Little Deaths

Vignettes from 2 Nissan Rogues and a VW Bug

It’s 6:47am and my mom is telling me how late for work she is going to be as I swing my left leg into my mom’s 2014 Volkswagen Beatle Convertible. My brother sat shotgun last and I know this because the seat is pushed as far back as possible. Usually my phone automatically connects to the bluetooth but today the universe decided that I should start my day with Alyssa’s pandora playing a Benson Boone song I haven’t heard before. It was fine. I used to instinctively say something mean about him, but in the last 2 years I picked up exchanging that mean thing I wanted to say with a proclamation of how badly I wanted to say something mean instead. Today I am too tired to open my mouth. The song is fine. Mom’s work commute is made up of one 30mph road that starts with a 4 way intersection and ends 7 minutes later at the school that she works at. She smokes a cigarette and a half and we don’t talk much until she drops a “God fucking damn it” as we’re about to drop her off. Me and mom watch a little girl in a wheelchair roll into what looks like an outdoor elevator that lifts her into a bus for kids with special needs. She says that it's annoying that the bus driver cant just wait a second when he sees her car coming so that she can skip this. I think about how annoying it is that I have to unlearn my inherited “the world revolves around me” thinking habits and at some point during this train of thought, Mom realizes I am not paying attention and pulls back on her offense. The wheelchair lift takes a really long time; like, take the amount of time that you think it would take and then double it. She says that she feels like the family probably has 2 daughters who need wheelchairs because of how long they have been doing the same morning pickup routine for and I point out the fact that the house has 2 different front entrances and neither of them are wheelchair accessible. She gets to work on time.

I try to play the new Samia record while driving back to the house but this part of town has no service and I haven’t downloaded it yet. I try to play the new Alix Page EP because that is downloaded but it doesn’t start and then I find myself doing 36mph in a school zone and I put the phone down and drive home in silence. The birds are nice and I think to myself that if someone was going to come to Connecticut for the first time this would be the best time of year for it. The sun peeks through the trees so sweetly and everything is warm. I open my voice memo app to record the birds for a few minutes after I turn the car off.

It’s 9:45am and I am in my grey gym shorts that I bought from amazon the week before I left for college 4 years ago. My stomach is full of yogurt and granola and the speakers are playing the Mt Egypt album with ‘N.Y.C’ on it. I made a tiktok about it yesterday and I want to see if I stand by the nice things I said about it before I post it. I don’t. I am trying to post a video every day “just to get the muscle trained” or whatever phrase my team is currently using to redecorate the money making conversation this time. I daydream about telling everyone I quit music and keeping all my songs in a vault to upload to the internet after I die. The other week I finished ‘Mr Penumbras 24-Hour Bookstore’ and, without spoiling anything, this ‘codex vitae’ idea has been swimming around in my head a lot recently. I want to be an artist but I do not want it like this. I think it’s so funny that the goal of the artists that you see online is to be known. I’ve started working on this analogy about ladders when I was super sick this winter and accidentally sang “I spent 2 years in LA climbing a ladder only to find out that its exactly that: ladders” into a voice memo. It’s corny but I think there’s something there. I want to stay on the ground. I would like to tell stories of me and the people I love. The people that I love don’t like when I share their stories. I don’t think it’s that deep, but I get it. I think it would rock to get to share all of it, unedited, without hurting anybody. I park at the gym.

I text my long-distance talking stage that I’m leaving the gym and then I play Hana Bryanne’s ‘The Last Time it Snowed in LA’ 6 times in a row. I fell down a rabbit hole of Hana’s substack and then her instagram and then Ruby’s substack, and in true parasocial fashion, I draft a text to Ruby to tell her about how much I loved her most recent post, realize we don’t text, and turn off my phone.

The seatbelt alarm is sounding because there is a grocery bag riding shotgun with me now. Chicken, hot sauce, cottage cheese, chips, eggs, and strawberries. The car is sitting still in the Aldi parking lot and I am checking for a text back. It is hot and then I remember that my mom’s car is a convertible. The top is down and I am listening to the Samia album.

