Sweet Things

I swear, one of the reasons I don’t write in you, nice diary, more often is because I always fall down a rabbit hole of picking the right writing music. This is the hole I find myself in now. I was trying the band Feathers Shuttle Forever, and it was real good but then track three went into skronky sax and I’m back on the hunt.

If after we died there was some sort of transfer station, a resting point before we moved onto what’s next, and it kinda looked like the resting stations we were familiar with–like a waiting room inside a highway gas station...but it also looked otherwordlly enough so we knew we were dead–all glowing orbs instead of chairs and pillars of light where the gas pumps should be. If there was some white room beyond all known things, surrounded only by blackness and stars, and it was filled with an all-sense softness and sort of galactic spiritism...well then I imagine this place would have music piping in from unseen speakers. THIS is the music I want to listen to when I write, but I don’t know the right genre to describe. I tried typing this whole paragraph into bandcamp as a tag, but it gave me nothing. Teen Daze is the closest I’ve found so far.

I’m doing real good. In Tauranga right now, staying the week in the iimaginarium (the place I work). I just took a hot bath while listening to ‘The Secret History of the World’ and drinking sparkle water so now I have a full body wooze going. I spent the moring staring at code and the afternoon picking blueberries, in a beautiful orchard run by a midwife turned farmer who told us to make our payment to ‘BB’ since she liked short names after she broke both her hands. It was a mix of a bad accident and arthritis, she said, but now she has metallic hands that she’s learning to use more and more and she doesn’t midwife anymore, but quite loves blueberries and making ice cream. And then she gave us her incredible ice cream made with her incredible hands.

I’ve been away from a computer for the last week, enjoying a camping festival outside of a hobbit town called Mata Mata. The town was delightful because it’s filled with Shire-themed architecture and art, but it’s still a small tourist town and filled with the same tedium and bored youth as any other tourist town. Our bus stop was a literal hobbit hut, circular door and big wood beams and all. After the festival, I waited for the bus home beneath a giant tree in the park, looking at the beautiful leaves and hobbit hut in the distance. And then I was interrupted by two stoned teens, one with a soundcloud-rap face tattoo, who asked me if I was having a good time, smoked the ganja, and knew where the girls were at. Then they walked to the mcDonald’s next to the shire and got mcflurries. In New Zealand, it’s the same moon in the sky as back home but it appears upside down–or at least upside down from what I’m used to. I feel like every aspect of the country follows that moon.

At the festival, I caught up with some of my solarpunk friends from Aukland. They were in a theme camp called Solar Sails where everything was solar-powered and made from salvaged trash. The entire camp was made from thrown-out boat sails, and they were all wearing baggy linen costumes taken from the dumpsters of the stage production of Mulan. They had so many mulan costumes, and gave me pants and angelica a robe. And I gotta tell y’all: I really love this linen lifestyle. The pants are mad comfortable, and I also got this flowy white linen shirt and when I wear the two together I look like some romantic poet, all wanting to talk of urns and love and rainy fields and such. I think this might be my new style–I wanna look like a gothic ghost who seems to know a lot about apple IIe computers.

I didn’t really have a structure or point to this diary entry, and I didn’t really have an ending either. I just like talking to y’all, and I liked these above moments and wanted to share them with you. Teen Daze is over, I’m listening to Better Oblivion Community Center now and def not galactic waystation music, but it’s quite nice. I’ll keep the songs on, but close the computer. Goodnight, dear friends!