This may be a placeholder. Most of the missives posted up here are incomplete anyway, but some are more whole than others. This is a vibe. It’s a mood. It’s a feeling I haven’t identified a descriptor for. Not just yet.

Not just yet.

RANCHO RELAXO has an almost shoegaze or dreampop feel, but maybe a bit heavier, like if shoegaze and stoner rock had a bastard child. It’s still got a sort of “not quite in the present moment” feel to it as well. Like a dream, or a hazy memory, a psychedelic tip but not at all with the flower-power, San Francisco nonsense. What they are doesn’t really matter though. It’s what I’m feeling this afternoon that matters. It’s a kind of in-between, not quite here and not quite there mood. Anyway, the music:

Kat, my partner, made a short film to try to explain the lingering funk/malaise/fear from 20-plus months of Covid-19, now that life is ostensibly going back to normal. Or the “new normal” as people were calling it for the better part of 2020. Now 2021 is over and we’re going back to our lives, whatever they look like now. Some of us are vaccinated, and some of us are just kicking up a fuss about being told what to do. Both sides of that argument though are moving back to the workplace, and their respective commutes, schools, etc. People are still dying. There are millions worldwide already in the ground. How normal is any of this every going to be? People are identifying with this sense of pervading dread that she says clearly in the film that she can’t identify. Maybe it’s something that none of us have words for yet? Something new? There has certainly been a lot of… a lot of new. Powerlessness in a very real sense. Long-term, large-scale frustration and anger. You don’t come down from negative shit overnight, and especially when it’s been hammering you into the dust for months and years on end. But I don’t know.

I don’t know if I’m feeling the same thing. I know that during peak Covid I said I didn’t want to go back to the way things were before. I was/am hoping for a shift in consciousness, but… am I seeing it at all. Am I experiencing it at all on a personal level.

How do I feel?

I don’t know. I really don’t know. That bothers me.

And can I be part of a solution?