One Big Dark Room: Genesis
Fortune Makes Fools of Us All
(attached song written/recorded in late 2012, but published to Patreon as part of this post in 2017)
Hi guys,
We wrapped up tracking the OBDR EP in our garage last night. It was a really cool experience to track us all live together, with the dogs around, and none of us used any monitoring to avoid dealing with aural-latency-induced mental breakdowns due to our substandard recording equipment set up. It made it more special to just be present in the room with the guys. We tracked everything live, all together, including the vocals. Later today I'll be mixing it down and setting it up to print it for this weekend. I'll send you guys an option to check it out in the next day or two.
I'd love to have your feedback on the following post. If you signed up/will sign up to hear the free track I'm giving away right now, you will ultimately see this as a blog post or email, but basically I have to do the very scary (but in a good way) thing of really sharing my truth and my story of how this project came to be. It isn't pretty - it's the sometimes sad and grotesque reality of Life: that we sometimes make mistakes and get lost along the way. That's what this project is all about, being in the trenches and finding a way to dig yourself out.
I hope you'll take the time to read this story. You'll learn a little bit more about me, where I come from, and in this post I'm giving a little more detail about my relationship with the deceased friend I write so much about, who is, ultimately, the primary muse of this project.
If you have any feedback on how to make this better, please post in the comments below. Or if you have a similar story of something to share, I'd love to know more about it. If you feel your story is too delicate to post in the comments below, feel free to email me at lex@onebigdarkroom.com.
The song I'm including in this post was one I cathartically worked at in the days just after she passed. The lyrics are actually all, until about the last verse, from a poem of hers, and I included samples of voicemails she had left me. I hadn't heard it in a while, and it made my breath shallow
thanks again,
Lex
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The leaves had just turned, and the most transformative period of my life was about to begin. I was 19, still living in my home turf of Southern California, just starting my third semester at University. A confluence of monumental events left me with wider eyes than before: My first big love and I had called it quits, I had just dropped out of the music program, and I was carefully walking a tight rope on the already-strained relationship with my father (with whom I had had a massive disagreement a couple years before), and my whole world teetered on the promise that I wouldn’t fuck up again.
I wasn’t sure, completely, what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn’t want to be there. Wasn’t college supposed to be that time where you get a fresh start? Because of the turbulence leading up to my Freshman year, the agreement was such that I would go to the closest University that had accepted me. This word, “university” was important, as I had the intention, all throughout high school, to go to a Music Conservatory after spending the previous decade studying classical voice, which I wanted to pursue as an undergrad. This was not what my father had in mind for me, and when decision-time came, it blew up.
Anyway, here I was, Round Two. Year One hadn’t been great. I barely made the GPA-requirement that my father had stipulated- or disownment would follow.
The idea of going to college at all was difficult for me to accept, as I had moved in with my father and his wife at age 12, following an icky years-long custody battle between my mother and her brother, and, then, I think a bit reluctantly, my father participated as well - ultimately winning me right as I was about to enter middle school. We had only met a few years before, so it wasn’t unlike being transported to an entirely different world. The laissez-faire attitude with which my mother raised me until then made me a self-reliant and wise-beyond-my-years child, even if I was a bit rough around the edges. He, however, adopted a more stern and rigid parenting style. To make matters worse, I was a black sheep amongst my newly acquired cousins - they all athletic, gorgeous, brainy, poised, and graceful.
My early life consisted of waiting in line for food stamps, digging change out of the couch cushions to afford a fast-food value-menu item so I could eat that night, caring for my little brother, and being beholden to my mother who was moody and emotionally unavailable. The idea of going to college, of doing what the rich kids would do, was alien to me.
I knew throughout how lucky I was. My father provided me an incredible education for those 6 years that I was in his care. I wanted to be in school- we just disagreed on where I should spend my focus. I tried to keep up with the courseload he asked, while trying to maintain good marks in my music classes, but floundered, isolated. Suffering life-long from severe anxiety and depression, the only thing that kept me alive that first year was that I was able to hide in my dorm room, alone, working on my schoolwork and maybe sometimes playing guitar.
But Year Two - had this magic to it. By providence, I was living off-campus with a mesmeric artist-lady and fellow student. Over that previous summer I had acquired a few new friends through the music scene as well, already playing little cafe shows around Orange County and LA, writing and sharing my own songs.
A week or so after school started, I played one of my regular spots, and a kid I sat next to in Music Theory the year before brought a girl I’d never seen around.
Something happened that night. After we became friends, she and I would refer to this sensation as “fore-memory”... where you feel deeply that something is familiar, though it couldn’t be- like the time-matrix has glitched and your higher-self recognizes what’s to come. Something like deja-vu, but softer. Just, a knowing. That’s what it was like when I first saw her.
She sat at a cafe table, smoking. A pixie-cut brunette with a blonde shock at the bang, tied up with a bowed-bandanna. She seemed vignetted somehow by the porch lights, as though I were watching her, spotlit, in a play on stage. We all went back to our apartment afterward and she and I instantly clicked, yammering on about a mountain of things until she left somewhat suddenly, and I felt confused at how disappointed I was that she hadn’t stayed longer.
Fate kept knocking us together, and before long, we were attached at the hip. (I had only had one friend like her before, and she had been snatched away in the night, sent off to one of those behavioral bootcamps, without a chance to say goodbye.) We could talk about anything, and I particularly appreciated how I could refer to things allegorically and she would follow. The meanings of our recurring dreams, life-symbols that kept appearing. Signs. Through the sharing of our experiences, we developed our own language, and we became spiritually connected because of the ability to recognize the metaphors in each other’s existences. God, I fucking miss her.
