The time it takes to let go.
you don't know what of you exists at home anymore, you, or some odd, slightly altered facsimile of what people knew you as and assume of you now
This past year, my brother and I got a text on Christmas Eve.
Ok wow yeah maybe putting that video there after that sentence was not the best. Everything is fine.
It was from an old neighborhood friend of ours. He’s a little bit older, married, has a young daughter, has worked in finance since graduating college seemingly forever ago, yada yada, life is pretty damn good for him. I would say it’s about 50/50, but a lot of the time, I’m pretty bad with ages and times. Once I thought a guy I was in a band with was 26 (my age at the time) because I legitimately didn’t know. He was 30. Oh well. Anyway, that’s a long way of saying that I can’t remember how old this friend is. I remember him buying a nice townhouse not too far from where we all grew up while I was still in college. Going over there while I was an undergrad and a recent graduate to have some beers before we would go out when I would be home visiting from Boston at various points throughout the year.
Group texts seem to be taking over more and more of my life. A more streamlined method of communication than an email, a call, playing phone tag through text, “hey can you tell so and so this if you see them,” etc. “it doesn’t feel like Christmas without the parshall holiday party,” the text read. The follow ups from my brother, myself, and our friend were pretty rote “yeah dang, this year, how’s the wife and kid, what music are you listening to, etc.” And I always realize how out of touch I’ve fallen with home. Or whatever that means.
It still surprises me when people are…surprised by the bands I’ve photographed over the last three years (and in 2013 - technically when I started / when I started learning what all the settings and shit were but had to give it up for a few years because of time constraints, financials, lack of motivation, being an idiot). Immediate apologies for the likely pretension behind that statement, but I kind of just assumed people from my hometown know “yeah probably hangs out with a lot of bands and shit who cares.” Kinda accurate, idk.
This older friend is a bit of local legend where we’re from. I don’t know how many individual records he still has on our neighborhood pool’s leaderboard, on his high school’s leaderboard, on his college’s leaderboard. For some very slight context and backstory, he was an extremely high level swimmer, going to Olympic Trials for the 200 Butterfly in 2004, the year Michael Phelps won eight medals in Athens (including the 200 Butterfly). The DC suburbs are a weird, insular little place for swimming. Everyone knew everyone. Everyone knew multiple people who were going to college on full swimming scholarships, or who had been on national or regional all star team rosters. It was just part of living there. You’re baptized in the chlorine of your local summer pool right when you can sorta kinda flail your arms a little bit. You swim in the summer. If you take it seriously, you swim year round. For the most part (trying to think of some exceptions to this rule but none spring to mind - thanks, years of booze and acid), if you want to swim, and swim at a high level (i.e. college scholarship, age grade travel teams, national teams), all you do is swim. You swim for your local pool in the summer. You swim for a local but more regionally based club in the winter and spring.
The word “should” enters my brain a lot. Should have done this. Should have worked more on that. All the time.
<Thursday at the Worcester Palladium, December 2017>
In this instance, “should have given more of a shit about music as a younger person and pursued it with more fervor.” I think we all have regrets. I don’t just have them - I’ve largely (unfortunately) defined myself by them.
I see this friend once or twice a year. Thanksgiving and Christmas. I don’t travel home from Boston too regularly. When I do, it’s for Thanksgiving and Christmas. It’s like I’m in college again, except arguably dumber, and with less hope. Whenever I see him at our now yearly pre-Thanksgiving “people from the neighborhood get drunk at the bar” event, 95% of our conversations turn to music. He was in a post-hardcore band in college, and I recall the two bands they were compared to most often were Thursday and Rival Schools. I was…15? 16? when his band’s EP came out? Young. I was young. Still really into the Vandals and the Ataris, just getting into Jawbreaker and Descendents and Circle Jerk and Black Flag and the DC hardcore bands of yesteryear.
It’s easy to think about the things I’m not, the things I maybe wanted to be, the things I thought I could be based on my proximity to certain people and experiences. Professional swimmer, rugby player, runner, cyclist, musician, writer, etc. My world has consistently revolved around the things I do that by nature (I think) are tangible extensions of who I am as a person. Has trouble communicating with people even though on the surface he’s gregarious and pretty outgoing? Make pictures, write words, retreat behind a digital screen. Addictive personality that can get extremely caught up in and centered on one thing at a time? Become an obsessive runner, bike rider, image maker, dive into that and ignore everything else.
This has gone off the rails a little bit. I actually started authoring this post back in December of last year (2020 for those of you that have managed to sleep off a whole calendar year, lucky bastards). I don’t really know where I want to go with this newsletter. This particular post seems to have been about <checks notes> a self-indulgent, over-stimulated look into my own personal bullshit. Less of those from now on. My thought with writing is that the author shouldn’t need to talk about themselves so blatantly for their personality to come through in their words. Much like a photographer has a style that people can see an image and say “photographer XYZ made that,” ideally the same could / should be said for writing. I really want to explore what it means to put words to paper (or whatever format / medium - I’m obviously typing this on a fucking computer right now, you know what I mean, dammit) this year. It’s been a while since I’ve taken that particularly seriously, having been knee-deep in the world of professional social media for the better part of the last decade, distilling thoughts down to 140 (or is it 280 now) character bites, catchy marketing copy, hashtags, and easily digestible posts on whatever platform the kids are all about these days.
Anyway, signing off. I should probably get to work. Talk to you soon.