It Will Get Brighter: OPTIMISM
The Putrefying Road to the 19th Extremity
One of the great things about living behind a slaughterhouse is the thriving music scene. You can only listen to the cries of sentient creatures dying in pain so many times before the soundtrack tires. Spotify helps to mollify the unease of constant screams, but I’m seldom content to merely cancel noise.
I want new content.
In the past it was always a random sporadic Sunday that I’d wander off into obscure blogs and databases in search of new material. But now, in a fortuitous twist of fate I find deeply grounding, my music gathering is tied to the season.
It is in spring that the bird population of LA Fresh Poultry, the polleria across the alley from me, swells to a deafening crescendo. Come April, I am hardly alone when it comes to testing the limits of my Wi-Fi speakers. But unlike my neighbors, I cannot survive on the same old R&B, pop-punk, and British alt-rock I shunned even in my tweens. The songs of those distant years sound to me still so shrill and needy. Like the last sobbing honks of that tired snow geese dying out the window, it pains me to pay them any more attention.
Instead, I prefer to search for something more fresh.
Spring initiates my season of music hunting, a profound period of aesthetic rebirth that lasts from March to April, climaxing around Easter, and from which I emerge more confident and awful than ever in the superiority of my poor taste. You might expect a text from me around 10 a.m. when the Adderall first hits and a false sense of wellbeing lulls me into spreading the good news, as I did for my friend Andrew, who is Jewish, the weekend before last.
B: Dude, Happy Easter! You ever heard of Demilich?
A: Is that on HBO Max?
B: Early ‘90s Finnish technical death metal band. Dizzying virtuosic guitar work. Super dissonant.
B: Track 2, “The Sixteenth Six-Tooth Son Of Fourteen Four-Regional Dimensions (Still Unnamed)” is essential listening.
Most of my friends ought to know by now to block me before the equinox. But some lurid part of them I think remains curious to see just how long I’ll go on blathering like a bum at a bus stop about the many unbelievable things only I’ve seen.
B: Track 9, “The Planet That Once Used To Absorb Flesh In Order To Achieve Divinity And Immortality (Suffocated To The Flesh That It Desired…)” is really good too.
My stubborn lust for the new, the latest and strangest, the unknown and forgotten makes me, I suppose, somewhat of a statistical anomaly. Or to use a more metal term, an aberration. Numerous studies over the past decade, all of them made possible through a sudden access to millions of streaming accounts worldwide, have demonstrated that the vast majority of music listeners cease discovering new artists and genres after they reach their early thirties, a phenomenon psychologists call “taste freeze.” A popular explanation for the chill is, well, children.
A: At the park now with the kids! Stop texting me.
There remains no better predictor of the imminent terminal contraction of one’s musical breadth than a sudden flood of children’s music appearing in your Spotify stream. And yet the sacrifice and time commitments of kids cannot alone account for the phenomenon of frozen taste.
B: You should play that track for your kids. They’d dig the cookie monster vocals.
B: I read online that the singer had his tongue surgically removed so he could scream better.
B: Onstage the only oxygen he’d inhale came from a plastic bag with a dead crow in it.
Even if they never opt for offspring, nor mistakenly sign a lease behind a LA Fresh Poultry, already by their thirties most people have begun sinking imperceptibly into a permanent feedback loop. Psychologists call it the “reminiscence bump,” a process whereby your formative years, and the pleasures, the powers and firm personhood gained therein, begin to occupy the bulk of your brain’s memory book. As a result, when it comes time to press play, more and more as you age it’s probable you’ll pull from a familiar page, those songs downloaded during your generative years when you were engorged with hormones and the promise of sex and independence and the sounds of The Smashing Pumpkins, The Offspring and whatever other trite horseshit the radio squished into your skull became the soundtrack to the most intensely felt moments of your life. Simply put, those songs are, to very real extent, you.
But not me.
I might be in my third decade and may have a minimum of 12 kids—a dozen unique families being the cutoff imposed by the sperm bank to prevent incest—but the ice of age has yet to deaden my step. Every spring I set sail into uncharted sonic waters… A wanderer above the sea of popular song.
