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[lovethesequelbaybee]

the past and pending.

when i was about to leave Iowa City for an internship with a film production company in Los Angeles in late 2014, preceded by the most decimating breakup i've ever experienced and my college gradation, i found myself fixated on walks.

you see, one of the cruelest parts about this heartbreak was its geography. my apartment was in the 800 block of Jefferson St., just East of campus (campus being 0 in this equation) and my ex lived in a giant, decaying house on the 600 block of Jefferson St.

so for the last two months-ish that i had in this small city that had been my home for 3 and a half years, i had to edit my route to either go a block North or South so as to avoid the source of my heart's plunging, merciless aching.

the cold seemed to reach every cell in my skinny bones that winter, and with the incoming graduation and move my head seemed to become more electrified with the need to LEAVE and thrive, although i wasn't convinced the latter was even possible given how severely my world had been torn apart.

even when i did avoid her street, i'd either see it from neighboring Market St. if i had decided to veer North or picture it in my mind if I was South. knowing it was there was draining to my soul but exhilarating to my potential new soul i could spur a bloom from once i just made it out to California and to my inevitable dreams in comedy and film and tv. which would obviously be easy. *cue record scratches on a loop*

the music that was heavy for me during this time was but is not limited to: Beck's Morning Phase, the entirety of Pavement's discography—especially "Spit On A Stranger", "Frontwards", and "Here"— Ben Kweller, that damn song from Linklater's Boyhood, Cataldo's Guilded Oldies, the 88, and perhaps most importantly and painfully, Waxahatchee's American Weekend (supposedly recorded all over a weekend acid trip), which felt like it had purposely been written with me and my sentimentalities in mind.

So i stretched my legs in speedy bursts, many of these moments wasted or hungover, and tried to make the time past as swiftly as possible. news of my internship had spread through my friend group and university PR dayjob (spread by me), and it seemed everywhere i went people were asking me for more details on what i would be doing. i could see the nervousness in some people and the overconfidence others had in me for how a life in Los Angeles would go for me. many times i felt i expertly could discern whether someone looked at me always having known i would get the fuck out of iowa someday and those who thought i'd wimp out 2 weeks in and request to move home.

at a morning office birthday party (or maybe it was a going away party for me?i honestly can't remember) a bunch of staunchy PR ass university corporate fuck types whose names i can't even now recall congratulated me on my next big step in life, and i found myself more tolerant of them than i expected to be, even paling around and faking an interest in the latest university basketball game. when the small party ended and i walked back to my desk, i was reminded of why it had seemed to fun for a moment there, why i believed them so much for a second. the reason was because i was still quite drunk from the night before. i hadn't showed and i looked like shit. but that was going in and out of my awareness and care. i mostly just tried to focus on the humor of having had trouble staying on the sidewalk on my walk to work that day. i was almost to drunk to walk. the hangover that bled in wiped the smile off my face pretty damn fast, however.

but positive or negative, buzzed or plastered, i pressed on and these moments and days that only really encompassed November 1 to December 20th or so couldn't help but secure themselves as assuredly monumental. even as a (extremely recent) Psychology minor, i knew enough about the acuteness of my depression at that time and pop culture-influenced magnitude set behind the changes of graduating, leaving my home state, and losing a lover i could tell these times would not be easily Spotless Mine'd.

if i ever write a memoir, even if it's 25 years from now, i feel i would have plenty of still visceral pain to draw from and recall. but in case i don't, here are a few of them to keep in mind:

my shitty orange coffee maker

the sea of flannel shirts and sweaters i mostly had to throw away having bought them with my ex or been gifted them by her

sidewalks, sidewalks, sidewalks

the creepy Seashore Hall building where my filming equipment was stored

the late nights i would get drunk with Cara or Kylie or Emily or Alex or whoever was drinking

the endless anonymous tumblr's where i published my heartbroken thoughts

the smell of the gluten free bread from the cult-y co-op grocery store

speaking about my ex in the present "together" sense to the stem cell researcher during an interview for one of the University of Iowa CORP's many squeaky-clean bullshit PR schemes

that last night of drinks with S***** in that wooden bar that only took cash

that last kiss or hug i can't recall which

so many tears in the cold, cold, Iowa wind

the corkboard Nikes and green denim skinny jeans i wore during this time

the way i hated me hair and didn't want it cut or long

the way i despised having been broken up with by someone who i knew never found me attractive at all and continuing to try to impress them when much healthier people were actually interested in me

Okay, wow, so there is some fodder for the future. Delicious details, highly ranging in cliche level. why does melodrama feel so good. still so apt for this period of time.

