“It’s not even that I’m not what I thought I was…” (excerpt) by Chris Molnar
It’s not even that I’m not what I thought I was – I am more myself than ever. The reality of my being is just overwhelming, every dream or doom I’ve seen coming true at once. Life is long enough that anything nursed as a desire dark or otherwise will emerge. The positives and negatives of my own personality – or rather the alternately repressed or spiked parts – the true kindness and submerged resentment, strictness and abandon, as I get older they settle into strange shapes. Everyone hints at what they will become from birth, but the becoming, those unexpected moments are unexpected and terrifying; less about what I do and more an increasing internal dissonance, succeeding in ways I had worked towards steadily for years – touring, visibility, logistics – yet with any serious appraisal of the music impossible, our work already classified as some kind of token. That and the inexorability of age, one’s thirties, the feeling that what has worked for me is no longer enough because the cargo pants fandom, if you can call random drunks a fandom, is intolerable, their music completely unrelated to us, a novelty at best, and I don’t know how to get respect, the closer it hangs the further it is away as you can no longer dream of how to achieve it. You don’t know who you are until you are truly desperate and thwarted. Until the gleam has come out of your most prized goals and possessions.
Palpable uneasiness coming from so many sides. Feeling destabilized in every way, which makes me more alert but less happy. No more safety of despair, of being young and forgotten. Less solid inside and so less critical of others, and accordingly more insecure, less social, wanting to disappear, to freeze in death stasis forever. The sense of my true smallness in the universe, accurate or not, the idea that we will never, have already not sparked anything at all, despite the kind of success I would have gaped at as a younger man, that perhaps no one listens to us, that our novelty has already ended and the cultural gravity I may have developed definitively horse dust. A need for bigger goals or at least to think rethink bigger goals while I continue to termite endlessly. A need to convince myself that everything will be okay again. Ever since I heard A died I’m destabilized. I got the call during a concert; they kept calling. I could see it buzz offstage in the deconsecrated church in San Francisco, enough to make me see. I was distracted, my personhood broken, my antic persona unseen, as if I knew already, that no one who would know my number would call again and again if it wasn’t terrible. No smile or scowl, just true emptiness as I moved and I could feel the audience stir, although I was fascinated too, maybe this was release, a lack of feeling forever, suspended in air, the cold dank of the timbers above. Outside of those moments everything is a dagger to me now, every small slight, the man at the record store who ignored me despite who I am, when I then bought what I had come here for, the record by my only true predecessors. The man asked cursorily whether I was a collector in a slow drawl. I could barely see his dull American glare in the unnatural sunlight. I used to enjoy being underestimated constantly – no longer. And yet you cannot ask for recognition; I’ve always known this; I was taught that these things should not even be sought. So I live with what broke within me and try to attain equilibrium, an equilibrium drawn further away by my upbringing, which made this life.
I was born with a sense of lingering doom, but this city has always loomed with terrible clarity in my mind even before I’d ever visited. We were booked at that dim rambling wooden shack, part of the great cycle of church to venue to mall and back again that defines this predictable country. The idea of an American city with character, charm, artistic history, beautiful old buildings clambering over each other to reach the top of some scenic, mild hill – fascination and envy and hatred, even before my current spiral. A place where you discover envy from afar, learning about it while trying to write poetry in the common hall of a blasted-out strip of haphazard little commercial buildings in gray north Midwest. When you discover that what you are is impossibly distant from culture itself, from the places that dictate what we see or hear. A cold doom place with strip malls and the occasional coffee shop where music lives like a timid flame or more likely is extinguished day in and day out. Whenever I get that sense of doom it’s inextricable from Michigan. Doom itself was born there, I told our tech, paranoia too. Our tech is from Southern California and doesn’t understand these things. Too much sun bleaches your brain like a coral reef. You can tell by looking at him he’s never seen the winter, he’s dainty and frail, the leather jacket is a spine, in need of extra vitamins. When we toured, Ohio into Indiana, towards home, the snow inching up, then whiting everything out, the van suddenly at the total mercy of drifts, of the curtains falling across the gray windshield… I said to him, look at the snow. See how it sits there and waits. He looked out the window and took a photo on his phone. Humans were never meant to live here like this, I said.
(11/6/24)
Chris Molnar is co-founder and editorial director of Archway Editions. In 2014 he co-founded the Writer’s Block, the first independent bookstore in Las Vegas.