But don’t take my word for it. Read my Spotify Wrapped.
Or see my rating on Obscurify.
It’s probably safe to assume that the only people curious enough to bother linking their Spotify to Obscurify would be insecure hipsters craving confirmation of their rarefied taste. And of those 1.78 million self-conscious US souls, I rank in the 99th percentile of pretentiousness.
In a very real sense, I am an aberration. But a beautiful one, or so I tell myself as the speakers drown the poultry screams—a man besotted in the warm albumen of perpetual sonic rebirth… I don’t suffer the ablutions of obscure albums in order to be rare. Nor to have something new to share. It’s not as though anyone cares about my cool music finds. Much like the neighbors in my building, my friends are set in their ways, conservative the more they age, content to go on consuming the same tired bands I first introduced them to in high school. And that’s fine. Statistically right in step. The neglected gems I excavate each spring mostly fall on deaf ears. Even the brand new finds I forward are met with either crickets or suspicion, like the excellent electronic track, “Make it B.I.G.”, by Baltra, that I sent my friend Steven in Austin last Saturday.
S: “Make it Big”? Lol. Where’d you find this one? The Slammer?
Steven was of course referring to the underground gay sex club around the corner from my apartment, its blank façade and yellow address sign tucked quietly alongside the cheerful pastels of a small two-story charter elementary school.
B: Are you saying the song sounds ‘gay’?
S: Ya
Just as Andrew’s music taste has yet to evolve much beyond the public school lunch quad, so it is with Steven’s sense of humor. And his diet. Probably he will die soon.
B: What are you up to?
S: I’m at Carl’s Jr. getting a bacon western cheeseburger and Dr. Pepper.
In twenty years the amount of money I will have saved no longer texting him Spotify links will more than likely cover the cost of travel to his funeral.
B: Sad
But I do sympathize with Steven’s homophobia, to a certain very limited extent… The Slammer has always been immensely popular and utterly ruinous to parking late on weekend nights. But the gay men eager to access the glory holes never used to pepper spray you in the face if you refused to surrender your parking space. Christina found this out the hard way a few weeks ago when a youngish white dude in a Toyota Prius with Texas plates simply could not be bothered to circle the block another time, so eager was he for a round in one of The Slammer’s famous slings.
People Love The Slammer on Yelp
Had a cum filled blast! Loved being in the slings. Lots of sexy guys.. Loved everything! —JCub F. Santa Ana, CA
The howls from the next door kennel lends a certain jouissance to one's escapades. —Paul M. Pasadena, CA
If you like clean trendy interiors, janitors that swoop in when your condom wrapper hits the floor, you’re shit out of luck here. —Jeremiah L. San Diego, CA
You can occasionally be surprised by someone standing in the shadows... You do hear the dogs from the kennel next door howling. I saw a major screen star in a booth there taking it up the ass. —Ernie A. Los Angeles, CA
“Really? You’re not gonna give me your space?” Texas Prius man said of the last remaining slot of street parking, which Christina had just halfway paralleled back into, her window down as he idled beside her. She remembers saying “I live here man” and I remember my phone vibrating at the brewery that night, stepping away from the tap handles, the swarm of starved patrons, and the bass of the Baltra banger I’d just switched on —“Hello?”—into the cold wind of the walk in cooler—“Hello?”—and feeling gutted for a moment as I listened to her lungs heave.
“Baby,” I heard in the background. “Baby…” A man’s voice.
A butt dial, it dawned on me. A very bad one, I thought. The worst kind. That evil ring that arrives 11:16 on Saturday when you’re bartending and you realize that your fiancé isn’t at home replanting cacti but off somewhere getting railed by a black guy. “Yeah, Baby.” Another long moan slid out from the phone, and for a moment, standing in the cooler, I imagined I saw her disembodied breath hanging there in the frozen air, a puff of glittering steam ejected from the hot screen, her ghost much too close yet gone from my grasp as, faraway, she orgasmed beneath a stranger’s hands. “Baby,” the man spoke in a soothing baritone.
