F*ing Mood

Soundtrack of My Life

1. Opening Credits: A Day in the Life - The Beatles

   • Sweeping shot of the universe that slowly zooms in toward a city, New York maybe? As the song up ticks so does the zooming, at the end of the song the camera “smacks” into a girl walking down the street, head down and headphones in, it spooks her she stops looks up and doesn't see anything, she turn a corner and enters a coffee shop.

2. Average Day: Coffee - Sylvan Esso

   • Girl working her shift at the coffee shop, dirty apron on, cleaning tables, making herself cup after cup of coffee, on breaks she watches people on their laptops. 

3. School Experience: Boy in the Bubble - Alec Benjamin

   • While eating dinner with her mother the conversation turns toward the girls weight, the girl thinks about the reasons she stopped eating a flashback of the bullying, montage of her “diet” Dr Pepper, Hot Cheetos and cigarettes and of her mother holding her down making her drink ensure. Finally HER hand holding back your hair when the girl had too much to drink and not enough calories.

4. First Crush:   i wanna to be your girlfriend - Girl in Red

   • Some grainy film filter; colors are dull except for HER, Girl sneaks up behind HER with the faded pink hair, bright yellow sundress, bracelets in abundance on both wrists, girl taps her shoulder HER turns and grabs the girl in a hug. HER gives the girl a cigarette, lights it, and starts humming “the way you look tonight” they walk toward the old airplane hangar where the girl lives.

5. Falling in Love:   Fell Down the Stairs - Tilly and the Wall

   • Present day, outside of coffee shop the girl is taking out the trash, boy with guitar case stops to help. Boy says he is looking for coffee shop with open mic night, the girl makes some witty remark and leads him to the sign up sheet at the coffee counter.

6. Secret Crush:  Honesty - Pink Sweat$

   • Guitar boy enters coffee shop the following week with a female. He waves at the girl and smiles, girl tries to play it cool, its not working shes awkward and jealous. Female is his back up vocalist, they aren’t dating? Secret Crush Song fades as Guitar boy plays a song called “I want you” https://youtu.be/T5VX4cqaTOc  As the guitar boy plays his song the sounds of the coffee shop stop, spotlight on guitar boy silence everywhere else.

7. Life's Okay: I’m Ready - AJR

   • Fast Forward montage of guitar guy and the girl’s relationship includes fights, romantic dinners, the female leaving guitar guys apartment AGAIN, kisses under street lights, friends singing in the round, the girl helping guitar boy release his first album, he doesn’t credit her. Ends with The female slapping the girl; guitar boy grabs the females hand and they leave the girl crying on the floor of her apartment, spot light over her everything silence as the song ends.

8. Feeling Proud: Sauce - Ella Mai

   • The girl walking down the street again, not looking down anymore, not smiling but not frowning, busts ass at her coffee shop shift, gets things set up for open mic night and heads out the door leaving the night shift to deal with the rest. She is on a mission. Camera follows her in a rapid succession of steps needed to get a passport, filling out online registration forms for a writers convention in California, booking tickets from California to Canada, talking to her best friend on the phone about the best places to eat in Vancouver BC before she gets on the ferry to Hornby Island. Ends with the girl knocking on the door of a house and giving the best friend a hug.

9. Family Relationships: On + Off - Maggie Rogers

   • The girl is sitting in a living room that only a grandma could decorate. The sounds of dinner being made in the kitchen grow louder then the muffled conversation turns to screaming, a glass shatters and the girls phone rings. She looks at the caller ID, puts her phone face down on the table stands up and screams. No one notices. She grabs her cigarettes and walks out of the room. Cut to a rainy fucking day, no jacket its biting cold no snow just slush covers the ground she lights a cigarette and walks with determination toward the bridge. 

10. Fight or Flight: Run Boy Run - Woodkid

    • Dream sequence, Christmas tree and presents, the sky is pink and the grass is yellow. The sound of waves crashing. The girl is wet. Its snowing then raining fire. She hears her mom call her name. She feels a touch on her forehead but no one is around her. There are NO people where the girl is, “Wake Up”  is being repeated by different voices. The girl finds a ladder and starts climbing upwards. The yellow sky feels soft again the girls body she slows her climb upward and takes in the sights, the world is fragmented. Looks like a board game board She hears her best friends voice “wake up stupid” the yellow sky consumers the girl and she tries to scream but the camera goes down her throat emerging from a tube in a brightly lit room, machines beeping. Best friend has tears in her eyes.

