TALK TO HER… Padua, Italy… Think Ian Curtis but somewhat less raw and bleak than Joy Division. Not to say that this is a clone band. Not in the least. It’s just the vocals really, that weird, distant baritone. This is going to come in video by video, which is a plus in the sense that you don’t have to spend 40 minutes looking at the cover art. There is the bandcamp link above also. Love Will Come Again is lush… a la 80s Goth/New Romantic. Coldwave… Darkwave… Post-punk… Electro-wave… New Wave… etc. Words aren’t coming today but you have the music.

It’s official. I am done with work for 2020 and don’t return until January 4, 2021. Let’s see what can be done with two weeks of recharging, rebooting and cleaning up. There are no expectations of 2021 being any less strange but rest is welcome. I’m done with this year. This year is done with me. It’s going to be weird going through the holidays on my own but there are no delusions there either. This is the life I’ve made, in one sense. Not that other people didn’t stumble over themselves also to create distance. I “get” it but there is some bitterness. That has no doubt led to some of the exhaustion but there are a few weeks ahead now to make peace with it. It will pass. I’d be lying at the moment though if I said that a few people over the course of 2020 haven’t left me feeling like non-essential personnel. Again, it will pass, as long as I allow it to pass. These are the people I chose to have in my life and I knew who they were from the start. Maybe that’s why they were chosen, so there would be an excuse for the distance later on, no matter who initiated it.

Let it go.

My anniversary is a few days away and it feels somehow different this year. Or it to the best of my recollection it is different? My relationship with sobriety has definitely changed. It’s much broader than the fear of how things were before. It’s a new understanding of everybody and everything around me. There is an ever-increasing clarity and focus. It’s almost overwhelming on some days to see the world in such razor-sharp, exacting detail. It’s the extreme close-up factor from the floral photos taken earlier in the year, over the summer. The detail is so up-close and sharp that the whole world can seem alien, and on some days, grotesque. Often an unfamiliar beauty can seem grotesque though, so there is that. Sometimes it is jarring and ugly also. You take the bad with the good. It’s all part of the total package. You don’t get to cherrypick the bits and bytes that don’t offend the eye or the sensibilities.

It would be nice to have someone(s) around to have real conversations about this stuff with. My attempts are rebuffed or met with more interest in what my hidden agenda may be for bringing up a subject. No hidden agendas exist. The agenda is the subject itself. People are sad in that way though, conditioned to believe there are ulterior motives behind everything spoken or drawn. That brings me back to talking to myself in a space like this, which makes me come off like a mental patient. If the desire to keep it very real and not play along with the game of mutual happy bubble is a pathology, then perhaps I am that mental patient. I don’t know. It just seems to me that we would all be happier if we aired out our inner monologues and dialogues. It doesn’t give them any more gravity or even substance to let them be seen. If anything it can defuse the doubts and insecurities and bring everyone closer.

But maybe distance is the endgame and nobody clued me in on the rules. Nobody gave me the playbook.

What am I doing then? Catharsis? Okay, that’s going to have to be good enough.