I don’t plan on doing retrospective reviews too often, but there are a couple of albums where during one particular time, I listened to them in such a perfect environment that the only way for me to do a good review of the album would be to try to relive the experience completely. One such case is I Want to Live by John Maus. It was a frigid January afternoon with a pale grey sky and a sun that didn’t even try to look golden like the one you see in cartoons- rather just appearing as a circle slightly whiter than the space around it. Four inches of snow had accumulated on the ground, the roads had been near completely evacuated. At some point, my sister and I were out there, both playing tennis on the streets, almost never having to move off of it. Two tennis balls stuck on the roof later, she went back inside and I put on John Maus’ I Want to Live on my MP3 player. The first half of the record I’d spent building a large heap of snow. The second, I’d been lazily slumped over on the lawn, eyes closed, snow angel formation. I didn’t drift to sleep but instead withstood the bitter cold of Maus’s synthesizers. The album ended with me just lying there, thoughtless. …”I long for you, I long for you, I hate you.”

Walking through the metal hallway connector area behind some large woman watching tiktoks of guys all doing push-ups that start with text reading “level one” and then seemingly never progressing past level one as she’d just scroll to the next video and it would be the same text in a similar room with a different guy. The very second the plane engines started, I felt my eyelids getting heavy and I put down Grey Bees. I put on more Malcolm Gladwell, but for whatever reason, the plane just wasn’t flying. I didn’t know why, but it felt as if the plane kept rolling around to build momentum only to fully stop. At some point, I’d had my eyes shut for so long that I just had to make sure I didn’t sleep through the entire flight. At that point, I was awoken by an announcement that the plane was rerouting for an unspecified amount of time so we were just gonna be waiting here. In response, I figured, why not get in a second airplane-related review? Man, these reviews are really gonna slow down once I’m not on vacation and therefore don’t have any interesting stories matching with the aesthetic of an album that I chose to listen to at the moment; how else can I explain the sound of the album to the listener through imagery of real things happening to me? Anyway, I put on The Narcissist II, although The Narcissist I was my first choice, but I just decided it wasn’t really a good fit for the moment. Anyway, The Narcissist II is a good fit for the situation because of its overall claustrophobia and discomfort. It really does sound like getting stuck on an airplane before it’s taken off. Someone went through the isle asking for water.

This album is one I’d remembered being incredibly ethereal and life altering in its heavy atmosphere, which was something I thought would fit with the airport on the flight home, as the airport has that blinding-shiny-white look to it. I find it rather fortunate that few truly strange things happened in the bathroom other than a heavy duty deuce being dropped in one of the stalls. We were actually quite early for our flight, and so we got quite a bit of time to ourselves. This was rather nice. The album ended quickly, yet the grooves and washes were stuck in my head… I wanna be the very best like no one ever was…

Continuing our way through the museum, we encountered a floor featuring a Rube Goldberg machine that caused ping pong balls to all go around a track. It would’ve been impressive given that all of the ping pong balls didn’t get derailed as they pulled an attempt at a loopdyloop on a singular track causing the entire machine to stop working. I’d been shuffling Lucy for a couple minutes and figured it’d actually be a good time to give Best Of a relisten. It’s a good Florida afternoon post-heavy rain sort of listen. Something about it reminds me of yellow rubber rainboots and jackets. It’s pretty nice of a listen for that experience. We drove to a Publix, I got some popcorn shrimp, my older sister got some orange cream Diet Coke, and we had a mostly silent ten minute drive before entering the airport.

It was the last day of our trip, at 1 we’d be taking the flight back to Cincy. I was wearing a homemade Born to Die t-shirt that seemed to catch the attention of all of the rare and endangered Florida twinks. We were going to be heading off to a local science museum, and rain’d begun to pelt the car. Sooner or later, the rain grew deafening almost to clear up near immediately. Through it all we could still make out a cybertruck in the distance which one could also count all the fingerprints on, because cybertrucks are the stupidest, easiest-to-dirty-up, and least aesthetically appealing cars conceived in human history, unless your desired aesthetic is that weird plasticky way artificial intelligence renders images. We made our way into a parking garage, walked up to the top floor on an outdoor flight of stairs, and crossed the skybridge inside. I put on Dial 747 by Lamborghini Crystal. The time seemed right with the records mix of corporate futurism with a nature-heavy griminess, something represented by any dignified museum. Inside we headed to a cipher-centric “exhibit” where through uncannily rubbery attempts at making brick walls that I could hardly stop myself from picking at (in fact, at some point, I wasn’t even stopping myself), we found a depiction of a hostage situation featuring mannequins that was given a “content warning for sensitive viewers” sign. Making our way downstairs we were able to catch a glimpse of a Burmese python and fish which despite the warnings, my dad touched.