#okay no but i found my old lps collection and these two just.. i felt it. they have an everlasting sapphic love for one another

[hyuck-xix]

they are girlfriends

[sinceileftyoublog]

Billie Marten Interview: Quiet Confidence

Photo by Katie Silvester

BY JORDAN MAINZER

“Where are you calling from?” I asked Billie Marten during our Zoom last month.

“East London,” she replied, “Like everyone else,” simultaneously rolling her eyes at and embracing the scene in which she’s found herself embedded.

The 22-year-old’s wry sense of humor, observations, and self-awareness complement the earnestness she’s shown on her three LPs, especially last month’s terrific Flora Fauna (IMPERIAL/Fiction Records). Though the rawer aesthetic of the record was influenced by a spontaneous, drunken purchase of a bass guitar, and many of the album’s instrumentals were fleshed out in the studio with producer Rich Cooper, Marten both dug deep within her psyche and branched out to the world around her to tackle the album’s themes of self-care and empathy. Opener “Garden of Eden” doesn’t waste any time, its drums rumbling and guitars scraping as Marten compares caring for people to tending to plants. It’s a sentiment that hits even harder after a year-plus of lockdown-induced isolation, when for many of us keeping our pets and plants alive was the only thing we felt like we could control. Throughout the record, Marten’s honest about her relationship with herself, relatable in her alternating between endurance and self-doubt. “Trying hard to teach myself a lesson / Give my body patience to bree free,” she sings on the hip hop-influenced “Heaven”; even if a partner or folks in the world around her think they’re already self-actualized, Marten’s looking out for her own mental health. On the flipside, a chaotically fuzzy stomp like “Ruin” has Marten declaring that treating others like she treats herself would be bullying: “Got a war with my body / Never win, never lose,” she sings desperately. 

Flora Fauna is much more than a collection of the good days and the bad days, though. Marten communes with all sorts of living things, from street pigeons to gardens. And perhaps the most consequential song on the album is “Human Replacement”, a song about women not being able to walk alone at night, inspired by a seemingly increasing rash of violent attacks on women in the UK over the past few years. In its juxtaposition of infectious groove and essential, in-your-face subject matter, it reminds me of U.S. Girls’ weighty “Incidental Boogie”. For Marten, putting herself in others’ shoes, in a sense, allows her to become something else. On minimal closer “Aquarium”, over strummed acoustic guitar, she sings, “Do you wanna go to the aquarium? / I feel I lately wanna drown / Sit down, stare out, shut up, and swim around.” She’s able to nurture an environment by immersing herself in it, like how dirt finds its way on her face and between her teeth on the album’s cover.

Marten’s getting ready to get back out there, with some festival dates in the summer and a UK tour in July. For now, she’s relishing reflection and admissions. Towards the end of our interview, in which she had her camera on but I didn’t, she told me, “I like that your camera’s not on. It feels like I’m in a confession booth.” Flora Fauna’s got to be the greenest confession booth in the world.

Since I Left You: How did you approach the order of the tracks on Flora Fauna?

Billie Marten: I definitely wanted it to follow the classic storyline writing/curve. “Garden of Eden” starts off with the plant, everything’s open, and you really get the main feel of the album there, and “Creature of Mine” is twisting you up to this darker, punchier world, and “Human Replacement” is very in-your-face. “Liquid Love” would be the plot twist. Then, eventually, we float down to the second side of the album and get back into that acoustic-y world slightly more, but it’s definitely still different from the first two albums. Laid bare with nothing but an acoustic...on the last song of the album. I love that it’s quite a loud beginning but very quiet ending, which is what a lot of album campaigns end up being. You’re selling this thing you’ve made for two years, and it’s all, “Look at me, here I am, here’s what I’ve been doing, here’s how much better I am.” That air of improvement has to be there. But in the end, it is what it is. Take it or leave it. I’m not a naturally outgoing, competitive person, so I quite like finishing it with an air of quiet confidence rather than being brash and loud.

SILY: "Garden of Eden” almost has its own quiet confidence. It starts like you’re already in the middle of a conversation.

BM: I definitely wanted it to be immediate, like you’re dropped into my life without any warning. Have you seen Soul?

SILY: Yes.

BM: What did you think?

SILY: I thought it was very good. What about you?

BM: I loved it, and I thought it was the best philosophical education you could have in two hours. It made me think of it that way, because he drops to the real world. I wanted that feeling here.

SILY: I read an interview you did that had the title “We really are just plants,” and I was thinking that while reading about the record before it came out and eventually listening to it. Was it important for you to start the record with a song that compared us to something that’s also living but we don’t always think about as living?

BM: Absolutely. Well said. We’re actually really easy to take care of. That’s why I wanted to simplify it down in the melting pot. Take away emotion from it. In the end, we just need water and light and a bit of space, but not too much, to survive. I was very aware of that whole concept. Especially in London, it’s, “Look how much I’ve grown or will be growing in the future,” not, “How’s everyone else doing? How’s your soil?”

SILY: On “Liquid Love”, you sing about “wanting to wake up as a human every morning.” Does that song point to an eternal optimism?

BM: That was very much an affirmation type line for me. That line about waking up every morning was about how glad I was able to do that, because not everyone gets to do that for a long time. The song’s a love/hate relationship with drinking, which I was doing quite a lot of in the first few years of music. I get hangovers really badly. It doesn’t take me a lot to be completely out of action for the entire next day. That line was about just waking up and feeling proper and normal as a human, because I’ve spent a lot of days not being able to function, and it was really getting to me. We rely on our conscience to remind us to take care of ourselves all the time.

SILY: Is your relationship with drinking now different?

BM: It’s definitely a lot better, and I’m a much happier person. I don’t use it the same. I don’t need it in my life; I just enjoy it. 80% of us probably have the same struggle with it. It’s something you can control, and something that takes us out of real life entirely. It takes up your attention for hours and hours at a time. It’s an incredible mask for genuine problems. With music, it’s around a lot of the time. Some people just can’t function without it. I have big realizations all the time. My body’s telling me to stop doing it and stop smoking as well. I keep getting tonsillitis every month. I think it’s its way of saying to chill out.

SILY: The theme of being able to control certain things seems to pervade the record. It relates to nature, too. On the album closer, your garden seems to represent a balance, a place where you can influence nature but not control it.

BM: I have a really strong urge to protect an environment. I use the word cradle a lot. It’s important that humans can do that with other ones. I wanted that side of confidence I’ve developed but to let people know it’s okay to be and remain vulnerable. I think those are some of the best sides of people. If I think of my friends, I don’t think of them as who they are when they know they’re being watched. I tend to think of what they’ve been through, their low points, who they are when they’re being honest. “Aquarium” is very much that sort of confessional poem.

SILY: There are other natural entities in song titles on here that symbolize something, like “Walnut” and “Pigeon”. I think I read the latter is a yoga pose?

BM: No. I was literally referring to the one-legged pigeons that hang around London that are all gammy and rough and ready and tough characters.

SILY: The pigeon is really smart and historically used for a lot but we think of them as rats.

BM: They’re complete vermin.

SILY: It’s almost like the way we treat nature and/our ourselves.

BM: Exactly. There’s such a different between a rural pigeon and a capital city pigeon. They’re almost completely different species. It’s funny. I’m getting a lot of misconstrued things coming out of this record, people saying I’ve left London, I’ve found spirituality, the pigeon thing. All of these things just aren’t true.

SILY: That’s sometimes a good thing. Of course there’s a line where someone says something completely wrong and claims it to be true, but do you like in general for people to be able to interpret your lyrics the way they want to?

BM: Yes. I’ve had a lot of experience [with the former], especially because we’re doing these things on Zoom, and then you read the written piece and it’s so different from how the conversation went. It’s an interesting social experiment. But I love when people take images and phrases and meanings for themselves and make them their own. It’s a great sign someone’s getting something from your music even when it’s not happening in your head.

SILY: On “Creature of Mine”, that post-apocalyptic, “this is our last chance” type vibe--Is that a scenario you often entertain, and how do you feel about it?

BM: I’m a sucker for diving deep into rumination in a very large, existential plane. Thinking just spirals until it gets bigger and bigger and you get to a point where you’re completely irrelevant. Like watching Cosmos or David Attenborough. [It puts] your existence into a tiny hole. I think sometimes that’s really positive because it helps me understand when I’m nervous for a performance or gig, it’s good to put yourself in perspective. However, it sometimes makes you not want to do things because they’re ultimately not important. It’s a fine balance with that style of thinking. It’s automatic for me. It’s my constant thought train.

SILY: Are there other places on the album, even if not in the same context, where you refer to that spiraling thought process?

BM: I think “Ruin” is especially difficult in that I was noting down my thought process, and that’s what the verses are. I don’t know why I do it, but it makes me feel good. I needed to do that to get it out of me and understand how ridiculous that thought train is. The chorus tries to put this analogy of [wasting] time being a crime. That’s what I was doing: I was wasting a lot of time thinking about it, so every time I sing it, it’s a weird slipstream universe type thing.

SILY: I asked the question hoping you would say “Ruin”. When you sing, “Got a war with my body / Never win, never lose,” it reminded me of that thought process. It goes in a circle. It’s not a linear thing.

BM: There’s no point in putting an element of battle into it. There’s no opponent. It’s just you. You could try and find opponents with other people, but that doesn’t usually work out either. This whole album is fleshing out these huge subjects I ultimately have no control over. Putting my two cents in and leaving it at that, making these musical, experimental creations. 

SILY: “Human Replacement” seems to be one where the juxtaposition between the instrumentation and subject matter is sort of contrasting. It’s this funky strut, but the song’s about women feeling and being unsafe alone at night on the streets. Were you conscious of that contrast making that song?

BM: Me and my producer [Cooper], that was the first song we did together in this album, so it needed to come out very immediate. I just had that [sings melody], and he sat on the kit just trying it out. I had no idea what I wanted to talk about. I was going into this Queens of the Stone Age, grungy, late-night mood. I didn’t have the narrative because what they sing about wasn’t relevant to me. I was looking outside and hearing all the sirens and hearing about what was happening in the news every day, and it was a subject that needed to happen. I wouldn’t say I’m in any way a political writer, but it is a massive problem. It’s a shame that narrative came out of me. The subject matter had to match the severity of the song. I couldn’t really talk about my own feelings in that song. It had to be a bigger subject.

SILY: Are songs like those more or less difficult to perform live?

BM: I don’t know. I worried about playing that one live because it’s so serious. My between-song chat is very much not serious. It’s my personality, which is who I am when I’m not performing. So I was worried I wouldn’t give it the air time it needs. Then again, most people don’t even listen to lyrics. They just like the way a song feels. It’s important to entertain those people as well. It can’t be all doom and gloom. I would say it’s harder than talking about myself, which I’ve been doing since I was 12.

SILY: How was playing your gig?

BM: It was at Banquet [Records], a record store in South London. I thought we were gonna be in the actual shop, me and my long-term collaborator and bandmate and TM Jason. He just makes a bit of [drum] kit, and I’m on acoustic. It turned out to be in this proper venue in this theater. It was a gig. I’m really glad we got pushed into that environment. Anything else would have been a lot more daunting.

SILY: Was it your first time playing many of these songs?

BM: Yes. There are still ones I have no idea how to play. I need to figure that out quite soon. [laughs]

SILY: Are you looking forward to touring?

BM: Yes. Massively. I really needed this break to make me realize that because I think gigs can be really hard for people. I definitely find that. There have been certain moments where I wish I wasn’t going on stage. Now it’s just like we have been given this gift again of living normally. It would be incredibly inappropriate to feel otherwise.

SILY: What else is next for you?

BM: Definitely writing. I want to start recording again. I can do it now since we’ll be so busy. It’s shaping up into a completely different soundscape again, which is interesting. You’re always going.

SILY: Anything you’ve been listening to, watching, or reading lately that’s caught your attention?

BM: This band called Coco. I don’t even know how I found them. They’ve got no information about them whatsoever. I think they’re American. They have 3 songs on Spotify. They’re very very good. To be honest, I’m not very good at watching things at the moment. I watched Nomadland and loved that. Mostly it will always be The Simpsons. To be honest, I’ve been too busy recently. I’ve been looking forward to June. Wait, we are in June! It’s the 2nd day of June. Well, I’m looking forward to this month, where I can do more domestic things again and stop talking about myself. [laughs]

[jamiefairfaxisntcool]

/mu/core album review | Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

/mu/core album review #1

this week on /mu/core album review, we look at:

Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

Ah yes, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. The album that’s mostly known as either, “that one weird album from the 90s,” or, “/mu/ basic bitch meme music.” If you’re anywhere past a casual music fan, you have most-likely heard some songs off this project, if not the whole thing, doubly so if you’re into 90s culture, Indie, or any sort of Art-Rock or Folk movements. As I type this, the most popular YouTube rip of the album has about 4.3 million views, a playlist separating each track stands at 500,000 views, and the title track has a remarkable 40,733,956 plays on Spotify. Holy shit, to put that into perspective: AV Club writes that, “In The Aeroplane Over The Sea was originally slated to sell about 7,000 copies,” that’s roughly 5,819 times the predicted sales numbers of the album on just that song. This also means that this song has been listened to for approximately 131,163,338 minutes, a total of around 131,163,299 more minutes than the actual album length. Humanity has spent a collective 249 years listening to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Oh, and that’s just the title track.

If I couldn’t spell it out so clearly there, this album is fucking outrageously popular.

Even if you haven’t heard any material off the LP, this album is memed pretty heavily in the music corners of the internet. I don’t think I can find a single music meme page or forum that hasn’t jumped upon the ITAOTS or NMH bandwagon.

At this current point in time, ITAOTS has became a permanent resident in the zeitgeist of internet music culture. NMH, and by extension, it’s creator, Jeff Mangum have been elevated to a cult of personality status. The band and this project are accompanied by a never-ending choir: 15-25 year old sad white boys who cry while sing-screeching about semen and Anne Frank and poorly play open chords on their detuned Ibanez acoustics.

It’s oddly beautiful.

The album is so deceptively simple, so creatively cryptic and has all the elements of a slog faux-folk fest filled with whining that would bore me to so many tears that they could rival the sad boy indie kids who lose their e-girls to their more socially active explore-page bait counterparts. To a person not familiar with it, ITAOTS could look like an over hyped, masturbatory depression tape. It looks boring. It looks like it should be boring.

If it should be boring, then why have I only listened to it and absolutely nothing else for the last two days?

This isn’t a joke, I revisited the album of course to refresh myself before sitting down and writing this review. I kept listening, over the course of a school day, in-between production and songwriting sets, while playing games, and as I write this, I just finished my eighth spin of the record. Before those last two days, I had only listened to the album probably twice. 

I remember listening to it back in seventh grade and not particularly disliking it. I was really into Yes and a lot of other Prog and Psych bands, but I wasn’t particularly impressed with the almost yuppie voice that Jeff had used on the record compared to vocal beasts like Freddie Mercury, Bowie, and Jon Anderson. Later on, I listened in freshman year, and I appreciated it much more, and had a few songs come up in my shuffle play, but thought nothing much of it.

