Imagine someone writing a song like Big Thief’s “Los Angeles” about you. What a beautiful song. The climax makes me feel things every time, feelings that I want to hold onto. Feelings that you need to slow down to experience.

Today, the song made me think about my parents. I realized recently that I am the same age my parents were when they had me. That realization has allowed me to empathize with and admire them in a way that didn’t feel accessible to me before. I can see how hard, in this stage of my life still, I have to work to heal myself from wounds I’m carrying; to break bad habits and coping mechanisms I’ve honed over the last two decades. I cannot imagine doing so while also raising a child - something they, like all other parents, had never done before. The anger a child is capable of feeling towards their parents runs deep. It is an extremely powerful force, and I have to imagine that it goes both ways. But right now, I can’t access that anger at all. It seems extremely small compared to how much I miss my parents in this moment and how grateful I feel for the life they have given me. I am thankful that relationships always hold the capacity to be transformed, no matter how fixed they seem. Wounds I’ve gotten used to tending are slowly healing, demanding less attention. It’s a long road, but I think I’m getting somewhere.

So what’s the use

Of holding

It’s unfolding

We’re all insane

We are made of love

We are also made of pain

While listening to the song, I was also overcome with an extreme sense of gratitude to be alive to experience songs like this one. Songs that are drenched in the universe and in life and in emotion, a marvel that only a human could have written, in the age of AI. It makes me want to be a lot more careful in choosing what I use my consciousness for. It is a tough pill to really swallow, but our culture is rotten, and engaging with it in any capacity requires giving up a little piece of your soul every time. It disconnects you from the mystery of your existence, packages it up in a routine and unspoken rules that feel stifling. If you were sat on a train your entire life, watching the landscapes flash past you in a blur, would you some day forget the train existed at all?

The picture box is full
And we are kissing in a fistful of fragments falling down
I throw them up and I watch them hit the ground like snow
Amputated dimension of the physical
Melting image without sound

~

On an airplane, 27D, crossing the Grand Canyon
But I can't see I'm headed home from somewhere
That I can't be remembering everything
I'll follow you forever even without looking
You call we come together even without speaking
I can tell what you are thinking even without saying
We dream our dreams together
Even without laying in the same bed

And you sang for me
You sang for me