about just getting it over with and replacing the TV

After over 3 years' procrastinating, I scheduled a day to replace my old TV.

The day came, so I left work early and Googled something like, “things to know before buying a new TV.” I spent several minutes skimming a few pages that each listed 9 or 10 factors, like the different screen-lighting technologies, how many and what kinds of ports and jacks you might want, the relevance of frames displayed per second, and so on. None of this was especially helpful. I probably couldn’t tell the difference between an LED, QLED, OLED, or UHD.

But one hint made sense: a good 55” TV will cost around $500.

Okay, so on to Best Buy, where I found a wall of 55” TVs. Only three of them cost about $500. Obviously, no Best Buy employee would go near a customer, so I took the time to Google each model’s specs and a couple reviews until I found a reason to justify picking one TV over the others.

Including research, driving, checking out, and everything, I spent maybe an hour buying an appliance worth over $500—an appliance that I spend significant quantities of time using and want to enjoy almost every day. It was the only way to pull the trigger.

Before I even dragged the box all the way into the house, I realized the TV was too big for my TV stand. I was so focused on the thing itself that I forgot about where it would go, placing time and value before physical space.

A person can get bogged down overthinking these things.

about how dreams are interesting only when they are yours

Dreamed we sat around in your old room. But the room was a basement space, so I watched a guy at ground level cutting back shrubs. He cut way too much! Also saw a bouncy castle outside, your kid nephew about to have a birthday party. We amused ourselves somehow. I played with old action figures. A Krusty the Clown whose head was supposed to boing up on a spring, but the mechanism was broken. We wrestled, I flipped you—flipped you more skillfully than we could expect—and we started laughing hard and like when you laugh even though nothing particularly funny happened. Woke up in the laugh and felt like after Padre Island, how I missed this.

 

a review of an album by one of my favorite bands

Twenty years after its debut, City of Caterpillar released its sophomore album

City of Caterpillar's self-titled debut is one of my all-time favorite albums. Twenty years later, the band released its follow-up, Mystic Sisters.

In 2002, the band was discovering something new. In 2022, it was recovering something old.

"Thought Drunk" starts us off with spacey reverb-drenched guitars behind a menacing bass while tom drums conjure something primal, like war drums just over the hill. A chant falls in with the momentum. The vocal grows manic until singer-guitarist Brandon Evans cuts it off, spitting, "Heads sunk, thought drunk / I'm sick of singing fears / I'm sick of singing fears / I'm sick of losing years / I'm sick to fucking tears." I've always liked Evans's time and phrasing. Then the band stresses the struts with a four-minute noise-rock playout.

So many great debuts are marred by poor sound quality. City of Caterpillar's was. But Mystic Sisters sounds much better.
 

The band releases some tension with "Paranormaladies." Rocking, seesawing riffs impel vocals that somehow sound brash and paranoid: "There's something here / I asked for a sign / Flipped the page, saw old words I scribbled down from my mind—a prior time, with different intentions—they read, 'We'll be waiting for you, best believe that.'"

With the album's release, Evans said, "The band is always focused on mood ... To me, that's the most important thing. I don't really want people dissecting what we're trying to say, because it's not really about us. It never has been. What we cared about 20 years ago was innocent, raw emotion, and that's what we care about now."

The title track builds gradually. Soft, ghostly guitars and a few low-end piano notes haunt. At 1:35, a guitar theme develops. By the three-minute mark, it sounds like an Ennio Morricone hook. At 3:40, this cinematic song breaks from the theme, shifts key, and then builds to a crescendo. Urgency and tension grip tight at 5:10 until a brief reprieve at six minutes. Then the band jumps back in for the coda—

My birth, my death, my ancestors, my brothers, my wife,

My children in the light, mothers birthing this life,

My sisters who have no say

There's mystics in the air,

There's mystics in the air, there's mystics in the...

They're everywhere, everywhere

The guitar drips tension with choice notes softened by reverb to open the album's eighth and final track, "Ascension Theft ... (Gnawing of the Bottom-Feeders)." The notes begin to pool with feedback and noise, then spill as the mood intensifies with the spine-stiffening bass. Then meaty bass notes colossus-walk over hills and through valleys, maintaining perfect control. At 3:30, the song takes off and then triumphs with a bitter, defiant vocal—

Feed your face until it bleeds

For the rest of us it's fight or flight

Spiraling through the thievery

Pockets full of puddled blood

For the rest of us it'll be just fine

Spiraling through the thievery 

Mystic Sisters was released September 30, 2022, on Relapse Records. The band picks up where it left off, building worlds to journey through. It happened the way almost all late-career follow-up albums do: the band reunited for some shows and ended up recording. Is it as good as it was the first time?

Is it ever?

Note:

- A lot of great post-hardcore came out of Richmond, Virginia, in the late 1990s through the 2000s. In addition to City of Caterpillar, the scene produced bands like Pg. 99 (or pageninetynine), Darkest Hour, Enemy Soil, and, later, Majority Rule, Malady, and Pygmy Lush.

- I thought I published this on here 18 months ago.