Newsletter of a Lost World
In which a lifelong listener becomes a first time reviewer and is left instead to explore art as an autobiographical experience.
Writing about The Cure until it sticks
If there’s one thing most people know about me, it’s that my first real love of music came from my parents’ shared enjoyment of The Cure. In the first edition of Trauma Angel, I considered throwing in a short review of Songs of a Lost World, since it felt absurd to write about music without discussing it. I wrote something hastily, then scrapped it. I hadn’t sat with the album long enough and it felt too cold and critical. Then the second newsletter came around and I experienced a variation on the same experience. I decided, instead, to make it the focus of this edition and to write freely and fearlessly about it until I wrote something that satisfied me. So here I’ve gathered a short collection of reviews, moving from something you’d see as a blurb in a magazine into a deeply personal short autobiographical essay, in order to best give context for what this all means to me and why it’s important to document. I am not sure if I’m pleased with any of the writing I’ve done here, but I also fear I’m far too close to the subject matter to ever view it favorably. Still, I know that I wrote my truth and that I wrote things that mattered to me. I hope that you’ll enjoy reading it as well. And if you haven’t yet listened to Songs of a Lost World, perhaps you should put it on while you read this. Thank you for your time.
The Traditional Blurb Review
On November 1st, sixteen years after the release of their previous album 4:13 Dream, The Cure finally released the long-promised Songs of a Lost World. Rather than manifesting as some sort of Chinese Democracy situation where a long wait led to mixed response, Songs of a Lost World has felt like a triumphant return, albeit somewhat softened. The massive elegance of Disintegration makes for a familiar touchpoint throughout, yet the urgency and frustration that ran through much of that record have been replaced by a self-assured comfort. Pillowy synthesizers almost shield from the undercurrent of sadness and age, softening the harsh lyrical realities addressed on songs like “Alone” and “Endsong.” If frontman Robert Smith’s words in recent interviews are to be believed, this isn’t the swansong it feels like, but the bursting of the dam before a late career return to form, but he’s not always been known to be the most reliable source when discussing his own band’s output and future. Many alleged “final albums” have been discussed over the decades, and many “big plans” have materialized later or in different forms than initially discussed. Still, if this is an ending point for The Cure, it can sit comfortably alongside their most respected releases rather than as an outlier or a last whimper.
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The Fan Zine Essay
The Cure is back with Songs of a Lost World, and I’ve seen fans decrying the “wrongness” of so many writers who handle the band now that it makes for good clickbait to discuss The Cure and their career. To be fair, I do think many writers oversimplify, but I also think this is an era where fan bias comes into play severely. If you’ve been clinging to hope and desperate for something new from your favorite band for over a decade, isn’t there a strong chance that nothing anyone offers you will be enough? While the average Cure diehard is a million miles from Swifties sending creepypasta edited curses to strangers on twitter or Halsey encouraging a second 9/11 to be visited upon the dark forces of Pitchfork, the outrage I’ve seen over silly listicles claiming to properly rank The Cure’s catalog has given me secondhand embarrassment.
Perhaps it’s because I’ve been writing about music for years, but I can’t imagine someone else’s opinion about art upsetting me. When a stranger commits the crime of liking the wrong albums by the right band, I don’t feel much of anything other than perhaps a curiosity to revisit something I’d previously found less than stellar. I also wonder if I’d really want to read a review written by an obsessive fan. I think that the context of this album in the band’s history is important, but I’m not sure if I want to read blind praise and ravenous exaggerations about a wonderful album that still deserves to be examined on its own merits rather than as a promise finally fulfilled.
