My Diary

Today a thought occurred to me to pull up masters of songs I had created over the years which had been implemented by a man I found on Fiverr referred to as Neks who did an absolutely fantastic job with my old audio files despite being in varying, jumbled states at times. After listening to the collection which I had amassed over the months or years I had worked with him (I have not committed to making new music seriously since the use of a weed vape pen seriously damaged my throat/vocal box and subsequently I haven’t used weed since—this occurred in 2019), I decided to publish a collection of the ones which I thought sounded ‘right’ and which merited sharing by making a video/visualizer for each one and posting them to YouTube, 15 tracks in total.

One of the songs I had sent to Neks was, unbelievably, an mp3 for a recording a friend and I made as a band we called ‘Lose the Suit’ which must date to around 2006–a 20 year old audio file at this point. Whereas many of the other tracks were, bluntly put, my impersonations of rappers who I admired and listened to through a majority of my adult life, including all of the counterproductive and, at times, hazardous bravado and glorification of vices which can sometimes entail that particular lifestyle, this track, called ‘Madi’ represented a more pure chapter in my life—one where I had never tried a drug (never had the desire or impulse to), never slept with a woman, never been arrested, never gotten so drunk my behavior caused me to embarrass or alienate myself.

With that being said, and with all moral judgments shelved for being useless or overly-ruminating, lacking value in their analysis, the music itself was also quite good, embodying its own “pure” quality—clean and simple, yet intricate and inspired, clearly “saying something” in its manner of execution, but I suppose one area which warrants my discovery or consideration is the little amount of “effort” I remember putting into making songs like this one in particular. Hell, a lot of the catalog which I produced, almost primarily written to sing alongside playing the guitar was quite good in my opinion, in the sense that the melodies were catchy, the lyrics were abstract enough to be generally relatable, though not meandering nor pointless, and solid rhyme schemes were thoroughly enforced throughout. I do have to admit, however, that I could not be arsed to write anything which was not a love song: my early, teenage songs absolutely embodied the subject, but, present were themes which clearly transcend since, most likely, they cut to very core or primordial motivations in folks, ones which are identifiable, ready available, accessible, resonating and relatable. Though I suppose, now, I can look back and see that overly-simplified frame which summoned songs like that, the notion of idealized or dramatized, romantic love, which may be suitable to underpin larger societal machinations or occasions in something like a Shakespearean tragedy, but, perhaps, are placed into contexts specifically like these—abstractions of art which, arguably, necessarily demand or, at least, provide for drama or emotions to be represented or explored, but which do not necessarily (nor usually) represent actual relationships in our lives.

As an example to support what I’m saying, let’s envision a man who is mystified or governed by the concept of romantic love. This man might set himself up for a vicious collapse of that frame of reality should he find those feelings unrequited, or even counterproductive when expressed or vehemently sought after, essentially seeking to ‘find’ himself in his romantic partner, since these forms of idealized “love” or romance entail participation from the desired alternate party. Otherwise, the man would only give his love but receive nothing in return, which, of course is not what a man who’s wrapped up in this form of thinking desires—he wants deep, stimulating, and affirming feedback. He should not only be satisfied to give love selflessly, but rather he wants to feel its effects reflected back to him; he wants to reap his reward, to find solace in that unshakeable form of identity which one can fortify when romantic love is received in equal measure as it is freely given. This is not to make a cynical observation that romantic feelings of love or deep connection are a mirage or involve some form of blinding or fooling one’s self to reality, and it’s also not to say that this particular category of romantic relationship are closed off or impossible, but they certainly run the risk of heartbreak and failure should they be solicited or navigated with blind naïveté or outsized expectations, perhaps due to lack of experience, or worse, blind faith in that as the system which is solely available to be implemented, foreclosing more sober-minded or realistic arrangements such as mutual respect and a sort of coupled-but-separate independence so that one party is not simply feeling as though they’ve settled for the other. I think if Jordan Peterson at this time, who warns against entering into relationships with partners for whom you lack respect, but I’ll take this one step further: imagine you are, blindly, the party whom your partner sees as settling or lacking respect for, and worse—imagine if you lacked the self-perception to realize that that was what that was. Haunting.