hairsmellslikechoklit

[hairsmellslikechoklit]

I stopped to listen,

to hear you out.

Gave you an ear and

a mustard seed of faith. Startled out of the fog that you led me into,

my eyes found their focus

just in time to see you slipping a blade

out from behind your guitar. You said that hearts make for perfect cushions for

the underside of your docs

and that they feel just fine underfoot.

I jumped back just in time barely missing my throat

being slit.

I bared my soul

for the dream of the cause.

I'm dearly missing love feeling like love instead of

a request for my su!cide

by way of great marketing.

My mind jumps back to the time

when love was the whole point and not a codename for wmd's.

I miss the portal.

I miss the transport.

I miss the rush and

the oneness.

The connection to more.

The kiss of something special.

Ah, no wonder my calls couldn't connect!

I was talking into

two tin cans tied with twine.

I thought your heart may have

understood mine

but this love of mine, according to you,

is most valuable to you

when smeared along the bottom of your luxury shoe

and my blood will not be

your sport.

My heart will never again

be open to you.

Your heart will never be

a safe harbor for truth.

Your truth is that you

are very, very, very small

because you refuse to grow.

All false love, no real connection.

All these characters

and no real love to show for it.

So all I can do now, is go.

[hairsmellslikechoklit]

— josé olivarez // natalie diaz

[hairsmellslikechoklit]

Do you ever feel guilty? Do you ever regret it? Ever wish that you could make amends? All of the carnage left floating in your wake. Body after body after body, left bobbing on the surface as your pleasure boat chugs by. Limbs and torsos and hearts chopped and mutilated by the merciless propellers of your good time. Proud as an apex predator; hawking promises of love and care and connection that you never planned to make good on. You are nothing like you say and are exactly as you seem. Declaring that you're Neptune god of the sea when in reality, you're just an arrogant self-serving a$s in a shitty dinghy. The brutality of apathy. The glamorous lure of an exotic romance. Young minds desperate for adventure, old minds desperate for a second chance at youth. But after you kissed her hard and told her that you really like the look of her in a wet shirt, you shoved her overboard in the blink of an eye. Her, confused by the abrupt shock of cold and salt and abyss. You, grinning like a Cheshire cat and already eyeing the beach for new friends. I believe that tormenting women and seeing them in pain and distress makes you c_m. You drone on and on about how deeply you love the sea. But every sunbather, swimmer or mermaid that ever crossed your path was left injured and yearning for the mountains instead of the coast. Strange how the sea can share so many similarities with the Sahara. Glittering and undulating and immense as outer space as it siphons the life right out of you. Lie by lie, betrayal by betrayal. But here you are, salty and dangerous and merrily puttering off and smiling to yourself contentedly as though you did her some sort of a favor by abandoning her in deep water to figure out how to get back to shore alone. May Neptune's trident never find me, may good fortune bring all souls lost at sea back to dry land.

[hairsmellslikechoklit]

Huh.

Looks like "your fav" un-stanned too. Bad sign.

[hairsmellslikechoklit]

Falling under the spell of stanning "the band" was one of the most cathartic yet most abusive periods of my life. It's real fucked up of "you", to play into/around with irl turmoil and suffering as a marketing gimmick for maintaining the cathedral of your absurdly large ego. Always insulting people for pleasure. "You" are EXACTLY who you claim to despise and I gave "you" too much credit. I gave "your crowd" too much credit. I gave "your mission statement" too much credit and I've rescinded the benefit of the doubt that I extended to you. "You know who you are", wherever you are, you ain't sh_t and you can gfy you trust fund'ed, schoolyard-watching, two-faced, fork-tongued walking skid mark. Karma.🗑🧿

[hairsmellslikechoklit]

Quiet

A new album and tour are coming and I honestly can hardly be bothered. I'm sure it'll all be beautiful, "the band" are tremendous artists. But for me, all the childish and hateful stan drama shit siphoned all of the fun out of anything involving them. Everything feels so damn different now, it all makes me so incredibly sad. The different layers of revelation. I very much miss the welling-up of excitement around their new projects. That bubbling of happiness is gone. The stains of everyone's true colors, I can't wash that off. The way they stomped on my heart for fun. What a shame indeed. I can say tho, that I don't miss the chaos. Being free of the rollercoaster of stanning "the band" has been a massive relief if I'm telling the truth. I guess ultimately, I miss when everything felt really good. It was a once in a lifetime experience and I suppose somewhere deep down, I'll always be mourning the death of that deeper emotional connection and enthusiasm.