To tell the truth, it’s hard enough for me to really pick at it myself. I’m anxious about getting it wrong. But why? I know my own thoughts will change over time. They always do. Almost every Cure album has been my “favorite” Cure album at one point or another and some of those former favorites are less favored now. That doesn’t mean what I thought was wrong. It just means that I loved The Cure when I was 18 and I loved The Cure when I was 6 and I love The Cure today at age 37. The love hasn’t changed but the things I love and why I love them change constantly. I think, at this point, talking to another fan yields its own interesting perspectives, but I prefer that as a conversation, not a monologue. I think if I want to read criticism or a proper review of the record as a mostly standalone piece that still acknowledges the band’s lengthy career and shapeshifting, I’d want it handled by someone who is greatly familiar with their work and the overall histories of rock and post-punk, but I don’t think I’d want them to be the kind of person who has cried at every Cure show they’ve attended (like I do). Since this is, a review, however, you’re going to get exactly that: words from someone too close to the subject matter to fully separate the art from their own identity, and from an obsessive knowledge of not just over a dozen albums, but also a similarly massive catalogue of non-album material. For this approach, since by now we’ve all established that I’m tackling this a few different ways (not quite six, as cute as that’d be), we’re going to be a bit more literal and analytical here. Not my preferred mode, but it’ll help me knock out some of the excess junk from my head.
The Cure has always known how to best kick off an album (and how to end one) and “Alone” leads us in with energy somewhere between “Plainsong,” “Out of This World,” and “Under the Stars.” It’s drifting, dreaming music, but ultimately mournful and grasping at impermanence, a theme Robert Smith seems to enjoy revisiting every time he puts out one of his “I’m growing older” albums. Still, if this sounds like a jab it isn’t. The Cure has always been big for reinvention, but with nearly 50 years of music behind them, it’s somewhat impossible for devoted listeners to not notice themes and patterns. If having a big, slow, memorably majestic opening track is one of those patterns, then we’re all better off for it.
Similarly, as I said, the band knows how to end an album. The album’s finest moment, “Endsong” places itself along cuts like “End,” “The Promise,” and “Fight” as a sprawling, lengthy closer that feels like a gut-punch to end things, leaving no doubt about what you’re meant to take from the experience. It flows in with an ethereal energy more akin to a Disintegration-era cut, but the tone shifts to a kind of reflective mournfulness that Smith simply couldn’t have written 35 years ago. With nearly six and a half minutes spent on the endlessly growing instrumental before his voice cuts in, the emotions are already running high before you’re given a chance to see where he’ll take things lyrically. While “Alone” repeatedly asks “where did it go” about his own youthful ambitions and dreams, “Endsong” simply declares “it’s all gone.” It hits harder with every listen, and I think I’ve listened upwards of twenty times by this point. The song has its own weight as a meditation on age, loss, and time, but my experience of listening to them for the entirety of my own life adds to it when thinking on Smith’s career and how the band is quite literally his life’s work, his sole focus.
Between these two massive bookends, The Cure offers up their most cohesive work since Bloodflowers, if not since Wish. While single “A Fragile Thing” took a bit to grow me, it’s more upbeat in pace and tone than much of the rest of the album, and its selection for public consumption makes sense. It also feels the most “torn from another era” of these songs, coming almost directly from 1999 as a b-side or outtake from the Bloodflowers sessions. It’s catchy, it’s memorable in its own ways, but ultimately the greatest strengths on the album are when the band plays into darker stranger forms, seemingly geared for the fans who are willing to endure any of the band’s great indulgences.
“Warsong” might be the album’s strongest cut from the middle, feeling like the band took “The Kiss” and ran it through the lens of nearly 40 years more life experience. It’s briefer, less ominous, yet it has all of the punch and the searing guitar in a shorter span. Following it with “Drone:Nodrone,” which feels like a spiritual successor to “Burn,” creates the best one-two moment on the record. “Drone:Nodrone” is the fastest track on the album, but in a way the band first developed in “The Hanging Garden” rather than the poppier efficiency of a song like “High.” It’s got some silly spacey keyboard sounds, but they actually add a lovely layer rather than feeling absurd. Like a lot of The Cure’s best work, it’s great because it’s almost too much, and a more cut back form might feel like something is missing. But again, I’m someone likely to cheer on the band going too far.
