If you are already on this website I think it's safe to assume you at least vaguely know of me. That's really the best case scenario.

This website is a place for me to practice sincerity. That's my understanding of it right now at least. I'm not making any effort for the writings here to be perceived in any way, they are very much just straight from my head.

This is effectively a journal of sorts. Only made public. Mostly I just write about things that interest me. Opinions. I wouldn't consider this a website of any serious societal value. The only thing you can learn about on here is me. But I think that's okay. I know the value that I get out of it at least, and I'm the one paying for the domain name at the end of the day.

Genuinely everything on this website is an invitation for a discussion. I like writing about things but I love talking about things with people way more. If I write something on here and you disagree I want to hear about it. Or if you have something you think I should see or a song you think I should hear, tell me.

Maybe that's the point of this website.

Anyway, below is Nick Mullen. My hero.

Sleep

Stereotypes are generally pretty bad. Like universally I would say it's not very good to promote stereotypes because they are usually racist or sexist or otherwise pretty evil. That being said, today I have been thinking about a new stereotype that I am surprised doesn't already exist. My stereotype is that of the late riser. The opposite of the early bird. I genuinely think that there needs to be a lot more societal pressure to encourage healthy sleep habits. I say this as someone who has for my entire life struggled with sleep. For literally as long as I can remember I have never been a morning person. This is a cutesy label I suppose that normalizes and excuses a bad habit. Then as soon as I had the agency to set my own bedtime things got really bad and for the most part have never gotten better. I don't think I have maintained a consistent, eight hours of sleep per night sleep schedule since maybe grade 9? Even while working a full time job. At one of my jobs I was actually able to graph my clock in times (see below). Ideally it would be a flat line but no, not for me. For me I have a consistent almost perfectly linear line. Despite this utter failure to show up to work reliably, nobody ever made any serious comment on it. So that being said I think this qualifies me to speak on the topic of bad sleep schedules.

There are a lot of behaviours that society has deemed unacceptable. If you have bad hygiene for example, people might not say anything to your face but you will be ridiculed for it. Despite a lot of recent efforts the same is true for problems with addiction, homelessness, teen pregnancy, etc. There is stigma, shame, and just general negativity associated with these things, and I will not go into whether or not it is valid. I think the reason society rejects these things is that they place a lot of strain on other people. Families, relationships, employers, are all affected by the "failures" of an individual. This is where poor sleep habits differ. Typically poor sleep habits exclusively impact the individual. It kind of puts into perspective that the reason people are so opposed to the other behaviours mentioned is not out of care for another person, but instead out of selfishness. Maybe this is obvious. A weird quirk of poor sleep habits is that, despite their destructive impacts, they get glorified in a lot of situations. Think of the start up founder, the office worker that goes above and beyond. On the other side of the spectrum, the partier, or rave goer. In these contexts being up late, getting few hours of sleep is a badge of honour. In my own experience I have never tried to hide my poor sleep schedule. Being a university student, I think this is probably the most accepted environment for this kind of thing. Most people are either in the same position or are willing to laugh without much serious thought when I joke about my situation.

I want to feel shame. Society has made a very strong effort to ensure that no one feels ashamed over poor habits or traits and yeah in most of those situations I agree. But not this. It feels backwards and almost like an obsolete way of thinking but I really do think people like me deserve to be ostricized for this. If I was met with pure, vitriolic digust, maybe I would change. Is external motivation what's missing? Lets be clear I have a lot of personal motivation to clean up my act. It's not a very pleasent feeling to wake up and the sun has already set. I cannot count the amount of classes I have slept through. When I have any kind of appointment or exam or lab I need to pray that I can flip my sleep schedule around on a whim. It's not just about waking up late either, you can wake up early and still have horrible sleep habits. Going to work on 4 hours of sleep is a miserable feeling. All of this is horrible and should be reason enough to fix things but clearly for me it isn't. I want to face social consequences. I want 1920s political satire cartoon caricitures of the late riser. It needs to be disgusting, a complete slob. I don't want fairness or accuracy, I want motivation.

There definitely are extenuating circumstances with this topic and I understand this. Those are not what I'm referring to. If you work a night shift this is completely acceptable. If you have actual medical conditions affecting your sleep of course I am not advocating for your ridicule. This is meant to target the individual who stays up late with no purpose beyond scrolling, or watching youtube, or playing videogames, or whatever other thing it may be. This kind of person should be tarred and feathered in the street.

They Are Gutting A Body of Water

This should come as no surprise if you've read my interests post from a couple days ago. I've been listening to TAGABOW since 2023 when their song Eightball came up in my Spotify discover weekly. I didn't listen to much more of them for a few months when I found out (too late) that they were coming to Toronto. They were opening for Panchiko I believe and tickets for that sold out. I got really into them over the following summer and fall so when I found out they were back in Toronto in November I made sure I bought tickets as soon as I could. They were opening for Julie, who I had never heard of at the time. Also playing was Her New Knife. I was super excited to see them and had to explain to my 50+ year old co-workers that I was seeing a band called "They are gutting a body of water". Anyway by the time I got to the venue, TAGABOW had posted on their instagram account that their bus broke down and they wouldn't be able to make it to the show. That was really dissappointing but the show ended up being really good. I sorta had a Julie phase afer that. Anyway back to TAGABOW. Since finally getting to see them live the other day, I have been listening to their new album obsessively. I've been watching and reading interviews with the band in between studying for my exams. Today I taught myself the riff from "American Food" on guitar by ear. It's not perfect I think. Anyway I'm really into this album. My favourite songs are The Chase, Sour Diesel, Trainers, and American Food. I need to figure out how to make music that sounds like this. This will be my winter break project once exams are done.

More Music!

I started recording full length original songs using a guitar in October of 2020. I was in grade 12 and was just about to turn 17. This started a 2-3 year period where I was constantly making new songs. You could call this my most prolific creative era. I was making about 40 songs per year? I never considered any of them to be finished or "real" songs that people would listen to. In the back of my head I always just viewed them as practice and each song was a step towards one day making something to a finished, "real" level of quality. I'm not sure if I ever really reached that point but over the years as I got better I had loftier expectations for the quality of my songs and recordings. Little did I know, pursuing this would turn recording into an unreasonably major task. Suddenly writing and recording a song turned from something I could do in a single day, into something that took weeks or months of trial and error. The finished product got a lot better but it became more a lot more trouble that it was really worth especially considering an increasing workload in school, jobs, relationships, etc. I don't think I will ever say I'm done with music, because I think saying that would cause some kind of serious crisis or ego death as this really was my whole life for a very long time. But yeah, the dream of doing this in a professional context is certainly not on my mind to the extent that it was a few years ago. That's not to say that was ever really my goal. My goal right from the start was just to have something that, in the future I can look back on. From this perspective I have absolutely achieved what I wanted to and then some. Over the years I have always had these songs available to me privately and I would revisit them every so often. I get a lot of value even from the oldest ones. I'll hear something in a horrible, noisy recording that makes me stop in awe that I did this. I think it's really unlikely that I will ever reach the same level of output that I was able to achieve at 17, but I would like to at least have a few "unfinished" recordings every year. I've never been someone that takes photos. Not to diminish the value of photos but I don't think looking at a photo holds a candle to listening to a song you made years and years ago. I can very vividly remember where I was and what was going on in my life when I listen to most of them. These songs are the closest thing I have to a scrapbook and I hope to add to it throughout my life.

Click the photo to go to the bandcamp page. It's all free.