Now, war had changed.

part 1: i’m the fucking carrot king

As I plopped down in my computer chair, my window crackled and banged like a distant firecracker with the smack of heavy rains on a Summer afternoon. I placed my headphones firmly atop my ears, closed my eyes and leaned back in my chair. I heard the opening chords of The King of Carrot Flowers Pt. 1 and tried not just to hear the instrumentation, but also pay attention to the lyrical content of Mr. Mangum.

When you were young, you were the king of carrot flowers And how you built a tower tumbling through the trees In holy rattlesnakes that fell all around your feet

Okay, so what the fuck is actually happening here?

Upon my listens, I inferred that Jeff is speaking to another party here, most likely a female love interest, in what seemingly starts in a nostalgic tone. This sounds almost like a picturesque, coming-of-age, Americana film. Maybe one starring Molly Ringwald and River Phoenix, with a surprise cameo from someone famous back then like Jack Nicholson. Maybe John Candy, with a John Hughes script. Everything would have those faded out, classic colors, a hearkened back era. Quickly, by halfway through the first act, the tone shifts. A darker mood, a stark, grim reminder that life wasn’t always sunny and shinning in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.

And your mom would stick a fork right into daddy's shoulder And dad would throw the garbage all across the floor As we would lay and learn what each other's bodies were for

The Mang informs us of a horrific family life, specifically about what seems to be his dad’s, stepmom’s, and stepsister’s interpersonal relationships. The lines are obvious and straightforward, the life of our protagonist was rife with unhealthy familial and sexual relationships, and a sense of love and sweetness was not found there. Keep that in mind when thinking about later songs such as Oh Comely.

After the somber intro of Carrot Flowers Pt. 1, we reach my personal least favorite track on the album: The King of Carrot Flowers Pt. 2 and 3.

Look, I know the meme. “I LOOOOOOOOOVE JESUUUS CHUHRIEEEIISSSSTT,” and all that shit. I’m not even worked up about that line in particular, I just dislike Pt. 3. It’s the weakest of the upbeat songs on the album, with the weird yodel-screech voice that Gumman performs with really takes me out of the experience, which sucks because the buildup and atmosphere of Pt. 2 felt pretty amazing. Luckily, Pt. 3 is fairly short, so we don’t have to worry about it too much.

part 2: earth angel’s thesis

The title track for this album is one of the best songs on this album, no fucking contest. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Oh Comely, The Fool, and Two-Headed Boy Pt. 2 are top contenders when discussing this album. If you like the faster, fuzzier, upbeat songs you could probably substitute The Fool for Holland, 1945.

The title track has a familiar sounding chord progression and we can hear Gum from Jet Set Radio’s saccharine but yelp-y voice belt out from atop the mountains his undying love and admiration for... Anne Frank?

What a beautiful face I have found in this place That is circling all round the sun What a beautiful dream That could flash on the screen In a blink of an eye and be gone from me

In the first verse, Geoff mentions meeting or viewing a beautiful person on this fleeting rock circling round the Sun. He also matches this with the idea that it’s truly futile for him to chase after this beauty, as it is only a dream that could escape him when he awakes. El Jefé has actually mentioned that some of his surrealist lyrics are derived from dreams. Perhaps these lines could imply a more literal dream fading? I don’t exactly know, all I know is what I interpreted.

The instrumentation of this piece is nothing straying from NMH’s usual repertoire: Mandrake on Guitar and Vocals, Scott Spillane on the Horns, Robert Schneider on Bass and Production, Julian Koster playing... something. What is he playing? Wait, give me a second.

He’s playing the Singing Saw? I thought it was like, a Theremin. What the fuck is a Singing Saw?

Oh.

Okay sure, you can play that, however the fuck you do that.

And finally we have Jeremy Barnes on Drums.

The personnel handle the music with a light, bouncy feeling, and the tone and timbre remind me of a faded, old, seaside town on the east coast. Another thing to mention is that the chord progression is G-Em-C-D; I-vi-IV-V. A funny thing I noticed is that this song shares a chord progression with tons of songs from the 50’s and early 60’s, which adds to the waning Americana feeling, but it more specifically shares that progression with Earth Angel by The Penguins. In the 80’s film, Back To The Future, Marvin Berry covers the song with his band for the Enchantment Under The Sea Dance where Marty’s dad and mom have to dance to ensure that the future stays intact. There’s no further real connection, but I thought that was kinda cool to mention.

After looking through the lyrics for In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, I will admit, as a brainlet Two-Headed Boy Pt. 1 eluded me. Patrolling through Genius and some other reviews, I guess the consensus about this track was that it was about Anne Frank again? Manta Jeff’s cryptic lyricism continues to fool me. Besides the lyrics, this track mostly remains a piece of really good filler.

part 3: stop the military occupation of my brainwaves

The Fool is amazing, anyone who says it’s filler is wrong. I know I might anger some people by literally implying that Two-Headed Boy Pt. 1 was filler, but seriously The Fool just makes me a feel a way. My brain creates a scene reminiscent of a depressing diesel-punk Les Misérables. Even though Scotch Spillage’s fantastic piece for horns is beautifully imperfect, it lacks lyrical content and is short and length. So, let’s instead talk about Holland, 1945.

This awesome, uptempo, almost punk-like piece of fuzzy brass is groovy son. It’s probably the song you could show someone not familiar with this project and they’d be like, “Oh, is this Cake? Why is the lead singer singing so high now?”

Holland, 1945 is a song that you can just listen for the instrumentation. Holland, 1945 is a song that promotes peace and love. There’s so many great things I can say about Holland, 1945. How it’s theme is so perfectly fitting for today’s political climate, how it manages to blend these psychedelic and bluesy timbres with a fast and loud sound and how well it continued the semi-conceptual narrative of Joff’s admiration and love for... Anne Frank.

Okay, fuck it, I have to say it. It’s bothered me ever since I discovered it.

Why Anne Frank? Like, I know why Anne Frank, but I mean like, why, y’know? I’ll say I admire Anne Frank, she was trying her best to live a normal life in a terrifying time to be alive, but I never wanted to fuck her. xxJeffxx’s mentions of Anne kind of make me raise an eyebrow. Especially because the album’s not just about her either. When he gets sexual, it’s difficult to determine whether he is mentioning a third party or Anne, which would be pretty weird, as she was 15 when she died and Heff was 28 when he wrote this. Maybe this is just some patrician music shit that I’m too plebeian to understand, like heated toilet seats or drinking for fun rather than to drown the pain. Maybe I haven’t sat down and watched enough flowery-squarespace-sponsored-lofi-hip-hop-muzak-using-pretentious video essayists to understand it, but what do I know.

part 4: the proletariat cries

To wrap on the second half of the album, this is the half that I cried in.

Communist Daughter is a good song, but with how short it is, it left me wanting more. This track is one of the few that actually features a soft-spoken Jeffen, and its open and dark but dreamy atmosphere left my jaw agape. The mountaintops weren’t the only thing stained.

Oh Comely, Oh Comely. Oh Comely is a song that deserves its own review. The lyrical chops of The Mangum Magnum are on full display as he belts somber, brutal verse after verse, with plenty of juxtaposition between sickening, sexual and vile situations alongside a description of a sweet, innocent young girl, just trying to survive with a guitar by her side. This beautiful, lovely girl gets taken advantage by someone, some people, perhaps even Yeff himself, only seen as an easy lay, a whore, like the ones her father visits often. He disgustingly describes semen in the garden, and her making miracles with her mouth, but I didn’t get a tone similar to so many songs about “sexual-empowerment.” The song is about self-deprecating depression leading to her being used, perhaps even abused. A situation all too real, too close to many of us. As I type this, I don’t know what to think. A woman should of course have individual sexual freedom, but this song doesn’t describe that. It describes trauma, emotional, psychological trauma. Meaningless sex, a rotten smell, staining the flower of a woman, all of this language that could be simply described as gross. This isn’t a happy song about fucking bitches. This song is about how a girl wanted to play music, pluck vines and was taken advantage of, reduced to her roots, and deflowered. Fuck. I wish I could save her. In some sort of time machine.

Two-Headed Boy could refer to a number of things. I have a head canon. This girl, Comely, is being used by the Two-Headed Boy for sexual favors. The Two-Headed Boy then “repays” her in friendship and music, playing their silly little songs. On the surface, Comely assumes the Two-Headed Boy trusts her and cares for her, but really all he wants is sex. Comely, living in a broken home and without a proper male figure in their life, is conned by the Two-Headed Boy, and just wants to live a normal life. Comely is trapped. She’s living in a place that is surrounded by the texture of scum and she knows it, she just can’t call upon the strength to leave. She’s trapped in a home, a ghetto, wanting to live a normal life, but she’s been placed here by the Two-Headed Boy, who knew her mother and father were broken, and she would be too. The Two-Headed Boy broke in, claimed to be her friend, and supports her, before defiling her. Comely was pretty, bright, and intelligent. She was just in a bad situation.

Comely was Anne Frank.

Not to say that they were literally one in the same, but I mean J. Mangum (private eye) is comparing two children, ripped from their lives by this awful world, and intertwining them, blurring the lines.

Who’s the Two-Headed Boy? As I said, it could be a number of people. Nazis, Peter van Pels, hell, even Jeff Manga himself could be the Two-Headed Boy. It doesn’t matter as long as we realize the relationship between oppressed and oppressor.

There is a glimmer of hope for Comely though. Read the closing words from Two-Headed Boy Pt. 2:

Two headed boy, she is all you could need She will feed you tomatoes and radio wires And retire to sheets safe and clean But don't hate her when she gets up to leave

Comely and the Two-Headed Boy split away from each other. Comely leaves the Two-Headed Boy, and the narrator says not to hate her when she leaves. On a deeper level, this could be an introspective Jeff Mangum relating on his past. I don’t really know.

outro

Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

9/10

What did you think? Was I way off the mark, or do you agree? What should I have covered? What did you like, what did you dislike, I’m all ears. Leave a follow and a like if you liked it and I’ll see you on Wednesday.

[praesidioest]

Ad astra per aspera

for @gladnisweek​

Day 1 - Tattoo

Chapters: 1/7  Fandom: Final Fantasy XV Rating: Mature Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Gladiolus Amicitia/Ignis Scientia Additional Tags:  Canon Divergent AU, fluff, domestic, slice of life, domestic angst, jfc can they kiss already (no never), slow burn, iono man Summary:  Their dinners are a promised thing, a coming together of Sword and Shield to reflect on their roles, their charge, the world at large, and (perhaps more furtively) each other. Until Gladio reneges without a word. Jilted, Ignis finds Gladio at his home to confront him, only to be met with a nostalgic surprise and a profession written directly into Gladio's skin.

AO3 link: here!

The kitchen was filled with the earthy scent of occidental spices, Ignis’s own meticulous blend of herbs de Provence that crusted beautifully upon the prime rib and the accompanying fork-fluted pan-roasted potatoes already nearing perfection in the oven. The cabernet he’d chosen to pair with it was already chilled and sat on the counter, artfully arranged in Ignis’s favorite wine bucket. From the restored Victrola out in the living room, a long playing record spun, dulcet voices like a descant above the entire scene, women singing in close harmonies over a lively big band arrangement.

Gladio had gotten that vintage contraption for him for his birthday, the phonograph restored to meticulous detail, of Gladio’s commission. “Nothing beats the sound of analog recordings,” he’d insisted. Said there was a warmth to them, a depth that lost in digital. Even went out of his way to procure a small collection of bossa nova records he thought he’d liked, which weren’t quite Gladio’s style, but he’d presented them with such enthusiasm that it would have been unconscionable not to give them the old college try. For the most part, they’d been pleasant enough, innocuous melodies that made for good background music during his ritual morning coffee preparation, or while he made dinner.

But tonight, the music of the hour was the copy of some encouraging tune regarding apple trees that sounded like vague threats sweetened with the dulcet tones of three female voices in incomparable harmony. It was the good, upbeat stuff that kept his spirits high as he finished the preparations for dinner, running through his checklist as he whistled along.

The knock came at the door, some jaunty, syncopated thing, and in his haste, Ignis failed to process the unusual pattern. “Coming,” he called, even as he opened the door, to two pairs of feet decidedly lighter in their footfalls than Gladio’s.

“Hey, hope you don’t mind having us again this week,” Prompto said with more cheer than was usual in his signature over-enthusiastic way. “Gladio asked us to stop by. Said you’d be waiting for him, and he felt bad cancelling. Said you’d probably feed us if we came fast enough!” A circumspect pause, and Prompto spoke again, this time less certainly. “Is that okay?”

Ignis frowned, but tried not to look too displeased. He did, of course, adore the company of Noctis and Prompto, and enjoyed having them over for dinner as often as they liked to come, but this had been the night of the week dedicated to Gladio’s company, wherein the Sword and Shield might have a moment to focalize on their tasks, their progresses, their hindrances, the Prince, and whatever else they might worry over in their offices.

Nevermind that Ignis had spent all week researching a recipe he was sure Gladio would enjoy, if only to impress him a little. It was perhaps vanity, on his part, to relish in Gladio’s epicurean delight in his cooking. Noctis was not particularly vocal for the few foods he did enjoy of Ignis’s making, and Prompto was so enthusiastically grateful for everything he got to eat that wasn’t some convenience store prepack that it was difficult to gain any satisfaction from his praise. But his disturbing admiration for Cup Noodles notwithstanding, Gladio did boast a surprisingly refined palate and an appreciation for his cooking that was as thoughtful as it was touchingly genuine.

But that was all a moot point in light of the fact Gladio did not come. No call, no text, not so much as a ��by your leave,’ and Ignis was more disappointed (and a little hurt), than he was angry. “Naturally,” Ignis answered belatedly, adjusting his glasses (needlessly, it was a force of habit), and joining them in the dining room, where he finished dinner arrangements.

Dinner went by as easily as ever, though the lack of Gladio’s presence was a little too obvious for his liking. No dark bass laughing low at Prompto’s stories, no warm hand at his back when he cleared the dishes, preceding an assurance murmured too close to his ear that he’ll ‘take care of it.’ It nagged at him enough that he interrupted a particularly lively story of Prompto’s, as he rinsed the plates in the kitchen sink. “Did Gladio make mention of why he couldn’t come?” he asked, the strain evident in the inquisitive lilt in his voice. “It’s unlike him, not to give me notice.”

Though Ignis could not see the, he was sure Prompto and Noctis were currently exchanging conspiratorially nervous looks in the tense silence that followed. “He sounded like he was in a rush,” Noctis said at last, and Ignis was sure that it was a tactical move on their part, to mollify Ignis’ perceived hurt with the unquestionable edict of the prince. “Didn’t really say.”

It worked, at least. Ignis only nodded, bowed his head, and finished doing the stack of dishes in a contemplative, brooding silence.

Gladio’s fingertips toyed long the spines of his LP covers with a deliberation whose circumspection was a pointless formality. He would choose the same record to begin the night as he’d chosen every Friday night for as long he could remember: a copy of his favorite Andrews Sisters album, something buoyant and lively to brighten the empty apartment as well as the neighboring ones on each side that would no doubt be subjected to his particularly spirited taste in music.