“Oh my God. My eye,” she groaned.
“I’m sorry,” the man’s voice said.
“It really burns.”
Wow, I remember thinking. He just came in her eye.
There were many pipes throughout the brewery behind the silver walk-in cooler walls, not to mention a surplus of hoses, rubber tubes, extension chords and tall step ladders. I could have easily hung myself without notice behind the back fermenters. Was it that awful Demilich album that drove her away? One too many early morning streams on the Sonos speakers? But then something saved me...
“Siri!” Christina cried at the other end of the line. “Siri, call BARRET!”
“Who are you talking to, Baby?”
And the voice, as I soon learned, was only that of the elderly homeless black man who lived in the broken Mercedes Benz beside the tent encampment across from our apartment. Sometimes he made fun of my round rim ‘Harry Potter’ glasses. And she wasn’t coming but sobbing. And the man, Oliver was his name, he’d seen the whole thing—the plume of pepper spray, the shitty Texas plates, their passage in and out of the The Slammer’s tiny, full lot. “Baby, here.” He’d brought over a bottle of Dasani but she couldn’t see it at the time. Couldn’t open her eyes.
“I can’t see anything!” I heard her whimper as she poured water over her face and phone. “Siri!” she shouted over the gurgling fountain sounds. “CALL BARRET.” She couldn’t see the mute button was on, couldn’t see who was helping her. Whether or not the bald man was gone. Couldn’t turn off the song I’d showed her. Couldn’t hear my voice. “Christina!?” “Hello!?” “Hello!?” “Hello!?”
“Hi…?”
One of the managers had soundlessly slipped into the cooler and stood staring at me through the gloom. He pulled out his weed pen. “Want some?”
I told him yes and also that I had to bounce. I had to save my baby.
B: I’m on my way.
B: Be there in ten.
“Why are you texting her if she can’t see?”
Sammy was very smart. That’s why he was the manager.
“You have to hold that button down,” he said. “Yeah. Push that.”
When I smoke this blunt, man
I get high like a stunt man
Then I'm ready to die
Once I make it big, then I'm ready to die—Baltra, “Make it B.I.G.”
Driving to find Christina in her car in front of the homeless encampment beside the elementary school a hundred feet from The Slammer, I kept wondering who it was that was ready to die and what I would use to kill them. I’d never killed anyone before but now that they’d hurt Christina I figured I’d have the chance. It was a strange feeling, like being in a movie, or maybe in another geologic epoch where human beings had not yet invented clothing, slept in caves and were regularly devoured by cats the size of Cadillac Escalades, one of which I swerved around now as it slowed, hazard lights flashing. How do you drive for Uber in a Cadillac? The proper thing to do, what the movies depicted and what most men or males did (were homo erectus and homo habilis even ‘men’? Was this question homophobic?) throughout the brief and awful history of the human race was kill. Who was I to reinvent the wheel?
I remember the strange calm washing over me as I blew through the red lights and merged onto the 101 out of downtown. It was as though I had been inducted suddenly into some vast and sad hall of fame. Pretty soon people would know me. They’d talk about me. The things I did. Prosecutors. Judges and journalists. Witnesses, of which, thankfully, Christina would not be one. And after my picture went up on the wall, there I would remain, alongside the countless other ape man, aristocrats and peasants of vengeance, all of us eyeing each other in silence until the end of time.
Like them, I’d been trying to hold my life together for awhile. Get somewhere maybe. Get ahead. Do mostly good. But all that was out the window now as the palm trees wheeled passed me. Gone. Some guy had hurt my girl. There was really only one thing left to figure out in the remaining five minutes before I inflicted grave bodily harm…
What song should I listen to?
