after LA, and on the eve of my 35th birthday, an idea came to me, to release something on this day, a little song that i love and have called sunday. as i've never ever have really written about myself to someone other than me, i would really like to try now, if only once, if only for me. and so i wrote this, and it's too long, and the song might've been just enough, but anyway...

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i have for quite a long time been experiencing a kind of ailment. it is hard to describe, given that it shows in bouts of strange, often new symptoms, in which i feel a stranger in my own body. it does not obey a known cycle; as i wade further and further from my familiar routine, it heightens and bears down on me like so many calamities i silently receive, unwillingly, as if i were the recipient of a negative grace by an terrible, inscrutable deity. the times when i'm not in its possession, i am a perfectly normal human being, capable of all the range of emotion and hope as if i were inbound of a band that no matter how much it expands, always it will keep me in its circumference, no matter the extremity of the emotion experienced. i never fear for i am as if in complete trust of the resilience of this band, it won't ever break, i will feel fear, love, hope, and never will it snap and throw my human existence out of proportion, out of all meaning. that other life, i can't speak of it as a life, but as an inhuman being, where precisely what happens is the rupture of all that is familiar to my mind, the world sharpens and begins to leak from all angles, my heart races in the yoke of this unknown visitation, every position my body assumes is wrong and an anguish without object suffuses my body and strangles time to a fevered stop. in such moments my suffering is inexplicable and although i've always manage to come out of it, the time spent in it is kin to eternity and so is without signage or insinuation of beginning or end.

experiences such as this have accompanied me for almost as long as i can remember, but the gravity of those experienced as of late may be tied to my perception of my body as beginning to age beyond a certain resilience to it. i am tired even as i, like sisyphus, have learned to call this ageless boulder my own. but i am tired, with a sadness that could further fracture the fault lines of this earth. that i have also harbored hopes of being an artist for almost as long as i've suffered from this is what i want to try to talk about. i became a father at 22, making a promise that both my little, "radical" family and my art would always go together, hand in hand towards an inevitable triumph. as the years went by, specially towards the end of my 20's, although i consciously still upheld that "founding" gesture, i reckoned i had actually leaned to being a father more than pursuing a career as a musician, as every attempt at one would burst into flames even before leaving the atmosphere. it lead me to believe i had no actual place in the world of music, that i would always carry with me an undecipherable message, with no actual existing recipient, and that in such conditions the only proper answer would be a principled renunciation of the dream.

and so i tried to renounce it. the problem with such principled retreats is that one must, as a rule, as soon as u find it in yourself to accept the principle, u should also procure to die, so as to keep the principle intact. i, in my stubbornness, naive as i've always been, kept on living. life did what it does and eroded both the principle and the memory of it and in time, slowly, insidiously, and surely, a new music and a new life came to me, even as i steadily, "in principle", continuously refused them. my "obscure" ailment continued on and off, but in the years of covid lockdowns, my wife and i mostly just dedicated ourselves to caring for the life of our two children, as i tended, almost unawares, to a secret garden of songs that kept expressing and growing alongside us. it is also within this time that i looked back at many of the writings i had kept from all those years ago, when i had just begun to be a father, and so i came to the notion that i had actually not deviated from my original intention, that i had in fact always kept my promise of being both a father and an artist, that i was continuously achieving what there is to achieve in both realms and that the radicality of this prospect was such that it kept me away from almost everything the music industry had been for the past 12 years. either i had not known how to market my specific situation or i had not cared to do so, but the result of this "obscurity" had not hampered my ability to produce the art that i did, and to reasonably be the father my own father hadn't been.

and so it is, as i have been in the throes of this cursed dream that is success in the music industry, that almost all that is related to it, the touring, the press, the labels, social media, etc.. all of it would be more or less foreclosed to me, whether by circumstance or by choice, but all stemming from this almost innocent promise i have kept for more than a decade. in a recent, rare trip to LA, in which both the human and inhuman parts of me howled in pain and delight, i realized that even if i were to try, i have not the strength to tour, there were moments where i could barely stand on my own two feet, or hold the gaze of my interlocutor, even as the situation seemed perfectly normal, i myself felt like holding my breath under fevered water, my body one odd moment away from bursting open, fear running thru me like so many streams of furious glacial melt, replacing the body of its consistency and placing it at the very edge of a timeless horror. the faces of the ones u love, the questioning and the bewilderment and the nameless terror that beckons, of which only the yearning thought of home seems to touch and to quell. it sounds terrible, and it is, but i also want to say, of that other part, the part where i live and am myself, that it does exist, beautifully, and i am beyond grateful for everything and everyone that helped be what it is.

i've held off on releasing anything, always indescribably, mysteriously hard to explain why. not moving, not living. i turn 35 today, and although i feel nothing has changed, weak and hopeful, me and un-me, i now struggle to find a reason not to. to mark this moment, a little gesture, meaningless but for the imagined weight it carries in my heart, where there still seems to be the hope for revolution, for a place of places where we breathe again the mystery of music outside the ideology of our feudal masters, i know that in the struggle will not be led by my traitorous body, in which i sorrowful and blissful continue to thread the mystery of life for whatever years are left to me. no matter! others will come. others will make it. i am another, even as i wake, even as i finish writing this pointless letter to no one. no matter! miyazaki's jiro horikoshi remembers paul valery "the wind rises, we must try to live." and so i promise, i will.