He pulled the vellum sleeve out from the jacket, handling the worn record carefully by the edges of the disc before setting it within the electronic Victrola replica. Gladio had only just lowered the needle when he heard the sharp rap on his door, and went to answer it.

Ignis stood in the hallway, in his ubiquitously crisp suit, no glasses, his walking stick already folded under his arm. Gladio had balked at the sight of him, if only because it was so unexpected to see him there. “What are you doing here?” Gladio asked in a soft wonderment, quickly realizing it might have come off as accusatory.

“Is it an inconvenient time?” Ignis asked, before Gladio could amend himself.

“No, god, no, never an inconvenient time,” he assured him, fumbling stupidly for a response in his surprise. “Come in.”

Ignis had crossed the threshold himself, but allowed the hand at the small of his back guide him through Gladio’s apartment, to the living room that smelled of pumpkin spice and fresh coffee. “I was afraid I might have caught you unawares, perhaps,” he explained, taking a seat on Gladio’s sofa. “You might have had company.”

“Nah,” Gladio replied dismissively, and Ignis heard his retreating steps as he stepped into the kitchen area. “What company’s more important than yours, anyways?”

“I wasn’t sure,” Ignis answered, a dubiousness lingering ominously in his words, in spite of the swell of warmth in his chest at the offhanded way Gladio always seemed to reassure him. “Whatever company prevents you from attending a weekly visit, without even a call afterwards explaining yourself. A girl, maybe. A date?”

Gladio laughed a little too loud, a little too awkwardly. “No, ah … no.”

The implication hurt a little. Gladio had made little secret of his more than platonic admiration for Ignis, though the latter preferred to keep things professional between them. Gladio had always respected that, to the best he could, but even Noctis made the occasional comment from time to time. That he was a little too concerned about Ignis. That he was a little too invested. That a blind man could figure out Gladio was stupid over him, and seeing as how that was exactly Ignis’s affliction, he should probably cool it on that note. (He never did.)

Barring any real answer or any desire to complicate things further with an explanation as to why that was so patently incorrect, Gladio changed the subject. “It’s good you stopped by, though,” Gladio asserted brightly. “Actually, before I forget, I’ve been meaning to get this back to you.”

In the black credenza off to the side, Gladio retrieved a fabric-bound notebook, its corners rounded and worn with age, but nevertheless in very good shape. “Here. You probably don’t even remember lending it to me. I think I’ve probably had it ….. Five years now? At least? You definitely gave it to me after Crownsguard.”

Ignis accepted the notebook with an expression of confusion mixed with consternation. His hand passed over the cover, noting the fine weave of the binding, the gold lettering in the faceplate that denoted it his: Ignis. “Is this what I think it is?”

“Your sketch book, yeah,” Gladio replied, sounding a little proud. “I found it sandwiched between some old novels I’d dug up last week. It was funny. I had some weird hair up my ass to re-read that series I was crazy about when we were in high school. You remember? That one about the military company caught in the immolation of Ishgard? Man, I was obsessed. Had half the books memorized. Anyways, while I was perusing, I found—” He gestured. “This.”

A pleased grin fought hard not to curl at the corners of Ignis’s mouth as he worried the worn point of the lower corner with his thumb. “Why in the world would you keep this?”

Gladio paused, but only for a moment. “Because it’s yours,” he said naturally.

Ignis ignored that, the casual devastation, in spite of a blush that colored the tips of his ears. “I was rubbish at it. Not that I had any leisure to improve myself.”

“Now you’re just being hard on yourself,” Gladio chastised him lightly, and Ignis could feel the displacement of his weight as he took a seat beside him on the couch. “I know you’re deflecting because you’re modest like that. But you had a lot of natural talent, actually. A real eye for proportions. And for color, too. You had this way of making everything look … I dunno, graceful. Like every curve was delicate. Like you drew it with so much care, but it still managed to look effortless. If that makes sense. A purposeful beauty. At least, that’s what I got from it. I don’t know a lot about art. Only what I like and don’t like.” He paused, frowned. “I’m probably not explaining myself well.”

There it was, that assessment that always felt like a compliment. But compliments were sometimes hollow, and superficially meant. Never the way Gladio delivered them. “No, no, I know what you mean,” Ignis said softly, a little bashful over the litany of praises. “I just never knew you appreciated them so much.”

“You know which one of your drawings was my favorite?” Gladio asked amiably.

Ignis knew immediately. “The gladiolus.”

“Yeah,” he laughed, ducking his head and hiding a grin that Ignis could hear in the resonance of his voice. “Makes me sound conceited, doesn’t it? Like you drew that for me. But it is. My favorite, I mean.”

“But I did draw it for you,” was Ignis’s matter of fact response.

“Yeah, but only because I asked you, didn’t I?” Gladio pointed out. “You were drawing flowers for everyone. Some pretty thing for Noctis— what was it? Forget me nots? Wisteria or something for the king, something else for the butler, even … I know I walked in on a few maids bent over your shoulder looking. I got a little jealous and asked you to draw something for me.”

“You asked me to draw my favorite,” Ignis reminded him gently. “So I did.”

“Ah.” And Gladio was dumbstruck, for the second time. But it was a comfortable silence between them. Something sweet and charged, with an energy that felt soft and frenetic under the skin, prickling at the hairs at the backs of their necks, like hackles raised in anticipation of something. “I noticed it was the only one you’d colored in that book. You usually watercolor them don’t you?”

“Mm,” was Ignis’s wordless confirmation. “And that wasn’t a coincidence, either.” He didn’t need to see the stupefaction in Gladio’s face to know he wore it.  

The clock struck a metronomic clip in the pregnant pause between them. Ignis waited for Gladio to speak, and in light of his inelection (or inability) to do so, Ignis changed the subject. “You never told me why you didn’t come.”

“Oh!” Gladio laughed, a note of relief in the high, breathlessness of his laugh. “I got a new tattoo. A slot opened up with my artist, and I took it. Would have had to wait another six months if I didn’t.”

“Is that all?” Ignis chuckled, amused. “You could have told me. I would have understood that. The whole affair felt so hush-hush, I was convinced it was some clandestine thing I wasn’t meant to know about.”

“Well,” Gladio said, and Ignis could feel the shift in the cushions as he leaned in, the closing proximity of his voice, the marine notes of his cologne wafting stronger as he did. “I wanted it to be a surprise.”

“Oh?” Ignis swallowed hard, sure he was about to hear something momentous, and not quite sure he was prepared for it. “Why?”

“It was kinda special for me,” Gladio replied, a little vaguely, but not without an enigmatic brightness to his tone. “Speaking of which. Now that I’ve got you here, would you mind if I beg a favor of you?”

“Me?”

Ignis felt Gladio’s weight shift, a low groan emanate from his chest as he reached for something behind them. “Remember when I got my crow piece? I was miserable, itching all over. You were the only one who I trusted to put the ointment on my back for me. I don’t know what it was about you. You had this way of rubbing in the lotion just hard enough so it felt like relief, but never so hard it hurt or irritated. Like some Midas touch for tattoo scars. I was kinda hoping you might be willing to recapitulate that horror with me. If you wanted to.”

Ignis laughed lightly, as one might do to an indulgent child. “Of course. Hand me the cream. Where did you get them? What location, I mean.”

Gladio shifted closer, their knees brushing lightly, and Ignis moved his legs reflexively out of the way. “My forearms,” Gladio replied, holding his arms out for the taking. “Wrist to just below my elbow. They twist around, just a warning.”

The ointment in his hands, Ignis started at the base of his thick wrists, where what appeared to be a stem of some sort began within a bed of sharp, blade-like leaves. His fingertips followed the ridges of the scar, up the stalk, carefully noting the bursts of sequential blooms following the twine of the stalk. “A gladiolus,” Ignis murmured, his brows drawn in an expression of consternation.

“Yeah,” Gladio affirmed, through a nervous, breathless laugh. “Your gladiolus.”

Ignis’ flinched at the attribution, a shiver of ineludible and unprecedented thrill at the thought.  Instinctively, he knew exactly Gladio’s meaning: the flower, and not his name. But still, the unintentional implication of Gladio belonging to him was strange, sitting amorphic and anomalous on his skin like new-worn sweater, unfamiliar but not unpleasant. But that prickling of pleasure was ushered from the forefront of his mind as his fingers traced and retraced the wounded skin, half in wonder, half in a desperate measure to commit them to memory, to map their remembrance as accurately as he could with assiduous fingers that ached to know every nuance of his scars. In a week, they would be gone, with not even cicatrices to mark their ghosts. Ignis understood implicitly that this was an ephemeral moment, meant to be understood in this rare sliver of time, shared with him with a singular purpose that did not elude him, no matter how adamantly he wanted to avoid it.

This was meant for him.

“What’s this little notch here?” Ignis asked, the pad of his thumb worrying at a peculiar outcropping by a petal that seemed too angular to belong.

“Dunno,” Gladio answered truthfully. “It looked like a mistake or something. Like something you’d erased, so I’m not quite sure.”

“And you kept it in?”

Gladio shrugged. “Yeah, why not?”

“It’s a flaw, Gladio, meant to be erased,” Ignis admonished him, with all the pithiness one embodies when spouting aphorisms.

“I thought it gave it character,” he explained, in that simplistic way of his. “Perfection’s for the gods, Iggy. Even masterpieces have flaws. Beethoven’s Ninth. The Sistine Chapel. Even—”

Gladio’s diatribe trailed off as he lifted his hand to brush the backs of his knuckles against the evened scarring at Ignis’s temple.

“Don’t,” Ignis warned weakly, grasping Gladio’s thick wrist in two hands and pushing it down.

“Sorry,” Gladio whispered, letting his hand fall away. “I didn’t mean … sorry, I just got caught up— …. I thought we—”

“Why did you make them curl around?” Ignis asked abruptly, changing the subject with a curtness that dared defiance. It was a question asked hurriedly, in a firm desperation to forget the lingering sweetness he’d left between them. Ignis’s voice sounded brittle in his mind, a little broken, but without sharpness. “Gladiolus grow straight, don’t they? Like blades.”

“Oh, yeah,” Gladio replied, sounding a little bashful. Unsure of himself. “I read somewhere that ancient druids tattooed snakes to their forearms, both as an affirmation of their faith and for talismanic purposes. The snakes were hallowed, believed to keep harm from the wearers who merited them. I kinda liked the idea, adapted it for myself. Like goodwill written in my skin.”

“And you chose my flowers,” Ignis said in summation, a question phrased as a statement.

“Yeah,” Gladio replied softly. “There’s a … it’s a law of sympathetic magic. Called the law of contagion. It says that effigies or likenesses of things imitative of a person carries their spirit. I liked that. Like I carried you with me, like a credo. Not like I have some weird, superstitious idea you’d keep me from harm. But I like the remembrancer. Like a reminder of what I fight for, and whom. Because what’s a Shield without a Sword? We were meant to—”

And without another thought to the logic of reservation, Ignis surged forward to connect their lips in a heedless kiss. So heedless it was instantly regretted, and Ignis broke away with a frown. And just as the apology formed on his lips—

“Hey,” Gladio said softly. “You kissed me.”

Was it an idiotic observation of the obvious? Was he mocking him? Ignis couldn’t tell. “Yes. I did,” he said, his tone a little clipped in defensive confusion. “Astute of you.”

There was a moment of contemplative silence in which Ignis wondered if Gladio took it badly. “Can I kiss you?” Gladio asked at last, and Ignis’ eyes flickered in an agitated perplexion, wishing he could see the honest amber he remembered in his mind’s eye, the circumspect softness he always loved about him.

Ignis nodded, and Gladio’s broad hand cupped his cheek, the heel of his hand couching just under his sharp jaw, tilting his head up to better meet the quiet, tentative kiss Gladio laid upon them. It would be dramatic, to say Ignis melted into the kiss like some Harlequin romance novel heroine, but it was precisely how he’d felt when he folded against him, Gladio’s arm hooking around him to hold him close, to anchor him to his chest and never let him go. He wanted to sink into his marred skin, to live holy and adored there, sanctified in Gladio’s regard, until he remembered he already did.

Ignis broke from the kiss, reaching to unwind the heavy arm from around his waist, to press a kiss to his scarred palm. “I never took you as a romantic,” he murmured wistfully.

Gladio watched the press of Ignis’ lips with a fascination too earnest to try hiding. “Curse of the Amicitia men,” Gladio quipped lamely, his throat gone dry with the claimant need to kiss him again. But he stopped himself, cognizant of the impetuousness of the moment, not wanting to make or say anything sudden that might send Ignis to beat a hasty retreat. “We’re all sensitive-like, I guess, to balance out being inveterate hard-asses.”

Ignis laughed bemusedly by the joke, pressing his cheek into the palm of Gladio’s hand. “Should I get one, too? A tattoo, I mean. Of my own.”

Gladio grinned up at him somewhat dubiously, an amatory inattention in the way he gazed up at him, as lovestruck as a boy. “Sure, why not? I can help you pick one out. Something classy. I can, um—” He swallowed hard. “I could help you figure out where to …”

“Why don’t you do one better?” Ignis asked, lowering Gladio’s hand, letting it fall away as his own hands now smoothed over the broad bow of his shoulders, his fingers interlacing just at the nape of his thick neck. The slightest pull and Gladio followed, letting Ignis guide him closer. Ignis’ lips parted to breathe softly along the line of his jaw. “Mark me yourself.”

The invitation had hardly left his lips and Gladio was upon him, his kisses claimant with the desperation of one who knew that every moment measured by a heart’s beat was precious and never promised. In a second, he could change his mind, remember the hesitation he’d espoused when Gladio had first confessed his feelings, an admission rendered inert as Ignis had laid a hand on his heart and solemnly intoned a simple and unelucidated “Don’t.”

But there was no hesitation in the way their lips met, like two halves always meant to be a whole, or the pass of his slender fingers through the thick of Gladio’s dark hair. And still Gladio pulled back, his forehead pressed to Ignis’s temple as he panted against his jaw. “Are you sure?” he asked, his fingers clamping over Ignis’s in a silent plea not to let go. “I want to be sure you’re sure.”

Ignis pressed a kiss to the point of his jaw, just below his ear. “As sure as you are,” he replied, and Gladio let out a strangled sigh like relief, his kisses renewing their ardent offensive.

“I’m going to love you too much,” Gladio sighed into the hollow of his throat, his lips tracing a line of kisses along the jut of his collarbone, over the lithe fabric of his shirt. “I know I will.”

Ignis’s head tipped back to bear his neck to him in silent invitation. “You’ll love me surely and honestly,” Ignis predicted, his voice soft with the tender earnestness of his assurance. “As surely as the conviction that spurred you to wear your heart … quite literally on your sleeves. I know you too well to doubt that you mean things with no less than your full heart. And I want you to know that I welcome this … progression … with no less certainty than you.” His arms encircled his shoulders, pulling him yet closer, until their chests abutted, two heartbeats hammering a syncopated rhythm that soon fell in step with each other in a symbiosis that felt as natural as breathing. “I’ll love you, too. Wait for me until then.”