I almost collided with a semi-truck at the 101-110 merge clicking through Spotify on my phone. “Catacombs” by Fearing felt right. The acoustic drumming and driving bass line embodied just the sort of muscular power I imagined I would need to beat a homeless man with whatever half-folded bicycle wheel I found beside his tent (I knew not then who had hurt her only that she was hurt bad and trapped in her car, unable to open her eyes, and 911 brought only a busy signal and I had to hurry to wherever she was, a location she could not provide other than to stammer “By The Slammer”). And the song’s mumbled dispassionate vocals, their words barely discernible, spoke to the hopelessness of the situation (My only hope was that I might make her wet a final time when the man started screaming; it had to be a man, a crazy homeless man, right?). I needed something to guide me in the illogic of my path. A formless phantom voice commanding from beyond the dark periphery, just outside the open window, as monotonous and anonymous as the wind. It certainly fit the mood, the dreamlike motions I was going through.
Speak to me phantom man, I thought. Rise out from the night, inhabit the Camry speakers, and carry me home.
It was the beginning of spring then, a perfect time to turn a new leaf, I thought, tear out the roots—bury my future in some pointless crime of passion, which I felt little of, only the cold duty of the Cro-Magnon man.
Look back to the catacombs
Look back to the catacombs
Looking back
Looking back—Fearing, “Catacombs”
Looking back at that night, over a week after Christ rose from the grave—weeks after Christina’s eyes were so swollen she looked like boxer who needed her eyebrows drained with a razor blade—I kept thinking I should have done something crazy. Instead I bought Oliver a chocolate cake and bottle of vodka from Vons. The Prius from Texas, the true perpetrator as I later learned from numerous unhoused accounts, had long ago set sail for further glory holes, greener slings, and play maze pastures.
“I’m scared of these gay sex freaks,” Oliver said, frowning at the site of the discounted birthday cake I’d bought him, the name Chloe misspelled Chole in wobbly red frosted letters.
“Don’t be,” I said. “You only have to fear if your car is operable and you arrive at the last available parking space at the same time as another man.”
He nodded. “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” he said, twisting off the vodka cap. We both stared down at the dead tires of his Benz. Spider webs stuck with brown leaves stretched between the asphalt and the flattened rubber. Several men in tight shirts hurried past us, avoiding eye contact.
“I guess I’m safe here,” Oliver said.
But a few days later he no longer recognized me. Nor Christina. She told me she smiled and waved on her way to meet the detectives but his mind seemed elsewhere.
“Hi Oliver!”
Maybe it was the liquor that tipped the scales, or my crappy cake, or the suggestion he not let the incident make him homophobic. Whatever the case, he now seemed positively agoraphobic. Terrified of everyone. Particularly some kind of shadow race I couldn’t see and that wouldn’t go away—no matter how many times he told them to “Get the hell away,” banging the hood of the Benz with the empty Smirnoff bottle—spectral emissaries thrice distilled haunting the broken road outside the elementary school; some kind of tribe of fallen homo habilis cursed to wander the city streets in homelessness forever, their mute and flickering forms perhaps not unlike those the tongueless singer of Demilich encountered before his excellent Finnish health insurance paid to have his tongue surgically removed and he committed suicide.
After too many dimensions
Arriving to the last one
A road covered with the dying
Shadows masticating them—Demilich, “The Putrefying Road In The 19th Extremity (...Somewhere Inside The Bowels Of The Endlessness...)”
“What the fuck are you looking at?” Oliver growled as I stood unlocking my car outside The Slammer.
The jacarandas trees were blooming.
“Nothing,” I said.
A woman had taken up residence on the manhole a few feet away. She sat fingerpainting the pavement with the feces of the German Shepard the first floor neighbor never picked up. A large logo adorned the sun-bleached wall of her sidewalk home. An old plasma flatscreen box. The smiling face formed by the letters LG squinted into the rush hour sun. “Life’s Good.” I followed the logo’s blank gaze and saw beyond The Slammer a two-man crew swapping out the billboard over Dewey Pest Control.
“It will get brighter,” it said. “OPTIMISM. passiton.com”
A police helicopter buzzed overhead and the woman stood suddenly and stared up at the sky. The sound of chopping blades beat in time with the children’s jump rope beyond the elementary school’s barbed wire. “Get out of my body!” the woman shrieked then hit herself in the face.
