[Spoken]
I was on tour, driving between Hamburg and Berlin
With my friend, Yannis[?] who had booked the tour for me
We'd spent the last few days together and I'm naturally very isolationist, classic only child, I spent
Most of that tour in a high state of anxiety worried that I was being
Rude, worried that Yannis and his Germanically outgoing friends didn't like me, and
I remember, in that car, driving between Hamburg and Berlin, going to sneeze and holding it in
And then needing to sneeze again, because that's how the human body works
And then holding it in again, and doing this three or four times in a row
I felt like I was going to break a rib
And soon after that my nose started to run
And I felt ashamed of myself, because I knew I would have to blow my nose in front of another person
This filled me with
Terror for some reason
There's a similar problem I have when I share a bed with someone
When I become acutely aware of how heavily I breathe
How repulsive that must be to the person next to me
And so I try to fix this by not breathing
By holding my breath in as long as I can and then letting it out as slowly as possible
It struck me, in that car on the way to Berlin, that I felt like my being alive
In any given situation is in some way an imposition, an invasion of everyone else's space and an abuse of their patience
Somewhere at the core of me, beyond the reach of rational thought
Sitting plump on a throne of twigs and burialist[?] brambles, the
The belief that being human
Is something is worth apologizing for
I still have not processed this
But I did write a song about it, in the car, while my nose was running
And it was the first song I had written in months
And it was the beginning of what would become the album that you are listening to
My name's Matt
This is the Narcissist Cookbook