Gladio said nothing, only nodded his understanding, his teeth sinking into the breadth of Ignis’s shoulder, as he marked the first of a constellation he’d leave that night. “Don’t promise what you don’t have control over,” he implored, half dizzy at the familiar fraicheur of citron and vetiver that scented Ignis’s skin. “This is enough. For the rest of my life, this much would be enough. We’ll take it slow. We’ll take our time. I’m not asking for anything more than that.”

“Very well,” Ignis agreed, with something like relief spreading through his chest, like a weight freed. “I’ll agree to that much. But there’s a prescience in my bones I can’t deny. I’m going to fall in love with you. There’s no helping that. You’ve left me little choice, you see. And I no longer have the will or desire to deny that.”

He felt Gladio limpen, all of a sudden accosted with the full weight of him nearly crushing him whole, but only for a moment until he remembered himself. “Then I’ll look forward to watching you fall,” he laughed, falling back upon the opposite arm of the sofa and pulling ignis atop him. For safety’s sake.

“As I have,” Ignis rejoined, his lips sucking a mark into the soft flesh beneath the hard line of his jaw. “There. We’re even now.”

“Not yet,” Gladio corrected lightly, his hands wandering boldly up the lengths of his slender thighs. “But we will be.”

[weirdwariii]

My Top 20 Albums of 2017 Part 2: 10 - 1

10. Alvvays - Antisocialites: What a delightful album. Like, I should just leave it at that, because I’m not sure what else I want to say about it. This is just the kind of indie pop-rock album that felt plentiful and unavoidable 10 years ago, but doesn’t show up as much anymore. But I don’t think its noteworthy just because it’s filling a niche. It’s just an effortlessly tight album. It sounds good, the vocals are great, the songs are amazing. There’s hints of some interesting inspirations sprinkled throughout (someone was listening to Stereolab…), and I just can’t get enough of it. I wouldn’t be surprised if, in the longrun, this album has some more longevity than most of the other albums on this list.

9. Thundercat - Drunk: Let me start here: I picked up this album on vinyl this year, and it’s one of the coolest looking packages to come out this year; great cover art, lots of art inside, and...the album spread across three 10” discs. To get through the album on vinyl you need the steadfastness to flip three different discs after each side, and to put away each disc and replace it with the next at least twice. That’s a lot of commitment for any album, and the very thought of listening to this album on vinyl exhausts me (considering that my turntable is located on the opposite side of the room from my couch). With that said, I’m pleased to announce that I love this album, despite its presentation. I feel like this is the third year in a row that Thundercat has felt like an important part of important music (see also: To Pimp a Butterfly, You’re Dead! and The Epic), and its good to see that its own name on the cover of his work this year. This is an album that feels uniquely his, and somehow makes a song about watching anime in Japan seem as much of an artistic accomplishment as making the best yacht rock song in 30 years with the help of Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins. The entire album is an equal parts quirky and soulful trip and hints that future albums could be even quirkier and more soulful. Just, like, listen to it digitally.

8. Rolling Blackout Coastal Fever - French Press EP: So what does this say: For a 6-song EP, these songs must be exceptional if it was better than all those other albums? Or that, as an EP, there’s less of a chance to be bored with it by the end? Well, for what it's worth, this is the only EP on the list, so it clearly did something right. Honestly, if this was at LP length and was 10 songs at the same quality as the 6 presented here, this would probably rank even higher. As is, this is just a breezy and effortless set of indie rock songs from a new band that sounds like they’ve been around 10 years longer than they really have. There isn’t a moment that goes to waste, and I’m always left wanting more at the end - a quality that even some of my favorite albums this year didn’t have. I sincerely hope there’s a full length on the horizon, and that it makes good on the promises hinted at here.

7. Oh Sees - Orc: Sometimes there’s just the perfect album at the perfect time. Maybe its a band that you’re finally getting into as they put out a new album, or maybe it's an album that just seems to mesh with the kind of music you’ve been into lately. Maybe it's an album that just resonates with how you’re feeling in that moment.  Sometimes it's all of the above, as was the case here. I finally got into Thee Oh Sees last year, absorbing their two albums in my quest for more music that was in the same vein as Ty Segall’s Emotional Mugger. Between these albums, and King Gizzard’s 2017 output (we’ll come back to that), I was 100% on board the fuzzed out psych-garage-punk bandwagon, and that's when this album fell into my lap. I just love everything about this album. It’s raw, it’s weird, it’s loud, it has the most epic drum solo I’ve heard all year on it. My garage-rock sensibilities were spoiled silly this year, and this album played a huge part in that.

6. Japandroids - Near to the Wild Heart of Life: I read a review earlier this year for this album, and I’m kind of paraphrasing from memory, but it essentially said: “In a trying year like 2017, you’d think a band like Japandroids would have more to say on that, rather than making more fun punk music.” And that literally made me love the album even more. The best response to the darkness of our world, as it turns out, was to remind you of what it looks when you make it to the light at the end of the tunnel. The band doesn’t necessarily do anything they haven’t done before - there are few risks or moments that would sound completely out of place on an earlier album. But they really are great fucking songs. The title track is, hands down, the best song that was released this year. Yeah, maybe this didn’t call our orange meat puppet a buffoon or anything, but it sure as hell will be playing on my headphones on the day that we wave goodbye.

5. Washed Out - Mister Mellow: As we approached the end of 2016 and with the mostly unknown, but likely dark, void of 2017 looming ahead, I vowed to make art more important in my life. It needed to be an escape just as much as a response. And when I felt overwhelmed by the news cycle, or when the inspiration I needed just wasn’t there, Mister Mellow was. Between the “visual album” aspect of this project (that I strongly urge you to check out) and the music itself, it completely fit in with my aesthetic as artist and never failed in giving me a little pep talk. It's not a long album, nor is it an especially deep one. But in terms of style and just being a pool of strangeness to get lost in, this album never let me down. It might not be an explicit reaction to 2017 in itself, but it definitely aided me in creating my own.

4.Tyler the Creator - Flower Boy (or probably, Scum Fuck Flower Boy): The genesis of Odd Future was a weird time for me as an aging fan of music. On one hand, here was this collective of talented young rappers churning out a near-constant stream of albums for free - a concept that was novel and exciting to follow. On the other, between fast-paced Twitter stream-of-thought and community in-jokes, Odd Future definitely felt like the exact moment that I felt like I was an old man who didn’t get what the kids were listening to. And through that, I followed Tyler from afar. He’s a funny guy who you’ve been able to watch mature, year by year, to someone who feels very much like a spokesperson for a generation (am I crazy for thinking this??). This album feels like his most personal, self-aware, and world-aware album in his career, and there’s a quality in the production and the songs worthy of that awareness.  I recognize the lack of hip hop music in my list this year, and that’s a very fair observation. My only excuse (and it is just an excuse) is that Flower Boy was just that hard to beat, for me.  I listened to this album a lot this year, and I found myself relating to some of Tyler’s own personal revelations.  

3. Father John Misty - Pure Comedy: Earlier this year, speaking to a friend of mine about this album, I was voicing my displeasure: “The album is just far too long and says far too much. I just feel like I’ll never have the energy to slog through the whole damn thing.” But, again, 2017. The world needed protest music, or at the very least, music that seemed to understand the world we now lived in. So I slogged through Pure Comedy and...it wasn’t a slog at all. Okay, sure. It’s long. It takes its time. But Josh Tillman GETS it. Its a bad, and darkly amusing, world out there, and he’s here to let loose about it. The album only got better through the year, with every single listen. Even the 13 minute “Leaving LA” centerpiece feels wholey essential, acting as almost an origin story for FJM as much as it's a state-of-the-union on Josh’s personal life. This album didn’t just grow on me this year, it came to feel absolutely essential.

2. King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard - Flying Microtonal Banana, Murder of the Universe, Sketches of Brunswick East, Polygondwanaland: Not only did it not seem right to pick just one album of the 4 (at the time of my writing this) albums released by KG&TLW this year, but it felt like there was a larger picture here that needed to be recognized. King Gizzard promised 5 albums this year, and of the 4 we got, not a single one disappointed. Not a single one felt like a weak link to me. Not a single one felt like a misstep or seemed inessential. In a year where albums from some of my favorite bands bounced off of me after a listen or two (sorry, Grizzly Bear), this one band somehow made 4 albums that I cared about and kept coming back to. Flying Microtonal Banana and Murder of the Universe were both instantly loveable. They feel right into the same psych-rock wormhole that Oh Sees had me traveling through - especially the latter, with its story-driven sections and spoken words just hit the spot in every way possible. Sketches didn’t resonate with me at first, admittedly, perhaps because of its vast difference in sound from Murder - but I came around on it quickly, and its jazz-leaning pop would actually become the second most listened to of the 4 albums (with Murder being 1st). Polygondwanaland, finally, felt like a singles compilation - a complete set of tracks that, while feeling a little disconnected from each other thematically, shows off everything the band is capable of as well as hinting at what could be on the horizon. I honestly can’t say enough good things about this band, nor can I recall the last time that a band’s entire aesthetic just resonated with me so much. And to bring such a great quantity of music (with equal amount quality) to the table was just...perfect.  Or, y’know, close to perfect. Because these albums are only #2 on the list.

1.  Priests - Nothing Feels Natural: Nothing Feels Natural was one of the first (if not the actual first) albums I fell in love with in 2017, and it felt like the album that all others would be measured against. And, for the most part, this album always felt like the best. There were times when other albums felt more important in a moment (Murder of the Universe and Flower Boy both immediately come to mind), but when the buzz wore off a little, I was always happy to come back to Nothing Feels Natural. Here, Priests nail both a cohesive sound, yet its done through an assortment of genres. The surf-rock of “JJ” (another contender for year’s best song), the spoken word punk of “No Big Bang” and the new wave of “Suck” all seem to be at contrast with each other on paper, but the entire album flows together effortlessly. The band is tight as hell, and for as much as I want to call them “punk” there just isn’t a lot of the discordant noise I’d associate with that label on this album. There’s a Spoon-esque attention to production on this album - everything feels planned and well thought-out and there’s barely any wasted moments. Musically, I think the album holds its own against almost any other that I’ve listened to this year. Yet, I don’t even think its the music that even puts it here in the top spot - that’d be the lyrics. You’re probably as sick of hearing about the influence 2017’s politics had on music as I am sick of writing about it, so I’ll try and condense it a little...but you get the idea. For songs written prior to the year, they certainly hit all the right spots for the issues that mattered in 2017: Identity. Feminism. Consumerism. Culture. Even if it would’ve been the right album at any time, it still felt especially poignant this year, and the fact that it sounds so great only propelled it the very top.

And that’s it. That was my favorite music of this year. All done. The end. Onwards to whatever black hole of despair 2018 will be.

[ecotone99]

[SP] [HM] Finders Keepers

It was a sunny but quite chilly morning when Maja and Lena Meubateux pulled into the driveway of their new home. Maja Meubateux parked the car and considered the old but stunningly beautiful French colonial style house with her radiant smile, usually reserved for her new wife who had long reached the main door and was waiting impatiently for Maja to open it up. If possible, Lena's joy about moving into this new home was even greater than Maja's. As an only child she had expected to inherit her parents house one day but luckily that day came without a tragic reason and sooner than expected .

Maja's parents, both energetic if not in best health, had been on the lookout for a wheelchair-accessible cottage for years now since the multi-level luxury home that lay before Maja and Lena had become less appropriate for their lifestyle. Nobody had expected that Mr. And Mrs. Meubateux-Pelletier had already found a suitable home some time ago and would give their daughter and new daughter-in-law a whole house as a wedding present.

Lena beamed with excitement as she unlocked the door to her childhood home that would now become her honeymoon retreat and gave her wife a little tour of the 13 rooms. All of them were still decorated in a slightly old-fashioned manner but with vital pieces of furniture missing. Of course this was just because Lena's Parents had taken their favourite pieces with them knowing that the newly-weds would soon bring and buy their own furniture anyway. But it did make the house look a little weird. A bedroom without a bed is a strange sight, especially in a house that did not need any help looking spooky. Maja and Lena sighed as they were reminded that they would have to spend the second night of their honeymoon on separate inflatable mattresses.

When Lena awoke the next morning, her wife had already gotten up and she could smell waffles from the kitchen. She put on one of Maja's shirts, a band shirt of some 80s group Lena could enjoy only in moderation. It was a bit big on Lena's petite body but that is what made it so cosy. She shuffled through the hall into the kitchen-dining room combination. “Good morning,” she said from the door since her wife was easily frightened and while she wanted to surprise her with a hug from behind, she knew it would end in disaster and waffles on the floor.

“Good morning, Babe,” smiled Maja and turned to kiss her. Her curls had miraculously survived the night and looked like a dandelion's head dipped in honey.

“Did you sleep well?”

“I did,” said Lena, “but I heard some weird noises last night.”

“Like what?”

“I don't know... knocking? Tapping? Maybe we've got squirrels or rats or something in the attic.”

“Yeah could be. We're in the countryside after all. Speaking of countryside – it seems like the furniture shop doesn't do deliveries to houses this far from the city. I'll drive by there this afternoon to pick up the new curtains and the sofa. I don't think you can come with me, I'll have to flip all the seats in the car to make everything fit.”

“It's okay, just don't be too long. This house still creeps me out a little bit. And buy groceries while you're at it! Your waffles are delicious but woman does not live by waffles alone.”

Maja drove off and Lena took the opportunity to clean the house. She put her long hair up into a messy bun and put on some old denim dungarees and a soft rock LP. She had taken her vinyl collection with her in the car so it would have no chance to break in the moving van. She opened and cleaned all the windows and dusted in the kitchen and living room until sunset.

As it slowly got dark outside, she closed the windows and turned on nearly every light. Something about living in her childhood home again made a piece of her feel the dread of a small child running up the cellar stairs. And how scared she had been as a kid in a house like this. Well I haven't changed much, she thought to herself. She finally reached the conservatory which was unusually big and extravagant and served as a second dining room. Lena was a little disappointed that she could not see any stars through the glass ceiling.

As she examined the floor to see if she should bother to vacuum, she noticed that a lot of earth was scattered on the floor around a big potted plant. She looked at the earth more closely and decided that there was no way it would have just fallen out of the pot by itself. She felt uneasy. There could not have been any wind since her parents had moved out. And she was sure that they would have noticed and cleaned a mess like this.

In that moment, Lena heard the keys turn in the front door and attempted to get up. But then she heard something else. That tapping noise again. Faster this time and it did not seem to be coming from the attic. She was too scared to walk to the door and decided to call her wife who just seconds later appeared before her.

“Is everything alright? Did you fall?”

“No. I'm on the floor by choice. I called out to you because I'm too lazy to walk, you know how it is.”

“I'm sorry I took so long shopping and let you succumb to madness, my dear. I did buy a lot of cheese though if that helps.”

Lena grinned and had Maja help her up and both sat down at the dinner table with some quick pasta.

“So what were you doing on the floor clawing all the dirt out of our potted plants?” said Maja smiling, Lena did not smile back.

“That wasn't me,” she said reluctantly, waiting for Maja to raise her eyebrow like she always did when she couldn't make sense of something. Maja raised her eyebrow.

