
A four-hour epic that melds reverb, opera, and detached strings into the sound of a distant century bleeding through the walls. The album begins with a minute of silence save for the faint sound of a ticking clock before the music of La Belle Époque unfurls through a scrim of crackle, echo, and time.
Not Waving & Romance – Eyes of Fate / Restoration of Bliss
Melodramatic loops and choral sludge of the highest order. Sometimes these tracks drift and fade midway, only to return in more menacing form. See also Romance’s A Kiss Is Just a Kiss and You Must Remember This for more smudged slow-motion elegance.
Alien hymns varnished with a jet black gloss. These eight tracks resurrect the cyberpunk spirit of mid-1980s Transmat and Cybotron for a new century, collapsing time and space until I’m in the passenger seat of Model 500’s night drive through Babylon back in ’83: The lights of passing vehicles reflected in her mirrored sunglasses. She looks at her watch, and I can see the liquid crystal display reflected dancing where her eyes should be.
Perhaps I’m biased, but Baker’s original score for After the End has become one of my all-time favorite pieces of music. After spending three months listening to this sci-fi lamentation reverberate across the stone walls of a chapel, it continues to reveal new textures and connections between the liturgical and the Blade Running.
Sometimes synchronicity strikes hard. This record was released on October 22, a day I’ll remember because it was C’s birthday and we were driving through the Mojave after passing through Kingman and Needles. And this record captures the gestalt of the desert as I’d like to imagine it: wide open and dazzling but edged with mystery and an eerie twang.
Broadcasting from Palestine, Muqata’a fuses classic Arabic songs with nearly every facet of electronic music, dicing up the sensibilities of DJ Shadow, techno, and even the occasional jungle break. But here, these styles are artifacts, grist for the mill of a much larger project that sounds like the stress and shred of thinking these days. This is my soundtrack for running and imagining what the future might sound like.
Wasted Cathedral – I’m Gonna Love You ‘Til the End of Time
A durable collection of hazy and occasionally frost-bitten loops from Saskatchewan that range from chugging drones to tranquilized dub to blissed-out reverb.
Elite-level shimmer and hum. This record operates in a state of suspension, echoing the sensation of an endless afternoon with dust hanging in shafts of sunlight. But these sounds never settle; they morph and unfurl new patterns. This is music for speculation, a future balm.
A masterful synthesizer workout that swings between the baroque and the zen, this is propulsive late-night highway music for speed racing and imagining better horizons.
Sunset: 5:14pm. The blurry days between Christmas and New Year’s Eve stand outside of time. These long nights are tailor-made for dusting off childhood memories and tending to personal passions. Perhaps this is why I’m dredging up my old delay pedals, tape decks, and loop machines. I’d like to start making tracks again, and I don’t want to do this anywhere near a screen. In an age of mind-numbing options and endless virtual palettes, parameters are critical.
Today I spent the afternoon rooting through a storage unit for my copy of Snowcrash and some audio cables, and my brains hummed with digital chatter and trash. Celebrities are shaving their heads, there’s a glass bottle shortage, and China is building a hotter version of the sun. I want to improve my ability to sit still and simply be a person, so I stopped by the local zen center.
I meditated in the recreation hall of a Unitarian church with two elderly men who were live-streaming the situation to the internet. No matter where I go these days, there’s a fucking screen. I closed my eyes and tried not to fidget or look at the clock while I listened to the two men breathe. Heavy rain fell on the rooftop that sounded like static, and I spent the time thinking about how to set up my soundsystem, debating whether my beautiful new reverb pedal should come before or after the cassette deck.
An old reverberated and looped bit of radio that I caught down in Texas ten years ago. I collected this with some other tracks for an extended-player in 2015, and I’m looking forward to making a new batch.
A warm and rainy Christmas in Ohio. Highs in the mid-60s and the sun will set at 5:11pm.
It felt like somebody else’s dream, going to Midnight Mass last night. We dove down empty rain-slicked streets before entering a cathedral filled with incense, chanting, and a menacing organ that shuddered the stone walls. I’d never been to Midnight Mass before, although I have smudgy memories of spending the holidays with my Polish grandparents when I was very small. Of mysterious late-night comings and goings, their voices downstairs mixing with the smell of cabbage and kielbasa. I wonder what it would have been like to grow up in a world shaped by ritual.
The pews were crowded with an exceptional cross-section of humanity, all awake at this late hour, hoping to connect with something beyond themselves. Taking a seat in the back, I thought about Leonard Cohen’s comment that religion is the greatest form of art. Maybe I don’t need to feel like an interloper. Perhaps it’s okay if I admire Catholicism only for its aesthetics, how it dramatizes grief and bends towards science fiction: the surgical ministrations of the priest and the fixation on eternal life and sexless creation; the swinging censer that fills the vault with smoke. The theatrical outfits and elaborate hats; the orchestrated calisthenics of kneeling, standing, and sitting while a man on a platform holds up a golden book. There’s a fascinating feedback loop in how speculative fiction borrows from the ancient rites of a faith that yearns for a future without death.
Most of all, I admired the humility of the Penitential Act: I confess to almighty God and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have greatly sinned in my thoughts and words, in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do. There was power in the sound of so many strangers chanting these words together, admitting we were screw-ups and wanted to be better. There was reassurance in knowing these words have been repeated for over two thousand years. I bowed my head and remembered my parents.
When the service ended, we wished each other Merry Christmas. “Peace be unto you,” we said. Then we scattered into the dark, where the streets were empty except for drunks and insomniacs, the penitent and devout.
