Endlessness

on being too online, releasing music, Hollenbeck Park and listening to Nala Sinephro

It’s less than a month until Erotica Veronica is out in the world, and I don’t really know how I feel. If you were a fly on the wall in my apartment, you might watch me go about the day and think “That’s a lot of unnecessary commotion”. I’m frantically eating almonds while I look at my phone and put on my pants. Frantically thinking “Is that all the almonds I held in my hand? I thought I had more”. Later finding those sneaky almonds resting on the hand towel in my bathroom. Repeatedly telling myself “Just choose one thing to do at a time!” and then immediately forgetting. Wondering why I must eat the almonds so frantically when it’s just as easy to eat them normally. Picking up my phone again for no reason. Forcing myself to go for a walk. Forcing myself to listen to Nala Sinephro’s Endlessness and try to think about nothing. It’s really a lot of very mundane activities but done all at once and as if riding a rodeo bull.

I know it’s not just the album. There are abundant reasons to be feeling…all weird.

Putting out music tends to bring out a certain amount of “What am I doing with my life?” for me, which is strange because, from the outside, it’s one of the doing-est times of my life. But, without fail, it’s right before I’m about to release an album that I start researching how much grad school costs and looking at positions for which I am unqualified on ZipRecruiter. Under my stress is fear. Fear of what? I’m not sure. Failure? What does that mean? To be unsuccessful at what I am trying to achieve. What am I trying to achieve? I go for a long walk to try to figure out what I’m trying to achieve, but I get too distracted by checking my step-count to remember to think.

On Saturday, my sister-in-law Dana and my niece and I got lunch and went to what they call the “snake park”. We played in the outdoor exercise zone. I became particularly enamored of a contraption where you stand on two ski-boot sized platforms and swing your legs back and forth. My niece is four and generally pretty fearless, but she thought that one was too scary. Still, she was very protective of her “turn” and reluctantly but insistently played on it twice just for the principle of “turns”. When we were driving home late that afternoon, I asked my niece what her favorite part of the day was. She scrunched up her tired eyes and looked to the sky, her sweaty head heavy against her carseat. After a moment she said, “I don’t remember how to think.”

I also do not remember how to think. But it’s not because I’ve spent too long in the sun.

When I first started making music I would walk from my apartment to Hollenbeck park, where I would stroll phone-free around the beautiful but dilapidated park. Hollenbeck Park is five acres of patchy grass surrounding a man-made lake with eucalyptus and magnolia trees overhanging a pathway that retains a fading sense of tranquility. There are ducks and bridges and fountains and pagodas– all the makings of what was meant to be an urban oasis when the land was gifted to the city in 1893 for use as a city park, part of a wave of city beautification that led to Griffith Park and Elysian park among o

thers. (Of course, the point wasn’t just to make the city beautiful, it was also to raise the value of the surrounding real estate.) But the ducks are coated in muck, the grass is littered with beer cans and condoms, the pagodas are often covered in graffiti, and the air has a pollution burden score of 100% thanks to the 5 Freeway that was built to cut right across Hollenbeck Park in the ‘60s, dropping the acreage precipitously from the original twenty-one to the current five. Quite a downgrade in the amount of park.

Still, it’s a lovable place. There are often quinceañera photos being taken, takis and soda being sold from carts, hotdogs being grilled in the barbeque pits. I actually didn’t learn until recently that the park used to be bigger, and it makes sense. The southwest end of the lake is truncated unnaturally, and if you look at it on a map you see that it nestles right into the I-5 like it’s trying to get closer for warmth.

Back in 2015, I would walk around that park with nothing but my apartment key, singing aloud to myself, allowing myself to wander. If I came across a good idea, I would try to hold it in my mind all the way back home, repeating it under my breath as I walked across the 6th street bridge and up Mateo.

I am happier now than I was then. Aging is, in fact, a wonderful thing. Then I was fraught with other issues. I subsisted on broccoli and tofu. I was afraid of bread. I didn’t know how to make friends or flirt with women. I was drawn to 5 am gatherings of people trying to commune with an unnatural high in dingy, under-furnished apartments, taking one more crushed pill before the sun rose and I had to splash water on my face and rush off to work the register at a juice bar. But I do miss those phoneless walks and the way that you used to be able to scroll down to the end of instagram.

Of course, it’s still possible to go on phoneless walks. I went on one this morning. But the difference is that I now have this ever-present sense that an endlessness exists in a small black brick, and when I’m separated from that black brink, I am separated from that endlessness. I am rarely wholly without my phone because I am rarely without the consciousness of my phone.

There’s something distinctly different about the endlessness that Nala Sinephro is playing about and the endlessness of the internet. She conjures roots systems, rivers, city streets at night. When I listen to Sinephro’s album, I am inside the expanse of our physical world. And the difference between the endlessness of the physical world and the internet is that the physical world is actually finite. At least our earth is. It feels endless because our bodies are comparatively small and our lives relatively short. It feels endless because if you are curious enough, there is an abundance of terrain to explore. You could stare at one tree for hours and never be bored.

The internet, however, is being ceaselessly replenished by eager participants and bots and, therefore, is actually endless. For some people, that kind of endlessness might be beautiful, but for me it’s suffocating, antagonizing, and if I think about it too much, debilitating.

I think the reason releasing music is so agitating for me is that I’m more online than other times of my life. And I’m online in the worst way possible—awaiting feedback.

Whenever I spend a day mindlessly checking my phone, I feel like I’m building a freeway over a park, choking that park from twenty-one acres down to five, so cars can get to work faster.

I don’t want this post to be too depressing, because I’m actually very excited to be putting this album out. I just wanted to be honest about this very real side effect of the process. And I imagine that people will relate to this, as I’m assuming many if not all of you have phones that connect to the internet. This week has been a little lighter for me and I wanna share some of the things I’ve been doing to protect my sensitive mind:

• I bought a Loftie Smart Alarm Clock. These are weirdly expensive and I don’t really know why. I think there are probably more affordable options, but I bought this one desperately in the middle of a sleepless night. I am in love with it. It has brown noise, white noise, gray nose, rain noise, mountaintop noise. Every kind of noise that I could ever want, really, except for the sound of my family talking and laughing in the kitchen as I fall asleep on the couch at my mom’s house.

• I’ve been turning my phone completely off for hours. If you have the luxury to do this, I would highly recommend. I know that having kids and/or certain kinds of jobs makes this very difficult.

• I’ve been buying CDs at the Philosophical Research Society in LA. They sell almost all their CDs for $2. I keep them in my car and it saves me from having too many listening options. It also saves me from mindlessly looking at my phone at red lights to change the song or switch to a podcast, which is dangerous and also interrupts my train of thought.