“I know. It's weird, right? Why would the earth just be on the floor like that?”

“The squirrels again?”

“Stop it already with your squirrels. I'm seriously worried.”

“How fitting then,” said Maja with a smug grin, “that I have bought us two a nice new couch big enough for myself and a slender maiden like you so we can sleep together tonight and I will protect you from anything that might make an attempt on your precious life.”

“Even spiders?”

Maja flinched. “Why would you bring up spiders?”

​

That night, Lena could not fall asleep no matter how hard she tried. She turned her head quietly and looked at her wife's sleeping face. She was an exceptional beauty, but in this state she looked rather funny; her mouth slightly open, snoring softly, her untamed golden blond curls everywhere in her freckled face. Lena always wondered how Maja managed not to chew and swallow her own hair at night. So this is the brave warrior that swore to protect me from all the evil in the world, she thought to herself and smiled.

Suddenly, she heard a loud bang on the living room window. She inhaled sharply and softly shook Maja awake. Maja looked at her with confusion for a short moment but was suddenly wide awake when she saw the fear in her wife's eyes.

“What happened?”

“There was a loud bang at the window!”

“A tree branch maybe?”

“I don't think there are any trees in front of that window.”

“Okay. I'll go take a look, Babe. You go back to sleep.”

Lena shook her head no and slowly got up to follow Maja to the window. There was nothing outside as far as they could see. Which was not very far as the clouded sky muted the stars' light and it was pitch black.

“Thanks for looking at least,” Lena said and got back on the couch. Maja joined her. Lena was still too scared to fall asleep but after a while she somehow managed.

She woke up the next day to her wife wearing garden gloves and her bad-news-face.

“I gotta show you something,” she said, and led Lena into their new backyard none of them had really considered until now. “I went to look under the window this morning,” Maja explained, but she did not get to end her sentence before Lena saw for herself. The whole backyard looked like it had been plowed. There were holes and mounds everywhere without discernible order. And to top it off, a dead and quite mangled bird was lying under the window the two of them had looked out of yesterday. “It must have...flown against it and died,” said Maja softly, looking with sympathy at Lena who she knew had a soft spot for animals. Lena felt sadness and disgust as a lump in her throat at the sight of the bloody pile of feathers.

“How would simply flying into something have a body look like that? And what's with all these creepy holes in our yard? What is going on?” Her voice got quieter. “Do you think we're haunted?”

“Us? What? If anything this creepy old mansion is the problem. I gotta be real with you here. I love you. I am eternally glad for the opportunity to live with you in this massive house. I respect your parents, but this spooky castle might as well have have a sign on it saying >>please do not disturb, ghosts inside<<!” Lena couldn't hide a smile. “It's not like that, I promise! I KNOW it's spooky. I wouldn't have chosen it. I thought it was creepy when I was a child and I still do. But! Things like this have never happened before. I lived here for 19 years. And I think I would have noticed something like THIS” she pointed to the holey backyard.

“Are you implying I'm cursed?” said Maja trying not to laugh.

“I'm just saying someone just does not get born with amazing handyman, sewing and cooking skills and looks like an Amazonian princess without their great-grandmother selling her soul to the devil.” Now they both could not contain their laughter any more.

“Seriously though, I think we've got a ghost problem”, said Maja “and I wouldn't mind one of the friendly ones but … I hate to say it... this one might have killed that bird. Plus it threw that dead creature against the window of the room we were sleeping in. Do you think it wants us gone?”

“If it did want us gone... what are we gonna do about it? I mean. I would call a priest but I don't even know if they do that kind of thing any more. Besides, I'm not very religious and given our situation...”

“What situation?”

“We're lesbians, darling. Well I am at least, I don't know about you. But I was kinda getting my hopes up after the marriage and all that. I don't think the catholic church is going to help us out in any way.”

“Well it looks like I'll have to do what every self-respecting haunted person would do in this situation and that is go look it up on the internet.”

“Sounds fair.”

​

Maja sat down in the kitchen with her laptop and continued to browse for an hour before she found something that looked reliable for a paranormal website. She read the questions on the site aloud.

“Did anyone from your family die recently?”

“Um. Yeah. My great aunt Sylvia.”

“Did she ever mention wanting to rearrange the garden, did she hold a grudge against birds as a species?”

“I don't think so.”

“Did you ever know anyone that would show such behaviour after death?”

“No.”

“Did anyone who is not with us any more ever express hatred towards you in an intensity that would make you think they would haunt you in the afterlife?”

“Well I hope my enemies all rot in hell but no, I can't say I do.”

“Well,” said Maja, “I guess we'll just burn some herbs then and hope for the best.”

​

When the moving company came by the next day to deliver their old furniture, the couple was a little embarrassed to have salt on their doorstep and crystals hanging from the chandelier in the entrance hall. But the workers were just glad to work in a house with big doors and windows to hurl dressers through as well as snacks and water. They had everything in its place in less than two hours, including the big canopy bed which, in retrospective, may have been an impulse purchase and now made the elaborate estate seem even more lavish and costly than it had looked from the start. But both Maja and Lena secretly found the thought of all their distant neighbours and old friends murmuring about a filthy rich lesbian couple living it up in the countryside incredibly amusing.

When they finally got to sleep in their own bed that night, both of them immediately felt more at home and fell asleep immediately. And yet, Lena could not sleep through the night. She was interrupted by a feeling of unease in her stomach that she could not shake off. It was as if something was watching her. She turned to look if maybe it could have been her wife who had made a habit of watching her sleep even though she knew Lenas intuition would immediately give it away, but Maja was dozing peacefully. Hair in face and all. It had gotten warmer in France over the last few weeks and Lena felt how the pent up heat in the room was slowly giving her a headache. She did not want to get up and so just shuffled off her half of the covers and repositioned herself, letting her leg dangle off the bed.

She took her phone from her night stand and carefully turned the screen away from Maja while she adjusted the brightness. She looked through some recipes she could not understand, picking out those she wanted to ask Maja to try. She decided on a lemon pie and a strawberry cake roll and scrolled on to find something with lots of chocolate.

All of a sudden she felt something wet and cold touch her leg. She screamed, waking up Maja who immediately embraced her and asked if she had had a bad dream. Lena burst into tears and had problems telling her wife what happened but finally managed. Maja looked under the bed and around the room for anything that could have caused the sensation but returned to bed empty handed.

“I don't think I want to stay here.” said Lena “But I don't know how to tell my parents. I can't possibly take their house as a gift and then sell it! And if we just give it back we won't have our own home for another 5 or 10 years.”

“It's okay, Darling, we'll find a way. Don't you worry. I will not let you spend the rest of your life in a ghost house. I'll look for a hotel first thing tomorrow morning, okay?”

“Okay,” said Lena. Maja fell asleep quickly after that but Lena lay awake and let her mind wander. Something about that sensation on her leg had been – what? Familiar? It had felt like a deja vu, like a glimpse of something that may or may not have happened before but when? And where? Here? Maybe the house really had been haunted back then already? Had she grown up in a ghost house and repressed these memories deep inside? But didn't it also feel... nostalgic?

And with a sharp inhale and a picture in her mind it came back to her. It couldn't be. Surely it couldn't be. But what if? Exhausted from the shock she finally fell asleep.

​

That sleep came to an abrupt end in the early morning hours by the sound of somebody falling down the stairs followed by her wife screaming and cursing. Lena quickly got up and sprinted down to Maja.

“I stumbled,” she said “I stumbled OVER something but... well as you can see there is nothing here.” She held her foot. “I've got enough of this house as well. Let's drive somewhere for breakfast.” Lena wanted to say something but she didn't. Not yet. Not while she was so unsure herself. She changed into a sundress and straw hat. She applied some lipstick and waited at the door.

“Would you drive? I don't think my ankle wants to!” Maja yelled from the kitchen.

“Sure!” Lena yelled back and grabbed the keys to go adjust the drivers seat. She opened the door to find a large wooden stick with bite marks on it lying on the mat. It had not been there the day before and did not look like it could have broken and fallen from a tree anywhere near the front door.

“I've had enough of this!” she screamed, picking up the stick and throwing it as far away from her home as she could “I can't take this any more!”

Maja was on her way to the door when she saw the stick, 15 meters down the driveway move. Lena saw her perplexed face and followed her gaze with hers. Both stood still but terrified as they watched the stick rise from the ground and then quickly move towards them, still 2 feet in the air. Maja softly pushed Lena back in an effort to block her wife from the paranormal force but much to her astonishment, Lena sank down to the floor. The stick lowered itself onto the mat in front of her. Lena looked up, extended her hand into thin air where it seemed to touch something and with a mixture of disbelief and hope whispered “Morrison?”

Suddenly she was knocked over backwards, bursting into tears laughing, covering her face from an unseen force. Maja stood dumbfounded, trying to make sense of what was happening but Lena beat her to it.

“It's Morrison, Maja! It's him! My dog from back when I was a child! He died when I was 11 but he's here, I can touch him! Can you?” Maja raised her eyebrow and tried to read her wife's face. What she saw was pure joy and happiness. The face of a woman who had been reunited with the only creature she may ever love as much as her. A love she would never dare to doubt – and after what had happened in the last few days, how could she? After all, what kind of insane person wouldn't recognize her own dead invisible dog? She kneeled down and made petting motions with her hand until it actually came into contact with something. She could feel coarse but soft fur. She moved her hand a little, trying to estimate the dog's form. She then decided where the ears must be and caressed him there.

“Good ghost dog. Can we keep him?”

* * *

The three of them spent most of the following summer in the garden. Lena reading, Maja planting flowers everywhere, Morrison digging those flowers back out. The couple quickly developed the necessary skills for living with an invisible dog and also bought some toys and a bed for him, which was difficult to explain to guests. After a heated debate, it was decided that without physical fur there was no reason not to let Morrison onto the couch and bed. Maja's efforts to convince her wife to let her buy a leash for him just to confuse pedestrians continue to this day.

One afternoon in the following fall, Maja came home early from work and nervously said “You know how much I love Morrison … but there is something I don't know about him that I would really like to find out.”

“And what is that?”

“Well...” said Maja and shyly pulled a flyer of a nearby shelter out of her jacket. “Do you think he could be friends with a living one?”

submitted by /u/Paeonia-Lactiflora [link] [comments] via Blogger https://ift.tt/34GyNJc

[jackfollmanwriter-blog]

The Ghost Next Door

The music studio was the last place that still smelled like my dad. That, and the fact that it housed my dad’s vintage record player, collection of prime late-60s/early-70s classic rock and folk vinyl and an acoustic guitar collection resulted in me passing much of my final high school summer break in the little one-room studio tucked into the back corner of my parents’ suburban backyard.

We were in between the third and fourth lesson of my dad trying to teach me how to play guitar when he passed away. To be honest, we hadn’t made much progress on my lessons because I would usually get frustrated with my dad trying to teach me dull chords which strained my fingers and we would switch to just listening to his Rumours or Sweet Baby James LPs about 10 minutes in.

A fatal heart attack at 49 would prevent my dad from ever teaching his only daughter guitar. I’m still deep in the hard clutches of painful sadness from his passing, but trying to teach myself guitar and listening to my dad’s sad old vinyls in the studio during the summer after he died was my first semi-successful coping mechanism.

The studio was the perfect place to get high because of the silent “recording alarm” my dad setup in there. To ensure no one would barge in during him recording a song, he set up a system that silently flashed a red light on the wall whenever someone got within 10 feet of the studio door that auto locked to the outside until he turned it off. With the system on, I could always tell when my mom was coming.

My daily routine got started the day after my junior year of high school wrapped and about a month after my dad died. I woke up late in the morning, about two hours after my mom had already left for work. Ate an unhealthy breakfast. Headed out to the studio. Smoked. Tried to teach myself guitar. Smoked again. Listened to records. Smoked. Then went back to the house just after my mom got home. Picked at dinner. Retreated to my room and browsed around on the Internet until I fell asleep around 2 or 3 a.m.

I felt the daily regimen helped me cope.

The night where everything changed started out just like any other that summer. I around 3 a.m. and heard music coming from the studio on my walk back to my bedroom from the hallway bathroom.

I knew the song. It was my dad’s favorite track from Rumours - “Never Going Back Again.” I could spot the fingerpicked slinky guitar melody my dad could never get just right with his own fingers.

I headed over to a window and looked out into the backyard and the studio. It was hard to tell if the light I saw came from inside the lone window of the studio or from the outside light on the side of the building. Either way, the song played on.

Maybe my mom was out there listening to Lindsey Buckingham at 3 a.m? No. I could hear her snoring from her bedroom down the hall.

I threw on a sweater and headed out the back door.

The song was still playing when I followed the stone trail in the grass which led to the studio, but I noticed a distinct sound in the music. It did not sound like the music was coming from a record player. It sounded like a live acoustic guitar playing the song perfectly - avoiding all the little missteps which plagued my dad’s renditions.

The music stopped when I was halfway through the yard. The only light I could see was the little bulb which rested on the outside of the studio.

I went into the studio to investigate. The room was quiet and empty.

*

I couldn’t get to sleep the next night. It was still more than 80 degrees at 2 am and the intense heat seemed to be working its way through the glass of my bedroom windows. I sweated under my blanket as I f kept my ears on high alert for any unusual sounds from the backyard.

The music started again at 3:30 a.m. It was the sound of a guitar again, but a different song. I couldn’t recognize it at first, but I eventually decided that it was a Rolling Stones song. One of their ballads. Angie, I think.

I followed the sound of music out into the sweltering backyard. The sounds of the cicadas and the choking humidity made it feel like I was in a jungle and not in a backyard in Ohio.

I could definitely see the light on inside the studio this time. I actually thought I could see the red glow of the recording security system light as I made my way through the backyard and approached.

The music stopped once I got closer. I was left alone with the song of cicadas and the mysterious disappearing guitar picker was nowhere in sight.

I checked the studio again, but there wasn’t a single sign of life other than the vape pen I accidently left in there.

I started to form a plan. I believed whoever, or whatever was playing guitar in the middle of the night was utilizing the recording alarm the same way I did. They vanished as soon as they saw the red light come on. I decided the next day that I would unplug the recording security system before I left the studio for the night.

Over the course of those two nights, my brain had turned into a stew of curiosity, hope, fear and anxiety. While I did truly want to know what was going on, there was a still a dark fear of the unknown and the unexplained. How was the person who was playing guitar escaping in the night without using the only door to the studio and without leaving any trace of evidence?

Worst of all was the darkest, yet most hopeful fear of all which simmered within my troubled brain. Could the musician be the ghost of my father?

I pushed that thought back. It was too hard to even think about. If that was the case, I was okay with being surprised.

*

The heat subsided the next night, but my sweating did’nt. I laid in my bed tortured by nerves. I tried to sleep, but found myself rolling over to check the time on my phone about every 20 minutes.

It was nearly 4 a.m. and I had yet to hear any music come from the backyard. Maybe I got too close last night and spooked the spook? My heart sank just a little bit with each passing check of the clock and each passing chunk of minutes. I eventually could take no more and slipped away into sleep.

