The Texts I Send My Friends At 2am.

You ever see a woman you hate bossing people around in a black leather jacket and just think:

Maybe this changes things.

Many times in my life I have come across music, stories, art, and thought…not yet. I’ll love you, eventually, one day. I’ll come back when I’m ready. You’ll find me again when I need it.

I loved singing as a kid. I grew up with a mom who kept Songs About Jane by Maroon 5 in the CD player, and a Grandmother dancing along to Patsy Cline any chance she got. My Aunt got an iTunes account just to download Carly Simon’s and Adele. My grandfather sobbing hymns.

Eventually, I got scared of sharing the music I love. I was told it was too melancholy, too angry, too overwhelming. That I was those things too. Friends would say I had terrible taste, like it was a joke, like it was obvious, like I was obtuse for not noticing.

Over the last year I’ve been trying to change that. Making music recommendations, playing Passenger DJ, singing by the sea.

I am honored by your response. Thank you.

Ready, Set, Go…

What’s your favorite Hozier song? Why? No, you can’t say all of them. And don’t choose something stupid like cherry wine (there’s nothing wrong with cherry wine. Obviously. But gods man, have an actual opinion).

You are, however, perfectly welcome to list a handful in no particular order. Here, I’ll start,

Wildflower and Barley ft. Allison Russell

“(I feel as) useful as dirt, put my body to work.”

If this song does not fill you with the incredible longing to fall in love with life, and love, and dirt, you are listening to music wrong. I am sorry, you are beyond redemption.

To Noise Making (Sing)

“Your head tilt back, your funny mouth to the clouds. I couldn’t hope to know that song and all it’s words wouldn’t claim to feel the same it felt the first time it was heard.”

“Was it that or just the act of making noise that brought you joy?”

Enjoy the moment because it will not last, but rejoice in the knowledge that more are coming, as similarly meaningful and unique and impossible to duplicate to the one you are currently living!

Make music. Make bad music. Make music for the sake of exaltation. Make art because if you don’t then what is the point in living! Make art because one of the first things a child learns is to take marker to a wall, or pudding to a carpet. Make art because it is an expression of self. Make art because it is proof of life. Live.

Too Sweet

“Don’t you just want to wake up, dark as a lake? Smelling like a bonfire, lost in a haze?”

Get drunk with your friends and skinny dip off a pier. Ignore the rules, what are they for anyway? Find meaning in how you see it. Confront the wild beast in the woods and let it merry meet the one in you.

Those church bells in the background- Are they ringing in a wedding, or a funeral? A simple Sunday Service, or acknowledging the hour? Life goes on, always. It’s the one continuity. It never stops. So what are you doing with it?

Moment’s Silence (Common Tongue)

“A cure I know that soothes the soul, does so impossibly. A moment’s silence when my baby puts the mouth on me.”

“When the meaning’s gone, there is clarity, and the reason comes on the common tongue of your loving me. And it’s easy done, our little remedy…”

Hot.

What, I can’t like music with an…oral focus? Too low brow? The beat and flow of the music takes you on a sensual journey as much as the lyrics.

Angel of Small Death and the Codeine Scene by Hozier, Fiachra Kinder, and Rory Doyle

“Jarring of judgement and reasons defeat, the sweet heat of her breath in my mouth, I’m alive.”

“With her sweetened breath, and her tongue so mean…”

“With her straw blonde hair, her arms hard and lean, she’s the angle of death and the codeine scene.”

I’m gay. Extraordinarily queer. Do I need to elaborate? This sound sounds like a death march. It sounds like the echo in your ears as you dance yourself to death. Years passing away in the span of a single dance and you don’t care, as long as she is your partner. You can’t manage to rip your eyes off her to save your life. You won’t.

Almost (Sweet Music)

“I’m almost me again…she’s almost you.”

It was Almost Sweet Music. We were Almost something. I’m Almost able to be normal about this song. Seperated by a pair of parenthesis, kept apart and yet part of the whole.

Foreigner’s God

“Her eyes look sharp and steady into the empty parts of me. But still my heart is heavy with the hate of some other man’s beliefs.”

“I’ve no language left to say it, but all I do is quake to her. Break it if I try to convey it, the broken love I make to her.”

If you, somehow, have missed the message that Hozier’s music is incredibly political- If you have ignored Nobody’s Soldier, Eat Your Young, and oh, I don’t know, just about 70% of his discography… What do you think this song is about?

