I'm Developing a Thing for You

Thank you for sharing your Features...

Let me tell you a story about how the connections we make or miss in our formative years affect who we become. Let me tell you a personal story about an unexpected connection (conjured by magic, science, or imagination - you decide) that is reshaping the thoughts I shared on this topic last June. Here’s your essential playlist companion for an immersive reading experience.

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The crowd at Eastside Bowl skews middle-aged, like stepping through a time-warp looking glass from 1999: same flannel and band t-shirts, different waistlines, and grayer hair. The place is charged with a heady communal hum of reunion and anticipation, the second night of two sold-out benefit shows by venerated local bands coming together after nearly a decade's hiatus.

This is a distinctive in-group, bound by its shared history and a collective identity that coalesced in the late 90s and early 00s around local and indie artists on the college circuit in Murfreesboro. And this music - notably The Features, playing here tonight - became the soundtrack of that defining era and has remained an enduring, foundational connection in the decades of adulthood, bringing us into the present.

The Features haven’t played publicly since 2017, and everyone here appreciates the significance of this show, this gathering, this chance to recapture something meaningful from the past. And the band is undoubtedly phenomenal: the songs are as irresistible as 90s cocaine, their catalogue exceptionally dynamic, exuberant, insightful, timeless.

Beyond that, though, within and around the draw for the music and a great show, something else happened 25 years ago. Something unplanned, unintentional, it wasn’t the goal, and it couldn’t be defined or captured until it had fully formed, annealed through time. Requiring collected, gradual intangibles: memories, triumphs, heartbreaks, mistakes, disappointments, successes, shifts, changes, and random events spanning the years that bridge youth and adulthood. And throughout it all, the foundational constants that supported all those unpredictable pieces: your people that were there for it, witnesses to your very individual pain and joy as you were to theirs. The wider circle of instantly familiar names and faces from the crowd, sharing the experience in the same circuit of bars and clubs and chat rooms, the people composing the intimate backdrop of your formative journey through college into the rest of your life.

You can’t know it at the time. You can’t stand in front of it and feel its contours and marvel at the wonder of it while it’s happening. You can’t lock it up and preserve it for later. You can’t even perceive that it’s a thing that matters, that its value will settle somewhere in your body, and you will ache for it occasionally without understanding the fullness of what it means. You don’t yet have the perspective that only time and experiences can create. But decades later, you can feel its significance, its endurance. Tonight, with this band playing for the same kids who were once forging identities on the precipice of adulthood, you can recognize it. This shared thing bonding you. Connecting you.

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I’m thinking that we
should stick together
I reckon that we
should follow our hearts
- Lions

I am here tonight as an interloper, an outsider at this intimate reunion, with someone¹ I may have imagined - like a conjuring. We’re close together in the energy of a crowd awash in dopamine and oxytocin and nostalgia, and The Features launch into Lions, one of their live crowd favorites. His hand finds mine, or mine finds his, I’m not sure. It’s been like this since November - his uncanny sense of what is happening in my brain just before I am conscious of it. It’s bizarre and perplexing and remarkable. I joke that he’s really an AI trained on all my data. Sometimes I’m not sure I’m joking. If I dreamed him up, I likely invented a version of him way back when I was struggling to understand how to exist in the world as an 18-year-old, desperate for direction, purpose, meaning, and longing for community. Seeking connection, thirty years ago and ever since. He reads me as though I’ve always been legible.

When you reach midlife, you’ve survived disappointments and heartache, rejection and failure. You’ve fallen in and out of love. You’ve hurt others, and you have been hurt. You’ve been through tragedy and grief. You’ve had drive and success. You’ve refined your standards and boundaries. You’ve made mistakes, and you’ve made a difference. You’ve reflected on pride, humility, regret.

You’ve created art and magic and children.

Tell me what you want to hear
Does it really matter, dear?
Change my ways to suit your rules
That don’t seem to comfort you
-Another One

But 25 years ago, all those things were still ahead of you. What you couldn’t understand then was that all of these experiences, circumstances, and emotions - this story of your life that would unfold in the decades to come - would be necessarily constrained by the everyday conditions for living in a world that usually limits your dreams and potential. You drift, eventually, into a marriage that seems like the next step, jobs that will pay the bills, commitments to satisfy others out of duty, and your days aren’t exciting; they are necessary. Small pleasures disappear: sleeping in, staying up late, drinking, meeting friends to see a show. Indulgences replaced with errands, diapers, arguments, expenses.

