dolorosa_12 | 'Set your giant eagles on me!' (Reply)

Thanks to

muccamukk, I've been doing little else other than listening to the Go_A concert embedded below.

As I was doing so, I was feeling an increasing sense of concert regret, because I had the opportunity to see them live at a tiny goth club in London last year, but the gig coincided with my mum's annual visit, so I declined to go, and then had to watch them tour all around continental Europe without any evident plans to return to the UK.

(I have concert regret about a handful of acts that I could potentially have seen but didn't for various reasons — Daft Punk's tour of Australia in 2007, various Massive Attack performances around 2010 or so, and The Knife around this period, and, apparently, Go_A.)

And then, by a bizarre coicidence, Go_A yesterday announced a series of UK concerts in October, and Matthias and I have tickets to see them in London (tickets are released to the general public tomorrow, but we could buy them early due to Matthias having a phone contract with O2). It was the weirdest moment of serendipity I've ever experienced.

I can't find a way to relate it to Go_A or concerts, but this griefbacon essay really resonated with me (overwrought prose and all) and I felt the urge to share it, so I'm sticking it in this post and calling the whole post a linkpost. It's about TV shows, and adolescence, and feeling intense emotions, and all the little things that matter so much when you are 12, 13, 14 years old:

High school is hell, and so are the years that proceed it. Childhood is brutal, and it’s a wonder anyone survives it at all. But to make that statement is to invite mockery, to take a position impossible to defend in rational terms. Viewed at a distance, much of what typically happens in childhood seems inconsequential compared to what comes next. [...]

Were I to try to explain any of this to anyone, now, in my thirties, it would sound stupid. I’ve negotiated on the phone with collection agents and talked through options with hospice nurses. Am I really going to sit here and tell you that other children saying mean things about me before I was old enough to vote or drink was as bad as any of that? The thing is, I am. I had nothing else to fall back on; there was nothing else there yet. Bad things happen now, but other things do, too; there’s always somewhere else to go. As a kid, it wasn’t just that other kids were mean to me; it was that their meanness was the whole cumulative sum of my existence. The skin of the world was so thin that any single cruelty punched a hole right through the backdrop that looked like the sky.

I do recommend the griefbacon newsletter, which can be read in the regular Substack way through your email inbox, or via the