#being old

found this on accident, made me think of you !!! Good soup !!!

Natalia Shalosvilli :: seasoflife

* * * *

This is one superpower of being old: You know that things are probably going to work out without your tense, controlling input. Maybe you won’t get your way, which I hate, but the roiled ponds of misunderstanding and hurt will settle. Older age gives us the knowledge of how powerless we are — not helpless so much but with little control over life’s results. I don’t love this. You come to forks in the road where you think, I can’t bear this, I can’t do this, I can’t fix this; I see no reason for hope. Plus, what if Iran gets involved, and what if there’s a nuclear exchange, and what if this is the end?

But then, if you are old, you remember countless other falling-outs, other miserable patches with people you love, where peace was restored. I believe in the resiliency of relationships, even if I struggle not to be initially devastated every time I disappoint someone. This is the main advice I give younger people who get troubled and stuck. I say, “Yes, it sounds really awful. Just do one good thing, and then another, and breathe. You’re going to be okay.” I tell them what John Lennon said: “Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.”

Anne Lamott

today i got peeved because water splashed on my shoe while i washed the backyard furniture

i think of her often, that little girl unafraid to skin a knee or stub a toe or get her hands dirty because she was just having fun. she was just living

when did it get so serious?

It's time for me to admit my greatest shame...

I am in my 30s.

That's right, I'm the weird one who wont get off the internet. I'm supposed to be having kids and working a Job™ and instead I'm on Tumblr, the website that is very much so only populated by minors and not a collection of millennials and gen xers who will never move on.

One of the things I think I have to grapple with the most as an adult is endings. And not "oh god oh god I'm reaching the end" ending, but just stuff like the things I love and had been a constant in my life just... Concluding. Gone. I thought as a Firefly fan I could handle a show being cancelled but fact is I was a fraud, I didn't watch it until it was over.

But I'm talking long running, decade long loves. The things that I couldn't even think about ending. Like fucking Sesame Street.

What I'm saying is Nanami Kento was the realest dude.

The Venture Brothers ended after 15 years. Final Fantasy XIV hit its big ending after 10. Destiny had the best ending it possibly could have had with the Final Shape. Naruto ended for me twice, first the Manga then the Anime. I didn't even watch the Anime, but I watched those final episodes and just like finding out who gave birth to the Venture Bros, and just like watching the credits roll on my Warrior of Light, I felt an immense feeling of catharsis. This was it. It was over. my investment is satisfied.

Here FF14 players might be contractually obligated to post the screenshot after mentioning the screenshot and I don't wanna take chances.

There was a big part of me that thought the reason I had such an emotional reaction to these endings was because of the investment, and that I'd probably never experience anything like it again. I wont have that wave of memories, a joy of seeing however many years of history culminate into one big ending.

So Lower Decks was only like, 3 years old? And as the final minutes of the finale panned over all of the characters on the Cerritos we've grown attached to over the years, I felt the catharsis. I felt that my investment was satisfied.

And I'm going to feel it again, because I was a dumb idiot wrapped up in despair over being officially Old. I didn't feel satisfied by the endings of the things I loved because they were old, I felt satisfied because they were satisfying endings.

Apologies to the Queen Mary Wolf Parade 2005, Sub Pop

Apologies to the Queen Mary is on the short list of ‘00s indie records that I’d consider masterpieces. The funny thing is that my list, as someone who was there (or there-adjacent), is pretty well fixed in time, whereas the consensus among Zoomer critics continues to morph in ways I’d never have figured. (Or maybe it’s not funny, really—just always how time and memory work.) In 2008, I would’ve bet my left pinkie that TV on the Radio (and especially Return to Cookie Mountain) would be the defining band of the era. Meanwhile, in 2024 the Killers are still riding the same five songs to a second greatest hits record and fifty times TVotR’s monthly residuals; the National have tween fans; and I hold a mug weird. Time clowns us all and Wolf Parade are a dad band now, owners of a few anthems from the era before genuinely weird indie bands could near the summits of the pop chart, economically compelled to continue touring small theatres together despite both Boeckner and Krug having been more invested in other, even less profitable projects for some time now.

Wolf Parade is one of those bands with two lead singers who sound indistinguishable before you know the group well, and instantly identifiable thereafter (like John and Paul of the Beatles, or Felix and Will of Chapo Trap House). They’re both yowlers who let their voices crack pubescently as shorthand for the frayed emotional spectrum they traffic in, given to barking and hooting to help drive their bric-a-brac compositions forward. Boeckner is a lanky post-punk looking fuckboy in roughly the Richard Hell mould, given to posing sweatily in torn undershirts and starting projects with a succession of raven-haired keyboard players he’s also dating. He loves motorik dance rock and Wire, but also has a substantial helping of Bruce Springsteen in his songwriting. Krug is a stocky, normal-looking guy who doesn’t really meet your eyes and self-deprecatingly called his solo project Moonface. He writes lyrics that sound like philosophy and love letters translated from an alien language, and prefers his music to both thwack and quaver.

Their similarities give Wolf Parade coherence, but much of their dynamism comes from how the two singers pass the controls back and forth. Backed by electronics tinkerer Hadji Bakara and Arlen Thompson, a drummer (crucially) capable of serving as a rhythm section unto himself, Krug and Boeckner find the perfect balance between Krug’s experimental art collective predilections and Boeckner’s slyly sexual rock ‘n’ roll heart. Krug leads with the empty warehouse strut of “You Are a Runner and I Am My Father’s Son”; Boeckner parries with the hooky acoustic rocker “Modern World”; Krug closes with the brittle seven-minute dirge “Dinner Bells”; Boeckner responds with the pinkly-hued Suicide-Springsteen collab “This Heart’s on Fire.”

Both Boeckner and Krug have made wilder, stranger music elsewhere, and there are plenty of other brilliant Wolf Parade songs to be found across their subsequent records. But Apologies remains the greatest blend of their particular talents they ever managed, a perfect example of two guys pushing each other to do their best work. With luck, a future generation will reconsider Wolf Parade and its many, many satellites (Sunset Rubdown, Operators, Handsome Furs, Frog Eyes, Swan Lake, Divine Fits…) as one of the most interesting micro-scenes the whole post-alternative rock era produced. And if not, I’ll still be here spinning the record a few times a year, believing in it all all over.