Alien
- Posted by mariteaux on September 17th, 2021 filed in Sperging
- Comments Off on Alien
Satellite comes and goes
Give each other all we know
In silence, we still talk
By the light of the stereo waltzBut when you wake down
Your cinematic love truck
I’m gonna hold you like
Nothing’s gonna stop us
Last month proved pivotal for me. I was actually getting out of the house pretty regularly back in March 2020, when suddenly, every country in the world tossed out their pandemic mitigation plans and instead decided to weld people indoors instead. What progress I had been making towards finally being with my Caby in person and being independent were suddenly put on hold, not because I felt in danger, but because it was decided I was by the people with the power and the connections.
Like a snow day, you get excited at first. It’s time to work on all those little projects the real world kept you away from! How exciting!
Then March became April, and the weather got warmer, and we were still locked inside. Then April became May, and spring was in bloom, and we were still locked inside. Rather quickly, we realized the “real world” being tossed wasn’t just jobs and responsibilities. It was travel. It was casually getting something to eat and casually going into stores to browse. It was, for some unlucky folks, walks outside in the warm weather.
And for me, it was having my real life put on hold. I grew out my hair while I waited. I had a big pandemic mane going by the time the real world finally got unpaused. I didn’t consider the half-unpause of “we can go outside, but we have to avoid one another” or “we can go outside, but remember to wear your Talisman of SpDef” to be the end of it. That’s not going back to normal, that’s still living differently. And I elected to not get it cut until I could get it cut the 2019 way.
That finally happened back in July, but the attrition of the past year still lingers. Once the snow day feeling wears off, you slump into something of a depression, filling the void as you wait, but unable to stop all that pesky “aging” shit that reminds you that the airports are still security theater and that authoritarians are still not done trying to restrict your freedom of movement and your freedom of happiness under what’s essentially the biological version of precrime–the thought that you too can be a vector for pestilence, and you need to be stopped before you hurt somebody.
I think I took 2020 better than most, but 2021 worse than most. I’ve gone through periods of avoiding friends, of barely wanting to get out of bed, of not updating this very blog despite nobody reading it being something I realized in my very first post on here. I always had stuff to write about. Did you know I released an EP of old rescued tracks last month? I didn’t tell anyone about it, but it was there. I didn’t write a post about marfGH: Volume 0, despite it being the culmination of seven years of want and work. I didn’t write a post about my ongoing periodical involving my boy Gonzo over on toyhou.se.
August was pivotal. Around the time I was listening back to The Lost Sessions, I had something of an epiphany. Listening back to all that material got me wistful–but why? 2019 was unquestionably a very, very off year for me. But how was it off? Was I was down and out? Not really. I had new love, I had new projects, I had new friends! Things seemed rather bright, even when people all around me were proving to be utter shitfucks and trying their damndest to ruin me. Maybe what was going on around me was off–but I was going somewhere with all of it.
2019 was the last time I ever had any momentum in my life. The stuff I’m fuzzy over is the stuff I haven’t had in a very long time–the regular walks in public, the feeling that I was growing from a very wonky teenager to a young adult who could say he worked and was saving up that money to finally be with that internet girl he likes. That’s not that long ago in the long term, but it’s a while now in the short term.
No momentum depresses a person. No momentum makes things feel futile. I didn’t even have a regular way out of the house for a good long while. I sat on it, doing all those various projects I wrote about right here on this blog and biding my time, but the momentum slowed down, and things stopped being fun. I stopped having a reason to write long blog posts. I stopped trying to find work. I stopped having a reason to talk to most people.
Last night, I started applying for work again. Caby reminded me that I have all this real world experience with websites and writing I could actually, genuinely get money for…if only I pursued it. The one silver lining to the response to the pandemic is that remote work doesn’t require me to have a car or to have the license needed for it, any of that nonsense–but it sure can buy me a car. It can buy me plane tickets. On a less practical but certainly more fun note, it can buy me upgrades for old computers or consoles I’d need to continue my (somehow) burgeoning musical modding empire.
I’ve always been a little bit behind where I should be for my age. I only had my first real romantic love at 19. I guess some people would be embarrassed by that, but I’m not operating on someone else’s timetable. I’m doing it at whatever pace I feel like doing it at. If that’s faster or slower than what’s considered normal, fine and dandy, I’ll just tell em I know a guy with no friends and no girlfriend at 30 still collecting Funko Pops. If I’m not there? I’m okay.
Beyond that, I’m just trying to unbury myself from plans so I can get on with either real world shit or the smaller stuff I’ve been neglecting so I can finally finish up the last of my obligations for, say, GH2DX, or the toyhou.se overhauls for Pennyverse Month. There’s nothing I delight more in than that stage where you have all these unobtainable ideas for stuff to do or for a project at hand, it makes it look like it’ll never happen, and then you toss them all out. Downright refreshing. My Trello had never looked cleaner than after I did that (and now there’s a small pileup again, but such is life).
I said before that the reason I wasn’t touching the Scratchpad was because I want to do more and talk about it less. Really, I’m starting to think the real reason was just because I wasn’t feeling that what I was up to was all that important. What’s the point in telling everyone about my new modding project when the lads read it and it’s another place to gather spam comments?
The point is that it makes me happy, and I’d like to do whatever I need to to get back to that being my hobby and less the thing I fill my day with because I’m waiting for all the shops to reopen. I went to a zoo not too long ago, and I’ve still got a page full of pictures to throw up about it (plus some videos of flipping otters!). The shops have reopened–have I?
Reprioritizing has been in order for a while now–I want to do whatever some guy asks me to do for his WordPress site, get money, come back, and doodle. I want somewhere to be again, and I want proof I can show people that I’m going there. I really think it’ll reignite my interest in everything, like all the change in friends and Somnolescent did back when.
I miss the momentum in life. I promise I’m coming for you, my love.
And she comes to take me away
She’s all that I needed
I don’t breathe another loverI’m an alien, you’re an alien
It’s a beautiful rain, beautiful rain
I’m an alien, you’re an alien
It’s a beautiful rain, beautiful rain, beautiful rain
