Audiophile Claustrophobe Abecedarian on a Road Trip

Alison’s Halo on the aux, or would you rather some
Black Tape for a Blue Girl? Something upbeat? I’ve been loving
Caroline Polachek lately. I’m a bit of a poseur; wrote a poem after her most
Danced-to song, “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings,” even though I told
Every friend I couldn’t get into her discography, no matter how hard I tried.
Funny how that worked out. Sometimes music is best heard with the sun out, its
Goodness faltered, in a noisy plaza. So the first 13 seconds of “Suck the Blood from My Wound” isn’t just
How my mom screamed when her muscles overshortened. So, things are what they are—nothing

Implied; nothing heightened. A careless girl falling interrupts Harold Budd composition, and it
Just remains Harold Budd composition. The gongs of memory do not eat the girl. Silly me, I’m sorry, I
Know you’re tired. The road is long. We should put Hole on and sing along, maybe, so you can be
Less worried you might run over a pigeon again, like you did two weeks ago. You know, there’s a
Melt-Banana song called “Pigeons on My eYes (GO TO Bed!!),” and I check the Genius page every
Now and then, but transcribers of the world seem to have given up on deciphering anything Yasuko
Onuki screams—and really, that’s good, to be so understood, beyond understanding. Point is, that
Pigeon didn’t have a family, because families are man-made, but I get your guilt; I feel for it. I first heard
Queen on my father’s memory stick. I haven’t yet forgiven him. You’ve forgiven him even less.

Rakhine Yoma drives us through ruins, as is nature’s nature. Flooding’s latest,
Silhouette Machine, does not suit the mood, but it trumps silence, so we don’t bother. You skip
“Transept Exit” and I say nothing. I heard it already, beautiful single, in your bed first crying to it,
Ugly and postcoital. Back then you said nothing. We feel so modern with our felt-up nothings. We feel
Velvet, slippery not soft—both fragile little things, both assholes, both angry enough to fuck
Waterways of sound and wear their remains, like every smug soldier stripping noise of throats. Next,
Xiu Xiu gorgeously fuck up their cover of “Fast Car.” Now that’s something the air can choke on. Little
Yips of drip-fed violence, the healthy kind, where we don’t screw up someone’s son. The kind where we
Zoom past half our memories. The kind where I say I’m sorry I never learned to drive, or leave.

Read more from Issue 22.2.