Heaven is a Junkyard

I am famously slow to move on. Like, glacially so. But I’ve found that some moments burn in me for so long that I can’t figure out if I’m the oil, or the wick, or neither and there doesn’t seem to be much of a way around it. It’s a strange time to be finding myself winding down like this, but it would feel even stranger to pretend that I’m not. As an example of what I mean, my second favorite conversation this week was with a new friend who is getting back into mapmaking. At this rate, I’m going to be opening a Barnes & Nobles for everyone who doesn’t move to Mars.

I’m not exactly sure what people mean by spirit animals, but the times I think I understand it most are when I’m thinking about spiders. I feel a deep kinship with anything excited to combine that level of patience and tactile tedium, and I like the idea of spending most of my time alone in a dark-ish place waiting for my food to arrive. I’m not completely over my fear of them and probably never will be (let’s just say I heard that urban legend about swallowing spiders in our sleep at the wrong age), but that’s OK. I’ve started to find a lot of comfort in the things about myself I suspect will never change.

I mention those two things because they came to mind tonight while I was walking to the grocery store for ice cream and listening to the new song from Youth Lagoon. To me, Trevor Powers has always had a vice grip on how to portray the strange parade that awaits us on the other side of our great heartbreaks, and having him back at his Youth Lagoon project is good fucking news. During particularly dark times, we have a feeling that we are going to get through the trouble of it and in some sense that is absolutely true. But in my experience, the other side isn’t a return to a traditional normalcy. Instead, there’s something waiting for us over there that feels like something between being kidnapped by a traveling circus and stumbling into the middle of the crowd of folks in Dante’s Paradiso who are spending eternity looking further into God. I’m not saying that heaven is real, but if it is I have a feeling that “Idaho Alien” would feel just as relevant there as it does here. Not because it’s celebratory in any way, because of its comfort with a level of heartache that just becomes the table stakes for anything meaningful as we age.