We’d talk about ex-boyfriends, and crushes, of course, and, boy, did I have one right then. By mid-term a solid core social group had been established, and I had it bad for one of our guy friends who was also a singer-songwriter. At the end of a raucous night playing songs in-the-round, and some of us maybe-possibly experimenting with a stimulant drug, he, seemingly, pointedly played an original song of his about not wanting to hurt someone whose feelings he did not reciprocate. She had stepped out earlier in the evening, so I frantically rang her - and she entered my apartment soon after, looking cold. Shaking, I pulled her out onto the balcony to recount what had just happened. Unsympathetically, she rolled her eyes and lashed out at me about how cruel, heartless, and self-involved I was - “How can you do this to me when I’m so clearly in love with you?”
The very few times I have told this story before, I’ve tried to convey how it actually felt like the world flipped upside down at those words. Maybe it was the pill I had taken, maybe it was what she had said, or a combination of both, but I think it might have been the realization that the whole picture of the world would never again be as I perceived. I stammered, bewildered, and apologized- and she left.
For the next few days I avoided her, not knowing what to make of it all. She was hyper-intelligent, beautiful, and we clearly had chemistry… but there was at least one major issue that I could then recognize: neither of us were gay. My buddy, Shane, told me to get over myself and stop being so homophobic, “I think you guys would be cute together.” He was right, really. What was the problem here? I knew I believed that sexuality happened on a scale, I was obviously attracted to her, and all I really wanted for myself was someone to love and accept me for who and what I really was… and wasn’t that her?
We smoothed things out but didn’t begin a relationship. Suffice it to say she had a slew of issues herself. We walked a delicate line between friendship and something more, while still entertaining pursuits of other partners. It was confusing and painful.
Once I settled into a relationship with someone else, she did the same. Almost all of us dropped out of school. Disowned as promised, I began working full-time - taking the train to LA on my days off to work on my first record with a producer from LA who had discovered some of my demos a few months before.
At the end of Year Two, I broke up with my boyfriend, quit my job, and moved to Hollywood to pursue my music career. She rejoined her parents in the Northwest. Shane, the friend who had told us we would "be cute together” was now her long-distance boyfriend, and hefollowed me to Los Angeles to be my roommate.
That next year was tumultuous, unsurprisingly. She would berate me for not reciprocating her feelings, but when I would come to the table ready to take the next step, she would retreat. By the time she moved to LA to join us, I had started another relationship, which she took a special interest in agitating. Our friendship yet held, that inexpressible affinity persisting despite her innumerable manic or drug/alcohol-induced episodes that made my daily life more difficult to maintain, considering the fragility of my own mental health.
Throughout, we wrote. She was an absolutely brilliant writer, better than me by leagues. Blogs of poetry and vignettes permeated our LiveJournal feeds- stanzas written in secret on napkins and in each other’s notebooks, exchanged when no one was looking. We’d spend the days drinking whiskey together, nonchalantly watching Walker, Texas Ranger in my boyfriend’s garage and then, at night, would separate to write Epics about our Star-Cross’d love. We used borrowed mythology to create our own: Neil Gaiman’s “Sandman” comics, the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, the Tarot, Shakespeare, Dante’s Divine Comedy. Using the symbols we talked so much about, we were able to create beautiful compositions with often hurtful subtext, and damn, was she good at it.
She and Shane moved away eventually, splitting a little later. She moved back in with her parents, her mental health seemingly deteriorating. I stayed in LA a while longer until my relationship fell apart and I left California for Texas to at last get that clean slate I was so keen on years before. She and I would fight, not talk, make up, then fight again. Sometimes in person, mostly in words.
There were a few more reunions, but all occasions would start well enough before devolving into dramatic existential crises. The last time, I had this sinking feeling as I watched her drive away that I would never see her again.
In the year or so that followed, she would call, but I would pick up less and less. I would miss her, want to talk to her, but felt that I needed to separate myself from her. Stupidly, I worried that more emotional investment would prove too painful when that *something bad* would inevitably happen. Of course, something did. Fortune makes Fools of us all.
On the morning of Thanksgiving Day 2012, her car was found totaled, but they hadn’t yet found her. Her father had called me to see if I had heard from her, but I hadn’t. Later that day Shane was the one to deliver the news, hysterically - “She’s dead. She’s fucking dead.”
I knew only one way to channel the regret, shame, and sadness I felt - the only way I could ever really reach her: I wrote and wrote. Journals, poems, and songs upon songs upon songs upon songs. Still, even now, years later, I’m still trying to communicate with the dead - this person who turned my world upside-down, who changed me, who knew the darkest parts of me that no one else on earth will ever know. Our mythology, the tomes we wrote together, made the journey all the more strange - while she was alive, we talked at length about death, life beyond death, our spiritual kinship that was otherworldly. Then she died- and I felt it a test.
For years, these songs have been piling up, locked away because they are too vulnerable, too sensitive, too evocative, too controversial. Death is too scary for most to discuss. Our modern society has a very strange way of dealing with grief - in that we don’t. I found this challenging when trying to process losing her that holiday season.
In the days following her death, I just wanted to talk. I wanted to tell anyone who would listen about how amazing she was, our life together, what a fool I had been. I suppressed a maniacal urge to grab everyone I saw and shout, “Hold what’s dear close! Leave nothing tender unsaid! Live your life - now!” Phrases I have to make a conscious effort to remember as time wears on, and especially in those peaceful times between heartbreak.
They might be just supernatural notes-in-bottles from a sad girl to someone she loves yet cannot reach, but I hope these songs can be more than that. I hope they help others the way they helped me while I was writing them, shouting into the void of eternity. I hope they might also serve as a reminder to not waste any days left alone in the dark.
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