All told, I can’t tell if Songs of a Lost World is one of their best albums simply because it’s too new, too exciting and shiny. Right now it feels like a fantastic sampler for new listeners who’d want a tour of the band’s many moods without sacrificing cohesion. Historically I’d suggest The Head on the Door or Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me to newer listeners for their variety, and I still likely might, but the fact that this feels like at least a brief lesson in post-1989 Cure (for all its ups and downs, even with strains of “Want” and “This is a Lie” from Wild Mood Swings and some of the more brooding tracks from the greatly misunderstood 2004 self-titled album) makes me inclined to sell it as a sort of supplement. Folks wanting to see where The Cure was during their first decade can enjoy Kiss Me, and folks eager to see where The Cure firmly planted themselves afterwards? Perhaps Songs of a Lost World can serve as that taster. Or maybe I’d just let them do what everyone does anyway and start with Disintegration, even though nothing else could ever be quite like it, not even Songs, though it’s the closest they’ve come since without feeling too pandering. For now, this is just a joy to have and to enjoy, and it feels good that it somehow feels like it’s both “for the fans” and also “for the Cure-curious.” What a true delight.
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The Essay on Sharing The Cure With My Mother
Growing up, I didn’t know that The Cure wasn’t a universal thing. The only memory I have of my parents being married is a brief one involving an accident that left me (physically) scarred for life after I cut my forehead open, so it’s rather telling that the one shared experience I have in both homes was the music of The Cure. In my father’s house, it was more a part of the general rotation, but with mom it was such a heavy presence that Robert Smith felt more like a distant uncle I hadn’t met (in much the same way Raffi or Mr. Rogers felt like adults I basically knew) than a complete stranger whose art filled my home. There are home videos from like 1991 of my sister and I taking baths and her babbling out the phrase “never enough” over and over, only partially getting the gist of the song. While some days before school we would watch a Sesame Street singalong tape, most days involved putting on one of mom’s collections of Cure videos. She had many, of course. I thought that the kids acting in the “Boys Don’t Cry” video were actually the band as children and I didn’t know the title of “Inbetween Days” for years because we called it “Happy Feet” in our house due to the colorful hands and feet that illuminated every minute of the video.
It wasn’t just the videos, either. Disintegration didn’t feel like a gloomy album to me because it had the song that was surely about Spider Man in some loose capacity and I thought that was just the most fun topic you could sing about. In the truck, mom usually had a copy of Standing on a Beach, The Cure’s collection of singles. On the cassette version, the b-side was filled with the actual b-sides from the singles. Again, I had no context for the radio itself or what constituted a hit. “The Exploding Boy” was one of my favorite songs as a kid. The frustration and repetition of futility in the song was completely lost on me until I revisited it as an adult, I just thought that it was exciting and upbeat and endlessly catchy. The point is, I wasn’t just raised with a casual appreciation for The Cure, I inherited an obsessive love for a band who was at their active peak when I was born in 1987 and who somehow remain a massively creative force as I near the end of my thirties. While my dad was less interested in the more ambient, meandering work of Disintegration and everything that followed it, my mom was suffering in ways that I didn’t understand as a child and the songs on Disintegration and Wish ushered her through some of the darkest times of her life. She’s three years younger than Robert Smith, which meant that most of the emotional crises and life stages Smith documented in his music were landing at crucial junctures in her own life.
Mom got sober on June 1st, 1992, after many years of addiction and depression, and just two days after her thirtieth birthday. One day I saw her smoking a joint, (I presume, I don’t remember her smoking cigarettes but it could’ve been either) and I said that Captain Planet told me drugs weren’t cool. From what I gather, that offhanded comment from a five year old was her wake up call. I’m incredibly proud of her for her ongoing sobriety and grateful for her unconditional love and presence in my life to this day. Still, though her drug use stopped, the depression didn’t. When I hear The Cure, of course I listen through my own context, but I also hear shades of my mother and her own passion. In their older albums, I hear a sorrow and a frustration that I imagine her going through. I can’t listen to “From The Edge of the Deep Green Sea” without imagining mom, newly sober, lost but looking for hope and forming new friendships outside the bonds of using. At a bottom, but growing in new directions. She says it’s one of the most important songs in their catalog. The first time I saw The Cure, on her birthday in 2016, I tried to call her when they played that song. Perhaps it was fitting that my signal was awful and the call didn’t go through properly. Instead, I set my phone down and just wept. I was 28 at the time, imagining my mother around the same age I was, and how huge it must’ve felt. Every time I’ve seen The Cure, they’ve played it, and every time I feel that I understand her better, even though addiction hasn’t been part of my own experience with severe mental illness. Suffering, sorrow, and bad relationships are universal, I imagine.