I don't know if I could ever go back to Iowa City and not go back in time.

the last time i remember being there was for the Floodwater Comedy Festival in either 2018 or 2019. even though some restaurants had changed and buildings had spurted higher and kids looked really young and the t-shirt shop in town (yeah, it's the one you're thinking of) was no longer hip and was in fact, passé, i couldn't really accept any of these updated details as a reality. i kept seeing the places i'd first been drunk, or high, or twisted (drunk and high). The first house party, the first time i got lost, the first time i was threatened, the first time i interviewed a university official, the first time i'd been broken up with in an academic building, the last time i saw her, the last house show i went to, the last time i ate her p****, the first guy i kissed, the second and third guy i kissed, the first time i felt overwhelmed, the first time i felt silly for feeling overwhelemed, the last time i felt like a kid, the last time i felt like a fool, the last time class ended for the rest of forever.

leaving Iowa City in December 2014 i felt like i'd aged a decade even though it had only been August 2011 when i'd arrived. i was heading out to a big place i had trouble understanding (and still do), but now, at 30, in my North Holllywood apartment, with a handful of scripts and a few albums of songs, many standup gigs and improv gigs and sketch gigs and entertainment gigs under my belt, i can finally fucking say i know myself better than i used to.

sometimes i miss not knowing, but i know the search isn't done and neither is the hurt or the cum or the laughs or the sunsets.

gag me.

-eric

[lovethesequelbaybee]

me & kurt.

10 Famous People With Scoliosis. That's how it started. I don't often admit that my obsession with Nirvana and Kurt Cobain as a 14-year-old in 2008 came from some ugly html website meant to make kids feel more at ease with their spinal deformities.

It was always cooler to explicate a more cinematic moment; the first time someone puts on "Smells Like Teen Spirit" for you, the first time you see that yellow squiggle subversion of the smiley face adjoined to the serif-font NIRVANA t-shirt on some doomy mall goth, the first time the local classic rock station in town injects "Come As You Are" into your earlobes.

But the truth is though I was abstractly aware of the magic in those melodies and production, I didn't really feel and understand the music until I learned more about the person's life who'd written them.

Seeing Kurt as the only cool, shaggy-haired, and haphazardly-dressed person on the list (also the only dead person), my pre-teen raised-as-a-boy brain was firing and I began watching YouTube docs on his life, his drawings, his art, his lamentations, his sarcastic quips, his gravely low drawl affixed to his dry humor, his blue eyes that burst so lively even in black and white photographs.

Like this dude, I was a skinny blonde depressive, friends with the theatre kids and music kids and newspaper kids and ridiculed with homophobic slurs by the jock breeds. I also lived in a small, lame town that was frequently cold and whose only hangout was a single coffee shop and whose only excitement could be found via vandalism, cursing, Apatow-era comedies, and loud music.

The chronic pain in my spine and my weak frame didn't feel so brittle when I could blast through Nevermind and In Utero in between watching and rewatching live performances, interviews, and eventually reading three different biographies of the man (which, surprisingly, I all rented from my Christian-ass high school library, known to not carry certain books that may have been too edgy or subversive. Fuck, in that town, Pepperjack Cheese was subversive).

I ripped holes in my jeans and grew my hair long and washed it less. I got droopier sweaters with bigger stripes and exclusively wore sneakers.

I don't know that I would've been cognizant of or able to articulate this then, but I had never before seen an artist be so capable of humor and melancholy simultaneously. Around my friends, I was jocular and amiable and the facilitator for hangout or party logistics. Internally and corporeally, I was in pain, deep, constant, chronic pain. Walking, sitting, standing, sleeping, it all hurt. It made me resent the things around me, the people I loved, the books I had to carry.

