Weekend Writing Warriors: All Alone

Hey fellow warriors, I'm back! This week, I'll share another excerpt from Imposter, a short story I wrote a little while ago. See here what happened the last time you met Paul, professional marriage imposter. This week he has his eye on a new lady.. 
Click on the cover the read the whole story on Google Drive. I've edited some of the excerpts to infuse them with a little bit of dramatic polish. :)


His most recent project was a woman named Augustine Cooper. The name initially triggered images of old gooses, but after watching her from his car, Paul had to acknowledge that Augustine looked incredibly young for a woman her age. She wore makeup, and tastefully so, and her hair, albeit neat and long, was taken in to a sleek bun. Observing how she treated herself, he immediately pegged her as someone with serious demands and expectations regarding men. 
Augustine lived a closed off life compared to the other seniors in town and Paul wondered why a woman who put that much effort into her appearance didn't follow a social calendar, or was at least part of a weekly Bridge Club. The realization that there were absolutely no elderly gentlemen sniffing around, no one lined up to escort her to cultural events, it baffled him. She appeared to be all alone.

The 1975 reviewed: I'm in Love with Music. And Boys.

This is strange. I went through my blog archive, and realized that in four years, I've never done a single music review. Frankly I don't know the first thing about music reviews, but not knowing something has never stopped me before. So why now, why this group? There are way more age-appropriate and current bands for me to review - you know, something to straighten my glasses to and accordingly nod my bun. ☺

But this is it, this is The 1975. Well all you mid-thirties and older, it isn't one of those bands that you'll have playing in the background while you discuss Hobbes' philosophy with your peers and a glass of wine in your hand. You'll want to listen to this album in solitude, preferably while wearing your headphones and colorful hand-knit socks.

The 1975 consists of mid-twenties Matt Healy, George Daniel, Adam Hann and Ross MacDonald, and on their self-titled debut album they sing about all the things that boys do, feel and care about. Although far from being a boy band, their RnB indulgence and double-tracking vocals, especially in Head.Cars.Bending sometimes steer their sound towards that direction. But the otherwise lack of designed synchronicity and artistic edge with all black and white imagery bails them right out of that pigeon-hole; more importantly the insane production value elevates their sound to a modern and crisp level. On iTunes, they even released new versions of some of their EP-tracks for the deluxe edition of their album. Neat!

The musical influences they list are pretty iconic: major 80s synthpop, but modernized, with explicit references to Michael Jackson, Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel and Talking Heads. The big ones. Listening to songs like You and Talk, I immediately felt taken back to another time, and the strong reminiscence to the 80s coming-of-age Brat Pack and their spiritual dad John Hughes, whose films the band said to admire (especially Breakfast Club). There are some other, more experimental songs on the album, like the ethereal An Encounter, a visit to ambient, or 12, an obvious and haunting nod to Sigur Rós. For what it's worth they could have been more brave in exploring those minimalist sound vaults.







The lyrics range from cryptic and grave to angry. It adds to the atmosphere, but while creative at times, the words are not as engaging as the sounds. They're at their best when music and lyrics cooperate like in The City's Yeah you wanna find love then you know where the city is, a prelude to life. It made me feel excited to revisit those places. And the ambiguous song Chocolate lets me remember what it was like to be dressed in black from head to toe, we've got guns hidden under our petticoats, and also bringing back the urges in the song Sex: if we can't do anything we might as well just fuck. Boredom and sex, hell yes!






I feel like I've pretty much outgrown most of the problems they're mulling over. The thing that reels me in anyway is singer Matt Healy's cadence. Many people don't like the way he sings. I'm finding that his vocals (and Skrillex hair) lend credence to the words he's saying. He doesn't play anything down, he doesn't cover anything up. It's a definite commitment to being vulnerable and uncool, and conveys a raw emotion, the kind of cheerfulness, desperation and delusional self-importance, that is the essence of being young. I think that the quality that possibly breaks open The 1975's music to an even larger audience is that their songs are joyful wallowing, never self-pitying.

The celebratory spirit of departure works well with the overall picturesque evocation of adolescence. At times the picture they paint even seems to be much more beautiful than reality. It's almost as if they're glancing back in nostalgia, telling us that even though being young at times can be troublesome, they know that one day they'll miss it. All of us old farts can relate to that kind of wisdom and it propitiates us instead of making us want to shrug it off as being juvenile. I'm thinking that the band's sound will evolve naturally, and mature with their next album. I'm not sure what their views on adulthood will be like - but since I like their take on adolescence, I'm looking forward to hearing it.





Download their album on iTunes: smarturl.it/the1975album

Decomposing Buttocks Rant

The older I get the more I think of my body as a letdown. I'm astonished at what a rotting, quickly festering meat bag it is! The process of aging is like moving into a relatively new building, where, once you sit down to unpack the crates, cold gusts of wind blow through holes in the walls and start tearing them down. And while I tend to care less and less about such trivial things as appearance, it's still not a very good feeling to lose confidence in one's vitality with teeth, rotting; organs, asleep or failing and hair, falling out in some areas, springing like bamboo in others.

How could anyone say that the human body is a well-designed masterpiece? This thing?! Only if it had been done by a drunk four-year-old would I be mildly impressed. We're basically walking compost piles, and we have no control over which parts grow and which ones fall off; yes, it may be ecofriendly to be living in a world of compost, but it's not pretty. And it smells.

Just because our bodies work for a limited period of time doesn't mean that either they or the system that created them are flawless entities. By the way, bio-degradable is not the stamp I want to proudly wear on one of my flapping butt cheeks, I'd rather be totally non-degradable.
I don't care for half-life, I want doubling time!

I Crush Ants For A Living

My hands just wouldn't stop shaking. I felt oddly calm on the inside, but my body appeared to be in disagreement with that other part of me. The thing that just happened, it happens every day. However I couldn't imagine how the exact same thing could have happened at all, to me or anyone else. And why I've never been warned on how awful it would be like!

I wish I could have kept my knees from shaking so much. They banged into one another like two clumsy sticks. I also remember cursing a lot. Cursing and shaking knees don't go together all that well. Still, this is what being all-powerful means. It means running over animals with your car when you least expect it. It means overstretching the gap between life and death within seconds. Couldn't it have been at least something else, I pleaded, something smaller, and not the beautiful red-and-white creature that came out of nowhere, wanting to cross the street in a hurry? Then again, what an odd impulse, trying to figure out ways to lighten up a horrible scenario. It's never cheerful.

After the initial shock had worn off, I parked the car and went back to look for the remains of the cat. I went looking along the roadside, under bushes and I even waded through a remote stretch of tall grass. Cats have a habit of going into hiding when injured. A big part of me didn't want to see that. The other part wanted to randomly ring every doorbell in the area and apologize to whoever opened first.

For someone who in life doesn't feel all that powerful, I realized in this one split second that I do have a lot of impact on my surroundings. Impact being the operative word..

I never found the dead body, or, what would have been worse, a half-dead body. The cat could have run further, even with two broken hind legs, which would have been a best-case scenario.

On another note, I crush ants for a living and I am not even aware when it happens. Being alive causes so much death and suffering, it makes remorse a strange reaction to the effects of existence. I can't help being a freighter in a world of canoes. I'm a freighter hoping to merely have broken the paddle of a certain red-and-white canoe...