Reaching new Hawthorne Heights

I went to Emo Night at Orange Ale House yesterday and fucking loved it.

I didn't consider myself an "emo kid" in the genre's heyday. I used to make fun of it, and pop punk, while rationalizing that the music I liked wasn't actually in that category. It was part of the whole "I'm into metal and emo is just flimsy tin foil" mentality. In hindsight, it was so silly to be elitist about. I love a variety of music, but there are three appeals of emo and pop punk (for me): the nostalgia, the surrounding community that bonds over it, and the fact that the lyrics are melodramatically angsty but the songs are upbeat and energetic.

I was happy to see the variety of ages. There were people in their thirties who remembered Good Charlotte and Death Cab for Cutie. There were the 22-year-olds screaming along to Paramore. There was music I remember from eighth grade. It spanned from the early to late 2000s. Some people dressed up. Others were people who used to wear fishnet shirts and Chuck Taylors, but still love the scene even if they don't sport the style anymore. It's more about the music and social bonds than the clothes. We came of age in the time when scene first reared its shaggy bleached head, and you had to drape your hair over one eye because the world was too sad to look at with both.

I saw so many people I knew. We were all bouncing in a continuous wave while skeletons and mummies danced over the projection screen. People wore glow necklaces as halos. We passed around a microphone and yelled into it together. Those unfamiliar with this subculture might think it's confusing how the lyrics "I can fall asleep tonight or die, because you kill me" could be sung with such joy.

Experiences like that are unique because you're in a crowded space with everyone talking, but you know what they're all saying. You're speaking the same words, but the lyrics mean something different to everyone. "There's a story at the bottom of this bottle" could remind someone of booze-fueled open mic nights, while reminding somebody else of soda bottles they stored money in as a child. Everyone has their own story at the bottom of a different bottle, and all of these bottles are floating in one wave, mixing their contents.

At some point during the night, a guy tried to pick me up by saying, "You look sad. What's the matter?" I bet that's his designated line to use at emo night. My sister told me, "That's not negging; it's therapisting."

One time the music stopped and a host yelled, "Here's something to dry these emo tears!" and then showered us with streamers and Silly String.

When I went into the room with all the music, Mike worried I'd been swallowed by the crowd. Then he saw that I loved it. Any night that ends with me jumping up and down and covered in Silly String is a good one.

The intimacy of Photoshop

There's a strange sense of intimacy in Photoshopping a person--not to change their appearance, but to remove smudges or scratches from the picture's surface. It feels like you're grooming them through real touch, even though you're only clicking on pixels. This can feel odd if you're fixing up a photo featuring someone you haven't seen in years, no longer have a relationship with, or have never met. There's a certain thrill in digitally primping someone you wish you had known, like a famous person or historical figure.

It's hard to divorce two-dimensional images of people from their tangible forms. For that reason, it's also eerie to find a photo of someone who is no longer alive and look into their eyes, even though they were alive in the picture. It's confusing to read a distraught message from a friend while seeing the userpic of their grinning face.

Time is never static, but photos give us the illusion of that. They really do seem to store an unchanging facet of a person. And maybe many of us present two-dimensional versions of ourselves in real life, because it feels safer than showing our fuller and unretouched selves.

My inner emo child is showing

Watched Blink 182's new video for "Bored to Death" and am currently torn in two directions like a Stretch Armstrong doll. The song is repetitive and the lyric "Life is too short to last long" is one of those maddening statements that's clearly meant to sound profound, but really is just self-defining (it's like saying "Fire's too hot to be cold"). But at the same time, damned if the scene of the angsty punk boy scratching messages into his desk and his bleach-haired girlfriend jumping around listening to oversized headphones and them skating in the parking lot doesn't leave my early 2000s mallcore heart screaming. I'm surprised I didn't combust into a cloud of AIM icons featuring Sally the Ragdoll and skulls with little pink bows on top.

What defines something as childish?

I'm curious about why certain tastes and activities are considered "childish". Things like Harry Potter or Pokemon or board games or video games or cartoons are often called childish because they appeal to kids, but it doesn't really make sense to exclusively label them "a kid thing," since a lot of adults enjoy them. Maybe an entertainment product is considered childish if it was designed and marketed specifically with kids in mind. But all the same, it was invented and developed by adults who may have been thinking of what they would still enjoy if they were socially permitted.

Certain types of entertainment are seen as kid stuff, but still acceptable for adults to partake in (Star Wars and comic books, for example). I wonder what makes some things more socially accepted as crossovers, while others are seen as exclusively the domain of kids. Maybe nostalgia is a factor. Because Star Wars has existed since the '70s, adults regard it as "acceptable" entertainment because it reminds them of their pasts. It also has a lot of philosophical/intellectual merit, as does Harry Potter, so that could be grasped as a reason to give it a pass for grown people.