*

I had no idea how much time had passed when I woke. Was it light outside? I checked my bedroom window. Still pitch black.

I heard the sound of a guitar ringing out heavy chords from behind the house. I sprang out of bed and ran for the back door.

I ran through the backyard as fast as I had since I was a little kid, my eyes stuck on the lights of the studio, excited that I didn’t see the red lighting of the security system and could still hear the rumbling power chords and what I thought was the sound of singing.

I dove at the door handle when I reached the studio. My body was still in a bit of shock when I took in the scene in front of me.

Seated in my dad’s playing stool was a long-haired kid clutching my dad’s vintage 67 Taylor acoustic guitar. He looked at me in panic with his straight brown hair covering half his face and tickling his lips.

“Oh shit. I’m sorry,” the kid shot out.

The kid dropped my dad’s pristine guitar and scrambled, almost falling off the stool. He stepped away from me and held his hands out in surrender.

“What are you doing in here?” I screamed at him.

He looked me up and down with light eyes and started to collect himself. He wiped his face nervously and slunk into a relaxed posture. I noticed a vape pen dangled in his left hand.

“I just moved next door and I was in the backyard and saw this studio back here and fell in love,” the kid answered.

He started to play with the shaggy dirty blonde hair around his ear. His eyes remained locked on mine. He maintained a slight, nervous smile. To me, he looked like Chris Pratt if he had become a rock star instead of a movie star and adopted the slender physique of a heroin-gorged guitar hero.

“I figured if I came back here in the middle of the night I could play guitar and listen to some records. There is about the best vinyl collection I have ever seen in here,” he finished by giving a wave at the stacks of vinyl which took up almost an entire wall of the studio.

The kid seemed genuinely sincere and harmless. I was still completely on edge, but his soft voice and features wore me down with each second we held our stand off in the soft light of the studio.

“Okay…

“Look.  Here’s what I can do,” the kid started in and cleared his throat while taking a wallet out of his pants. “I can give you my driver’s license which shows that I do live next door and my ASB card which shows that we will go to the same high school next year.”

The boy produced two cards from his wallet and handed them over to me. The Ohio state driver’s license confirmed he did live next door and his name was Adam Long and the ASB card confirmed he would be going to Kirkland High School with me next year.

“I’m Adam by the way. Nice to meet you.”

I handed the IDs back.

“Nice to meet you,” I mumbled.

“You can call the cops if you still like. I understand. But, if you aren’t too totally freaked out, I would love to come back here, play some guitar, smoke out and listen to these great records if you are ever interested. I can even bring some of my own and my own guitar. Just head next door and knock.”

Adam walked right by me before I could get another word out and slipped out the door. Leaving me alone in the studio with the sound of the guitar still ringing in my ear.

*

The idea of knocking on Adam’s door and inviting him to teach me guitar or listen to records gnawed at me for three days before I finally made the trek down the street and found myself ringing his doorbell. I chewed on my lip as I waited for an answer.

Adam quickly answered with tired eyes and messy hair as if he had just woke up even though it was 1 in the afternoon.

“Uh, hi,” I mumbled.

“Let me get my guitar,” Adam blurted out.

Adam ran off before I could even get my question out.

Adam came back with a beat up old vintage guitar which looked like the one Willie Nelson plays. I think he calls it “Dolly” or “Darla” or something quaint that starts with a D.

Within minutes, Adam was picking out the opening to “Under the Bridge” on that ratty guitar and explaining to me that it was a 1964 Fender and possibly worth more than the two-bedroom fixer-upper he moved into with his parents about a month before.

I couldn’t help but laugh at Adam just about every minute. He had the demeanor of a puppy golden retriever, excited about everything and clumsy beyond belief. He actually fell off the stool before he launched into the verses of Under the Bridge.

Before he could even get up off the floor and before I could even stop laughing. Adam was insisting he wanted to teach me how to play guitar.

Adam seemed to have a knack for showing me the ropes of guitar my dad didn’t possess. He showed me the chords and how to hold the guitar, how to hold the pick, how to ring out notes properly the same way my dad did, but what he showed me seemed to actually stick in my brain. It was like he somehow could plant the directions in my brain before he actually showed them to me.

Adam’s guitar lessons became a daily routine. He would show up around 1 or 2 in the afternoon and meet me in the studio where I was already hanging out. He would teach me guitar for about an hour and then we would spend the rest of the afternoon listening to records with interruptions of him playing and singing my favorite classic rock songs.

It felt as if Adam’s lessons and companionship pushed along the healing process of getting over my dad’s death. Each day that passed with my new friend seemed to thread a piece of fabric over the giant, gaping hole in my heart.

I have to admit that Adam did more than just patch that heart though. He found a place for himself in it. Within about a week, our teacher-student-friend relationship crossed professional boundaries.

It was tragically cliche. We hinted at what we both felt through enough flirtations and lathered ourselves up with weed and some sips of vodka and lemonade I had stolen from my mom until we melted into each other halfway through Joni Mitchell’s Blue on the hottest afternoon of the summer.

We seemed to be the only other people either of us hung out with so it basically just felt like Adam and I were boyfriend and girlfriend from that very moment. Even though we had not been out together in public, neither of us had even seen the other’s parents and I had never been over to his house, it felt official.

It simply felt perfect and that was all I needed.

However, the problem with starting with perfection is you have nowhere to go but down, and we would go down a long, long ways.

The first chink in the armor of love took place on a night not long after that day of sealing the deal in the studio.

I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of music coming from the studio again. I checked the clock. It was 3:30 a.m. Right at the time when I first heard Adam playing in the studio.

I rushed out to the studio with visions of a romantic gesture by Adam waiting for me in the studio. Maybe him playing Blackbird in candlelight with some red wine pilfered from his mom in glasses or fresh picked flowers.

What waited for me in the studio was not the scene out of Nicholas Sparks novel I imagined. It was more like something out of a Chuck Palahniuk novel.

The unnerving Beatles track Revolution #9 blared through the door of the studio before I opened it. I didn’t even think the speakers of my dad’s record player could get that loud, but apparently they could damn near blow the doors off the building.

I opened the door to the studio to reveal pure darkness. Black was all I could see in the room. I could still hear the horrific song playing at full blast, but I couldn’t see anything in the room.

“Adam?” I tried to yell over the volume of the music.

The music cut out and the lights of the room came on, brighter than I ever thought they could. I can barely even summarize what I saw because of how much it still hurts...but, laying on the floor was my father, lying on his back, his arms limp and out to his sides, his face a sickening shade of purple, white foam coming out of his mouth, his hair wet and slicked back. I assumed it was the vision my mom came upon in their bathroom while I was at a friend’s house that day.

I wanted to run, but was frozen in my stance in the open doorway of the studio. The only thing I managed to do was pinch myself on my forearm to confirm that this was not a nightmare.

A quick shot of pain reminded me that I was very much awake in the moment I was in and a new song began to spin.

I recognized the song from the first note, “Starry, Starry Night,” it was my dad and my unofficial song that we loved to listen to together.

I was finally able to run. I ran away from the studio as fast as I could and made it to the pavement outside the backdoor to my house. I collapsed there. Fell on my side and curled up into a ball. I started to convulse. Sob uncontrollably. Right there, I was back in my friend’s car, on our way home from a movie, getting the news over the phone that my dad died and I couldn’t take it.

I laid there on the ground sobbing for what had to be nearly 20 minutes before I was able to pick myself back up and trudge to my bedroom and my bed. I shut the door and didn’t come out for more than 24 hours.

*

I wouldn’t interact with a single thing until the middle of the night, the next night. I had finally managed to get to sleep around 2 a.m., but it didn’t last. I flashed awake around 3 and looked around my room that was completely dark except for a periodic flashing of blue light and almost completely silent except for a period rumbling on the floor.

My disorientation held my brain from realizing the flashing and buzzing was coming from my phone on my nightstand. I looked over to the phone and saw it flash one last time before going back to sleep.

The end of the buzzing let the room go back into silence, but only for a moment. I heard a shuffling sound come from over by my bedroom door before I could even unlock my phone.

I panicked. I dropped the phone and looked up to the door. Standing there in the same sheepish stance he had when I first caught him in the studio was Adam.

He pushed his hair out of his face.

“You weren’t answering your texts so I just came in. The backdoor was unlocked,” Adam explained.

I sat up in my bed and tried to catch my breath.

“What the fuck? My mom hasn’t even met you. She might have stabbed you if she ran into you in the kitchen in the dark.”

Adam found a seat at the foot of my bed and looked at the floor. His usual clumsy and jovial demeanor was nowhere to be found. He seemed now like a child who had just been told his puppy had died.

“I was just feeling really sad and wanted to say that I’m sorry for what happened to your dad,” Adam said so quietly I could barely hear it.

I recoiled a little bit from Adam in the bed.

“I didn’t think I told you about my dad.”

I had no memory of mentioning anything about my dad to Adam other than saying that the albums and the guitars in the studio were his. I’m sure it was a little strange to Adam that he had yet to see any living presence of my dad, but I had never mentioned anything about him being dead.

Adam froze. He looked up from the floor and out the dark window of my bedroom. I changed my posture and leaned towards him.

“How do you know about my dad?”

Adam didn’t answer.

“It’s okay if you just Googled him or something. I get that it’s weird that I didn’t say anything about him. I just want to know.”

Adam mumbled something I couldn’t make out. I leaned further forward and focused in on him just a little bit, it looked like there were tears in his eyes.

“You can tell me,” I insisted.

“No, it’s okay. I just wanted to check in on you because you weren’t answering your phone,” Adam spoke up, clearly, before he got up off the bed and walked out of the room.

I got up and followed Adam to the door which he left open.

“Wait,” I called out the open door and down the hallway, but received no answer.

The heart of the house was silent other than for the rumbling hum of the air conditioning.

I went back into my room and tucked myself into bed. I grabbed my phone up from off the floor and unlocked it.

There weren’t any notifications on my home screen. I checked my texts. I didn’t have any new ones. Checked my phone log. No missed or new calls.

*

Adam went dark for days. He wouldn’t return texts, phone calls, voice mails...nothing. I knocked on his door each afternoon, but never got an answer.

I passed the days practicing the chords Adam taught me in the studio and listening to music alone and it just didn’t feel right. The studio no longer had the warmth and coziness he had brought back to it. It went back to being a dim mourning room for my dad filled with sad old records and lonely guitars.

The days drug on like your worst days at a horrible job. The routine which had once given me a sliver of peace of mind had now turned into a mundane test of mental stability. I felt like I was on the verge of breaking down at any moment of the day.

I figured it was time to set up another trap for my friend next door.

I ordered a pizza to be delivered to Adam’s house on a Wednesday night at 8 and waited in the bushes next to his house to see him answer the door.

I sweated and itched in the bush as I watched the delivery driver stroll up to the front door of Adam’s house and ring the doorbell. I chewed on a nail during the wait for the answer.

An answer never came. The delivery driver eventually cursed under his breath and took his big heated bag of pizza and retreated back to his car.

I guess I had never actually confirmed that Adam and his family were even home. Maybe they had left on a vacation or something?

No matter the case, I needed to do my own investigation.

I ran up to the front door of Adam’s house and tried the handle. It was unlocked. I opened the door, stepped in and closed the door behind me.

The smell was the first thing which I noticed. The house reeked of the scent of abandon. Like when you go into a vacation rental home no one has been in since the previous summer, or the guest room at a grandparent’s house where people rarely go.

The fact that the house was completely empty was the second thing I noticed. A quick stroll around the main floor showed that there wasn’t a single thing in the home other than my presence. Every wall was blank and white, the carpet still stiff and new with nary a piece of furniture on it, the kitchen spotless. Maybe it was possible that Adam’s family simply moved out of the house a few days ago when he went MIA and they had already spotlessly cleaned the place out, but there was no way. There would still be a hint of life and I hadn’t noticed any cleaning trucks or heard any sounds of work coming from next door.

The sound of footsteps coming down a staircase at the end of the dark hallway I stood in interrupted my thought. I froze in my tracks on the immaculately clean white carpet.

“Adam?” I whispered down the hallway.

I saw a pair of feet wearing the navy Converse sneakers Adam always sported come into view. I watched as skinny legs in torn blue jeans made their way down the stairs until I saw a faded grey t-shirt I had seen Adam wear come into view splashed with blood. I held my breath and finally took in the full site when he stopped at the bottom of the stairs and stared at me from the other end of the hallway.

Blood snaked out from Adam’s wrists, dripped down his forearms and all over his jeans and t-shirt. He looked to me with pained eyes for a few seconds.

I ran.

I stopped at the bottom of Adam’s sloped driveway and looked up at the front door. I tried to catch my breath, but couldn’t. I stared at the small windows built into the front door, wondering if I would eventually see him, but I didn’t in the minute I took before retreating home.

I locked my parents’ front door and turned on the alarm system before running up to my room.I grabbed my cell phone off of my desk. The only question was whether to call my mom or 911 first.

“Ruby,” Adam’s voice shot out from the corner of my room over by the bedroom window.

I shrieked in a way I don’t think I ever had before and clutched my chest. Truly wondered for a second if I had a heart attack.

Adam stood in the corner of my room without a drop of visible blood on him.

“What in the actual fuck?” I yelled across the room.

Adam started to move toward me.

“Are you fucking dead?”

I put it out there as clearly as I could. The blocks had all added up to that question in the past five minutes.

Adam stopped in his tracks. Looked away.

“Yes,” Adam confirmed. “But it’s not as bad as you think.”

“I don’t even know what that means. I’m not dead, am I?” I asked.

“You’re not, but things aren’t exactly what they seem. You’re going to need a lot of help, very soon and I’m probably the only one who can help you. Are you open to that?” Adam asked.

“I don’t even know how to answer that,” I whispered, realizing all the yelling might attract my mom to open the door and see what I imagined looked like me having an argument with myself.

Adam moved towards me again and put a soft hand on my shoulder.

“I don’t even know what to say,” I shivered the words out, salty tears falling into my open mouth. “This is the most freaked out I have ever been in my fuckin life.”

Both of us found a seat on the side of the bed. Adam put an arm around me. Nothing about his presence or touch felt dead. I questioned if Adam was telling me the truth about me being alive or not. I hadn’t left my house area in months, my friends seemed to be ignoring me and I barely saw my mom. This was all on my own accord, but I still wouldn’t have been shocked if there was a living, breathing barrier between me and the living world which was helping me stay away from it.

“You know that statistic you hear sometime that there has never been a recorded instance of a ghost causing the death of a person? I think they have mentioned it in a couple of horror movie trailers,” Adam said.

“I think so.”

“It’s not true. It’s not a lie. It’s just that people don’t understand how everything thing works. Ghosts kill people all the time. They just do it in a way that doesn’t make it seem like the case. Real ghosts don’t hide in the closet and then jump out with a knife or try to scare someone to death. If they want someone to die, they are much more covert. They’ll make it look like a natural cause or an accident. That guy cleaning the gun. Let’s make it ‘accidentally’ go off. The depressed woman soaking in her bathtub. Let’s slit her wrists. The overweight middle-aged man running on his treadmill. Let’s shoot him full of adrenaline and spark a heart attack. Make sense?”

