Multipolar Powers

I live in a world that is wholly in my mind and anyone can visit if they bring a song to accompany them. These songs represent the visitor and these songs are the visitors and these songs form the multipolar powers that decide my fate. Through these powers I am manipulated, posed, possessed, and controlled.

I met the first of these powers when I was seven years old. My parents had taken me to Brian’s house. He was my childhood best friend. Brian and I would spend hours after school, neglecting to do our homework, playing RuneScape. These were the first days where I talked about nothing. These were the earliest ways that I’d self-directed. These things happened in RuneScape. But today we would be playing different games. Today we would be sneaking into Brian’s older brother’s room. And today we would see him, listening to Dragostea Din Tei, doing something on his computer.

“What are you doing, William?”
“I’m coding!”

And of course—with William being the older brother—William did the coolest things. William listened to the coolest music. William was the coolest. So William liking these things must mean that these things are cool. That must mean that coding is cool. And that must mean that Dragostea Din Tei is cool. And that must mean that these two things ought to go together—Forever.

And it was so. These two things did go together, Eurodance and coding. Later that year, when I wrote my first lines of code, I would remember to listen to Eurodance. I would remember to listen to Dragostea Din Tei, because it was the first of the powers that would control my life. This power told me what I must do. I would be a coder.

The second power came when I was alone. YouTube was just barely a year old. YouTube was younger than my new baby sister. But my parents would let me play with YouTube. They wouldn’t let me play with Kyra. She was too little, they said. But YouTube was so big—so much bigger than I was. On YouTube they had Welcome to the Black Parade and they had When You Were Young. YouTube had the comments section that could teach a seven-year-old boy that music could mean something and that music could be interpreted and that music, furthermore, could teach you something else.

From When You Were Young, I learned longing before I could long. I learned about nostalgia before I had experience to be missed. My complete impressionability might have let me feel these feelings more than a man twice my age (14). In some practical sense, When You Were Young taught me that you should write down the names of songs you like, lest you—

“he isnt jesus song”
“doesnt look like jesus”
“song look like gentleman”
“song when you were young”—YES!

I’ve learned to carry these feelings with me for my whole life. I’ve learned to be so nostalgic that I start missing the present before it’s become the past. How can a child understand impermanence? The second of these powers told me what I must feel.

I remember being in the back of my mother’s car on the way to the Valentine’s Day dance. I was crying so powerfully and so silently because How To Save A Life was on the radio and I related to it so much.

I remember playing Tic-Tac-Toe with my grandmother in the house that we had just moved out of. She claimed to be the national Tic-Tac-Toe champion and Lonely played on the radio. I remembered that song from Flushed Away. And I really liked that movie.

The third power would be the first, but I lost it and only found it again when I was sixteen. It was summer vacation and I had nothing to do at my grandmother’s house in Boulder City. I called up my friend Ryan and explained to him a predicament of mine. “There is this song that I remember from my childhood. I’d begged my parents to record the music video for this song on the TiVo and I listened to it as often as I could. Except one day I got grounded. And during the week that I was grounded and disallowed to view anything on the TiVo, my mother deleted the music video. I don’t remember anything about it, other than the fact that the band was animated.”

“animated band”
“music video animated band”
“2005 animated band”—YES!

We had found Feel Good Inc. and I felt good that this was the song that I’d been remembering faintly for my whole life. The visuals that I saw when discovering Gorillaz with Ryan that summer revealed something to me about the aesthetic preferences that I’d held my whole life. Dirty urbanism. The liminality and the irony in being isolated but creating a cluttered and noisy world for yourself in this isolation—exactly because your isolation afforded you the time to do so. This power told me what I must find beautiful.

The fourth and final power of the multipolar powers I’ll write about today came at the very end of high school. In my senior year I was in a free period with my friend, Kyle. Kyle said to me, “I don’t like this too much but I think you might, Thorne. It seems right up your alley.” He sent me a link to the Chilled Cow Lofi Hip Hop livestream. And I had to listen to it because whoever Chilled Cow was, they were using a looped clip from Whisper of the Heart, my favorite Studio Ghibli film. And I had to love it exactly because it tied my life together.

Lofi Hip Hop’s propensity for 90s anime samples, emphasis on nostalgia, and general low-key nature let me spend the final half of my senior year of high school reflecting on my life up until that point. I was going to miss childhood so much. I had been missing childhood so much already. I remembered how I cried when I had turned ten because I would never have a single-digit age again. I remembered how I cried when I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Being John Malkovich, and even The Truman Show, because I couldn’t handle the notion that life wasn’t as it seemed or that you could live a life in which you wish that it had all gone differently or that you wish you could forget all of it. I wanted to remember all of it. This medley made me.

I think this last power taught me that everything is so utterly connected that anything I might do or think is so pathetically small that it doesn’t matter and so incomprehensibly tied that my vibrations will echo into infinity. I don’t know though. I’ll think about it for another ten years.

What I Must Do
What I Must Feel
What I Must Find Beautiful
How Little and How Powerful I Am