There's also often an overlap between nerd culture and things that are judged as childish. Fantasy, sci fi, gaming, cosplay. But many of those things are increasingly embraced by adults, and the appeal is generally understood even by those who don't engage in them. This is part of the process of nerd culture moving to the mainstream.

Whenever a new entertainment trend pops up that relates to nerd culture, a lot of people denounce it as childish until gradually, it just comes to be seen as geeky (whether the person uses that term in a disparaging, affectionate, or neutral sense). I hope that will be the case with Pokemon Go. I hear a lot of surly sentiments along the lines of "I don't play because I'm an adult and I have responsibilities!" It's ridiculous to assume all adults who like the game have no responsibilities; many use it as a fun escape in their down time. Everyone who makes that complaint has a hobby, but they don't consider their own leisure activities to be immature. So it doesn't follow that every non-utilitarian act is seen as childish. I think it has to do with initial knee-jerk reactions to nerd culture. I hope to see this game assimilated into the menu of hobbies that are treated as valid for all ages.

Social media time travel

I wish there was a social media network to connect us to people from different times. And before anyone says "books", I mean in a reciprocal way. A Facebook-like service to communicate with others from the future, or the far distant past, or with relatives the way they were before we knew them. Or even with a friend who completely changed; to talk to them when they were different. It would ret-con the universe and completely screw up our timeline, but it would be so damn interesting and cathartic before time starts to eat its own tail and the aliens have to show up and fix everything.

Split screen memory

I wish that every time you walked into an abandoned house or building, you developed split-screen vision. Half would show you what it looks like today, and the other half would depict the place when it was busy and teeming with life. That side would also show you who used to live and work there, and the most important things that happened in the spot where you're standing.

An autobiography in stanzas

An autobiography in stanzas:

Poetry at age three is
Repeating the same words
Repeating 
Repeating 
Until the big people think you're buffering, but
You're just making friends with the consonants
Petting the vowels
Tasting their texture
Finding rhythm nestled in noise.

Poetry at five is
Proudly wearing the verbal flow
because 
you now dress yourself
in stanzas
and find words that match (rhyme)

Poetry at eleven is
Digging up riddles
and burying your own for others to find,
Like realizing you should compliment people 
In all three tenses
Past, present, future
Because saying "you are"
Doesn't mean "you were" or "you will be"

Poetry at fifteen is
FEELINGS
An avalanche of
Humans as hyperbole
and
Why don't you love me
and
Longing for a home you haven't yet written
Stuck in caps lock all day

Poetry at twenty is
Calmer moments, fastidiously scheduled
Enfolded and hugged between parentheses

Poetry now is 
Following train tracks of thought backwards
While waiting for the next to arrive 
Sword fights with exclamation points
and 
Facebook philosophy; ellipses footprints 
at 3 a.m.

Poetry now
is sitting in your lungs
Filling every vessel,
Sometimes exhaled
in ink.

Honey, I Shrunk the Trump

In a group chat, friends were discussing "Honey I Shrunk the Kids", which led to a discussion of which celebrities we'd like to shrink to an inch tall.

I want it to be the entire panel of presidential candidates, just so we can hear them all debate each other in tiny squeaky voices.

Written in March '14

Social media makes us nostalgic. The websites are expansive rooms filled with everyone we've known over the years, existing in the present and in a time lock. We perpetually run both backwards and forwards, each half in the opposite direction, and then wonder why we never feel like a cohesive whole. Photos are nostalgic by nature, by the act of harnessing time. We exist in pixels, colors and frames. Photos offer an illusion of stasis, but even the images and recollections alter with perspective. We just do what we can to hold on.

Nostalgia even emerges from times that were terrible, because I miss not knowing. I miss the unconstrained possibilities. Even if they weren't actually infinite and everything followed its inherent course, I miss having no idea what would happen while holding endless ideas of what could.

At 4 a.m., or on Facebook, or alone with the quiet and impassive reality of time, I greet my sadness. It always lingers in the periphery, but now there are no distractions. It's late at night and I can see it reflected back in every letter and pixel onscreen. The clock carries weight in each tick. I need that grief, because the pit in which I can lose myself is the wellspring that sustains me. Compassion, creativity and connection flow from its stream, which permeates everything that matters. And so I embrace the paradox of an ache that can consume me but also fuels my inspiration, and the paradox of a website that links us to each other but divides us from ourselves.

No one is fully cohesive. We're spread out in words and pictures and ambitions and memories, dispersed into each other and scattered through time. Being bound to a million different places may not always feel freeing, but in a way, it also makes us limitless. We can choose where we want to be.