Every chance I got to implement Kurt or Nirvana into an English paper or journalistic endeavor for the school paper, I would. Knowing the band's impact and lifespan were so immense yet so limited made me crave every single detail, even though so many of them were yarns by Kurt himself. I related, often embellishing my own personal stories and dreams into something resembling a caricature of myself.

I may have been a lithe, witty kid to everyone around me, lustless and harmless to boys and girls who felt no pain and were fortunate enough to experience that "immortal" feeling so consistently and often inappropriately affixed to teenagers.

I was very aware I was mortal, I couldn't think from all the misery my body was inflicting on me. I wanted to die.

But at the same time I felt like if this emaciated and misunderstood kid across the country in some other shitty frigid town could make a big impact on the world and art, maybe I could too. Maybe I could do it and not die. I mean, at the time I honestly was young enough to believe the conspiracy theories about his death. I, like many people used to and many still do, considered suicide weakness, a failure, something someone I loved who was so dead could and would not succumb to doing.

So in the minutiae of Kurt's short life, I would cling to the similarities: On freezing bus trips to neighboring towns for improv and other speech/theatre-related meets or competitions, I would look out the window and reread Heavier Than Heaven and find solace in Krist describing he and Kurt befriending some kids in Iowa on the road while waiting in line for Taco Bell, I would wonder which Iowa town and if my school bus was passing by it on the way to my performance and I would feel an almost spiritual kinship to thinking it might have been that town right there. If I had been the right age and the universe had been kind I might have met him. I wore converse and Levi's because he did, bought "grandma sweaters" as my girlfriend at the time would call them because he did. I drowned myself with all the influences he indicated he was inspired by or straight up "copying": Pixies, REM, The Vaselines, etc. etc. etc.

And though this obsession would fade as I got into other music and issues and as my back surgery in late 2008 quelled a lot of my physical ailments, the flame would fail to burn out over the years. And, perhaps due to my back surgery or all the stress and pain pills I'd had to take over the years, my stomach soon mimicked many of Kurt's stomach issues, IBS a blanket term for what doctors gave up on learning about (according to both Kurt and me now, at 30, having just had a colonoscopy and still not having many answers on why my stomach can handle less and less types of food every year).

It's comical how much of a poser I felt like for getting so into Nirvana in the mid-to-late 2000's, as if it was my fault I was born too late to see them live. Now in 2022 I'll see comments on YouTube videos of Gen Z folks typing about how much they love Kurt and Nirvana unabashedly, praising his prescient feminist, genderqueer, and anti-racist and capitalist tendencies, alongside his knack for high-powered, heavy pop and rock melodies with lyrics that could be stupid and sagacious all at once.

I felt wrong for the false nostalgia I had held onto, felt like I was disrespecting what real grunge kids in the 90's had really experienced. This was before I understood that nostalgia doesn't always have to be one's own; the kids playing teens on That 70's Show were making a living off of other people's nostalgia for god's sake.

And now I'm nostalgic for that nostalgia. For 2008. For the moments in between class where I was smartphoneless and rereading the same passages about the Reading Festival or SNL performance. For my stomach's previous durability and the simple existence of completing homework without a job or taxes or the knowledge of true intimacy with another person.

Being a teen is one of the most miserable times in your life, especially if you're chronically ill, furtively queer, and so full of emotions and creativity that seems to have no vehicle for existence. And I miss it dearly.

"Teenage angst has paid off well, now I'm bored and old" Kurt sang. And I'm happy to know more of who I am now. Grateful to have lived longer than Kurt. But I do miss the spark of that intense emotion sometimes. I have to focus more to try to access it now. Trying to access it is like trying to write when you don't feel like it, it simply can't happen. The "psychodelic angel" from Conor Oberst's "Landlocked Blues" is not always "tugging on your hand." You need a breakup or song or film or conversation to ignite the embers of youth, of intense hormones, of that particular throb.

Part of what he was looking for and trying to explore is what has kept me alive. Part of him lives in me, or so it feels like it. That's an amazing thing for art that was written off as depressing junk by a lot of my parents' generation to do.

Sometimes I'm depressing junk. Sometimes I'm attempting to be the life of the party. I'll probably always be skinny and blonde and physically feeble. But when I'm doing standup or writing a song or editing a script or drawing a picture, nobody can stop me from needing to endure those processes and the catharsis they provide. Nobody can pilfer what I feel.

