Something Good Is Happening (And It Has A Soundtrack)
This one is kind of lengthy and all over the place thematically. I grew up listening to Phish, though, so long compositions with weird combinations of content styles isn’t that weird to me.
Good morning. I got up at 7, and got busy making my new phone capable of what I need it to do. Custom firmware to remove bloat? check. Put Gemini in charge of all of the automated tasks? check. Get all of the apps I was using and couldn't smart switch because the last phone couldn’t boot. check. I didn’t lose any of the music I was working on, or the tones and effects I spent countless hours cooking up, thankfully.
Thank God for clouds. It’s my theory that none of the devices we own or carry will have any of their own processing power in the hardware sense and will all just be terminals for really powerful computers in a big building somewhere that are connected to a network. This goes for everything, including video game consoles. The broadband capability isn’t there yet, but i’d give it less than 5 years.
There was something odd about the backup, though and I lost a lot of contacts. So, if you think I should have your contact info, send it to ev.penk7@ Gmail.com.
Fair warning, though: if I have your contact, you’ll have to get used to me linking Fred Again music to you. I can’t shut up about this kid.
I somehow got invited to the premiere of this live stream last Sunday. and took a nap while it played, woke up toward the end and was impressed but I actually gave it a 2nd spin yesterday, and something very different happened.
I was on the bus, with my headphones on, like any other day. All of the sudden I loudly blurted out “HOLY FUCK!”, as if I had tourettes syndrome. I was hearing some of the best music that I think I have ever heard.
the only thing I can liken it to from my experiences with listening to music is hearing a concert recording of Phish doing their song Harry Hood when I was maybe 15. I remember thinking “oh, shit music can do this, too?”
You can listen to the Version of hood in question:
https://phish.in/1991-08-03/harry-hood
I’m careful to avoid hyperbole, and I know i’m annoyingly relentless about how often I share content from this artist but you’ve got to understand how rare it is for something to hit me this hard, and literally rattle my whole understanding of music and it’s possibilities.
Anyone who says that electronic music is without soul and the ability to communicate emotion doesn't get to have opinions about music any more. sorry. Figure out how to go back in time and write album reviews for Rolling Stone in the 70’s or something
Plus, Fred does social media and Instagram stories the way that I do (too many) , so you feel like you’re on the crazy ride of being a 30 year old classically trained music scholar who somehow headlined the biggest music festivals in the the world by himself this summer, which is fun.
This shit is the soundtrack for my summer in Queens.
let me shut up about it. I had a lot more I wanted to get at today.
I’m trying to figure out why i’m not losing my shit lately when something like the only phone I have, that I use for everything and have no way to replace goes and kicks the bucket. Even a few weeks ago, something like that would have absolutely sent me into a stressed out shit fit. I mean, I did curse rather loudly, yes but the response was decidedly less intense and unmanageable than it would have been.
even that last paragraph would have never come out of me, I simply would not acknowledge any kind of positive growth. I would only see where I had fallen short. This is why I finally wrote a thank you email to the people I worked with In the program I was in before I got here to Queens. I guess I could share it, because it’s something I wrote, and I put the things I write on this website.
“I had intended to write this a lot sooner, but I guess it’s time, besides my early days of post treatment life were a bit too rocky, but gladly, I’m light years ahead of where I was over the winter. I just wanted to thank you guys for the experience I had there, as going to Education Alliance was likely one of the best choices I’ve ever made.As i write this, it’s a rainy sunday afternoon and i am comfortably sitting in the master bedroom of a brand new house (which even has its own separate bathroom) . My neighborhood is a very nice predominantly Indian and Guyanese area where I have taken to attending a hindu temple which is located at the end of my block. I am conveniently located near everything I need for daily life, including the A-Train and I have a job interview on Tuesday locally that i feel pretty confident about.
All of that stuff is nice, but that’s not why it was such a good idea to spend a year and a half on avenue D with all of you fine people.
The most important things I learned at EA have to do with perception, especially the perception of myself. You see, I could never be compassionate towards myself, and understand my unique talents and the contribution that I can make to the lives of others. Through working with Mariano i came to understand that am the kind of person who needs to be creative to feel properly alive, and since then i have been fostering and practicing my artistic self expression with the kind of serious dedication that i would have never picked at any other residential treatment facility (trust me, i’ve been to a whole lot of them.) As a direct result of my stay, I literally figured out who I am and what I’m made of, and a lot of it is very positive stuff.
The other really important thing that I got there (especially from Sereen and Evan) is the practice of examining my thoughts, and realistically evaluating them for cognitive distortions. I spent so many years with all of this really self defeating, catastrophic all or nothing thinking that 100% limited me from living any kind of enjoyable life. You guys taught me that not everything is true just because my mind says it is.
So, if I look at things the way I learned to look at them on Avenue D., this is what it looks like today: I am operating at the highest level that I ever have in my life (in terms of health, creativity and spirituality), because I care about myself and what happens to me. Is there room for improvement? Absolutely, all humans have things to work on but I can see truthfully that just because there’s room for improvement, that doesn’t mean I’m a failure and I should give up. This kind of nuanced thinking I got directly from the staff there.
Before I left, I kept saying that I was going to write a thank you letter, and it occurred to me that I hadn’t, but I wanted to make sure to give credit where credit’s due, so thank you again. I would recommend Education Alliance to anyone who needed the kind of help that I did.
Sincerely,
Evan”
I guess doing things like giving yourself credit for incremental improvement is the type of thing that normal people just know how to do, but i’m not a normal person. I’m fucking glad i’m not though, that would be so boring. It turns out that it takes all of the parts to make us who we are, even the ones that aren’t so desirable. If I didn’t have some of the more maladaptive and fucked up traits I have, I could never write the things I do.
If I had never had to sleep on the heat vent next to the station in midtown, I might not appreciate the roof over my head. I definitely would not feel rich when I have like 22$ if i didn't know what it was like to get by on zero.
I don’t know if it’s growing up, therapy, listening to Ram Dass speeches on YouTube, or experiencing ego death on powerful psychedelic chemical recently. Something good is happening. Even though there are bad things, they don’t cancel out the fact that something good is happening.
We all have our own shit to figure out, that’s life. To me, it doesn’t really matter how you figure it out. You could still figure things out too, as long as you aren't dead. Could I have made things easier on myself and stayed sober since I got into AA ten years ago and pulled off a 4 year stretch? oh for sure, but we’d be looking at a different picture, then, wouldn’t we?
There are infinite nuanced complexities to humans and the human experience. i’ll be careful not to speak for anyone else but I personally want things simplified for easy mental digestion . things are either good or bad, one or the other. There are good people and bad people, and given that I have so many things wrong with me, i’m most definitely the latter. It’s not that simple.
There are some really good things in my life that are the direct result of very very bad things happening, and having to adjust to dealing with them.
Listen, i’m in a good mood today, and i’m probably not going to always be able to grip the kind of things I wrote about today, like acceptance of the whole picture and all of that, so I wanted to document it. I don’t read my own writing but maybe if i’m having one of those days where I can’t accept anything I could open this and remember that it’s possible.
I may feel good, but I did eat grits for lunch and have no clean t-shirts so I need to go the grocery store and laundromat, which I cannot afford at present so if you ever get anything out of these little posts, and are in a position to swing it, please donate to my ko-fi page. I will thank you, sincerely https://ko-fi.com/evr0ck17