[hairsmellslikechoklit]

On Love

As you go through life, your understanding of what love is and the way love works, changes. We're all sold an unrealistic standardized ideal of "what love is" and what love "should" look like. But the tendency in action, or at least how it seems to me, appears to be closer to *how* we love. How love is, moreso than what it is. How expressions of love expand and contract relative to who we're loving and all variables therein.

Love is a gift that your spirit offers to the world, an explosive emotion cultivated deep within you by way of whatever personal reasons specific to you. That said, regardless of how strongly you may feel (or *think* you feel) the world is NOT required to match your emotional tempo just because. You may feel a certain way about someone, but that does not mean that the object of your fixation or affection is required to feel the same way about you.

Love can't be bought. Cooperation can be bought, easily at times, and although cooperation is a structural function of love the two are very much NOT interchangeable terms. Manipulation is not love, a falsely contructed reality only works as a snare for attention and does not typically morph into fertile ground for real love.

Attention is not love. Attention is, simply, attention. Someone paying attention to you isn't an infallible indicator that they love you. Someone being openly romantically attracted to you isn't (necessarily) evidence that they love you. Someone being openly sexually attracted to you doesn't (necessarily) mean that they love you. Again, love can be expressed by way of those things yes, but they are not all terms that mean the same thing. People are capable of f-cking, and sometimes do f-ck people, that they do not love. Some people f-ck people that they don't even like or respect. Humans can move strangely and hazardously on occasion, chalk it up to the game. So attraction, as exhilarating as it can feel, should never be conflated with love.

Love is the gravitational pull that compels us to hope when things turn sour. It's the force that keeps you caring and urges you to stay supportive when the best case scenario turns into the worst case scenario. When the cute dinner dates, material gifts and gestures, pillow talk and "best foot forward" moments become more infrequent. When physical and mental health become more difficult to maintain under the heaviness of daily modern life; love helps you shoulder the work of physically caring for another person.

Real love never seeks to cause you pain or injury. Abuse is never love. Never, not once, not even a little tiny bit. Never. Love can demand uncomfortable work from us from time to time and love isn't always smooth or easy but it's never malicious. Love doesn't find joy in injuring you. Love moves to heal your injuries, not wound you further. Love is the struts of dedication and commitment. Love is the expression of gratefulness, joy and camaraderie cultivated by the experiences shared between people. I say all that to say that if someone (habitually) hurts you on purpose in the name of "love", be it for sport or proof of power, then that is not "love". At best it's a toxic dysfunctional mutation of love and at it's worst, it's a lie used to lull you into submitting to taking abuse.

On the personal responsibility side of things, just because you are not constantly coddled in your whims does not mean that you're not loved. Well-being doesn't start and stop with optimum comfort. Sometimes it takes work to build something great, and sometimes work can be very uncomfortable. But that discomfort is an energetic payment toward something you're positioning in your life that's meant to ultimately benefit/nurture you. It is incorrect to label you not having frivolous wishlists fulfilled, as "abuse". Furthermore, the trivial and flippant use of the word "abuse" is not only extremely distasteful, it's sets extremely dangerous precedents.

Once your personal definition of love is identified, it then becomes more about *how* to send that gift out into the world. Some relationships require intense emotional dedication while with others, some people (lover and love recipient both) may be better served by loving/being loved from afar.

Most important of all you learn to love yourself, and you find growth in understanding that loving yourself roots the love that you put out into the world in pure soil. That even when life throws a fastball made of shit your way (as life tends to do every so often), real love is not easily shaken because it's stands on its own legs and not just superficial gimmicks. That in all its variety of expression, real love is the only thing that will ever really matter.

[hairsmellslikechoklit]

"■l■x■ gr■■nl■■f"

The word "deserve" is NOT synonymous with the word "want". Getting “what you deserve” is the return of the energy that you pour into what you do. A return on the energy frequency that you send out into the world. _l_x_, no one cares what your lying, manipulative, spoiled, racist, envious, jealous, fake crocodile tears-crying ass "wants". What you DESERVE, is to pay every debt owed for the senseless damage that you've done.

