alicia wright

March sure did go out like a lion. One really great thing about my house is that every room has an exterior wall, and the side facing the nearly knocked-down trees in the woods is almost entirely windows, so tornado warnings that include “stay away from the windows and exterior walls” aren’t my favorite but at least I’ll see the storm (or a tree) coming.

But that’s neither here nor there! I’ve come to confess something: coming of age in the era of Garden State and its soundtrack ruined my life. If I don’t listen to whiny baby indie (or indie-adjacent) music while I’m writing I simply will not get anything done.

This is what it means to have suffered through an early 2000s young adulthood. Traumatizing, truly.

It was very warm at the start of March – alarmingly warm, even. I coped by starting a playlist titled “It’s ~warm~.”

(I’m not interested in dropping the tilde as emphasizer, thanks.)

Fifteen songs later, it was cold again. Shucks.

I wasn’t going to abandon the playlist, though. It was a masterpiece.

Five years ago this playlist probably would have been titled something like “Go Fast Playlist,” because five years ago I was a person who drove around for hours, mind mostly blank, when I had nothing better to do – and when I did have better things to do and didn’t want to do them – dreamy voices and stringy guitars playing too loud. The speaker in my passenger door rattles when the volume’s above a whisper now.

Sometime between then and now I turned into a person who mostly just drives in silence for five minutes to my office in the morning, then five minutes with my music at a low hum back to my house at night. Might as well make it five decent minutes, I guess.