Here’s an assembly of songs somehow reflective of the past year and a half or so.

The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by bell hooks

From Chapter 4, “Stopping Male Violence”:

“Male violence in general has intensified not because feminist gains offer women greater freedom but rather because men who endorse patriarchy discovered along the way that the patriarchal promise of power and domination is not easy to fulfill, and in those rare cases where it is fulfilled, men find themselves emotionally bereft. The patriarchal manhood that was supposed to satisfy does not. And by the time this awareness emerges, most patriarchal men are isolated and alienated; they cannot go back and reclaim a past happiness or joy, nor can they forward. To go forward they would need to repudiate the patriarchal thinking that their identity has been based on. Rage is the easy way back to a realm of feeling. It can serve as the perfect cover, masking feelings of fear and failure.”

This one is dated 11/25/20 (possibly made after watching the movie Cellular):

“The narrative trope of the dirty cops (the “bad apples”) being caught out in the end, thus leaving only good and noble cops remaining on the police force.”

I’m developing probably too many projects at once, with some amount of overlap between them. Amidst the notes I’ve made for these projects are ideas that may never be fully realized. Instead of lamenting that likelihood, I’ve decided to start posting excerpts here. This first one is dated 11/4/20:

“Dramatizing, in somewhat condensed/accelerated form, the entire process of just offhand, without even thinking about it, saying ‘no, it’s not’ and then thinking it through a split second later and becoming more consciously defensive and then really starting to think about it, reflexively building a counternarrative, and every time you think of a new way in which it could be true, your defensiveness surges and you kind of argue with yourself, and it’s an argument you make without trying (this part of the process can loop for a long time, perhaps eventually slowing down, but you can fall back in even if you’ve progressed) and then approaching a place of acceptance that it could be true, and you acknowledge that possibility out loud, but still with a dismissive undertone, with a reluctance to making a full-throated  concession of the possibility (and even probability) and apologizing for being so resistant before.

“Different layers of your body processing, as you get closer to the core.

“A kind of metabolization.”

Here’s a little story I wrote. It’s undated, but probably from sometime in 2019.

A piece of paper printed with three typewritten paragraphs that read (lightly edited) as follows: / A man finds a typewriter in a shop. The co-proprietor beams when she sees he’s picked it up. “I used that to write my first novel,” she tells him. “It’s got a bent part in the body, but otherwise still works great.” The man wonders why she’s selling it since it appears to have sentimental value for her, but he does not ask her why. Instead he purchases the typewriter for $45. The co-proprietor tells him of a nearby typewriter repair shop. “Run by two brothers,” she says. “They took over the business from their father who started it in the fifties.” The man thanks her and says he’ll check it out. / The man walks a few blocks to where the woman told him the typewriter repair shop is. There is a sign advertising the space for lease and what looks to be a new, cheap paint job on the exterior of the building. He peers around the sign, through the glade of the front door. It’s empty inside. Next door is a bright white shop selling tiny cactuses and succulents. / The man arrives home to his apartment. He sets the typewriter up on his kitchen table and goes to look for a sheet of paper. Sure enough, the body of the typewriter is dented, right at the space bar, so that the space bar doesn’t easily depress. He immediately has an idea for a story where the main character buys a dented typewriter with a non-functional space bar, but the reader doesn’t discover that the spacebar doesn’t work until some way into the story. However, the story itself is written without spaces between any of the words or punctuation marks, as if it were written on the typewriter WITHIN the story, likeso,sothatwhenthereaderdiscoversthatthetypewriterdoesn’thaveafunctionalspacebarhesuddenlyunderstandswhythestoryiswrittenthisway. The man thinks this idea is very clever. He sits for a moment and considers writing that story right now, and then goes to bed instead.