When I listen to Songs of a Lost World, I sometimes wonder what she thinks. Robert Smith is 65 years old now. These songs feel more culled from the era of The Cure that belongs exclusively to my mother, and not to my father, whose favorite Cure material is punchy, tense post-punk like “Jumping Someone Else’s Train.” As Smith meditates on age and time, past goals achieved and past dreams left behind, I wonder how she feels. The album is for me to enjoy and give my own meaning, but I cannot hear it without feeling like Smith is less of a “distant relative” type and more of a mouthpiece for my own relatives who are around his age. I’m nearing forty and already wonder what happened to my own hopes and dreams, as this newsletter is just about all I’ve got to show for myself. A week or two ago I texted mom to see what she thought of the new album. She wasn’t impressed by the single she heard and hasn’t bothered to listen yet. It seems somehow fitting to know that the emotional weight of Songs of a Lost World sits entirely with me, too young to fully grasp its meaning, while my mother has no need for art that tells her what she already knows.
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On Capitalism, Depression, and The Cure as a Source of Comfort
Two weeks before Songs of a Lost World was released, the café where I’d been working was shuttered. It was the satellite attachment of a local restaurant with a few locations around town, and I was fortunate enough to be assimilated into the restaurant space next door. However, what went from five days a week with moderately consistent pay dwindled down to two to four days a week for about half the rate. While some people respond well to stress or use it as a motivator to grow, my typical response is to just try to survive. And to get incredibly depressed. I was not living a luxurious lifestyle working full-time, but I was able to occasionally get myself a treat or go out for a nice meal. I’d planned on pre-ordering the new Cure album on vinyl. I was even considering getting a shirt and a coffee mug with the album art. When my income was slashed in half, I decided that I’d have to just enjoy Songs of a Lost World on streaming services until my period of penny-pinching ended.
The thing about being depressed and also going into “survival mode” at the same time, is that you don’t really give yourself much to look forward to. You wake up, get through the day, eat food you can afford that likely isn’t as healthy as you’d like, and you do what you can to try to prepare yourself for the next day. I have a roof over my head and two or three meals a day. I’m not dead or in danger and I do enjoy more comforts than most, but I’m also living a series of days that look nearly identical to one another with an acute awareness of the cost of taking the train to work and buying my groceries. For the last six weeks, I’ve been so fortunate to have a new album that fits the flat, gray existence I’ve been living.
It's not just about letting these new songs go from foreign to familiar. Any album can do that. And many albums are bleak. For me, the experience of Songs of a Lost World arriving when it did has been one of an old friend returning when they were most needed. My connection with The Cure has varied in its consistency over the years, as it’s been nearly half my life since they’ve released new music, but for me they came back when I needed them most. I first saw The Cure live a few months before finally getting out of a rocky living situation in which I was trapped in a lease with a former partner and neither of us was happy. In 2023 I saw them just two weeks after an unplanned emergency hospital stay that resulted in a surgery. And this year, I get to hear their new album as often as I want while figuring out how to take a low period in my impending middle age and turn it into something to grow from. I can’t say I feel hopeful or certain, but I have found a small comfort and joy in Songs of a Lost World and can’t wait to see how it’ll grow with me over time as my own life changes and (hopefully) improves.
