Commercial Break

Speed Hump photo (bottom) is by Mooso.

Commercial Break started forming in my brain sometime in 2023, while I was still writing some of the later tracks on You Are In Wilkinsburg Now?. I was watching these long compilations of commercials from after the 2008 financial crisis--commercials I used to watch when I was a kid--and really starting to feel like I understood more about the reality that I never really recognized due to my age. I'm not going to pretend to have a long diatribe about the mortgage crisis to share, but the act of watching those commercials so regularly made me recognize the way that I've been feeling for a long time. I realized that, since 2019, I have felt stuck in a commercial break. A side-effect of watching too many coming-of-age movies, I think at some point during my later teen years, I developed this belief that I was completing story arcs or character arcs. I didn't think I was a main character (I was, at best, a tertiary character even in my own fantasies), but I felt like I was at least getting some air time.

In 2019, shortly after I graduated college, as I've mentioned probably too many times in my music and on this site, my cat Tiger passed away. When I think back to the morning it happened, I can almost hear "We'll be right back after these messages" ring in my ears. My feet cemented to where I was standing, and I didn't feel myself moving again after that. Obviously, the global pandemic did not help that. My brain already had repossessed the narrative of 2020 being a "filler season" and, without my cognizance, my brain kept maintaining the fantasy despite my body doing things to move the story along. Moving away from my parents, meeting my partner, adopting another cat, starting a job and getting promoted at that job, completing collections of music that my younger self wouldn't believe; my life kept going even though I was emotionally on a commercial break.

This album is about the cocktail of mental illnesses that resulted in that belief and the people, animals, and media that helped me snap out of it.