• "She/Her" lit a forest fire because they couldn't force certain men into romantic relationships with them

• She/Her and co. is/are the combination of toxic weaponized yt priv and weaponized toxic feminism/femininity personified

• She/her is soothed by hurting others because she/her has experienced pain in the past

• She/Her covers their demands that you humor their inflated ego and vanity, with virtue-signaling 

• She/Her attempts to force you into feeling guilty for not catering to she/her

• She/Her is a transactional, heartless con-person and demands that the people of she/her's choice can and should be “bought”

• She/Her stacked lie on top of lie on top of lie

• She/Her is strongly suspected to have had and still have multiple burner accounts on social media multiple platforms, likely 10-20 accounts per each platform, through which she manipulated people into her sick game (she/her didn't know tho, that the people that they tried to play against one another, were in communication with and had real friendships with one another)

• She/Her's good deeds are covered with anthrax

• She/Her has a bottomless, insatiable hunger for attention. Good attention, negative attention, angry attention, as long as it’s about her then she/her wallows in it proudly like a pig in a mud pit

• She/Her, and I say this unpatronizingly, needs very very serious psychological help

My heart's great wish is for cosmic justice. That she/her, she/her's "friends", she/her's co-conspirators and any other parasitic hangers-on involved in the dee-aitch accusations situation reap exactly and precisely what they've sown. For their dangerous carelessness with others' lives, for their self-centered personalities that reek worse than a warehouse piled high with spent diapers baking in the hot summer sun, for both their closeted and out in the open yt suprem ways, their “velvet” racial discrimination all sloppily and disingenuously layered over with insincere virtue-signaling and false concern, for mocking the law and TRUE abuse victims by cosplaying sexual abuse victimhood as a ploy for more attention/more followers on social media...

Somehow, somewhere, when they least expect it, karma will tap them on the shoulder and fuck all of their shit up.

You don't mess with others people's free will.

You can't force people to love you or like you.

You can't force people to pretend that they feel things for you that they just do not organically feel, by threat of blackmail or public humiliation.

When you violate natural law, natural law always rights itself. Always.

I don't feel nervous or ashamed or embarrassed by how I talked to or interacted with anyone over the years, be that with other stans or people at dee-aitch. I never felt the need to flirt with, send nude pictures of myself to, perform/promise to perform sexual favors for, fake friendships to try to get more access with an.y.one. Pretending to be harmless in order to manipulate people isn’t my style. 

I don’t run on social media clout. I am who I am with my whole chest. I have a sense of self and a backbone that does not look to or rely on the court of public opinion. Translation: that means you hating ass stan hoes can eat me. I tried to share with you all in the spirit of friendship, but 99% of you stans acted spiteful and jealous about it, so go woof down a diseased d_ck then. :)

Even when I insisted that there was no need for all of that. That instead of gossiping and lying on each other in the shadows, why don’t we all just be friends instead? Well they decided to despise me instead of being friends, free world, their choice. But their choice showed their true colors in a way that they could no longer gloss over or explain away. Not because they didn’t want to be friends, but rather because of their reasons for pushing me back. 

Cuz they envied the cool shit I was able to do, cuz they didn’t get to do it. They despised that I got what they all so desperately wanted for themselves; all ironically achieved while not being a yt blonde malnourished fake woke woman-child. They convinced themselves that striving for brittle yellow hair and a prepubescent-looking body and ideological corruption was the "right" way to get what I got. Their dumbass philosophies, not mine. I didn't fit the formula and that made the stan chicks very very upset. They hated that they envied me, the anti-icon of their “scene”. Well, tough shit. Stay mad. ;*

I got the things that they wanted for themselves, and they can never take those incredible experiences that I had away from me. I treasure those experiences in a way that many stans have shown they simply aren’t capable of. Because they don’t seem to be capable of love, only capable of selfishness and destruction.

There's a lot of people in the stanosphere that should be (and likely are) very nervous and afraid of the possibility of the type of people that they truly are inside, being publicly revealed. They should be because a lot of them showed themselves to be really fucked up, twisted people.

[hairsmellslikechoklit]

For a second it all felt real, and that was magical. 🖤

[hairsmellslikechoklit]

Seen Queen

Was today years old when I realized that I was an actual scene chick, not the "turquoise baby Bieber swoop bangs n coon tails" aesthetic variety lol but, let me explain...