REVIEWS
Poppy- Negative Spaces
I became a Poppy fan in early 2021, when her cover of Jack Off Jill’s “Fear of Dying” arrived just as I was entering a period of deep nostalgia for that exact era of my own musical development. She swiftly followed it up with an EP that felt like Slipknot mixed with touches of alt-rock, only to drop the massive Flux later the same year. Produced by Justin Meldal-Johnsen (longtime bassist for Beck, as well as a touring member of NIN among others), Flux felt like the finest album of 1996 that somehow got held up in contracts for a quarter of a century before releasing. It had enough alternative rock edge to balance its pop sheen, and even an incredibly solid dreampop tune or two to round it out. Following it with last year’s Zig felt like a mixed return. It had a couple nods to the strong rock songwriting she’d done, but mostly felt like a revisit of her career prior to making guitar-based music, focusing heavily on electronics and jagged beat-driven music. It wasn’t bad, it just didn’t feel as magical or inventive. With barely a year separating it from Negative Spaces, I’d anticipated more of the same, but this album feels more like a continuation of 2021’s EAT EP. While it doesn’t move me emotionally the way the material on Flux did, it’s nice to see Poppy leaning fully into her full range both as a singer and as someone with an incredible voice for harsh metal vocals. If her collaborations with bands like Knocked Loose haven’t made it clear, she seems to be aiming for a spot in that modern metal world where bands land somewhere between classic metalcore and nu metal sounds, something both muscular and tuneful. It’s nice to have an album that appeals to me today that I also would’ve enjoyed 20 years ago when I was a teenager obsessed with anything that fused nasty sounds and a singalong chorus. I’m definitely eyeing tickets to her upcoming tour.
Machine Girl- MG Ultra
I’ve said it before in here, but I don’t know enough about rhythm-driven electronic dance subgenres to separate my breakcore from my jungle from my drum’n’bass, but I do know that whatever the hell Machine Girl has fused into their digital hardcore scratches a manic itch that I really need to hear. I know there’s a large online following that seems hellbent on preserving the integrity of Machine Girl’s earliest works as a more electronic/techno-oriented act, but I’m not at all a purist and truly love the rock-leaning material they got into in recent releases and think that MG Ultra, their most pop-friendly release to date, is probably their best work. It’s got enough throbbing rapid-fire electronics and limit-pushing bpms to threaten anyone looking for something mainstream, yet the beating human heart behind it all has never been more present than it is on tracks like lead single “Until I Die” or “Hot Lizard.” Machine Girl’s recent work on the massive soundtrack for the game Neon White seems to have paid off, as the dozens of different modes of Machine Girl presented on that OST have been distilled into something pure and focused, yet capable of stretching almost any direction without losing cohesion. If you’re a fan of industrial music, electronic music, or any sort of shapeshifting rock from the last thirty-five years, this is a must-hear.
xPHANTOMSPIREx- Black Raven Cerulean Lightning
xPHANTOMSPIREx used to be Phantom Spire, but has undergone an apparent reimagining as a vegan straight edge act. Change in name aside, the music remains consistent in quality and is still raw atmospheric black metal with a strong sense of wonder. I’ve kept up with XPHANTOMSPIREX since their debut, Our Heaven Amongst the Stars, and while many of their songs are a bit less lengthy and have undergone some sonic shifts these days, their cold beauty and ability to haunt is unchanged. Synths and programmed drums remain dominant forces, but guitars share the space equally now instead of feeling like a background buzz below the atmosphere of more electronic elements. It’s still murky, dungeon synth-heavy, and has that distant swelling vocal quality that sounds like the spirit of the wind itself, but it feels more focused than ever before. If you don’t need a specific guitar lead to carry you away as much as you’d like an overall mood to get lost in, then this will suit your desires wonderfully.
Various Artists- A Christmas Fucking Miracle: 15 Covers and 15 Originals by the New Wave of Nu Metal
Organized by one of the hardest working folks in current music media, Holiday Kirk, this compilation is a clear labor of love that promises a hint of nostalgia but mostly excels in delivering a handful of great new music. I’m 37 and while I love hearing old favorites through a new lens, I think I’m not fully ready to let the lure of a song I already know be my start and end point with something like this. This compilation just released yesterday and while the covers are consistently a solid balance of “sounds like the original, but with a twist,” I’ve been most thrilled by the new (to me) material. Some songs are from bands I already love, like Memorrhage, Pulses, and Flagman, but I’m really excited to dig more into groups like Cheem, Thirty Nights, and DARLOTODO. I said it elsewhere when discussing the Poppy album, but it’s truly such a joy to be at a place in life where I can enjoy forms of music I’d have loved as a teenager without feeling “too old for this shit” or like it’s somehow artistically bereft. This is fun and exciting and I’m so glad that young people today have just as thrilling a crop of new artists as I did when I was in high school and first getting into that initial wave of exciting nu metal bands.
