What I'm doing right now

Reading

Finished Ban en Banlieue and I still don't have a clean sentence for what it did to me. Some books leave a bruise instead of a summary. Switched to poetry on purpose, Hanif Abdurraqib's There's Always This Year, which is about basketball and grief and Columbus and somehow about every room you ever grew up in.

Writing

Song lyrics, mostly. A growing pile of them and I still don't know which ones are for a record and which ones were just for me to have written down. There's an essay forming about the difference between being liked and being known. It keeps refusing to be polite about it, so I'm letting it be rude.

Listening to

Type O Negative weather arrived early and I am nothing if not predictable. That band has been the sound of every September I can remember. The new Spiritbox single on repeat because that voice does something to my ribs. And one Loathe song after midnight, the one that sounds like fog deciding to become a wall.

Thinking about

About alone versus lonely. People mix them up constantly. You can be lonely in a full room and alone in the good way at two in the morning with a record spinning, and only one of those is a wound. Also September, how nothing actually resets but the air smells like it does, and I fall for that trick every single year. Fine. Falling for it again.

Working on

Songs. One of them crossed the line from idea to actual thing this week, which is the exact moment it gets terrifying. Otherwise it's maintenance season. Keeping the lamps on, tending things, the unglamorous work nobody brags about. It counts.