It is 1:03pm and Mom needs to be picked up so she can take a smoke break since apparently you cant do that at school anymore. I don’t mind. I take the same trail for the 3rd time of the day and I count it out loud. The top is down because last time it was nice outside and the top was up Mom got upset. I like driving by the elementary school because, if I’m lucky, kids will sit by the fence and shout “Honk the horn!!!” and I honk and it makes me smile. I turn the corner onto the street and I hear it and I honk and I hear 5 or 6 kids do a collective “YEAHHHH” and I hear a teacher shoo them from the fence. I smile and I turn my music back up. I ride the same 3 speed bumps and park behind a cop car. Mom walks the sidewalk that is usually overridden with middle schoolers climbing on each other. I told her I’d bring her the grapes that she left on the counter but I forgot them. She says “That’s okay,” and I offer to stop at home for them and she says “Thats okay,” and we pass the elementary school again but the kids are inside now. We take a right instead of staying on our route and we drive by the nice houses on the lake. My mom has a couple stories that she repeats and one of them is about how she used to park on the street by the lake and daydream about living there until one day a woman walked up her driveway and told her to stay out of her neighborhood. Mom smokes 3 cigarettes and tells me about the kids that are giving her trouble. There’s one who my mom says is disabled because his parents talk to him like he’s a baby and there’s another one who my mom calls an asshole. If I listen loosely I forget that she’s talking about 4 year olds. She says that the kids get less competent every year and she turns down my Samia. I tell her about the baked chicken on the counter that will soon be buffalo chicken dip and she tells me that a friend of hers who does financial advising tried to fuck her over by trying to get her to put away 20k every year to get a tax refund. Mom says that she needs that money to live and I feel bad for dropping her off on that note. I count “4” out loud as I pull into my moms apartment building.

It’s 30 minutes before my mom needs to be picked up but I skip it and send Zach to get her, I am in my best friend Carly’s car. I sit down and she says “Jake Minch!”. I ask her how she is doing between jokes and she says that she is doing good. Carly is a 6 foot tall ginger and I love reminding her of this. She points at her tan and I call it a sunburn and she calls me George to try and piss me off and she is playing Hunter Hayes’ greatest hits and the windows are down. We drive past her friend Mia’s house in Easton and we talk about how many houses Mia has. Carly also has stories that she repeats and today she tells me 2 of them back-to-back. She says that she used to call Mia’s house a Castle and I smile instead of responding and then she tells me about how they don’t have a pool and Carly’s family makes fun of them for it. I smile instead of responding again and we stop for coffee at a coffee shop. By now, we are out of things to talk about. She plays an artist that sounds just like Luke Bryan and I make a joke that there are 5 country voices and everyone picks one and uses it. Carly gets lazy with her turns and I flinch when we pass the mailboxes. You can tell that she’s been down the same streets thousands of times because she drives her Nissan Rogue like the stoner friends she used to have that we’d make fun of. We have been bickering lately and I don’t know what’s going on with us. We stop at a gas station for a new pair of sunglasses and gum and she tells me that she is going to drop me off at home but she takes the long way home so I know she’s not upset with me.

I tell Alanah that I’ll be at her house in 20. The top is down, I am checking that my guitar is secure in the back, and I hear Mom’s upstairs neighbor say “thank god,”. He used to shout “no more music!” at me when I’d walk out of the apartment and eventually he simmered down to a “no music after 9pm”. In February I came the closest to killing myself I’ve ever been and this is the first week that I’ve been able to film myself singing comfortable since a few months before that. For a while I thought me and this upstairs neighbor were having a playful banter, but as I watch him stand up to walk inside, I see his whole ass crack hanging out of his pants and I realize that this is just a bitter old man. I start the car and the lady voice in my speakers that gives me directions is really loud so I turn her down and I take backroads to Alanah’s. Her house is a 2-story east-coast-style home in a neighborhood littered with cars and an open garage that her dad works in sometimes and when she opens the front door her golden doodle, Oliver, runs out to greet me before he runs to the neighbors lawn sending Alanah chasing after him. She hands me the book she picked out for me and invites me inside for a cup of tea. I tell her about the tiktoks that I have to film and I invite her to the park to sit with me. We have been friends for a long time but without Carly we would have never been seen independently in the same room until the other day. Carly has suffered through more than I’ve seen anyone go through ever. She is a christian and God stands in a hick’s backyard shooting bottles with the people that she loves. Her step-dad passed a few days ago and Alanah and I did laundry and dishes and bought groceries together and it was nice. Alanah said that she had to cook dinner for her family but she would keep me posted. I take a really scary left-hand turn into the park and I spend 10 minutes scanning for a spot I can play music at without anyone seeing or hearing me.