RECENT JOYS
LISTENING
Prick’s 1995 self-titled album
I heard Prick years ago and kinda overlooked them at the time, but maybe 18 months ago I finally got into them in a serious way and I’m kicking myself for not letting this album exist as a teenage obsession. It’s industrial rock in a way you could only make it in the mid-nineties, but with a healthy heap of the glam rock that many of that era’s stars wished they could capture. Even if Marilyn Manson weren’t fully and thoroughly out of my personal rotation by now for his vile acts, this would stand head and shoulders above his alleged Bowie period in a way that renders it useless. It’s just masterful and it kills me to know that Prick had a second album that went nearly nowhere and have since done pretty much nothing. I love to be thirty years late to the party, it seems, but god this one may warrant its own deep dive essay in a future edition of this newsletter because it’s like musical comfort food for me and I really want to figure out why it works so well.
Walking around with headphones on, but no music playing
This sounds like some sort of cop out but I’ve been trying to come up with ideas for my own music. I’m not going to pretend I’m a competent player on any instrument, though I own a few, but I like to come up with little lyrical hooks or melodies that I can toy around with on my bass or my guitar. So far I haven’t brought a single one to the folks I’m playing with, but I’d like to change that. Walking around the world and just seeing what it sounds like while also focusing on what my brain offers me to distract itself has been a wonderful exercise. I don’t think this is unique or special, but it’s been really good for me. I tend to feel like I’ll lose my mind if I don’t have constant musical stimulation, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by what happens when I let myself fill in the gaps. It’s probably also healthy not to require constant distraction, but that might be more of a talk for my therapist than for this newsletter.
Flooding- Silhouette Machine
I’m not entirely sure what the term slowcore entails, but Flooding has such a nice mix of minimalism and ugliness that it’s making me consider a deep dive. Equal parts Oxbow at their sparsest and any given violent skramz or hardcore band at their tensest, Silhouette Machine feels unstable in ways that scratch all the right itches for me. It’s a 2023 release but I didn’t come across it until about a month ago and I’m kicking myself, since I see Flooding played here in August. Hopefully there’s much more to come soon, both from Flooding as a band and for me as a budding slowcore listener.
PLAYING
Mouthwashing (Steam)
I was hesitant to even discuss this once I learned it’s essentially become a creepypasta type of fixation for a lot of folks on TikTok, but I played it in a sitting and it was fine. I’m glad I checked it out and I’m also glad I had no concept of discourse surrounding it online before I did. It’s mostly a competent walking sim with a dark story that has bits of suspense around the edges as you go through. There’s about four sections where timing and precision actually matter and they were interesting, but a bit too much of a deviation from the rest of the game for it to work the way it should’ve. Not a bad game or story, but not sure if it’s a legendary experience in horror gaming that it’s being made out to be. Folks interested in uneasy games and story-based gaming should absolutely check it out, but it’s hardly horrifying and felt mostly just like a love letter to some of the greats of the genre, both in gaming and in film.
EATING
I bought this blue abomination for $2.99 from a bodega about three months ago in a moment of impulsive weakness. I figured that $2.99 was a reasonable price to entertain myself for a moment. I was wrong. I should’ve been paid $2.99 for the five sips or so I took. I made my partner take a sip to confirm I wasn’t losing my mind. I thought it was going to be a soda, but there was no carbonation whatsoever, just a flat blue drink that didn’t even taste like a blue drink. If you melted a pixie stick and drank it, it might’ve tasted like this, but that would somehow taste less artificial. I feel like this is the kind of sugar drink that is designed specifically for seventeen-year-olds to mix with vodka from a plastic jug, but that honestly feels like an insult to both cheap vodka and to the time-honored tradition of underage drinking (which I must note that I wasn’t cool enough to participate in because I was a straight-edge kid in high school). I cannot advise against this strongly enough, but it was worth mentioning because it’s also funny that I still haven’t learned not to do this to myself.
