brain zap fridays

i forgot to take my antidepressant last night so today I have brain zaps and a sluggish body. Anyway, here’s something I wrote and some non-fleshed-out thoughts on Cowboy Carter:

Non-fleshed-out thoughts

• The central problem with doing a country album is that the vast majority of people still associate country with the popular country music that’s capitalized the current conservative base. To suggest that country music could be progressive or affirming gets you ostracized like the Chicks, even though the most popular country song of the last few years is a song about the class struggles as seen through the eyes of a black woman in small-town America.1

  • Country has always been black, its origins were black so it’s ridiculous for anyone to even question black people’s contributions to country music. They don’t need to do the work, you need to.

  • She’s playing with the idea of genre super well asking what the fuck is country music anyway? What the fuck is Southern music? It’s only southern when it’s white conservative. Which, she’s fucking right. The country of today looks different than the country of yesteryear.

  • This is the same thing for people who say country music isn’t queer. Which, yes, country music is very queer. Half of the rodeo is straight men dressing up with tassels and fancy clothes and riding bareback on a bucking bronco. The symbolism is there, even if you can’t see it!2

• That Jolene cover is good good.

• Channel surfing through black music coopted by white people with Willie Nelson is very smart

• Riding side saddle on a white horse with an American flag. Yes, rodeo queen.

• Ya Ya using boots made for walking AND good vibrations jfc

Something I wrote

In the summer you cleave pounds of flesh from your body and etch red marks deep into your skin. High heat and almost dehydrated you wander south Austin looking for something to do to cool you off. Everyone you know has already left. A went on summer vacation, B left to live in France, and P had a mental breakdown and went back home to live with her parents.

K invites you over, but you decline. You two just have this habit, you know? You circle each other, fangs barred, but always end up laying in bed together, sweaty and unhappy. You wish you could chart your happiness–make it visual. Track the ups and downs of your mood and find some grand unifying theory of passing through it. 

Some years ago M told you he felt depressed and you tried to work him through it. Ancient history, who cares about resurfacing it now? How you wanted to scream to him (to really anyone) that you could carry that weight like you’ve carried this one. Your loneliness like a Texas summer: eternally bright and impossibly hot. 

You’re sure he mocks you now. The transparentness of your desperation. It would make you uneasy too. Not everything has to be big. Not everything has to be a revelation. Some things unfold like life: unremarkably. 

During the days you scroll through pictures of men with the body type you want but lack the motivation to achieve. When you were younger your body was coveted for its thinness and now the only people that show you a crumb of attention are online chasers with pent-up sexual energy. You lack the subtlety metaphor requires. You complain about yourself too much. You see life like a long series of juxtapositions: good next to bad, red next to blue, big next to small.

Fairness, you know? That’s what you’re craving right now. Justice. The coolness of the feeling; the simmering of it all. Every year you say the same thing: you can’t stand another Texas summer. Yet still, you stay.