ando

Several years back, the closest person I’ve had to a brother had posted several songs and EPs to his YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@_johnnydenim). Unfortunately, he has since deleted most of his older songs. I think it’s because of a bad breakup he was going through at the time of writing many of the songs. One song in particular, titled “Out of the Loop”, resonated with me and I still listen to it in my head from time to time. I can still remember most of the lyrics, which were (unsurprisingly) looped many times during the song:

I'm so out of the loop I don't know what to do Can you Help me through This night-mare

It's hard for me to imagine the depths of what he was going through when he wrote this and other songs from that EP. Even though I would almost call him a brother, I have barely talked to him in the last decade. Not for any bad reason, but that is just my personality. If someone or something isn't forced in front of me regularly, I quickly start to erase it from my thoughts and habits, until it is nothing more than a faint wisp of remembrance. Or to say it another way, I am very much “out of the loop” with most things going on with people that are not immediately in my daily life, even if I (should) care about them otherwise. At this point, I have very little connection to his current self. But, those songs remind me of my past and bring about a strange longing for home. I can feel the sub-suburban, near-dystopian futility, Midwestern skate-punk of his youth, which I was much more closely involved with. He wrote these songs and others about his love and heartbreak of the time. While I feel a sense of nostalgia listening and thinking about his sounds, about his struggles in life, considering them in more depth brings about a bitterness and unease with my own life. My “out of the loop” makes me almost actively avoid contact and interaction with people. Due to that, how could I ever manage to make a connection to someone on a level that would move my inner self in that kind of way, that I would be able to share my soul with another and be enriched by it. A connection that if severed would cause me pain. It's something that I have slowly been thinking about for many years now, in particular after a few fleeting attempts at online dating. I think ultimately, with the way I am, it's better that I just accept that I will likely spend my life alone (or rather, probably become a crazy cat person). I think accepting this realization has been better for my overall health, but it still doesn't make the longing completely go away. Part of me still hopes that perhaps one day, someone will be forced into my life in a way that enables such a connection. But until that happens or I pass away, I will likely continue to remain “out of the loop”.