MAR's album: Somewhere Else (Sun Ra)
an essay no longer about music
We've started on our college essay in my English class. It's making me really fucking unhappy, if I'm honest. There's something unnerving about it — about trying to bare my heart to men I've never met, tell them “Look, I'm interesting. Let me in.”
I'm very private in real life. People don't need to know a lot about me: they don't need to know my pronouns, they don't need to know my gender, or my thoughts on every matter. It's very public-private to me. There's things meant for the world and things meant for me.
By the time that I publish this essay, the first draft of my college essay will have long-been turned in and graded by my English teacher1, raked apart and analyzed. She'll probably know more about me than I ever wanted her to.
But it's whatever.
After my difficulty with Biophilia last month, I decided to jump the shark totally and fully — my album this month was Somewhere Else by Sun Ra. The jazz artist.
There's nothing to analyze for me, not really — I'm a casual Sun Ra fan, I'm unfamiliar with the majority of his politics beyond the stuff I've picked up over the years of mild googling, and I’m not particularly educated on the history jazz. This album, to me, sounds largely similar to the rest of his works. It's hard to come up with something to say about it: there's only two songs that contain words, and they're not exactly the clearest with their meaning — not that Sun Ra ever is.
But there's always been something raucously appealing to me about space. It's probably got to do with the autism, but I find myself helplessly attached to characters out of place, literally and metaphorically. Even in the opposite direction, Richard Rider of Marvel Comics is a favorite of mine, and yet he's human. What makes him so appealing is his cleaving from the rest of the world, from the Terran population. He lost his humanity when he became Nova Centurion Prime.
Sun Ra channels that feeling to me pretty well. Every album he released is imbued with this unsettling feeling of displacement, of wrongness, of — you're not meant to be here and I'm really sorry about it.
I've been reading more sci-fi lately, too. There's this one novel I've been thinking about lot — I was introduced to it awhile back while looking for Turkish fiction, which is funny, because while the author is Turkish, the piece wasn't originally written in Turkish at all. There is a translation: it's currently sitting in my files collecting dust. I'm sure I'll read that version someday. But the story called All Tomorrows and it’s about humans no longer being human.
It's really hard to come up with something to say about Somewhere Else. I’m trying to tell a story about it, because that’s the point of these essays, and yet after a month of living with it, I still don’t feel like there’s a story to tell.
When we were doing our college essay brainstorming I had this scary dialogue with myself in a lonely document. It reads:
Has anything ever happened to me before?
No. Nothing has ever happened to you. Not ever.
Which is bullshit. Things are always happening to me, but few feel like moments that I can talk about. I wrote later in that document “Every part of me that makes me special —my bonds, my important moments— take place quietly, under the skin, bathed in bluelight. I don’t want you to know who I am. I don’t know who you are. / I’m a chronic liar. Everything that I say is a lie.”
The interesting part is that I didn’t even consider what those two bullet points looked like, when sat next to each other. I only saw them as two individual thoughts.
Love in Outer Space → Everything is Space
I like putting those two track titles right next to each other, I like that Sun Ra said “outer space” and then decided he had to specify — there is no outer space, not really. Here, there, it is all space. “Outer” of what? Humanity? Don’t say the stratosphere — I don’t engage with sci-fi because I know anything about science. I’m here for the flying cats.
I want to circle back around to All Tomorrows now, but I’m not sure how I’m meant to do it. Something about the beginning probably, the part where we learn of the civil wars, of how the wars took ages and they were slow and still millions died, but that’s not related to what Sun Ra was saying when he put those track titles together, I don’t think. Maybe I’m just thinking about All Tomorrows for no reason. Maybe I’m afraid of being changed irreparably as a punishment for my own mistakes, at being left behind, at being told I’ve acted like a freak and ∴ I will become one.
The Common App essay is apparently six hundred and fifty words, you know? I’ve been worrying about this essay, and the one on Biophilia. Been worrying that my writing is getting shorter, which is odd, because by all counts it’s been getting longer. I’ve been pushing my poetry to settle for far longer than a page, pushed my (published) fanfiction2 from max ten thousand to over forty thousand in one universe.