The kids of the generation known for the MySpace-bred "scene queen" or "scene kid" aesthetic were actually a little bit behind my own generation age-wise. Close enough in age to where there's some cultural relatability but still with a big enough age gap to be seen as one of the older kids that the late 2000's and early 2010's tweens looked up to for their social and style queues. In layman's terms, I lived the life (for the most part) that the scene kids tried to emulate.

Many ("MANY" not "all",) millennials and zoomers, goaded on and souped-up by superficial ass social media culture, seemed to adopt a very intense "monkey-see-monkey-do" manner of traversing the social landscape. Unquestioned & complete loyalty to the idea of mimicry. Which always tickled me because for a niche of kids whose battle cry was pretty much "individuality or death!", scene kids always read (to me) like a pack of neon-colored dead-eyed mindless clones. All, quite colorfully, doing the exact same things for reasons they themselves could never seem to clearly explain. Not an original or unique thought to be found for hundreds of square miles lol, just blind obedience to whatever they thought would make them appear edgy or cool to their peers and a lot of boasting about their forced, performative quirkiness. Cookie-cutter clothes, hairstyles, music tastes, talking points etc. "Listen to [insert random indie screamo band name here] if you REALLY want to be 'scene', you may not like the music but just force yourself to listen to it until you start to like it!" type of vibes. So let me get this straight, scene kids forced themselves to listen to music that they actually DISLIKED during their friggin leisure time, just so they could falsely claim to be a "fan" of said band even though they didn't personally enjoy that particular band's music? Or buying "followers" for social media accounts through shakey third party sites, then pretending to engage with those fake paid-for followers as though they're actually their irl friends on their account timelines? A culture of pathological lying and shock value stunts for any morsel of internet attention they can scrounge up?? Weirdos lol. Cute or whatever if you're some middle or high schooler trying to figure out how to outwardly express your personal style and/or who you think you feel that you are. Super childish and off-putting coming from adults. And extremely frustrating when you have to deal with such childish, self-absorbed mindsets and antics in adult spaces. Imitation isn't flattery to me as the old adage goes, it's theft imo. Inspiration or homage are totally different, cuz there's reverence being paid to the source idea in one way or another. But being too lazy to cultivate a personality of your own, to then recklessly copy+paste someone else's personality onto yours, TO THEN go scurrying around the internet streets looking for pats on the back for authenticity kudos for the shit you flat-out STOLE from someone else??? Illogical, unsettling, strange and gross. We didn't try to convince people that buying concert tickets was a talent or personality trait.

Now me and mine, we went to shows cuz we enjoyed the music, with no agenda past enjoying the night.

[hairsmellslikechoklit]

Den of 🐍🐍🐍's

With a fever dream soundtrack meant to chronicle the chase of the pulse of the zeitgeist; unearthly music crafted by loving, thoughtful hands oh so pillowy-soft with privilege. Through the thick watercolor fog, the eaves of a structure slowly came into focus. A neon sign that read the lie "all are welcome" pretzeled into cursive font and glowing a humid blush pink. The coaxing before the turn.