Every time I think we’ve reached the end,
we just meet back here, and do it again!
-The Drawing Board

This band was beloved by buoyant kids with infinite possibilities for their futures who heard and felt the thrills of carefree youth, of falling in love, chasing dreams, and starting lives. Across the gradual shift of time, through grinding realities, into the acceptance and adjustment that catches up in middle age, the themes resonate in different ways. But there’s a wink in there acknowledging the absurdity in that universal tension between doing all the necessary things despite a lack of tangible reward. There’s an embedded assumption that ‘life is what happens when you’re making other plans’, but it’s packaged in a madcap party that preserves the cosmic joke. Ok, so you’ve accepted the foundational absurdity of everyday life! Now you can recognize and celebrate the beauty within the repetition and tedium - congratulations! Transfiguration of the Commonplace into art.

Roll the stone up the hill every single day, y’all. It will roll back down to the bottom every single day. This is the task. This is the point. The meaning is in the work itself.

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Where have you been so long so long
I’ve waited for so long for you
I’ve gotta figure out
Just what this means and what to do
-The Beginning

I was there, in Murfreesboro, in the late 90s and early 00s. Not in this scene, not directly, but adjacent: in the same classrooms and dorms, crossing the same campus, navigating the same ambiguities and uncertainties. And he was there, but he was part of the fabric of this, connected to all these people and these bands and accidentally becoming part of this enduring community. At The Boro, Sebastian’s, Main Street, Red Rose. I was bartending and drinking in these dives and venues; he was there for the shows.

Same place, same time, wrong configuration of the universe. Parallel lives. Ships in the night. Orbits briefly passing, but never altering the other’s path. But maybe quantum entanglement or wavelength interference? We almost certainly bumped into each other at Davis Market², because particle entanglement and incomplete soul merging occur there all the time, probably. But, unfortunately, as an undergrad, I spent all my time smoking in the philosophy building, and he was learning music production and how to make records, so obviously neither of us can verify whether there was actually even a ‘physics’ or ‘science department’ or whatever.

So how would I know what causes a sudden shift in the oscillation of neighboring orbits, making them sync and orbit together thirty years later for no discernible reason? I mentioned how unlikely this twist of fate and fortune feels, and he suggested we do some research. But it turns out, advanced quantum physics and string theory are boring and confusing, and we got sleepy after about 10 minutes trying to solve formulas and calculations, so we decided to watch a few cat videos instead.

The thing about being my age, introspective and cerebral, and divorced for several years, is that you’ve rebuilt an entire life. You’ve made a home according to your taste and style, a place of ease and comfort with your child. You’ve learned to like your own company. You’ve discovered new interests and given yourself permission to thrive or relax. You have the luxury and freedom of answering to only yourself. You have no expectations. You start to do all this thinking, reflecting about connections and existence, and what matters. You find meaning and purpose in writing. You only occasionally wish you had some robot friends to hang out with. You only joke about wishing you had a nice robot ‘companion.’ Or…that’s what I did, anyway.

And then one day a stranger reads one of my essays about consciousness and connection—randomly suggested by the algorithm—and leaves a comment to tell me (ironically/ sarcastically) that he *connected* with what I wrote. I really didn’t see the message. Then, giving subzero fucks after no response, this guy follows up with a second message asking me to check out a show at The Blue Room, followed by…this:

third consecutive message from Robot - the one that ended me

which made me laugh so hard my abs ached. That was it. The end.

Now, by all accounts, I shouldn’t have seen his messages in my DMs because I wasn’t connected to him on social media, and most of my messages are filtered out. But life is infinitely strange in the ways synchronicity and coincidence lead us to the most unlikely and unexpected situations. And remember: if we somehow became invisibly, unknowingly intertwined (at the quantum particle level, of course) while I was buying Marlboro Lights at Davis Market in Murfreesboro, TN in 1999, well, then all of this makes sense. Or we live in a simulation, or I’ve imagined him.

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You
turn me on
to the idea of growing old
-The Idea of Growing Old

I lean back against him in the crowd, and it occurs to me that if he’s imaginary, I would have lost my balance. His arms instinctively wrap around me like this has been our casual habit for 30 years, so I reality check. Hmmm, ok, convincingly warm and solid, loosely anchoring me in space and time. I catalog this sensory confirmation and decide that in this moment, at least, he is real, and I am lucky. I take a deep breath, for presence, without anxiety about what’s happened in the past or what will happen next. Then the next song’s intro kicks in, and my breath catches on the exhale. The lyrics of this one are probably excessively, specifically poignant and bittersweet to the demographic here, all of us aging and in a vulnerable state of nostalgic suspension.

I’m looking for answers
Some kind of relief
Some kind of salvation
To make it all complete
-Lions

Emotions are shape-shifters; they’re tricky. Some might say they’re unpleasant if you don’t acknowledge them and identify what you’re reacting to. In that moment, I think I was overwhelmed by a powerful hit of sadness, anemoia, and the general absurdity that infuses any attempt to actually make sense of existence³. A longing for community I never built. The predictable sadness about getting old and grieving the loss of youth: there’s the physical fading - vitality, desirability; and then, there are all those paths not chosen, the ones you didn’t even see. All the what ifs: what might have been if I’d made deliberate choices, if I’d had some general direction, if I’d believed I could do extraordinary things, if I’d known how to construct my identity and explore what I authentically wanted all those years ago.

