Radio/Change.

an october mini piece.

The radio plays the same six songs every day. Six to six twenty am.

The only thing that shifts is the order, some strange rotation of odd numbers, like a pattern I’m not meant to understand. I don’t know why the fuck I hadn’t noticed that before. Maybe I’ve just been too far removed from myself.

I used to notice everything.

I used to be fun! God, I was fun personified. Barefoot and running down the dive bar stairs screaming and laughing, with many women looking down at me, not because I was young and inconvenient (well, that too), but because time had passed. Time will pass, anyway. They should have had more fun, seen more of the world, dated more than just joe. We all think we should have done more. That’s one of the main problems of many human consciousness affairs. Retroactive greed.

Time passed, as it always does, and I don’t know when that version of me slipped away. Maybe it was gradual, like a light dimming one click at a time. Or, as one naturally does, maybe I just grew out of the idea that I could ever be one of the greats, Byron, Hemingway, someone who actually mattered. One of the main problems of typing words like crazy.

There was a time when the world listened to artists. When people believed words could move something bigger than themselves. Now, it feels like the only way to be heard is to say something outrageous and call it “political science” on your podcast.

Either way, I have been, in fact, a stranger to everything that has been circulating the orbit of my own world. Nights are longer, days are shorter. I’m being more fond to inconsistencies, and I don’t know if that’s just a reflection of what’s going on in the world or not. What is known to me is not working anymore. I am an adult and I have done nothing to change the world as I said I would in my lifetime achievement award at school.

I haven’t even changed the reality of my own life, instead, I spent an embarrassing amount of money on lottery tickets yesterday. I don’t know if it was an act of desperation or a call to change.

A call to change.

Isn’t that a powerful thing.

One must die to change.

figuratively, of course. You must die like me. I’ve had more ego deaths than you can ever imagine. Many call that “humbling”. I call it dealing with men and women who also don’t know what the fuck is going on. They have to remind you that you also don’t know who you are, or what you should be doing to feel better about the insane world we’re living in.

In many cases, though, one must change to die. Many of my favorite movies have that narrative. So I can’t really die in a literal way while being twenty one. Instead, I’ll keep being this confused, and I will continue to suffer the most excruciating type of death, the one in which a person suffers the most, the one that happens and you don’t even notice it.

I’ll Change.

(like the order of the same six songs that the radio plays everyday).