“As much as it can make sense,” I said. “I’m going to go ahead and assume with your last example that something like this happened with my dad?”

Adam nodded.

“Why?” I asked.

Adam let out a deep breath. I watched him bite down on his lip.

“It’s a shitty world,” Adam said with an exhale. “You can’t always explain things. These dark spirits, some of them just wander the universe looking for someone to latch onto. I think this one lived in your house years ago and had some kind of unfounded grudge with your dad, and your family since you moved into their old place.”

“So it’s not just after him?”

Adam shook his head.

“That’s why I’m here. To try and protect you.”

“I don’t like that you used the word ‘try.’”

My statement seemed to set off a sharp pain in my stomach and I folded over on the bed, clutched my gut and struggled to breathe.

“So what’s this? This thing trying to kill me slowly and painfully?” I seethed through gnashed teeth.

“Unfortunately, yes,” Adam announced.

“What the hell can I even do?” I asked as the simmering pain finally starting to cool down in my stomach.

“That’s why I’m here,” Adam said and made eye contact with me for the first time in our interaction that night. “I can tr...I can protect you.”

I almost was able to force a smile when Adam stopped himself from saying the word “try,” but I didn’t really get what he could do. I felt like this thing was turning my insides into to rotting mush and I didn’t really see how a 17-year-old with a puberty mustache and acoustic guitar skills was really going to help. This wasn’t “The Greatest Song in the World.” You can’t beat a demon with an acoustic guitar solo.

“So you’re going to take the disease and pain this thing is sticking in my stomach and take it away?”

“I’m doing my best to just keep it there. You don’t want it to grow into anything more. That’s what it will do if I have to go away again. It will grow and grow until you are looking at that deep dark pain that you saw in the studio and you saw in my house again. That’s when it can really hurt you. The restrained pain, the one that gets in your insides you have now, that can take down an older man with some heart issues, but all it can really do to someone like you is make you sick. I’m going to do everything I can to make sure even that pain which has been reduced down to just a tickle in your stomach goes away.”

“And how are you going to do that?”

Adam leaned across the bed and kissed me softly on the lips. He reached around and gently placed his hand on the back of my head, he stroked my hair as we kissed on until I was tired, ready to go to bed and the burning in my stomach was a suddenly a distant memory.

*

I woke just before daybreak. Adam was gone, but I was perfectly tucked underneath my covers. I felt as if I could still sense him in the room with me, even though he was nowhere to be seen.

I went out to the studio at sunrise to smoke and make some progress on learning the chords to the first song Adam taught me - the simple chord progression of Wonderwall. I hoped hearing me play my choppy melody would coax him out of the empty house next door.

I broke out into a smile when the alarm system of the studio lit up and I anticipated Adam stepping in to join me in just a few seconds.

The jiggling of the studio door stirred my heart, I looked over to the entrance with the guitar in my hands, mid-strum.

“Welcome back,” I said, my throat still grumbling with morning grog. “Sorry...I.”

I stopped my tongue. Instead of Adam standing in the doorway, it was my mom. She was vomiting uncontrollably all over the floor and screaming at the highest pitch I have ever heard a human being emit.

“Mom!” I screamed out and threw the guitar off of my lap.

I ran over to my mom as she dropped to one knee and started to collect herself. I didn’t even think about the burning joint which fell to the floor behind me when I got up and ran over.

“Let’s go inside.”

I helped my mom to her feet and led her out of the studio. We walked through the backyard and back into the house.

I calmed my mom down in the kitchen with a tall, cold glass of water and a cold towel to the forehead.

“I don’t know what happened. I just woke up burning up at the crack of dawn. I couldn’t move at first and when I could I started throwing up everywhere. I tried to find you, but you weren’t inside. I didn’t know where you were.”

My mom started to break down and cry. I caught her tears with the moist towel and wrapped her in a hug. It was the first time we had physically touched since my dad’s funeral months before.

“I think I’m getting really sick,” my mom said in the midst of sobs into the fabric of my shirt where her face was buried.

I had pretty much forgotten about my mom in everything that had happened. I had been thinking she must have been worried about my withdrawal from the world and isolation, but I never thought about her doing the same. I joined her in tears as we embraced at the kitchen bar area.

My tears started to stop when I felt a wet mass wash down my back. I pulled away from my mom and looked her in the face.

The face I saw was not that of my mom at all. I was instead face-to-face with a bare skull dripping with melted skin, hair and viscera. It looked like the pool or wax that collects at the bottom of a red candle on a saucer. I vomited into my mouth and caught it with my hand. I staggered backwards in the kitchen and watched that face keep melting like a cherry popsicle in the sun.

The scent of what I thought was burning flesh stung my nose as I stood in the living room and watched the woman who I thought was my mother melt down into a puddle before my very eyes. I held my breath until I could watch no more and turned towards the door which led out to the backyard.

A quick look out the window informed me the smell overtaking my nose was not that of burning flesh, it was of burning wood and machinery. I could see the studio going up in flames at the back of the yard.

I screamed and ran out the back door, ignoring the final moments of the melting person who was reducing into a puddle in the kitchen.

A closer look from the backyard showed that the studio was already completely engulfed in flames. I ran to get closer, but couldn’t even get too close without feeling the power of the flames burn my face. There was nothing I could do. My sanctuary and memorial for my dad was gone.

I retreated to the house where there wasn’t a single sign of melting flesh anywhere in the kitchen and where my mom was waiting, screaming into a cell phone about the fire, looking fine and dandy. I confirmed with my mom that I was okay and ran out the front door, on a mission to get back into Adam’s house.

I wasted no time with knocks. I just ran right into the heart of the dark house and screamed out…

“Adam. Adam. Adam.”

I got no response. Just the faint echo of my voice bouncing off the lonely walls. I let out a pure and simple scream, hoping my raw emotion could draw out Adam, but no luck.

I swept the house on my own, but found nothing but empty rooms and the smell of dust and paint fumes. Adam was nowhere to be found.

The fire department was already at my house when I left Adam’s. I could hear the commotion of men screaming out directions and the distant spray of a powerful hose as I walked up to my front door with a hollow feeling carving out my insides. I had nothing left to even care about. My last safe place in the world was gone. Who I thought was my love turned out to be a flaky ghost who failed to deliver on promises and my mom was just as big of a mess as I was.

I retreated up to my room and tried to shut out the sounds of the sirens and the men trying to douse the fire which ravaged the studio. I dreaded knowing I would soon receive a knock on my door and have to be ushered out of the house by the dad of some guy I went to school with so I could be “safe.”

It felt like it only took two minutes for that dreaded knock to come.

“What?” I yelled at the door with attitude as if the person on the other side of the wooden door was trying to hurt me and not help me.

No answer was given. I looked up from the pillow I had buried my face in and saw what I thought was Adam standing just inside my bedroom door. I recoiled and climbed backwards on the bed, towards the wall.

I would have been scared to see Adam just appear like that in general, but my fear and recoil was inflamed by his appearance. Adam looked very much like the melted woman who showed up to the studio earlier in the morning. His scalp was burnt bald, just an oily slick of his hair left sticking straight up, his skin was scaly white and burnt away, like a shed snake skin you might find in your yard, his body was charred and his clothes were hanging off of him, scalded and stiff.

Adam made a couple steps toward me, but stopped.

“You were supposed to help me. Where were you?” I pleaded from my bed.

“I was there. I was the one who warned you. What you saw was your mom and your ghosts. You saw yourself melt in the kitchen and your mom barfing and burning in the studio from the smoke. I sent them for you to wake you up because you fell asleep in the studio and it was about to burn down and your mom was about to get burnt trying to wake you up and drag you out of there. That big ass fire wasn’t started by your little ass blunt. There was an electrical short in the studio right before you got out. The thing burned down in two minutes once it started. I saved you, and your mom. I saved you from the that fire by sending your ghosts to scare you out,” Adam explained.

Don’t worry. I didn’t 100 percent get it at the time either.

“And now I died again for you,” Adam said, but much more quietly than his previous statement.

“What?”

Adam let out a flurry of grotesque coughs. He fell hard to the floor and curled up on his side.

I got off the bed and ran to Adam. The gore on his body was much harder to take in up close.

“The ghost that was after your family is gone now. I trapped it in the studio as it burned down.

“I may have said something cliche in the moment like “no, you can’t go,” or “wait, please stay,” to Adam, but I can’t exactly remember. I only remember what he said.

“You already knew me,” Adam said then gasped for air.

“What?”

“Adam Rocket Central two-six-one. No spaces. Find it and you’ll find out. Just know overall that you and your mom are safe now,” Adam finished with another deep gasp.

That gasp would be Adam’s last. I watched Adam fade from vision shortly after those final parting words. Where Adam had laid on the carpet suddenly went back to just being a beige piece of fabric dotted with Diet Coke stains.

*

I took some time to (try and) absorb everything that happened before I took to Google to investigate Adam’s parting words. I’m glad I did because what I found warranted some calm and preparation.

AdamRocketCentral216 was a Twitter handle. Smiling back in the profile picture was a face which was instantly recognizable - Adam.

The profile’s tweets were protected, but there was a Tumblr link at the top I was able to follow.

The first post on the Tumblr couldn’t have been more clear. It simply read: Ruby, please start from the beginning.

The earliest post was from 2011, back when I was only 11. Fittingly, it was titled simply 11.

The post started with a picture of me in front of a glistening lake, smiling and flanked by a shaggy-haired boy I recognized as Zach Harris, my first boyfriend. I had never seen the photo before.

The copy of the post told the start of Adam’s story. He was a shy 11-year-old boy who developed a crush on your’s truly at the summer camp we both apparently went to, but he never got the guts to talk to me and watched horrified as I fell in pre-pubescent love with Zach Harris.

The posts went on for three more ages, each about the summers we attend summer camp together and how I accumulated boyfriends and failed to acknowledge he existed. Each featured a photo of me with a boyfriend.

The second-to-last post, age 14, told the story of the progress Adam was finally able to make. He found out I had a crushing break-up with my boyfriend and he tracked me down on the dock and comforted me for an hour.

Adam detailed a lengthy conversation of bonding over quoting The Simpsons, shit talking love and the awful summer camp our parents made us go to. He said we ended the conversation by him writing his phone number in my camp yearbook with a promise by me to call him when we got back to our respective home towns.

Memories of that afternoon on the dock started to come back to me. I vaguely remember a boy comforting me about breaking up with my boyfriend, but I mostly just remember crying my eyes out about said boyfriend and not a good samaritan. I understand situations like that where you view the interaction with someone as a deep, memorable event, but the other person simply sees it as a fleeting conversation with a stranger.

I rushed to the final post - 15. It started by confirming I never called Adam that summer and he talked his parents out of making him go to camp that year.

The post closed with a simple instruction: Find your summer camp yearbook from 2014. The name Adam Long is written on the last page with a phone number. Call the number and ask for Adam...the rest will take care of itself.

I dialed up the Cincinnati area code number and waited with my ear sweating against my phone.

“Hello,” a cautious female voice answered.

“Uh hi,” I had not idea how to start in. “I was told by Adam to call this number. Adam Long?”

The line went silent for a good five seconds. A deep exhale on the other side broke it.

“Is this Ruby?” The voice on the other end wavered with emotion.

“Yes.”

“Adam gave very specific instructions on what to do if this day ever came. I can’t tell you any more, but I am going to put a package in the mail for you this afternoon which will give you all the answers I can give. What’s your address honey?”

I gave the woman my address. We exchanged pleasantries. She hung up.

I don’t know if I thought of a single thing other than that package in the week and a half I had to wait for it to show up at the door.

I tore into the thing before even walking back to the house. The package was about the size of a shoe box, but contained nothing but a single flash drive. I smiled, knowing the mailing format was either a symptom of Adam being his over-dramatic self or him making fun of his over-dramatic self.

I opened up the drive on my laptop and saw it contained just one video file.

The video opened up on a shot of Adam sitting at a desk, looking around the age of 13 or 14 based on what I remember from the old summer camp photos on his Tumblr. He ignored the camera at first, but then looked straight at it with his soft blue eyes and smiled.

“Hey, it’s Adam. Welcome to my video blog. I started the Tumblr, but I thought this would be a better way to tell my story from start to finish.”

The first 30 minutes or so of the video explained the summer camp saga pretty well detailed on the Tumblr, but with a little more emotion and the painful image of Adam telling it himself just inches from the camera with me knowing I would never see his face again. I had to stop the playback at least a few times to collect myself and wipe tears from my cheeks, jaw and neck as they rolled down.

The last time I had to stop it didn’t have anything to do with Adam’s story. It was simply when the video stopped and then started again with him this time aged to 17. The age I knew him best. The little flecks of pathetic stubble on his chin. His hair a little longer and curled at the ends. His jaw a little stronger. He was as close to a man as he would ever get and had the same blue eyes I first connected with in the studio in the middle of the night.

I was able to get myself to eventually hit play again.

“This is it. The last message,” Adam said on the camera with a smile. “This is the hardest one.”

The tears started to come again.

“You might be watching this months later, even years later and be begging me not to do it, but just understand that I had to. It was the only way. I know this is crazy, but I think this is the only way I can get close to you. I’ve been reading a lot about love and the afterlife and how it all works on Reddit and I think I know how I can make this work,” Adam went on, tears falling down his cheeks.

Adam took out a long knife and flashed it on the screen. Long and thin, it was the kind you use for precise cutting.

“I’m ready to just do it. I’m bored of this existence. I Googled you and saw what happened to your dad and I think I can help this way. It’s not fair. That’s why I’m doing it. For you. Not for me,” Adam said with the knife flailing around in his right hand.

Adam took in a deep breath. His hands dropped below the view of the camera.

“You don’t have to see this. I love you. See you soon,” Adam whispered.

Adam let out a scream. He let out another and the screen went black.

*

I did my own search on Reddit and discovered the subReddit about the afterlife I believe Adam talked about in the video. It had all of the details about the good and the dark spirits Adam explained to me in that bedroom that night when he admitted he was dead.

Adam had been obsessed with me for years even when I didn’t know he even existed and even though we lived hundreds of miles away from each other. He thought he was in love, but it was just infatuation. He discovered through that Reddit afterlife forum that if he died, he could track me down and slip into my life. He also believed that a dark spirit had caused my father’s heart attack and was going to go after my mom and me. As a good spirit, Adam thought he could stop it, and, hopefully meet me and make me fall in love with him.

Now here’s where things get a little more tricky…

Things keep stacking up against Adam’s case. So much that I wanted to write it all down to explain why I am no longer so sure that what he told me was the truth and that he had my complete best interest in mind and not just his.

The Case Against Adam

The date stamp on Adam’s final broadcast where he killed himself was three days before my dad died, yet, he referenced my dad dying in the video.

I connected with the admin of the Reddit afterlife forum and discuss what happened to me and he mentioned that anyone who killed themselves does not enter the afterlife as a good spirit. They enter as neutral at best, and many times, come in as bad spirits due to the darkness of their passing. The spirits also may not know what kind of spirits they are. A dark spirit may assume it is a good spirit because of their own personal belief in themselves, but not actually be one.