11. Learning a Lesson: Please Please Please Let me get what I want - The Smiths

    • Girl is sitting at a desk with a pen, signs a document and camera pans to a doctor seated across from her. Camera follows the girl down a long hallway, each door she enters is a new office, medical procedure room, group therapy session, as she makes it to the end of the hall, the light from the windows fade and the last door she enters in a spare room with a twin bed. She lays down, eyes open until the light comes back and she walks the hall again.

12. Friends: Along for the Ride - Mates of State

    • The girl is writing best friend a letter. Every word she writes turns into a cartoon of some kind and fidget, walk or dance off the page and gather above the girls head. Memories not quite remembered correctly cause the cartoon characters to fall back onto the page. The girl gets frustrated and cries, but letters keep coming, and she keeps writing responses. 

13. Deep Thought: Here I Dreamt I was an Architect - The Decemberists

    • Girl is taking a walk down the coffee shop street. She comes to the door, stops, peers inside, the people seem to be moving in slow motion, she thinks she sees herself inside its not her, she keeps walking. Girl walks from place to place looking, searching pausing and making notes. The girl comes to the bridge, she stops in the middle and peers over the edge

14. Flashback: Panic Room - Au/Ra

    • Flashback of suicide attempt. Shows her walking to the same point in bridge, putting out her cigarette, climbing on to the ledge and jumping, during the jump the path between bridge and water turns into one of those black hole water slide rides at water parks (ref: https://youtu.be/KBP7LMfhB6k?t=9) which end up in the yellow sky place and everything moves in reverse from when the girl was last there. Best friends face zooms in and out and the girl falls into a single tear before suddenly snapping back to the middle of the bridge. She steps back and crosses the bridge.

15. When I Was Young: Sour Patch Kids - Bryce Vine

    • HER opens a door smiling, grabs the girl in the same hug same as First Crush, kisses her cheek and invites in inside a warm looking living room with kid toys, piles of laundry that needs to be folded, children laughing in another room. They sit next to each other at the kitchen counter HER grabs the girls hand under the table squeezes. They talk about the past, present and future.

16. When I Get Older: When I’m 64 - The Beatles

    • Fast Forward montage of HER and the girl’s relationship includes fights, romantic dinners, kisses under street lights, friends singing in the round, the girl proposing to HER in a parking lot in the pouring rain; time passing, grey hairs sprout from their temples HER looks tired. ends with the girl and HER with a spot light over them in a doctors office.

17. Happy Dance: These Boots where Made for Walking - Nancy Sinatra

    • Gritty film filter, HER is the only thing in color, montage of HER when the girl first met, wedding photos, ultrasounds, baby shower the girl holding HER hand during labor, HER and the girl together with the Baby. HER, the girl, Baby in the backyard of their new house, dog running around and Baby laughing, cat on the rail of the patio, its warm. HER looks tired.  

18. When I'm Feeling Down: 20 Years - The Civil Wars

    • The girl wakes up in a small room, in a simple bed. Its dimly lit. the girl reaches for her notebook and a pack of cigarettes. She lights one as she opens another beer. Clicking on the lamp she opens her notebook. A cartoon of HER dances along the page. The girl starts writing weaving a beautiful picture with words on the page. A smile creeping across her face as she focuses her attention on the story shes made up for herself within the notebooks pages.

19. On Top of the World: Stuck in Nirvana - THUGLI

    • The girl looks at herself in a very large mirror. She is dressed in a very fine garment that sparkles, she feels uncomfortable but forces a smile. She steps out from behind a curtain and is standing in a spot lit stage. There is a glass of water and a book on a stool next to a mic stand. she picks up the book and turns it over in her hands. The title read "soundtrack of my life" the girl turns to the mic clears her throat and the scene fades as credits roll.