Waiting inside for me was a funhouse of racialized sociopolitical & emotional terrorism. A hoard of grinning self-proclaimed Mother Teresa's all running at you with bloody butcher knives and hatchets in a wide-eyed frenzy, chiding you about how your screams from being blood-let are "killing the vibe". For a p.o.c. (a p.o.c. without aspirations to be yt/for yt social acceptance at least), the place felt like the lobby to hell. A fucked up hideaway of dark delights where kids sought out pain, instead of fun, as proof of their "good time". A thick, pungent, oily goulash of racial micro and macroaggressions. Hints of a more subtle sort of misogyny and a culture rife with the sexual grooming of teen girls and young women, in the chic sheep's clothing of fully grown male "feminists" whose "respect for women" only goes about as far as pert 19 y.o. bra-less ivory breasts are in arm's reach for the fondling at sir's convenience; after which of course said breasts as well as the women attached to them are promptly discarded. Transactional "respect". Sadism and joy found in injuring others. And the constant breathless, death-odored romanticism of mental health ailments, eating disorders, substance abuse, emotional abuse and masochistic stunts put on full public display with the aim of forcing strangers to pay attention to them via shock value tactics. Any other spare moments where you weren't made to run from being actively attacked, were reserved for the endless low end moan and groan of sucking capitalism off. A torched, spent landscape crawling with entitled upper middle class yt women filled to their brims with equal parts caustic insecurity and raging superiority complex. Hailing from their gated yt communities, educated at schools with a mostly yt student body and yt faculty teaching a yt curriculum, shopping mainly at yt retailers selling goods targeted at yt consumers, yt friends and yt coworkers. Bubble-wrapped and shielded by their questionabley-obtained wealth from ever having to deal with the full ramifications of their actions nor the immense gravity of reality. With everything from the tips of their blonde eyelashes to the line of the horizon, scrubbed and wiped clean of anything and everyone brown. Having scarcely a one p.o.c. close personal friend or family member, yet somehow each of them scamper over each other like crabs in a barrel to puff up their chests in attempt to yell the loudest from atop their soapboxes (constructed of actual Blk ppl's skulls at that) their tall tales of how "liberal and accepting and inclusive" they are all are. A huge ego circle jerk based in the fantasy of their flimsy "good heartedness". So "inclusive" that they only included other fellow yt ppl that also boast about how "inclusive" they also are, but still happily and cheekily excluded all of the actual brown ppl???

I wandered in there hoping to find a retreat, but I stumbled out barely escaping being ripped to pieces. I thought the things that make me happy, made them happy too. I sincerely tried to share that, and myself, with them. But jealousy and misery brought them happiness, and they found the things that made me happy useless.

They hated that I didn't envy them. Their experiences, their mindset, their look and their way; soaked through and dripping with false concern, absentee virtue and thorough mediocrity. A grand charade of pretending to be decent. None of them ever made the cut for any of my pedestals. None of them.

I never needed to feel accepted by them and that pissed them off. Even more so when I got what they wanted (or rather what they coveted). I never needed to prove myself to them, I never needed their permission and they loathed me for it. I did what they were afraid to do and they scorched in envy over it. I never cried myself to sleep wishing that I was blonde or emaciated. I never wished I was younger as to be accepted by them. Never felt the need for them to see me as cool. Certainly didn't want to hang out in their cesspool. And they simply couldn't imagine someone like me not being jealous of people like them, so they made up whatever they needed to to soothe their own rancid egos.

I witnessed all of this from the inside. In their group chats and message boards. While they talked around me as though I wasn't there, entertained by and blissfully convinced of their perceived "superiority" over me, they didn't realize that I'd been watching and listening the whole time. The way they regard each other enviously but pretend to be the most bestest of bestest best friends in the whole entire world with people they not-so-secretly despise in hopes of gathering up social currency (as well as social media currency) spoils for themselves. They plot and plan and scheme on each other. Harrrass each other. Hoping to undercut and undermine each other in order to win a grand prize of hot air. Wallowing proudly in the absolute worst of human nature while simultaneously wondering why all this despair doesn't feel like joy.

They don't realize that I've seen the back end of all of their smokescreens and gimmicks. They are a crowd of trust fund babies mostly pretending to have hard luck stories while daddy pays the rent on luxury apartments and furnishings and tuition and car notes and insurance premiums. All needs and responsibilities tidily handled elsewhere so that they can go on pretending their parttime gig at that instagramable sandwich shop (that they call out sick from every week) is what keeps them in the luxurious lifestyle of which they're accustomed. The "bleeding heart for global and social issues" song and dance they all seem to do from a soapbox with a megaphone only goes as far the amount of likes or new followers they think doing so will get them. They treat eating disorders and mental/emotional trauma like a fashion statement for cool points amongst themselves. All of them so fucking "sad" and so fucking bored that they're so well taken care of in their spoiled and comfortable lives. Pampered and provided for to the point that the only thing that seems to thrive in them is absolute vanity, viciousness and a bottomless appetite for any kind of attention that they can manage to scrounge up. They are morbidly selfish and incurabley self-centered. They are pathologically dishonorable and untrustworthy. They are soulless and heartless. All are allowed to walk inside sure, but all are certainly NOT "welcome", and the unwelcome are quickly designated as targets for target practice. That was made abundantly crystal glacial water clear.

