When I'm Asleep

11/16/2022

I meant to update last night/this morning, but I stayed up far too late and just woke up a little while ago. My sleep schedule sucks, but it's alright. It happens, and I enjoy any time I get to spend resting.

Last night, I wrote 3,458 words. I need to update the wordcounter on my page, so I'll get to doing that soon. In a couple of days, I'll be visiting family, so I may not have very much time to write here. I'm hoping I'll be able to set aside some small time, but I also wanna just cherish the moments I get to spend with people I love, so no guarantees!

When I was writing last night, I stumbled on a song I love very dearly. It wound up fitting the scene perfectly, so now it's on the official soundtrack I'm building in my head. I also have the soundtrack written down so that I can show it to my friends. The scene that I was working on where this song fit is one where my protagonist is grappling with himself, what he feels about the person he was, the person he is now, and how those all culminate inside of him. There's also another character in the car with him, and the two are driving in silence, listening to an old CD that my protagonist used to love. There's something melancholic about the way he feels as he listens to the music, something nostalgic too, because everything from his past seems to have tendrils that wrap around him even in the present day.

I think that the concept of the past being a living thing is a very fascinating one. It's not a closet we throw old baseball mitts and homework from elementary school into, it's not a door we open and shut and lock. It's got a breathing to it. It's got a reason for being there even when we want to pretend it shouldn't be here. The past is an animal, and to embrace it without accepting that it's also flawed by nostalgia is to be bitten by it. My protagonist has to grapple with his sense of self being impermanent. He's never been just one thing. He's always been a multi-fractal'd human being, every face tessellates in and out of existence depending on who he's with and what they're doing and why. I think only three or four people have ever known the real him: his old best friend, his former mentor, his patron god, and his mother.

I wrote this line from the perspective of the other character in the car with him that I'm pretty proud of, so I'm just gonna put it here:

The orange lights that flooded through the windshield and windows, the stars that now speckled the tapestry of the dark, the trees that blotted it out in areas they would pass, the liquor stores and drug stores, restaurants and cheap small-town entertainment, all of it was suffocating to the man. He had seen more than his fair share of shitty little towns. He loved the decay of them. He hated the smell of it.

The song that spurred these ideas I've been having about the protagonists' understanding of himself, his lack of such, etc etc, is "No One is Ever Going To Want Me" by Giles Corey. I take a lot of inspiration from Dan Barrett's music, both his own projects (Giles Corey, Nahvalr), and his work with Tim Macuga in their duo "Have A Nice Life". I like to listen to their work when I'm writing because it makes me think more heavily about the characters that I work with. There's a lot of bullshit my characters have to go through just to become themselves again, and no matter how far they run, they come back to themselves again and again. It's a living poltergeist, the past. I think that that's the best way to describe the thing that my main character wants to bury.

Anyways, I'm gonna get back to work. Here's the song, I hope you'll enjoy listening to it! I love this song, and the line "I want to feel like I feel / when I'm asleep" gets stuck in my head. Just remember, no matter how bad things may get, the only way to find out if it gets better is to be there. There will be joys and sorrows, but at least there will be joys.

Giles Corey - No One Is Ever Going To Want Me