Welcome To The World Through The Looking Glass

soliloquy by an immortal cave painter.

there is a willow grows aslant a brook, that shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream; there with fantastic garlands did she come of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples that liberal shepherds give a grosser name, but our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them: there, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke; when down her weedy trophies and herself fell in the weeping brook. /// don't ask me why i hate myself as i'm circling the drain 'cause death, it takes too long and i can't wait

So, some people he was really tender with and some people he was really harsh with and some people he will carry regret with and some people he probably wishes he had gone further.

But all of that pathology was on display as a cry for help for anybody who was really looking to see it. More than I felt it was indicative of how he felt in a normal frame of mind in those relationships.

He pushed Abbot so far away. He pushed Dana so far away. He was overly harsh with Mohan. He was almost paternal with Javadi. He had a different vibe and energy with everybody. But ultimately it was to say goodbye.

I’m glad people felt [Robbys behavior] wasn’t appropriate because it was a man setting fire [to his life].”

In 2018, I wrote down a passing thought in my cheap little leather-bound journal I was writing a collection of songs in that would go on to become Preacher’s Daughter. “If I finish this album the way it needs to be finished, it will change my life, and it will leave a hole in my heart for years that I won’t know how to fill.” I’ve always had a knack for eerily accurate self-premonition. Preacher’s Daughter certainly left a hole, and it certainly changed my life, but only on the outside. All the songs I wrote for it were about characters, a girl in a “faraway” place living her “faraway” life, albeit still parallel to mine, but wholly detached from me. Willoughby was doomed to be closer to home. I wrote Nettles and Waco the same week, the first week I spent in the Alabama house where I would finish Preacher’s Daughter after so many years of trying. The difference was I wrote them about me. There were no characters at first; it was just me. In fact, I wrote them in an attempt to hide from Ethel Cain for a moment. She eventually devoured those little ditties too, of course, as she always does. In hindsight, I’m glad I had to share them with her. I couldn’t have carried the full weight of them myself, I know that now. My premonitions were out in full force; over the course of the next few years, I’d script out my own life in the same morbid fashion I always have. Maybe it was a lesson in not training my eye downward as I’ve spent the majority of my life doing.

I had 3 weeks for the holidays between mixing and submitting Perverts and jumping back into the maw of taming an unfinished Willoughby Tucker. I spent the first three months of 2025 on probation, unable to go much of anywhere, awake only when the sun was down. I’d never mixed a record of that magnitude, which was daunting with deadlines immovable. I remember 9am on my 27th birthday rolling around after being awake for hours whittling away at mixes, announcing the album and entire tour before going back to mix an album that still wasn’t done. I’ve never cried so much finishing a record, and that was before it was even out. Combining your Saturn return, your first shot at true love, and the longest tour of your life is something I would never recommend to anyone. It was the death of both ego and everything around it. I couldn’t be more grateful. Never in my life have I been so turned inside out, so uprooted and unraveled. Looking back, I needed it more than anything.

robinavitch’s fledgling

“princess rhaenyra was a different matter. daemon spent long hours in her company, enthralling her with tales of his journeys and battles. he gave her pearls and silks and books and a jade tiara said once to have belonged to the empress of leng, read poems to her, dined with her, hawked with her, sailed with her, entertained her by making mock of the greens at court, the “lickspittles” fawning over queen alicent and her children. he praised her beauty, declaring her to be the fairest maid in all the seven kingdoms. ” — fire & blood