I climbed in my car and started back downtown, two miles away, to the brewery, watching Oliver in the rearview as he swung his fist at another ghost buried down somewhere inside the bowels of endlessness, thinking all the while that the craziest thing I’d ever done was continue living here. Why? Why? Why?
And as I rolled down First Street, coasting by the $300 million Walt Disney Concert Hall, that was the new song I listened to, a new find from my new favorite band.
Why do people have to live outside
When there are buildings all around us
With heat on and no one inside?
Why?Why do people have to live outside
In tents, under bridges?
Living with nothing and horribly suffering
Why?I've never had to push
All my shit around
In a shopping cart
Have you?
Have you ever had ringworm?
Scabies?
Have you ever had to live outside?
I don't wanna live outside—Chat Pile, “Why?”
I’d actually had scabies before, sexually transmitted by Christina. And ringworm from the foster kittens she brought into the apartment. But singing along helped lift my spirits. They were probably somewhere two or three feet below average now, which I guess still put them three or four feet underground. Secretly I knew I should have brought Oliver a bottle of Dasani. But what could I do? Reinvent myself? It was literally my job to get people drunk. To fill pint glasses of IPA and answer common sense questions about craft beer— “Is your sour beer sour?”— freeing a whole new generation of aspiring alcoholics to imagine themselves as daring foodies. But what bothered me the most was that I’d assumed it had been Oliver or someone like him who’d hurt Christina. What did it say about me that I’d imagined no other option? Sure there were over 70,000 people living unsheltered in LA county’s streets, but what of the 9.8 million others outfitted with lock and key? Many of them were just like me, perhaps only a paycheck away from packing up and pitching a tent. I guess as you clung to your shaky ground, it was imperative to have something else to point to, something to prove if not your absolute material security than at least your moral superiority. Of course you didn’t have to push all your shit around in a shopping cart. Such a fate was reserved for those who found it fun to pepper spray a pretty girl in the face.
But of course, this wasn’t the case. The man in the Prius had driven away. And I hadn’t done anything to stop or help anyone. In fact it had been Oliver who rescued Christina. And now, as if to certify my lack of heroism, he didn’t even remember me. And to make matters worse, I let it bother me.
I hated that look people sometimes shot me at the brewery. “You really don’t remember me? I was here last Saturday!?” How could I explain I sometimes lost track of faces after pouring four or five-hundred IPAs, that they merged into one collective malcontented ghost that swallowed all my time, kept me awake until the witching hour, and one week later, pissed a paltry paycheck? “What are you, some kind of comedian?” they ask when I confess I also forget their order.
“Sorry. What was the second beer you wanted? I got distracted thinking about death.”
“Hahahaha!” they laugh. “Hahahaha!” And they ask my name. “Barrett!?” they say. “Like the gun!? WOW BRO. What a cool name! Barrett, I’m David.”
People used to think Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd fame, or some character form the Final Fantasy video game, but now it’s just Barrett the rifle. “Have you ever shot a Barrett .50 cal!? Man! Most powerful rifle on the planet. Pure sex, boss. Try it! You gotta bro.”
“Definitely. I will.”
“Say, Barrett, I wanted to ask. Who’s in charge of the music here?”
“Why? You like it?”
“Not really. I wanted to see if maybe you could change it for me.”
“What do you want to listen to?”
“I don’t know. Maybe like something more normal. Like upbeat, kinda sunny, you know? I’m trying to meet the ladies tonight. You feel me?”
To which I respond like some kind of advanced A.I. robot machine fresh out of 2001.
“I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
I was surprised to find Christina and her friend still awake when I returned home from the brewery, both of them seated on the couch asking ChatGPT complex questions about fellatio. For a minute it seemed like something fun might happen but then they ran out of ideas and started yawning. I turned on some obscure music then. Robert Turman’s pioneering 1981 thumb piano album Flux.
“Your neighborhood is really interesting,” Christina’s friend Mary Anne said when someone started screaming outside.
Normally Abdul, the owner of LA Fresh Poultry, screamed during the day. It was weird to hear him thunder on through the dark.