It’s also just a really fucking good song.

Wrench Watch-Dogs is nonbinary and I will not be explaining-

(…that is a lie I come armed with proof.)

I feel like we really lost something when we started looking at writing as a reader-centric product meant to appeal to the desires of a specific audience rather than a writer-centric approach of someone writes whatever particular thing particular compels them/whatever weird thing the demons in their head want to talk about, and people out there who are also compelled, and/or relate, find that writing. A lot of discussions of writing really center around what readers want rather than a writer's exploration. Sometimes as a reader I don't know what I want. I click on a fic or pick up a book I'm not sure about but that looks interesting, and I love it. Reading what I expect to get is it's own joy, but we always need to expand our horizons and not get mad at creators for not always writing what we want/expect.

I’m gonna make a list of all the reasons the show fucked based off my half baked thoughts of improper remembrance, actually

You find out relatively late in the game that the main character’s best and only friend in the world is a secret agent getting paid to keep him compliant.

The secret base that is considered the only safe haven in the world free of corruption is named Providence.

Everyone is getting puppet mastered around by a guy so steeped in purity culture that he calls himself White Knight and lives in a air tight pressurized room cut off from the world to keep out corruption on a cellular level.

(This is both a normal thing to do, and something possible to achieve. Sure. Why not. )

White Knight is canonically kind of evil and he gets replaced by a worse guy named Black Knight.

A talking monkey sidekick uses a gun, if that appeals to you.

The doctor singlehanded tying everyone together and keeping this organization going is named Rebecca Holiday.

Rebecca: to tie or bind. Holiday: Holy Day. The religious connotations are not so much connotations as they are punching you in the face.

Theres a scientist flying around the planet in a space ship so fast that it’s only been a couple hours since the apocalyptic event that permanently changed the earth. It’s been a decade for everyone else. He does not know about the apocalyptic event.

It’s been a decade.

His parents are the ones who doomed the earth and its populace.

They also injected his kid brother with a killer nanite chip that makes him a god.

The kid mostly uses this to turn his legs into a motorcycle.

It has the unfortunate side effect of wiping the kids memories every few years. Last time it happened he forgot that he turned into Godzilla and wiped out an entire city.

The kid lived in japan where he was the leader of a mutant gang for a while. He was like 12.

There’s a guy who goes by Six because he’s the sixth most deadly man alive. I know. He is the teen robot god’s babysitter. He is also aware of the ridiculousness of this.

Generator Rex is legitimately one of the best cartoons ever created, and if I could find a way to watch it I would promptly write a 10k essay on why.

Me at 9 years old, riveted, watching Christine Baranski tie a towel around a young man’s waist in the shape of a diaper while singing Does Your Mother Know:

I just think she’s neat.

Me at 12 years old watching X-Men cartoons unable to break my gaze from Emma Frost’s chest:

I just think she’s cool.

Me at 15 years old, utterly obsessed with Billie Piper’s portrayal of Rose Tyler in hit Science Fiction show, Doctor Who:

No you don’t understand she’s the Actress of Our Time-.

Me at 19, pondering if perhaps there was any signs I was gay that I should have noticed sooner:

…huh.

"it's concerning if university students are genuinely struggling to read full adult-level books for class" and "don't overstate the reporting of a single news article" and "if this shift is genuinely real, it's reflective of broad curriculum changes in lower education levels, probably at least in part due to remote schooling during COVID, and doesn't mean the new generation is being willfully Stupid and Vapid" and "when reading for personal pleasure people should read whatever they like without shame" and "reading from a broad variety of genres, styles, and authorial backgrounds will improve your understanding of both literature and the real world" and "actively mocking people for their tastes in books does not encourage them to become more adventurous you're just being mean" and also "but seriously adult books are not just boringly pretentious nothingburgers padded with pointless sex scenes, and claiming they are just shows how little you've read" all can and should co-exist.

I’m a simple person (that is a lie.), I put on a suit jacket, and suddenly I’m possessed by the spirit of Narcissus

A Discovery of Witches, Season One, Episode One

If you haven’t seen it yet, try to make it at least half an hour in.

The dialogue gets better.

Also:

This is one of those times something get’s compared to Twilight and it’s not lying. This has strong Twilight-isms, for better or worse.