by max fainaru-wada…..
It’s honestly something I never thought looked much like a backyard.
I guess a better way to put it is that the placement always was surreal to me in a way. Around two years of living here obviously made me used to it, but in the beginning months, I always enjoyed the fact we could see a high school right across from here. The specific part of it that’s close to us is the football field, with a game every Friday night that the whole school would show up to. Friends would come visit and we’d sit out back with a typical evening daze and listen to that obnoxiously enthusiastic announcer like he was watching soccer. I could picture our neighbors next door getting righteously pissed off by how loud he could make that voice. Sitting here now in some nice overcast weather, I can’t for the life of me remember what that kid sounded like. Whether it sounded forgettable to begin with or dissipated in my head over time is another mystery. I don’t know. I guess it feels like there’s some time missing and it’s hard to pinpoint where it was.
Damn, we’re terrible with this lawn. It’s become an unkempt and despairing-looking jungle, with the hammock barely visible in the back from the tall grass. I should mow it right now. Legit. Nah fuck it. This bathrobe’s too comfy at the moment. The sun hasn’t shown all day. It’s a perpetual state of me trying to convince myself that today, I need to be in daylight just once to receive some form of energy. So now here I am, out in the open, assuming I’m getting some kind of light. And all that’s stuck in my head is Brook Benton’s Rainy Night in Georgia as I’ve been staring for what feels like hours at just a blade of grass. Not in a way that physically make the person look introspective, more like a vegetable. I feel like R.P. McMurphy by the end of his journey, permanently no longer able to process anything. He always seemed to have a nice enthusiasm.
Last year on Halloween, we attempted to throw a party here. Friends showed up, then acquaintances, then strangers, all seeming to relatively enjoy garden variety spook trap and Beetlejuice projected on the house. I’ll never forget that kid inside. We hadn’t known how he’d gotten in as we attempted at the beginning to keep the inside off limits. He just walked around, slack jaw with some wandering eyes that read ecstasy, until he rushed out back to join his friends. The short EDM-club green hair with thick rimmed glasses clearly felt necessary for him, like he aggressively needed to let people know the kind of drugs he enjoyed and that his yearly calendar was booked with various shitty electric music festivals. A couple weeks later, I heard the news that he died somewhere up in Tampa, which is apparently where he came down from. No real emotions are being felt, but it’s all there is right now to think about for some reason. And yet it’s such a lovely day out.
Hoverin’ by my suitcase
Tryin’ to find a warm place to spend the night
Heavy rain’s fallin’
Seems I hear your voice callin’ “It’s all right”
— by max fainaru-wada
Your writing so successfully captures both the constant self battle between productivity, mental health, and laziness that I (and I think many others) have been experiencing as of late.
The whole piece is very raw, very impactful, very emotional, especially where it is emotionless.