Now Playing: Tenderness – Parquet Courts

The raging sandstorms have died down now, as have the reverberating explosions of the meteor showers. I carefully sift through what was once a spice rack, now filled with various cassette tape mixes. Some of them have very distinct titles scribbled on, like “songs for daydreaming about concerts”, or “artists that feel like a hot bath”, but after the tragic death of my beloved magic marker, I had to make do. Now, the majority of my cassettes are labeled with a single-color blob of oil paint.

Today, I feel burgundy.

 Ahead of me was about an hour-long trek down what used to be a highway, to what used to be a mall, to what used to be the city’s premiere destination for physical music: ‘Muzant’. About 20 years ago this wouldn’t have been much of an issue, but seeing as how human lungs don’t much care for inhaling sand, cement, and space rock particles, having to navigate the outdoors with an oxygen mask and tank became a given. Of course, hauling ass with a silicone respirator while the scalding sun hangs overhead creates its own complications, as does wearing airtight headphones under said sun. And the meteors. They’re pretty high up there.

I can quite clearly recall the first few times I went down this road. An asymmetrical vista of disproportionate sand dunes, smoldering ruins, and dilapidated billboards so faded you couldn’t even make out the product’s outline. I had often heard of ‘industrialization’, as the buzzword appeared on most of the punk records within the radio’s extensive collection. For all I know, I may have been the last individual to witness those man-made structures, but at the time, I was just excited to finally gain a better understanding of what those artists were singing about.

One of my favorite songs at the time, Tenderness, had a lyric about the intoxicating effects of the cheap odor of plastic. Now me, being the intellectual that I was, simply assumed that all the plastic in my radio station had been too expensive to emit that particular smell, so the sight of a beat-up water bottle genuinely got my heart racing at the time. I practically ripped the oxygen mask off, and took in so much air through my nostrils that I could feel sand sticking to the back of my throat. There was a smell, but it was so… plain. The same way water has flavor, the plastic bottle had odor.

My eyes again glide across this landscape of rusting metal and rotting insulation, of crumbling cement and lived-in space, frozen in time, and each subsequent time they go through these motions, the odor of plastic becomes more palpable. To someone who once lived here, I’m certain seeing this microcosm of everyday life would inspire some type of emotion. I’m just as sure that to someone much older, the still image of an abandoned civilization would immediately elicit countless memories. Perhaps a significant amount of people would find beauty in its narrative. But above all else, I have no doubt that if I were to take off my respirator, open my eyes and truly look, it would still be plastic to me. 

I take a deep breath through my mask; the smell of stale rubber filling my nostrils.

I wonder what I smell like.

***

Burgundy fills my ears as the long-abandoned mall begins materializing on the horizon. A really good song just came on. My fingers curl into the shape of a barre chord, and my fingernails scrape the stiff strings of an electric guitar. I turn the volume knob on my tape player. The reverberating noise continues to violently resonate against itself as I sloppily finger the neck of the instrument, a deluge of sustained notes spilling out of the amplifier. The cue comes on for the solo; my knuckles contract like the hammers of a grand piano, slamming each finger to their own rhythm as the music swells-

*crunch*

A loud noise cuts off my air guitar routine, snapping me back to reality. Among the various debris strewn about in the sand, I see that my thick-soled boot has plunged straight through a skull. I groan. It’s vexing, but it makes sense that the passing sandstorm would’ve unearthed various artifacts around this area, especially given the fact that the mall is within spitting distance of this little dip. I take a load off and start to pick out the skull chips from the bottom of my shoe. It’s not the first time I’ve stumbled onto a corpse while outdoors, but I don’t particularly know if I should be following any etiquette for when it does happen. Many songs I’ve burnt through at the radio station sing about burials, cremations, ceremonies, but I can’t imagine these sun-bleached skeletons would want to burrow back into the sand, let alone immolate into a pile of ash.

I won’t make an effort to understand it. Having pulled out the last piece of skull out from the sole, I lay the pile of bone chips on a small rock, far above the reach of the nearby dunes. My burgundy cassette starts playing once again. I’m looking forward to what I can find at the record store.