And that gets us back to nostalgia, the ways in which we try so desperately to stitch together our lives with disparate details, both real and imagined. Like dropping the Claw Machine into a bin full of all your former identities, hoping desperately you snag the right one.

Our masculine world is unsafe for far too many, and heroes like Frank Ocean don’t just create space for the rest of us, he takes the punches on our behalf, too. And while I’m sure there are plenty of would-be fans who posture up publicly in protest against queer celebrities, I suspect it’s just that: posturing for the sake of preserving a public image, to alleviate any speculation about their own sexuality within groups still nurtured to demonize differences.

‘Fear of the Other’ isn’t new in this country, or anywhere else, but it’s quite clear there’s a rise in hatred these days. Laws are regressing, queer spaces are being targeted, bathrooms monitored, books banned, and in Florida it’s even illegal to use the word “gay.” In several Red States, it’s illegal for medical professors to provide care to Trans bodies. So much for “All Lives Matter,” “Pro-Life,” and the Hippocratic Oath.

Praying the gay away doesn’t make the gay go away just like banning books doesn’t stop stories from being told. There’s no easy solution to the toxic masculinity crisis, but I do know that representation matters. Seeing oneself in another’s story is how we discover ourselves, how we see there’s a different path forward. Repressing urges doesn’t remove the urge, it just misplaces it. And all too often that urge comes out in all the wrong ways.

I’ve felt resentment for being so unknown, and misunderstood, and yet know that some of that is unfair: one can’t be known if you won’t allow others to truly know you. What I’ve learned these past years is that I actually knew less about myself than others saw in me, words unspoken carved between us holding back a deeper understanding.

About “Abattoir Blues,” off of his 2004 album by the same name, he says, "it's the apocalypse that's happened or is happening incrementally, gradually. Or it's metaphoric." That’s sort of how I see our modern times, gradual ending rather than all at once, a closing in, the way all things all at once seem to be breaking around us. I, too, have the “abattoir blues,” and sometimes it feels like my shoes are stuck in thick mud, each step forward a little more difficult than the one before it. Every news story, a catastrophe, a genocide, a privileged man let free. Every step that slows us down is one step closer to the end, and for now, at least, I’ll happily go back to being the angsty curmudgeon, the campus preacher, the whiskey-breathe word-flinging ranting madman who’s screaming to wake up, look around, fight for what remains before there’s nothing left at all.

Today is Memorial Day, a time when we remember those who fought and died in wars. While I’d love to be the sort of idealist who believes war is always avoidable, I know better. Sometimes survival is at stake, when one side is clearly right and the other clearly wrong. But in almost every example, those declaring war aren’t the ones fighting them: the men (and it’s always men) in the high castles sending other parent’s children into death trenches. Every President in my lifetime has waged war against someone, but only one (Biden) has had a kid who served (Iraq). Last I counted, Trump has five children old enough to serve. The only lines they form are powdered white, cut with privilege, and snorted through Daddy’s $20 bill.

Basically, he's a racist prick with too much talent who, when his worst traits are restrained by superior humans, can make millions of us feel things he clearly can't feel himself. The Smiths were profound, the runner-up to The Cure in their rivalry for best band of the '80s. On one hand, it's astounding the catalog they compiled in just over five years, and now that we've gotten to know Morrisey more it's even more impressive they accomplished anything at all.

A new Gold Rush is here, and the already-rich are getting richer. They know what they’re doing, what they’re taking, what damage will be done, and as a result they’re plotting their escape. When the floods come and the robots take over, the white men who broke everything will be millions of miles away. Where will we be, what will we have left?

That’s the thing about dystopian stories, isn’t it? The impossible task of carrying on, figuring it out, finding purpose after the ground has gone missing. But dystopian stories aren’t just about nuclear holocausts, asteroids, zombie apocalypses, and pandemics. Sometimes a dystopian story is what happens in our heads when faced with unshakable grief. That’s how I felt for years after losing my Mom, and what I’m reminded of every time I see a friend or stranger posting about their own loss: that endless process of reshaping oneself around a new truth—the knowing how much suffering must happen before moving on is possible.

My kid is 13. His childhood has been shut down, online, on fire, at war, insurrect-ed, under protest, a chaotic backdrop at odds with any possibility for innocence — an anxious, confused generation slow to develop socially and academically. And yet, they’re stronger, wiser, more prepared for whatever comes next — even an overreaction to the most innocent of gestures. Perhaps one day, when they’re in power, a red balloon will be nothing more than a red balloon.

I felt that way then, too, in my own version of a small town, in that isolated way in which we dream alone about broader worlds while battling the fears that claw to hold us back. I drive the way I run, less of an escape than a passing of time, the blurring of one place with another. As I've gotten older, and as I've begun to process the world my kid is inheriting, I feel that same unease I felt during more innocent times. The dark is getting darker - fires and floods, genocides and pandemics, capitalism's savage inequalities, an inevitable AI takeover, and the divisive politics barreling us towards a preventable Fascist regime. These are the times that prologue those dystopian novels and films, the 'what ifs' and 'we should have' moments that could've prevented what comes next.

We’re consumed with mediocre, unimportant content now, targeted to us by algorithms that aren’t designed to discern quality. And we never know why certain things are sent to us over others. Spotify’s Release Radar is pretty decent, most of the time, but there’s enough what the holy fuck suggestions that make me think even that, which is meant to be based on my listening habits and tastes, is for sale to the “artists” willing to pay for that space.

Looking back at our younger selves can be complicated, a process of reconciling who we are with who we thought we’d become — wondering what happened to that spirit, and energy, that goes missing in so many as we get older. There’s just no song in the modern era that captures the nostalgia for our former selves quite like this one.

Perhaps sometimes the person who caught the actual football missed the point entirely, that the resulting cheerleading and deification created a false sense of success, a misunderstanding that things will always be so good, that the ball will always fall gently into our hands. It's a trope, at this point, that those who rise to the top in high school reach their peak too soon. That's not always true, of course, but in that way I'm glad I wasn't the one who caught the football.

It’s time we blame the real problem: out of touch politicians for accepting big tech lobby money at the expense of common sense regulations, the tech platforms profiting off of art while inhibiting earning potential, and ourselves for buying into the model at all.

I guess that’s what happens as we grow older, more removed from our pasts. We’re not just strangers to our old friends, we become strangers to ourselves. And that’s never more obvious than when we go back to where it all began, when we can see in the mirror of others all the ways in which we’ve changed.

To be queer is to know you can’t fit yourself in the world as it is, that you either mask, hide in safe spaces, withhold your truth in any way you can, or boldly present yourself exactly as you are to a world that might reject you. It feels at times that rousay’s use of Auto-tune plays in this space, a way of distancing or numbing oneself from having to perform as anyone other than yourself.

My favorite art transports me to places and feelings, introduces me to characters I can’t be, conjures meaning to experiences I couldn’t otherwise comprehend, sends me to parts of my mind as foreign and faraway as long-gone cultures.

If an artist was adamant about something never being released, I don't want it. That's not so clear with Russell, who was still creating and recreating right up until his premature death. Perhaps he's different, given his sensibility, that a song was only finished when he was no longer there to edit it.