They are NOT my tribe and I won't be returning.

[hairsmellslikechoklit]

2019 ABIIOR

- Show#8: The Roxy. Bomb ass intimate venue show. Miserable, torturous queuing experience. Kids cut the line, kids shit-talked each other for days on end. Misery on misery on misery, not my idea of fun at all. The beginning of me officially losing my patience with concert camping culture.

- Show#9: Much quieter camping experience. Was invited as a guest of an ex-friend to the m&g the morning of the show. Matty was a precious, took one of my favorite pictures with him. The show that night was nothing short of dreamy, he seemed to be feeling good, the band sounded great. 3 thumbs up.

- Show#10: I had one more show lined up after this one but something came up and I wasn't able to go. So #10 is my last 75 show attended. Mellow camping situation, picturesque venue, band looking and sounding on point. Made it into the band's tour IG post, I look like a werewolf in the middle of screaming lyrics lol but it's cool to have such a special night immortalized.

[hairsmellslikechoklit]

2018 Pre-ABIIOR

- Got a ABIIOR care package in the mail (DH mailed a select amount out to randomly selected fans around the world). The 1975... you got a blessing coming lol.

- Won tix to the ABIIOR listening party through a radio contest. One of my most cherished experiences with the band, I love bts shit. Took a polaroid with best good friend and the band while Matty used my shoulder for a jungle gym and suspended his feet off the ground. I laughed, it made for an unreal picture. I had so many more questions, I wished we'd had 20 more mins. One of my favorite days to date.

[hairsmellslikechoklit]

2017 ILIWYSFYASBYSUOI

- Show #5: My first m&g with them in the afternoon. When it's me and my best good friend's turn to take a picture with them I hand him a card. It's really fast but they're all very sweet and friendly. Best good friend and I bounce to grab pre-show dinner, we get drunker than we'd planned. At the venue I get one more drink, it's seated and I scored front row seats so I'm here to party. Show starts and I'm shitfaced. Matty sings Me and I have a meltdown cuz life's been fucking rough. Right there on barricade for all band and crew to witness and pity lol. Matty feels bad for me, comes up and sings the intro for fallingforyou while holding my hand. I'm embarrassed and I appreciate his kindness. I made a fool of myself but still a great show.

- Show# 6: It's seated but a great view. Matty's wearing a beautiful suit, security threw a heckler out. A good night. A great show

- Show# 7: G/A, squeezed into a little pocket on barricade, score. Matty does the Medicine guitar solo right in my face, I egg him on energetically. We do the dance off thing to Girls again, I think he kinda remembers my goofy face at this point. A better show than the last, I feel full and alive.

- Show# 8: MSG. Nothing to see here just a small indie band jumping into the big leagues. The merch shirt I wanted sold out early, bummer. Floor seats in the back section with best good friend. Drunk once more and here to dance, that's just what we did. Still looking for that MSG shirt.

- Band is recording nearby. I had a sappy letter I'd written to them that I'd hoped to hand off at the next show but since they were recording nearby I figured I'd go try my luck. Hung around outside the studio for a bit to see if I (well me and best good friend) could catch them leaving. We caught them leaving. The gate opened and Matty was hanging halfway out of the passenger side window, he said he didn't think there'd be anyone outside. He called us over to him, but my letter wasn't quite finished. He said to bring it another day, told us how long they planned to be there and to come back any day around the same time.

- Came back the next week with my letter finished, alone this time. Dunno if he ever read it but it felt good to at least get the words into his hands. He asked my name and I got a pic with him. Looking back on the timing, I wonder if I was one of the last fans he interacted with before going to rehab, that idea and the album that followed still sit in a peculiar but special place in my heart. ICBMIL is one of my favorite songs and I think he did sessions for that song while at that studio.

[hairsmellslikechoklit]

2016 ILIWYSFYASBYSUOI

- Show#1: Caught The 1975's set at the music festival, left feeling confused and impressed and way more curious about who these guys were lol.

- ILIWYS and debut album are now on repeat, Somebody Else in particular. My best good friend notices my Spotify seems to be frozen on Somebody Else. She tells me she loves the song too and that a guy she was dating at the time was really into The 1975 and put her on to them, they have plans to attend their show later in the year.