The sun is down and I am trying to call my manager on my way out of the parking lot. I wave to Alanah and I turn my heat on. My phone is at 13% and my manager does not pick up and I am too anxious to be on my phone while I drive so I am soundtracked by the wind whipping through my moms broken window. I debate eating more of that buffalo chicken dip before I shower. I think about how annoyed my brother is that I took the car for 3 hours without asking.

I am showered and I have called my manager and I am wearing a white t-shirt and pajama pants and my hair is wet and I am using the sunglasses I bought earlier as a headband. I joke about how I can’t wear headbands because I’m not that gay and Carly rolls her eyes. We are in Alanah’s white Nissan Rogue and Carly has picked up the habit of saying “don’t piss me off” after she’s already pissed off which I think is funny. We tell Alanah about our bickering in an attempt to circumvent the actual bickering that we are doing. Alanah asks “where are we going?” and Carly says “I don’t know, Jake, where are we going?” and I take it personally for some reason but I look up Diners that are open past 11. We drive route 25 to a place in Newtown and I don’t like how Carly is talking about the people that she loves so I tune out. I send a recap of my day to my talking stage. I get the idea of writing this substack and I also catch a whiff of a song that I forgot about and I spend the whole car ride silently trying to figure out what the song is. It is a mousy woman saying something about little deaths and the closest I’ve gotten to the answer is that I know that I heard it for the first time in the Uber that I took from Santa Monica last April when I had to stop home and grab my guitar for Sadie Tour rehearsals and I ended up falling asleep in the car. I don’t know why I didnt save the album. I don’t even remember if I was using Apple Music yet either. We are at the diner.

We are leaving the diner. I had a big piece of chocolate cake and I bit into a purple gumball and I thought about the sugar in the gumball and I threw it out. Carly reminds me that I just ate a whole piece of chocolate cake and I don’t say anything. She won 2 games of deal and Alanah told us about her trip to France and we remembered the Ed Sheeran song ‘Dive’ so we played it and Carly turned the speaker volume all the way up. I think about how blown out the speakers are on her car and I come over the loudspeaker of my brain and tell myself to chill out on Carly. I catch myself consistently having one person in my life that I hate and it has been a lot of people but it has never been Carly before and so I work through it in my head. I think that she has given up and this is the time that Carly needs Carly the most. Then I think about how corny it is and I keep it to myself. The music is loud and I hate loud music but Drops of Jupiter comes on the queue and I don’t mind the volume. We are driving on route 25 again. There is a strip of road that is stuck in time and if you squint your eyes you can be 12 again for just a moment. Alanah’s window is open and the air is blowing on my face and I start to get my nightly wave of guilt and doom. It feels like every time a moment is sweet I first have to acknowledge all the versions of me that are experiencing it. There is a sick 17 year old that sees it and is angry, there is a 22 year old that sees it and is scared, and there is a 30 year old that I can’t imagine ever existing but I quietly nod to. Alanah queues ‘American Pie’ and I remember how uneasy the song used to make me feel as a kid and I get that anxiety that sits on your chest. I can’t place it until I’m singing along to the chorus and I say the “this’ll be the day that I die” line. I check all my social medias and I tell the person that I’m talking to that Carly doesn’t want to watch a movie with me and he says that he doesn’t want to either. I’m annoyed about it. I think about how hard I used to be and it is a little death to acknowledge how soft I’ve become. Carly skips ‘American Pie’ halfway through and I tell her off. ‘Piano Man’ comes on and the two of them shout along and grab each others arms while Alanah drives. I am daydreaming about writing this and I decide to send Ruby that text about her essay. We park at Alanah’s and Carly gives her a hug.

I’m in Carly’s car and were driving to hers and there is an old nostalgic song that I found while looking for the “little deaths” song and Carly lets it play on loop for the drive home. It's called “Little Dead-Eyed” and we don’t say a word for most of the drive. I think about how I don’t believe in god but it felt like Carlys step dad was written into the show during season 2 and it makes sense that if anyone was going to die it’d be him. We pull into the driveway of her low-income-housing condo complex and she asks me if there’s anywhere I have to be at a specific time. I say that my mom’s break at work happens at 11 tomorrow instead of 1 so I have to be home to get the car for that.