But my essays are shorter now.
I feel less like I understand what I’m saying and more like I’m saying words, more like, when I’m writing, I’m not doing it because it’s fun.
These essays weren’t meant to be narratives about my life, month by month. They were, by all counts, meant to be brief analysis of an album I’d chosen, interspersed with some anecdotes to connect it to what I was living. But they’re monthly essays, and it’s been a long month, and maybe I just want to tell the world all about it. And sort-of connect it to the music I was listening to when the month happened.
I abruptly changed my tumblr blog’s title this month to a lyric from Everything is Space. It’s not like the previous title had been that interesting — a lyric from Guess, by Alex Unknown, my tumblr blog’s previous theme and the continued theme of this Substack blog (why? I don’t know. It’s an important song to me).
The new title is “compel it to cease” which, I mean, isn’t actually the lyrics. Those are “They cannot stop the silence / They cannot compel the silence to cease,” but I’d adjusted them to be meaningful mostly just to me. I knew what it meant, that’s what was important. “They do not know yet / They do not know yet, how loud the silence can become.”
It’s been really hard to go to school lately. I manage it, barely. Better than one of my friends can, but I’m still struggling. I don’t know if I’ve had a full week of school in a bit. Missing one day per week for several weeks at a time, silently disappearing in a way that doesn’t seem to raise questions. I’ve got all good grades, somehow, but I feel like I’m dying.
Shoulder hurted so fucking bad. Stayed at kitchen table all day. Read emails, didn’t finish my math. So fucking tired. Haven’t read the news in so long. Useless! Useless! Whatever. Watched some hockey. I’m just so tired…
diary entry, 2025.
I’m falling apart at the seams, it feels. I can’t focus. I’m missing days. I feel worthless and like a fool. Exhausted. I had four days off and got what done? Nothing. I’m so tired. It all feels like one big pointless anxiety attack. Showered. Natejo. Tacos for dinner.
diary entry, 2025.
I mentioned in a different essay that I listen to jazz when my head feels like a hot spike through my right eye. Sun Ra is a bit different than the music I listen to then. I’ve gotten really into playing Ella Fitzgerald on vinyl when I’m doing bad, something Griffin has, embarrassingly for me, picked up on. But Sun Ra isn’t really any thing like that. Listening to Sun Ra is sort of like listening to music that reverberates through your shoulder muscles, rather than your lungs, you know? Presses down on you and massages out the stiffness, but doesn’t leave you feeling… good. It just— there’s a feeling, probably-possibly, like dying, and it’s not your fault if you end up liking it.
I’m exhausted a lot, nowadays, but it doesn’t mean I don’t usually give it my all. Turn on the game, listen to the radio broadcast if it’s all I can manage; check my emails when my clock tells me to; fill out my diary entries. Write these essays. I like being productive, I’ve decided. I like cleaning, actually, I like being organized. I cleaned my room completely for the first time in what felt like ages. A deep clean that involved dusting and vacuuming (much to the dismay of my cat) and a lot a lot a lot of time. A weeks worth of working on it and having to pause and coming back the next day. A lot of that cleaning happened under the masterful work of Sun Ra and his Arkestra, and I’d trade it for nothing.
I wish I could be even more productive. I described it as “being intentional.” Peter told me I needed to get a bad habit, “do crack or something,” and I felt proud of myself when I said my bad habit was not going to sleep at the proper time, ending up with a few hours of accumulated sleep debt by the end of the week. But, the truth is that it’s hard to have any other bad habits. Even with just those few hours, I end up far behind, tired, irritable.
At least I have music, at least I have esoteric jazz. Exhaustion hasn’t taken that from me, not yet.
if you enjoyed this, i also blog on tumblr as offslime (music, comics, etc.) or compher (sports). my art is accessible on hlaoruin.
Yeah, no. She still hasn’t graded it.
Some readers will be aware of a very very long piece of unpublished perhaps-forever-unfinished fanfiction.