Music Etc.

One time, when I ate a handful of psilocybin mushrooms with a handful of friends at an airbnb perched on a hill in California, and I ended up locking myself in a dark bathroom for five or six hours, the first thing I did was cover the mirror with a towel. I could not bear to look at myself. Or at least that body of mine, representing something fleshy, stuck, and instantly outdated.

But actually, equally as notable as this sudden fear of mirrors, if not more so, is the reason I was in the bathroom in the first place. And that is due to the simple fact that when I was amidst my laptop-on-the-kitchen-table friends–the ones calmly ‘working from home’ that day–while sinking into my mushroom trip, I felt like a revolting piece of shit. It was terrifying. I felt that the statement I was making was something along the lines of: your world is not good enough for me; I need more. I felt pompous. Backstabbing. Evil.

Though I am starting to shake it, little by little, I do often feel in this life like I am squirming my way through a neverending hall of mirrors. Running into versions of myself blocking my own path.

This icky feeling has proved pervasive and all too influential for me. I am not, as it turns out, a man of radical leaps. Which is fine, to a point. Though I may often needle myself with hippie daydreams and beseech myself to cut obligations and live alternatively by my own rules, I in practice have been a steady plodder when it comes to my own growth. To the fencing off of my own integrity in who I am and what matters to me. I dip my toes in the water. I ask everybody if it is cool for me to go in. If I get a less-than-enthusiastic response, I gently campaign. And then once all lights are green, I still wade forward with intense anxiety. But I do it, over and over again, asking permission and proceeding onwards.

One key benefit of this method is that I get to pull many along for the ride. I maintain relationships; I do not burn bridges. This is kind of a funny place for me personally to pull an analogy from, but I happen to have thought about this all an awful lot while watching the Wicked movie in theaters in December of 2024–which, for the record, I loved. I sat there in my movie throne, in the dark, giddily mapping out a sociopolitical treatise in my brain. If you’re unfamiliar, in this prequel to the Wizard of Oz, it is shown that before their split, Elphaba the Wicked Witch and Glinda the Good Witch were briefly good friends, electrified by their differences, balancing into a fearsome duo. The shrewd, green-skinned Elphaba is not evil; she is ostracized, sensitive to other unloved corners of the world, and therefore radicalized. The buoyant, blonde-haired Glinda is not just popular; she is tapped into culture, able to connect with so many different people nonjudgementally, and therefore politically skilled.

They need each other. Because a well-loved socialite without any idealism only conserves hegemony. And a radical activist without any ties to the public struggles to gain any ground. Unfortunately for both of them, for the world, Elphaba ends up splitting off. It’s all right there at the climax in “Defying Gravity:” Elphaba is “through with playing by the rules of someone else’s game,” she’s taking the leap out on her own, but Glinda warns that with this stiff inability to play the game at all, she has “hurt [her] cause forever.”

This is the opposite of my problem. I usually play the part of Good Witch–losing myself in social niceties. But the question remains: what if they had continued to work together? What if these parts of ourselves can learn to work together? The part of myself wanting to run off and do something magical is better served manifesting itself through the rooted, community-driven part of myself. That’s where the real livin’ lies. Fascinated by models of powerful, long-lasting, and healthy relationships (platonic, familial, romantic, etc.), I wonder often about the possibility of some structure itself promoting expansion and reinvention. Getting jiggy with death and rebirth. This seems crucial.

A doodle I happened to make a few years ago, which I feel is pertinent.

In the same way that I think about how to build structures which actually encourage growth and change, I also think about the machinery which clutches at the opposite. I think about what a brand is: something reliable and comfortable. An investment that you can be pretty darn sure will return exactly what you expect. I really wanted to start a music blog. Steven and I had talked about it for years. Writing those first several articles was riveting. Compiling playlists. Designing all the art. And then after a year or so, I stalled out. Not because I “got busy”–I was making time for plenty of other things. But maybe, as my new theory goes, because my creative energy no longer precisely fit into the mold I had designed. I have realized that I am still quite excited by writing and sharing my ideas, and surely it will sometimes still take musical form, but it began to feel like I was trying to shoehorn all this expansive curiosity and inquiry into music when it only sometimes sat cleanly in that camp. How often does this kind of inflexibility kill ideas? Projects? Relationships?

This is such a small, fairly low stakes example of all of this. Materially, all I am announcing here is the addition of the category “Etc.” in our menu bar (*a lone trumpet fanfare*), so that I or Steven can post whatever we want to post, and yet it does feel important to me. It is true that I was allowing a creative platform I had spearheaded and built with so much excitement, vigor, and joy to sit here rusting away because, well…

Why, precisely, it took me so long to poke my head out of this self-imposed cell, I am not fully clear. I had sold a brand to a tiny group of Instagram followers, mostly friends and family, but also more insularly had co-created an expectation with my friend Steven, and on some level I must have been afraid to ask any of those people for more bandwidth with which to share myself. Or maybe it’s just that I let the actual generative spark go cold. As if this website and the things I write were just collector’s items to sit there and look cool–rather than a dynamic portal to keep unclogging and rerouting as I and the target both forever shift around. As if any of this were about content at all–rather than creativity itself.

I am far too restless to be a brand. And far too community-oriented to wave goodbye and launch myself into alien space. This essay, then, must represent some sort of flinging out of a hand to stay in relationship even (especially) as time marches us all onward to stranger and stranger shores. My plea to myself: what would it be like not to towel over everything in this hall of mirrors, but to stare down my own reflection in everything around me, wink at it, and dance on through? Mirrors have frames, but they are not photographs, after all. I am free. I am free. I am free.