“It’s where it all converges,” I said.
“Is that Arabic?” Mary Anne asked.
I’m not sure why Abdul yells so much some days. You’d think he might sound happier. He kills his birds fresh, halal style, the most painful way, and business is always booming. I used to think maybe the presence of ultimate fear pumping through the chickens’ veins might tenderize the meat before the final moment. But someone, one of the brewers, told me it was just the opposite. Stress ruins flesh. My only thought these days is that Abdul’s maniacal howls somehow conjure fond memories in his diverse clientele, a remembrance of the old country, the brutal bellows of the cruel dictators they fled here to escape.
“What do you think’s converging here?” Christina asked.
“The springtime’s hottest music scene.”
Below, the downstairs neighbor, an Absolute Vodka rep, started playing “The Thong Song.” I turned up Robert Turman’s thumb piano on my phone. Abdul’s nocturnal ejaculations continued unabated outside.
“This music is so lame. Can’t you play something more normal?” Christina asked as I opened the New York Times app and started doom scrolling. “Don’t you think you’d be happier?”
“I don’t want to be reminded of my roots.”
For weeks I’d been afflicted by the vision of myself as someone senile, 89 years old, unable to recall anything from my past, not even the faces of my own 12+ children, and then someone in the hospital puts on a Blink 182 song, “What’s My Age Again?” and suddenly, in a tide of remembrance, it all comes back to me. I see myself at 13 years old, dragging my roller backpack in a pair sagging Dickies, a yo-yo able to sleep for sixty seconds stuffed in my side pocket, the suffocating trail of the Ralph Lauren “Romance” cologne my grandma bought me for Christmas, back when I still believed in Jesus, pursuing me all the way to the algebra homeroom as I visualized squashing kitten skulls with my DVS skate shoes in order to banish an involuntary erection.
“Why don’t you play The Roots?” Christina said.
Songs from the reminiscence bump, I’d read, dredge autobiographical memories in Alzheimer’s patients far more powerfully and reliably than anything, even family photos.
“Okay.”
But I did feel better now as I switched on Blink 182.
“Ew,” Christina and her friend scoffed.
No grandkid would get to play it for me in the assisted living home—Scientists and top tech executives, so said the failing New York Times, were calling for a moratorium on A.I. research. One of the top minds in the field, Eliezer Yudkowsky, said we’d all be dead in couple few years. The best we could do was “go down fighting with dignity.” Like Abdul’s chickens…
“The Store Where Los Angeles Converges,” ran the recent New York Times headline. “LA Fresh Poultry, a halal-style butchery, caters to a diverse clientele of home chefs and professionals who want to be reminded of their roots.” The Times published the profile in their new “The Look” section. For years, though, whenever I’ve looked out down the alley a hundred feet away to the 1,200 square-foot pink stucco hovel where Abdul lives with his geese, turkeys, chicken and squab, I’ve mostly seen a second story door set in a wall with no balcony or staircase. Dark liquid drips beneath it down toward the rusted gate with its crippled wheels and the metallic albumen stench of avian death rises to the apartment windows on hot sunny days, alongside the song of birds, which of course pours from their vocal cords with a special power in that half-minute before they’re finally slit.
I guess it’s reasonable though that the Times used the word ‘converge.’ Something is definitely converging here.
“I think it’s the future,” Mary Anne said. “You can feel the future converging here.”
Christina took control of the music then. Switched on something familiar. Something from her own reminiscence bump, and both her, her friend, and I began to sing.
Can't you feel the knife?
Can't you feel the knife?
Can't you feel the knife?
Can't you feel the knife?—Grizzly Bear, “The Knife”
Demilich, Adversary of Emptiness
Baltra, Ambition
Fearing, Shadow
Chat Pile, God’s Country
Robert Turman, Flux
Grizzly Bear, Yellow House
Read about the reminiscence bump here and NYT doomsday there. Listen to Lex Fridman’s eye-opening A.I. conversation with Eliezer Yudkowsky here.
I think you need to give poor Abdul a break. Have you ever cooked a couple of his fowl for guests?