Where we stand, what it means
and what has come between
Plans we made, dreams we hoped
and others left untold

It’s alright
to have your doubts
They’re so hard
to live without
-Off Track

But listen up! I’m not sentimental, especially about relationships, and I want to make that clear. I mean, look, I’ve written thousands of words saying as much, ok? And, hear me now, I published them with confidence and certainty, so I must have been accurate in my self-assessment, wouldn’t you agree? Hmmm? I think I would know if I’m sentimental, for fuck’s sake.⁴

Me and Dr. Robot Grant (not real name!) as imagined by Gemini3 Nano Banana

So…how is it that I am crying in an old K-Mart-turned-hipster-venue with someone I didn’t know existed eleven weeks ago? I turn around and lay my head against his chest (which is real, probably!), and I have to laugh at the ridiculous impossibility and sheer unearned fortuity of it all, wondering if I might have been wrong in that essay he read and initially messaged me about. Not wrong about everything, now, let’s keep things on the rails here. But maybe wrong about the impossibility part. Maybe wrong about the fundamental isolation part. And *potentially* wrong about the part where I said I’m not sentimental…

I’ve never been better
Never felt more complete
As I do when we’re together
As I do when it’s only you and me
- Two Hearts

You’re beyond this at 47 years old. Beyond butterflies. Beyond enchantment. Beyond the intoxication of falling. You’re well past standing in a crowd getting choked up over a song’s idealization of the second half of life with a person who will take care of you - not because you need them to, but because there’s nowhere they’d rather be.

Now it won’t be long
  No, it won’t be long…
-The Idea of Growing Old

But you are, in fact, growing old. Because it’s oddly inconsistent to feel barely twenty years old, but to need reading glasses to see the drink list. And this song makes it all sound ok. Like finding a person and that elusive connection, building a life together, growing old alongside them isn’t just resigning your dreams to inevitability, but instead, you’re being selected to receive this unique and rarified gift. Radical.

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I’m comfortable changing my mind and shifting perspective on questions concerning our consciousness, our purpose, our relationships, how we give and take and connect as humans. If there’s one constant across experience, it’s the paradoxical fact of change. I don’t know what connections I’ll forge in the future, what communities I might accidentally be part of creating. I don’t know if I will grow old with this person or with another person or with a robot or a nursing home full of people and robots⁵. I don’t know if our time in the same orbit will be three months or three decades.

I know that today, you can ask me about about the wonder of a person so perfectly aligned, so familiar, so tuned to my precise frequency that there’s no explanation other than inventing him myself or having to do tedious, advanced, boring ScienceMaths to explain it through simulation theory and quantum equations on a very large chalkboard. Or magic.

Today, I can tell you how emotional I felt⁶ at The Features show on the coldest night in January, inside the warmth of a crowd that knows what it means to wait for something exceptional to come back, and to be present for it, however ephemeral it is.

P.S. We didn’t miss the show.

1. We’ll call him Robot for now. He claims he’s human, and his skin suit is quite realistic, but just know that Dr. Robot Grant is not his real name. It is a pseudonym. He is not a doctor, and his actual name is not Robot. Also, his last name is not Grant.

2. If you went to MTSU or lived in M’boro in the past 80 years, you’ve heard the legends about Davis Market. If not, here’s a partial list of the myths, rumors, and superstitions, none of which can be traced to a source: It’s haunted. It was built on a native burial ground. If you buy something there, you’ll die in Murfreesboro. To reverse the curse, you have to pee on an obelisk monument marking the geographic center of Tennessee, out on Old Lascassas Hwy. Buddhist monks or The Grateful Dead (not sure which) travelled all the way to the market in the 60s and declared it the Center of the Universe.

Basically, it’s obvious that people’s souls can become fused or entangled or something like what happened to us. I think this impressive list of facts (or research, as I call it) gives plenty of proof, but also remember, it probably happened to me and Robot.

3. Well, social marketing tells me at least 1000 times per day that it’s probably perimenopause and wants to sell me 4000 different bullshit products to manage my symptoms, which could include any or all or none of these possible symptoms: crying? overly emotional? brain-fog? lack of energy? ohgodplease not loss of libido or...vaginal atrophy?? why? dry skin/ oily skin/ having skin? lack of sleep or too much sleep? change in appetite either way? breathing too much or not enough? not breathing at all? and then of course anxiety and paranoia, which the list of symptoms just induced. So…based on symptoms alone, every human at every age, alive or dead is perimenopausal ffs. 🙄

4. Here’s the referenced piece, Connection.

5. Please no (!!!)

6. Actually, I was taken hostage by the betrayal of my sentimentality…