Donuts
When I was 28, shortly after I was first diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, I quit my job as a shift supervisor at a Whole Foods in a sort of crisis and thought I could make a living doing my freelance writing. That failed pretty quickly so I took a job for minimum wage working in one of those boutique donut shops that thrive in Portland, OR, where I lived at the time. The donuts weren’t too bad and I enjoyed the work well enough until I got a burn so bad that a latex glove I was wearing fused to my skin and I had a blister that took a few weeks to heal. Anyway, after eating like four cake donuts a day to save money on my groceries, I kinda assumed I’d never want to eat donuts again, but lately I’ve been dabbling in the simple joy of a super cheap donut with my morning coffee on occasion. I found some discounted boxes of old fashioned donuts at a local grocer and got them, assuming the worst. They’re far better than I expected, but hardly what I’d go for if they actually cost more than a dollar like any decent donut should. I imagine this period of my life will last no more than another week before I develop a sudden sense of disgust, but for now it’s nice to have a little sweet treat to balance out my morning cup.
Chili
My partner bought me a slow cooker a few months ago for our anniversary. It’s one of those aspects of domesticity I wouldn’t shut up about. I have no real need to make food in large batches or over an extended period, and yet I’ve heard the siren song of the eight-hour stew in my mind for the last few years, beckoning me to a lifestyle where I prepare dinner immediately after breakfast then sit and wait for it to reveal itself to me. I finally made a massive portion of chili in the thing maybe two weeks back. It took about six days to eat it all. I tend to like my food a touch lighter and more refreshing than this, but I can see myself becoming a real big “batching and freezing” guy if I’m not too cautious. It’s economical and removes the whole “what’s for dinner” concern from my mind, replacing it with the simplicity of the microwave, a device I was reluctant to adopt but have found myself using more and more as I approach the threshold of middle age. Sometimes I simply don’t have the energy for anything beyond my conveniences. I accept this.
In Closing
I drained myself in more ways than one preparing this edition of Trauma Angel and a hiccup has arisen with the writing I’d planned on sharing in two weeks. The interview I’d been plotting out has fallen through due to personal issues for the other party that are temporarily occupying a bit more time than anticipated. All is well, but it simply can’t go on as intended. Additionally, with the holidays and the chaos of working in a restaurant while half my coworkers are changing their schedules last-minute, I continually find myself at work when I’d scheduled time for writing. It’s not enough work to actually help me get on my feet financially, but it’s enough work to exhaust me and throw me off. This post was meant to go live yesterday. Work had to come first, unfortunately. This may be my passion, and neither one quite pays the bills, but I can’t get fired from writing like I can from my job waiting tables.
All this is to say that I’m still plotting out my next move for Trauma Angel. I’ve talked it over with a couple paying subscribers who simply suggest that I publish what I want when I want and not stick to such a strict schedule or format. While I like that, in theory, I know people like consistency and when many of the folks reading this signed up, they signed up in part due to a specific plan I laid forth. I’ve considered moving to a format with a single large essay (like today’s) each month, with smaller weekly posts instead of one large post every other week as it is currently. It’s genuinely hard to say what I want to do because nothing feels like the right or wrong move, they’re all just different courses of action that seem equally positive to me. So if you’re still here reading this after 6000+ words, I’d love to know your thoughts. You’ve read a couple of these, presumably. What have you enjoyed? What would you like more of? What would you like to see change? It can be in terms of content, tone, length, frequency, or anything else. I’m not going to become anyone other than myself, but I can certainly find ways to make this practice as enjoyable for you as it is for me.
One way or another, I’ll have something else for you to read very soon. Inspiration is rolling and I’m eager to keep moving with it. Thanks for being here. Love ya.