- Things don't pan out with best good friend's gentleman friend and they stop seeing each other. She now has a spare ticket to the concert and invites me to go with her.

- Show#2: Best good friend and I go to the concert expecting to enjoy a good concert. We instead, and each of us on our own, have an out-of-body experience. Tobias' lighting masterpiece, the colors, the energy of the songs, the vibes, Matty's manner on stage. We weren't ready. Neither of us was ready. We leave the show a couple of disoriented wound-up lovestruck schoolgirls. We buy bootleg tshirts in the parking lot cuz the real ones are all sold out. We get in the car to head home and try to figure out how we're gonna get to another show asap.

- Show#3: We get last minute stubhub tix for the next concert a city over, literally like 6 hours before the showtime. We loose our minds again. I get some real merch this time. We're both officially knee-deep in the shit now.

- Ravenous consumption of The 1975 media. Music on heavy rotation, interviews articles, message boards, social media, the fucking works. Got all caught up on everything I missed by not being down with the band during the debut album promo cycle.

- Show#4: In a fomo fit, best good friend and I plan to get on a plane and camp to try to get a good spot in g/a. We get there early to find ppl already camped. We grumble and bicker and sleep semi-rough for two days but we pull barricade. We hand a gift off to Matty. Matty sings Paris standing on a speaker right above my head. Matty is doing the guitar outro for Girls, he slumps down to catch my line of sight cuz I'm watching his guitar and we lock eyes and have a 5 second dance-off with each other. I playfully say "you're stupid!" to him and we both giggle. I catch, drop and re-secure Hann's guitar pick. Heavenly.

[hairsmellslikechoklit]

2014-2015

Fall 2014 - One of my best good friends mentions The 1975 to me. Highly recommends and she thinks I'd be into it. I read a blurb or two about them but never sit down and give them a listen.

Winter 2015 - Going through the lineup of a music festival I was planning to go to the following year, I come across The 1975 again. The name rings a bell but I didn't quite remember why in the moment. I listened to UGH!, Chocolate, Love Me and Heart Out. I am intrigued and I make note to catch their set.

[hairsmellslikechoklit]

Why?

Because I love the arts. I love and feel inspired by people that are intensely passionate about creating art. I love learning about the stories behind the art that I love. Because I love to pick creatives' brains. I love the wholesome feedback loop of gifting an artist with a little piece of my own heart in exchange for the piece of themselves that they shared with the world that happened to find its way to little ol' me and provided me with comfort and or inspiration. Because I love a well-orchestrated visual spectacle. Because I love solid musicianship and sick choreo and strong vocals and thoughtful lyrics and big full harmonies and moody lighting and jumbotrons. I love art that I can get lost in, art that makes you think and make connections, art that stops you in your tracks and draws a gasp from you, and artists that pride themselves on craftsmanship and bringing you art that you can sink your teeth into. I love to shower artists with encouragement and let them know that all of their effort and energy are sincerely appreciated because they've often had difficult and or complicated lives and everyone loves a morale boost. Because I like to have fun and I treasure how artists have more fun seeing that I'm also having fun so it becomes a love fest of all of us having fun together. I love to connect with the art that I admire on a more personal, intimate level. It was always about the enhanced human connection for me. It's never been about sex or power (or the power of wielding sex) or popularity or pissing contests or blue check bedpost notches, at least not for me. Simply, I've always been in search of being moved, especially in times of personal turmoil. These are the main motivators for why I stan, the way that I stan.

So much was packed into just a few short years. Fate lined up for me in a curiously serendipitous way. I've been lucky enough to have had some very special experiences throughout the years with The 1975. Moments we're grateful for often get lost in the shuffle and chaos of life. I'm logging my experiences here, so I can remember and reminisce. Who am I? I was someone that was being swallowed by grief that stumbled upon a bed of creativity that soothed and excited me.

I found The 1975's music by pure chance, I was cruising the artist roster for a music festival that I was planning to attend, trying to figure out whose set I wanted to make a point to see. Well the band made points as well lol, I saw their set at the music festival and it sent me down a rabbit hole. And I've been Alice for the last five years, overjoyed and (at the same time) terrified at my time spent in Wonderland. It was a real rodeo of a ride. The parts that sucked sucked in a major way lol, but when it was good it was REALLY good. I'm so thankful that I was the one able to experience it all.

🌿