I got my second vax on April 4. Moments after the injection, I got a call back from a producer friend who told me she’d be happy to read my script, which seemed serendipitous. She was on her way to England for a couple of months though. The vaccine opened up some real party possibilities. I had been celibate-dating a guy that I had a hard time getting a bead on — he was very nice and good looking and God forbid age appropriate. There was something kind of sterile about him — he lived in West L.A. for example. But he was sweet and thoughtful, and we had our first date on the day after my second dose of Pfizer. I went to pee at one point and “Party Talk” by Craft Spells, a random song from 2013, was playing in there, thanks Shazam, and I loved it right away and that became “our” song in my mind but I didn’t tell him.
I’ve been developing a taste for something I call sad hip hop… not hip hop really but hip hop informed I guess — lowkey beats, pretty melodies and autotune basically — which I first discovered via the Chinese Canadian warblings of Organ Tapes. Certain friends are really not having it when I play it in my car but what can I do. Bladee released 333 which rocked that Scandinavian sense of plaintive melody and paired it with contemporary “urban” production.
His label mate Ecco2k put out PXE later in the month…
And soon thereafter Organ Tapes remixed the sublime “Bad Habit” by Takeem (it took me a minute to stop trying to parse the lyrics and realize it was sung in Chinese). More soft boy music that whispered its pain to delicate me.
A big, meaty ginger bear showed up in my Tinder feed and he was unusually willing to get together without endless back and forths… I hadn’t had sex in nearly five years, since I broke up with my ex, the one that I had been so obsessed with. The ginger bear was from the Bay Area and we met up at the Red Lion for drinks. It ended up being dinner for him — he was a bear after all — and he acted friendly in that old familiar way, and next thing you know my personal levee broke. He was nice and grunty in bed, and his forearms were like the size of my thighs. It wasn’t love, but my dormant bedroom skills were up and running and there was more to come.
April kept on giving — Entertainment, Death, a new one from The Spirit of the Beehive, OK granted not as consistently pleasure-inducing as 2017’s Pleasure Suck, but twice as inventive, digging into some much appreciated My Bloody Valentine textures in the course of its lysergic journey.
And Cory Hanson’s Pale Horse Rider explored Neil Young-adjacent alt-western landscapes, floating through a painted desert kind of psychedelia laced with odd humor, notably “Your mother, she was a psycho-analyst / Until she egged my car / And then she was a nemesis.”