I started talking to my mom again and she divulged a secret about my dad I never knew. When I was 15, my dad intercepted a package addressed from me, opened it and discovered a collection of love letters and racy self portraits. He also intercepted a call on my parents’ landline from the boy who asked for me, but my dad did not pass it on. Lastly, my dad discovered the boy hiding outside of the house one night and took him to the police station. My dad told my mom that he scared the living daylights out of the kid and got him to promise to leave me alone. My mom and dad didn’t want to scare me, so they kept all of this from me. My mom said she was pretty sure the boy’s name was Adam and my dad said he lived in Cincinnati.

To me, this suggest Adam may have taken the information from the Reddit forum, realized killing himself and using the spirit powers he knew existed to take out my dad from the afterlife so he could finally approach me without him in the way. Adam then died in the afterlife in the fire in the studio and fully passed on to the other side.

But, I’m not 100 percent sold yet, because…

The Case for Adam

I felt it. I truly felt Adam was genuine. I felt that he was telling the truth and we were in a strange kind of love. It lived in my gut, bones and heart.

And you know what they say...you should always trust your gut.

Originally published by Thought Catalog on www.ThoughtCatalog.com.

[mtwy]

Record

UK March 1985

Maybe She’s Good - 10 Theories on How Madonna ‘Got It’

By Laura Fissinger

Usually it takes a while for a pop star to earn heavyweight hatred from a significant percentage of the press and public. But like everything else in her (very) young career, fear and loathing have come quickly indeed to singer/ writer/ dancer/ hot number Madonna. Loathe her or love her, it’s interesting to try and figure this one out. Theories abound, including a few from the lady herself.

I. Phyllis and Bob Theory As Madonna puts it, “I seem to be the girl they hate to love.” No kidding. Private citizens tap their feet to “Lucky Star” or “Holiday” while wondering aloud if anything short of exorcism will get her off their radios and MTVs. The press file reads like she’s a ghoulish maidservant of notorious anti-libber Phyllis Schlafly and notorious Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione, sucking all the feminism and IQ points from the fragile neck of popular culture. Fans and foes alike seem to agree that she’s an ’80s incarnation of the “It” girl – blessed/cursed with a charisma that makes skin goosebump as well as crawl, something beyond her prettiness or infamous tummy. It makes her videos, records and (soon) movies impossible to dismiss. It’s there in person, too. She comes down a corporate hallway in a big black jacket and modest red-knit dress, looking like the video Madonna sans the bare belly and excess Catholic iconography. There is absolutely nothing solicitous in her manner of greeting, nothing straining to charm, nothing yanking at you for approval. Her handshake (a tiny red glove conceals the hand) is firm, and brief. Even so, the force is with her; it swallows her little frame as she walks toward a vast conference room like a sixth grader going to a hard math exam. Undoubtedly, her mind is elsewhere. Just this week, “Like A Virgin” has gone to Number One on the pop charts, and its namesake LP to Number Three, only five weeks after release. Her first LP took almost a year to happen, but once it did it sold two million-plus copies. It’s not quite finished yet, either. Nor is the fallout, which so far includes the four hit singles, three videos, one starring film role and one small part in a movie for which she sang three tunes. Oh yeah, and the lousy reputation. Part of that reputation says that Madonna is simply not a nice person, but superb at appearing so when someone‘s approval could be useful. On this particular day, anyway, she is kind of bristly. A little sharp-tongued and self-satisfied. But she makes no effort to hide any of the warts. More than a few rock stars are downright oily and self-protective when they need nice press. Madonna answers questions straight out, is only pretty nice most of the session, and leaves the warts right out there. If she’s such a master at showbiz politics, where’s the politicking? Where’s the manipulation? II. The Wedding Dress Theory Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone was born in Detroit on August 16, 1958. Veronica is her Catholic confirmation name, chosen because St. Veronica “wiped the face of Jesus and then carried around the cloth with his blood and sweat on it — it was so passionate and weird.” The French-Italian family had five boys and three girls who lost their mother when her namesake, Madonna, was six, Madonna didn’t much like the stepmother that appeared two years later; no doubt the woman felt it. Even in grade school, Madonna apparently had extraordinary intensity; it both scared and fascinated her. “I felt overwhelmed by it at points in my life. People didn’t understand me, especially when I was young; I’d realize I’d just alienated someone and scared them away, a boy or a friend or whoever. I handled it in a number of ways — either I’d get more arrogant and say ‘I don’t need you, I don’t care if you understand or I’d get upset and cry. You can get hurt by it, or you can give them the finger. But it still hurts.” She learned to be defensive then, and still practices, frequently, “It’s easy for me to come out and say stuff. I think I was naturally a verbal and defensive kind of person, but I think I really developed that aspect of my personality growing up in my family, not feeling happy, feeling like I had to defend myself and make a statement, you know? It’s about insecurity? There are mementos of that time. “Just the other day I found a photograph of me dressed in my mother’s wedding gown when I was five years old. It was very strange.” III. The Barbie Doll Dishwashing Theory “Oh yeah, I played with my Barbie dolls all the time — I definitely lived out my fantasies with them.” Madonna lets loose a naughty chuckle. “I dressed them up in sarongs and mini-skirts and stuff. They were sexy, having sex all the time. I rubbed her and Ken together a lot. And they were bitchy, man, Barbie was mean.” She hoots. “Barbie would say to Ken, ‘I’m not gonna stay home and do the dishes. You stay home! I’m going out tonight, I’m going bowling, okay, so forget it!’ You know? She was going to be sexy, but she was going to be tough” A quote from a recent story is brought up in which Madonna had claimed sexual awakening at age five. “Made it sound like I masturbated all the time, didn’t it?” she says with a raised eyebrow. “I really do remember from when I was very, very young, being really attracted to men, and being real flirtatious. The power of my femininity and charm, I remember it was just something I had, that I’d been given, you know what I mean? From the age of five I remember being able to affect people that way. I felt something but I didn’t know what to do with it. I was just very aware of it.” IV. The Boyfriend Theory In the teenage years, two things were pure pleasure — dance and music. Madonna studied ballet as much as her father and her legs would allow. As for the music, it was on her radio, and the more radio-perfect, the better. “My favorites when I was little were Stevie Wonder, the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, the Jackson 5, the Motown sound. But then I really like ’60s pop songs too — “The Letter” by the Boxtops, “Sugar Sugar” by the Archies, Gary Puckett, Bob by Sherman, “Happy Together” by the Turtles. I loved all those innocent little pop songs. No hard rock, no heavy metal, no jazz. Pop and soul were it.” Dance won her a four-year free ride at the University of Michigan, but the prognosis for toe-shoe stardom was lousy. As would be the ease for years to come, Madonna saw no reason to follow rules, and that rubbed the rulemakers the wrong way. After one school year, she moved to New York City. Hometown friend Steve Bray had started her on drums and singing and a little songwriting. It didn’t take long in New York before dance stepped aside to make more room for music. The next teacher/companion was Dan Gilroy of Queens, whose adoration of the Beatles and their melodies shaped Madonna’s sense of how to construct a song; Gilroy also had the instruments and the patience to start her with the C chords. Madonna left for a frustrating European tour singing and dancing behind a disco singer, then came back to spend a valuable year in the Gilroy brother’s band and home. Eventually she wanted things in the band her own way, although that way wasn’t entirely clear yet. Manhattan and new compatriots beckorted. Bray came out to work with her through two rock ‘n’ roll bands. They didn’t turn out to be the way either. “I didn’t want to go in a rock vein, and that’s what created the schism between my manager of that time period and myself. I was really being influenced by the urban radio stuff that was starting to be everywhere, on the streets and in the clubs. I love to dance in clubs, and I love all the music they play. It made me really want to dance, it was so soulful. I thought, why can’t I do that? I wanted to make music that I would want to dance to when I was out at the clubs.” Logically, New York nightclubs is where she went next. It came down to peddling R&B demo tapes done by her and Bray, at the places where the songs’ magic would get their roughest test. If the songs made people dance in New York’s hippest hothouses, that would be the sign that her way, finally, was the right way. DJ boyfriend Mark Kamins remixed one tape and then took it to Sire, where a deal was made. But neither Bray nor Kamins got to produce the first album, a job they each felt had been promised, and earned. Instead, Madonna was done by veteran R&B producer Reggie Lucas (Stephanie Mills, Phyllis Hyman). Madonna knows it didn’t seem right. She also knows what else it seemed like. She looks the reporter straight in the eye: “If anybody wants to know, I never f*cked anyone to get anywhere. Never.” V. The Trickle-Down Theory Stories about Madonna’s method of career advancement started to circulate shortly after the debut LP came to life on the pop charts. How did this woman with no band or playing credits on her record and no known credibility connections score such a surprise hit? Awfully, uh, juicy looking, isn’t she’? “Some of the things people say are so ridiculous, it’s not even worth defending yourself. The guy who wrote one recent long story, – he got his facts right, all my boyfriends’ names right and how they helped my career, but he wrote the article from just one corner of the room. He just talked about what he saw from that one corner.” She speaks with a tiny shade of sadness, but no rancor. “Yes, all my boyfriends turned out to be very helpful to my career, but that’s not the only reason I stayed with them. I loved them very much.” A pause, then a smile and a shrug. “I’m not Alexis from Dynasty. And going around in corsets is not all I am either. People hone in on what they want to hone in on. They rarely go for the sum total of someone’s personality.” Madonna is not the only one who got helped. Gilroy’s debut with his band, Breakfast Club, is due soon. Kamins is collecting royalties from Madonna and working on new projects. Bray is working with the Breakfast Club; he also had four cowriting credits on Like A Virgin. And Lucas, who lost his slot to Nile Rodgers on LP #2, is reportedly busier than ever. VI. The Bathroom Theory “Reggie was about one thing,” explains Madonna. “He did R&B. He’s a good producer, very open and sensitive. But Nile has worked with so many kinds of musicians, and every record he’s made is a great one as far as I’m concerned. He has the pop thing in him really strong, and he’s done great dance stuff with Chic and Sister Sledge and all those others, and he’s worked with a lot of female vocalists like Diana Ross. I identified with him, too. He’s a real street person, and we hung out at the same clubs. Even before I started to interview producers I thought he was the one I wanted for the second record.” Rodgers is getting to be a popular interview these days for people writing about Madonna. The implication is, of course, that Rodgers is legit, see, and if he likes Madonna without being her boyfriend, then maybe she’s not a total bimbo. Rodgers is affable and willing to talk, even with a mean head cold and a long airplane trip only a few hours away. “Someone like Iggy Pop can get out there and be super-sexual and wild and that’s great. But Madonna is a woman, so they say she’s sleazy? Madonna is blatantly sexual and sensual, but not sleazy, not even a little bit. In my opinion, she’s an excellent natural singer, a natural musician, a serious artist. It would be real nice if some ostensibly smart people who know about music would get past the image and get into the music. I’m hoping she can just ride out all the crap people are saying about her. I think a lot of the real nasty stuff is coming from men. And all that arrogance bit — she sticks to her guns, that’s all. It’s that attitude that comes from growing up in a huge family, you know, always having to fight and yell for things like time in the bathroom.” VII. The Chauffeur’s Friend’s Theory “I was making this movie, Desperately Seeking Suson. One of the drivers that took me to the set every day was this kid, and one day he said to me, ‘I have this bet going with my friend, he told me that all the music you do was done by someone else and they picked the songs and did it all, and all they needed was a girl singer and you auditioned and they picked you. And Madonna isn’t your real name and all of it is fabricated.‘ And I said, ‘WHAAAAATT?? Are you out of your mind??!’ But that’s what his friend told him, and it suddenly hit me that that’s probably what a lot of people think. It hit me.” VIII. The Phyllis and Bob Theory, Part II Here’s the catch for the modern girl: you can be self-determining. You now have the right. You should be self-determining, you must. But. If your self determines that it wants to be smart and sexpot at the same time? You got the power to choose, honey, but you chose wrong, “I thought the Gina Schock quote was pretty funny,” grins Madonna, referring to Schock recent statement to the effect that Madonna makes it hard for people to take women seriously but that Schock loved the record in spite of it. “I think people want to see me as a little tart bimbo who sells records because I’m cute and record companies push ’em because they know they can make a quick buck on my image.” Madonna gives another eyeball to eyeball look. “People don’t want to like me. And that’s because you’re not supposed to be flirty unless you’re an airhead. And they say I do all this stuff to my appearance and look the way I do because I want to please men.” The blue eyes roll toward the ceiling. “I’m doing it because I like it. If I don’t like it, no one’s going to. I do it because it turns me on.” Any female role models or heroes? She sighs. “Carole Lombard. She’s my all-time idol. I love her so much. She’s real sentimental and vulnerable, and funny, and sometimes she’s real bitchy and tough, too. She’s it.” IX. The Sheet Theory You gotta pay if you wanna play, says the firm set of her mouth. “I try to have a thick skin, but every once in a while I read something that someone says about me and it’s so slanderous and moralistic, and it has nothing to do with my music. There was this one review that said things about me that boys said to me in the seventh grade.” For instance? “For instance – ‘slut.’ Yep, they called me that in this review. And ‘cheap coquette,’ a girl who made her way into lots of back seats in the drive-in theater, the kind of girl that made your father slip you a Trojan and pat you on the back and say, ‘Have a good time, don’t stay out too late.'” Her eyes focus across the room as if she’s watching a movie. “I remember guys saying that sort of stuff to me when I was really young. I thought suddenly that the whole experience was repeating itself all over again. Those boys didn’t understand me, and they didn’t like me because I wasn’t stupid, and I was blunt and opinionated, but I was a flirt at the same time. They took my aggressiveness as a come-on. They didn’t get it. And they didn’t get it, if you know what I mean, so I guess they had to say things because they knew that was the only way they could hurt me. That review felt like junior high all over again. And check this out! This reviewer also said that every guy across the country is stroking himself under his sheets thinking about me.” Madonna’s face creases in mischief. “Maybe he’s doing it himself and he feels guilty. Or maybe he asked me out on a date five years ago and I snubbed him.” It’s not out of the question. X. The Time Theory Madonna has to vamoose in 15 minutes, cover story and unanswered questions notwithstanding. This week preceding a needed vacation is crammed with band auditions for the boys who will go on the “Virgin Tour.” The trek will start around March and cover the States as well as Europe. Before and after and probably even during the tour there are TV tapings, fashion layouts, photo sessions, videos, commercials, movie scripts to consider and on and on. And then, “I’ll check into Bellevue, or maybe the Betty Ford Clinic, huh?” Any positive press along the way will be nice, of course, but serious reputation repair can only come if she keeps going, going, going. And she knows it. “The fact of the matter is that you can use your beauty and use your charm and be flirtatious, and you can get people interested in you. Maybe at the start they’re only interested in your beauty. But you cannot maintain that. In the end, talent is the only thing. My work is the only thing that’s going to change any minds. The videos, the records, the movies are the things that will eventually make them think that I’m more than just a girl with a pretty face who’s had some pop hits. It’s just going to take some time.”

Photo Credits: Deborah Feingold, Laura Levine