[lovethesequelbaybee]

fri.day.nite.

the older i get the more i want to just be comfortable and warm and have food i like that won't make me sick and watch something that makes me cry. basically just going full grandmacore.

honestly it's a fun era of self to be in. i say things like this was years ago as preambles to stories. sometimes i'm honest about not remembering meeting someone instead of acting like i knew i have. even still, people who forget meeting me more than like, twice go on the naughty list forever.

not that good naughty list that's like your own personal sex positive fetish menu, more just like the naughty list we were all brought up on as kiddos.

ugh, side note, anyone who calls their partner 'kiddo'. like, yuck.

not much else to say in this dispatch other than i'm enjoying the things i can control and working at accepting the gradual processes of life. allowing boredom but stopping it before it becomes despair. having a senioritis about the holiday-ish break i'll get from work. remembering it's all relative and lamenting the fact i'll have to spend some of my off time with my relatives.

but loved and grateful and present, except when i'm stuck in old songs or traumas. which is daily, when i listen to songs connected to traumas.

good eve to ye all,

eric

[lovethesequelbaybee]

It’s always been difficult to determine whether visiting my family is “a good time.”

The immediate reaction when most people ask me whether a trip was enjoyable is to say yes immediately because of guilt. Most people’s parents suck so much and mine really don’t. They’re pretty open minded and accepting overall, especially considering they’re boomers who have mostly lived in the Midwest.

But just because there aren’t any dramatic, HBO Familial Drama level problems in my relationship with them doesn’t mean every visit is good. Or that I should always be in the mood to see them. Or that we don’t have issues at all.

I’m currently on Day 5 of a 6 day trip and it’s honestly not been overly good or bad. But it’s flown by when I think about how it’s been minute to minute. I’ve squeezed in some communal hangout time, but I’ve honestly found myself desperately working even a little more intensely than my job really expects me to. I’ve spent non-work moments stoned and doodling and playing the new Pokémon game.

But I haven’t honestly wanted to be here. I came for my dad’s bday to make him happy. And I think it has. But there’s a subtext to the discomfort I’ve had being here, and it’s bigger than the fact that no one commented positively or negatively on my pink hair and earrings, just neutrally. Like “oh these sunglasses match your hair.”

And it’s not like I need them to like how I look but it would be nice if they could acknowledge it. Cause part of me looking different is due to feeling different. IE I’m trying to explore gender a bit and I’m bicurious. And I know if I tell them they‘ll be freaked out and supportive at once. I don’t have to tell them, but I feel bad not doing it.

it feels like one of the many examples of ways I don’t fit in with my family. Maybe every family member feels this way at some times but I truly feel like the way they talk about love and memories is different than me. My past feels more painful than it used to now that I’m getting to know myself more.

I’ve always hated being misunderstood or mischaracterized and more and more it just feels like I’m such a different person than they think I am, and I’m still bouncing between the real me and the me they think I am constantly.

I‘m not saying they’re being bad to me or that they’re not accepting of me. I think they’re just a little more willing to let nostalgia be golden and I’ve gotten more in touch with my true feelings and how they’re much more complicated than a fuzzy Kodak bliss.

So I’m writing the following things down to attempt to make myself realize they’re valid and true:

1. it’s okay for me to feel and be different than what my family thinks of me. It’s okay to try to explain this to them and it’s okay not to as well.

2. Having a family that is on many fronts “functional” does not mean it is perfect or that I should feel endlessly grateful just due to comparison to other people’s familial situations.

3. it is okay that my life is far away from them. They still act like it’s really wild and crazy we live far apart. Lots of people live far apart. In different countries even. I’m not bad for living my life.

and parts of this visit have been pleasant and relaxing and comforting. and their shower actually works and they can buy whatever food i need and they‘re patient with my stomach’s unique challenges.

but i kind Of wish it felt diffferent and I’m still discovering exactly what that means. For the moment, I’m proud I have not drank here (something I have never been able to hold back from since adulthood) and I’m happy to have some boundaries where I had none before, even if they’re weird to discuss or enforce.