Archive

08.13.26 THOUGHT - ✩ YOU’RE JUST SOME GUY ✩

I’ve been listening to The Beach Boys a lot recently, specifically Surf’s Up. I definitely understand that it isn’t their strongest project, as that’s obviously Pet Sounds, but I’ve been pretty obsessed with Surf’s Up lately just because of how dark and strange it is, especially that second half.

There’s something so interesting to me about a band that had basically become synonymous with sunshine, surfing, California, etc. eventually making music that is this neurotic and depressing.

It’s also nuts to think that at the height of the Beatles’ career they just bailed and went to India to study Transcendental Meditation. They came back with a ton of material, a lot of which ended up on The White Album, and the whole experience influenced what they did afterward.

Imagine Taylor Swift randomly taking six months off to study Shingon Buddhism and coming back with a bunch of completely insane experimental pop music. That would be pretty fucking cool in my opinion. And I think that’s what I find so interesting about older artists. They seemed more willing to become different people.

I see the opposite happen all the time now. Tame Impala started off making genuinely interesting psychedelic rock and gradually moved toward increasingly polished pop. I’ve always thought it would be way cooler if his career had gone in the opposite direction. Imagine a dude who starts off making completely generic pop music, gets really successful, and then slowly loses his mind and ends his career making increasingly insane psychedelic rock. That’s a pretty sick trajectory.

But I don’t really want to blame the artists for this. If your career becomes a corporation involving labels, managers, employees, contracts, touring, private equity, and millions of dollars riding on your next project, suddenly “I think I want to try making a weird psychedelic record” becomes a much more complicated decision. Of course you have a brand. You literally have a corporation to run.

What I find more interesting is how much regular people have started acting like they have one too. There are grown men out here second-guessing posting videos of themselves playing piano on Instagram because they’re worried it doesn’t fit the brand they’ve invented for themselves. What brand? Who is going to pull funding because you suddenly decided you’re interested in piano?

And yet we’ve somehow absorbed all of these constraints without actually having the constraints. What you post, what you wear, what job you have, what hobbies you have, what music you listen to, what you’re “into.” It all starts to feel like a permanent case for who you are. You start worrying that if you suddenly become interested in something completely unrelated to everything else you’ve done, people will think you’re weird or inconsistent or that it doesn’t “fit” you. Maybe it’s all just a symptom of this rampant consumerist culture we’re in.

But it’s important to remember that you’re just some guy. You can change your mind. You can get bored. You can abandon the thing you spent five years getting good at. You can suddenly become obsessed with piano. You can become interested in something that makes absolutely no sense given everything you’ve done previously.

You can go do drugs in Croatia to further your creative output. Who gives a shit. There’s no pressure from private equity money to stay on brand.

The Beach Boys were obviously a commercial band operating inside an industry, but they still kept allowing themselves to become different versions of The Beach Boys. They didn’t seem particularly interested in preserving some perfect, coherent image of themselves.

And I think that’s probably a good way to live too. You’re just some guy.

08.12.26 PROCESS - ✩ THE ARCHIVIST SCRIPT ✩

08.10.26 RANT - ✩ FUCK E-BIKES ✩

I hate e-bikes. I hate lithium-ion-powered scooters and things of that nature as well. I feel like these things are everything wrong with society condensed into a small, stupidly dangerous vehicle.

I always tell Sam that if a genie gave me three wishes, I would wish for a trillion gajillion dollars, world peace, and the instantaneous destruction of every e-bike and shitty lime scooter on Earth. I know this is probably unreasonable. But I mean it.

What fascinates me is how casually we’ve allowed these things onto our roads without requiring much of anything from the people operating them. I constantly see dumb idiots on these electric scooters hurting themselves. And while I don’t ride bikes, I imagine cyclists can understand what bothers me about this: It’s another example of lazy people entering a space others genuinely care about and immediately finding a way to make it cringe for everyone involved.

The guy who has never gone on a bike ride in his life but suddenly buys a shitty e-bike isn’t necessarily trying to become a cyclist. He just wants to go somewhere on a bike. Which is fine, I guess. But there is something funny about buying a machine specifically designed to remove the unpleasant parts of an activity you have not yet learned how to do.

I don’t think motorized vehicles are bad. I’m not what they call a “Luddite”. As a filmmaker, I wouldn't get in a helicopter to get an aerial shot. I have a drone. I have no interest in doing something the hard way just because it is hard.

But there is a difference between removing unnecessary work and removing the part that was the point. Cycling is hard. You ride a bike, your legs hurt, you get better at riding a bike and in turn get in better shape. There is something satisfying about having subjected yourself to something that totally fucking sucks for a while and coming out the other side slightly better at it.

Everything is constantly being optimized. There is always some dude in a hoodie looking at a process and wondering why it takes seven steps when it could take two. Sometimes he is right. But sometimes those seven steps were the activity.

I think about this when I am writing. Writing can feel like a stupid activity. You sit in a room and try to make your brain turn some vague thought into a sentence. It is slow and frustrating and most of what you come up with is bad. I am doing it right now and I hate doing it right now. But if I could simply remove that part, I suspect I would lose something. I don't know.

I just think the e-bike is a pretty perfect little expression of a larger instinct: take something difficult, remove the difficulty, and in turn make the entire thing shitty.

Anyway, I still think every e-bike should be blown up, assuming the cheap battery doesn’t blow itself up first.

11.25.25 DREAM JOURNAL - ✩ SOMETHING’S IN THE VENTS ✩

I woke up sweaty and confused to my girlfriend Sam screaming my name. Her eyes were red from crying, and she could barely speak. She finally told me, “Something’s crawling around in the vents.” I felt an intense sense of dread. I slowly realized I was dreaming because our bedroom was completely scrambled, but the feeling of lucidity kept fading. I followed her to the basement, which had somehow become enormous, with ceilings eighty feet high. A ladder led to an exposed vent in the ceiling, and I climbed it. I reached the top and looked inside. Sam threw me a flashlight, which I barely caught and when I turned it on, my dad was suddenly inches from my face. He hissed and crawled away like a rodent, even though he still looked like himself. What the fuck.

Terrified, I rushed back down the ladder as Sam screamed. We heard my dad moving through the vents throughout the house, so I followed the noise upstairs. Suddenly, a vent cover flew off the wall, and my dad crawled out. He hissed, ran across the hall, climbed the wall on all fours, and disappeared into another vent. I felt intense fear and I woke up pretty shaken and took the morning to recover.