20. Closing Scene: No Waves - Fidler 

    • Cheesy credits of old Polaroids of the characters. The girl in the barista apron. HER at a festival with the girl. Guitar boy at open mic and such the little cartoon characters pulling and shoving the photos along. Last photo is black and white of the girl holding a book and looking off to the left with a big smile on her face.

F*ing Airports

Airports are such a weird place.

There is a girl sitting at the other end of the bar and she keeps looking over her shoulder... like shes waiting for someone but whoever she is waiting for… they aren't coming, its written all over her face, she looks like shes struggling to hold back tears.

You know the ones, they well up in the corner of your eye and you try and blink them away.

I've made up a story as to what happened.

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It's a dude and they met on the plane.

Maybe they got seated next to each other and spent the flight finding out that they had everything in common.

When they landed she gave him her number and before she even got to her hotel he had texted.

They met up downtown, spent the night drinking, meeting new people and acting like they had never not known each other.

When it got late he called her an Uber and they exchanged those shy kisses and a peck on the cheek.

She couldn't stop thinking about him.

So when she got the reminder to check into her return flight, she did something brave and asked him to come back with her.

He didn’t say yes but he didn’t say no.

He invited her to dinner and they held hands under the table. The shyness disappeared and everything seemed desperate.

When she woke up the next morning he was not in her hotel room.

He was gone....

She sent a text and another... no response.

She cried her way to the airport... and bought herself a drink thinking that airports are romantic places, the movies always had the lead male come running just as the flight starts to board and he says "don’t leave"

She knows this isn't her movie ending.

---

That's all fiction in my head that I've made up about a stranger at the airport.

But she just got a text and the look on her face is pure joy.

---

I later found out her name was Alison and I was wrong. She’s a mother of 3, she came to visit her mother who had been sick and had just found out that her eldest just got some crazy cool science scholarship.

My story was better but like I said airports are weird places.

F*ing Love

Love is such a subjective thing.

I’m sitting outside and the traffic is mesmerizing. I love the way motion catches my attention and I spend a second to acknowledge the color and speed of the passing object. It almost like mediating.

It all sounds very romantic until you realize that the is just a distraction.

The noise of screeching breaks, the smell of exhaust and occasional honk from a distressed traffic sufferer raging inside a two ton metal box.

The contrast is kinda what love looks like, possibly an over used analogy…

I’ve been thinking a lot about how love is felt.

I don’t feel loved. I know I am, I hope I am loved but I cant FEEL it.

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Where have my butterflies gone? Why are things colorless and tasteless? I struggle with depression. I think that’s evident in my writing as a whole but there has been a new sharper twist to it lately. Like needles, not unlike a fresh tattoo, except this feelings tattoo is infected.

Each remembered touch of a lover adding more salt to a wound that never seems like anything other than fresh.

From the poet that made me watch them scratch the word love out of every letter they ever wrote me and then burn them while I cried.

The drunk that I shouldn’t have been loving but did in such a way that they never had to hit me to make me ache.

Or the being out of time that I pursued and when they refused my advances, my insecurities created tears so violent that my eyes swelled shut, all the while asking myself why I wasn't good enough.

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What have I got for people to love? Why do I think that knowing will bring happiness?

One of the most irritating things about trying to talk to people about this train of thought is the first cliche to fall from their well meaning lips is “You’ve got to love yourself before someone can love you.”

I don't love myself… does that make me undeserving?

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I’m a mother now so romantic love isn’t the only love that I have to manage in the grey matter.

The love for a child is so damn intense. These parasites you bring into your home, that you feed, clothe, shelter… the little shits that say “I hate you!” One second and then “I love you more than anything ever!” In the next…

I would do anything for that little human but even that love… isn’t enough sometimes.

“You can't kill yourself, your a mother now.”

Ahhhh yes because this tiny human needs me and my suffering, no matter how great, should always be trumped by that fact.

It should ALWAYS be enough.

Sometimes it simply isn't.

I wish to whatever higher being that might be around that it was but some days it’s an accomplishment to even lift your head from whatever horizontal surface you’ve landed on.

But my kid knows nothing about my suffering. It’s not their job. Being 6 and a half shouldn’t be about managing your parents mental health issues.

My kid knows that mom, dad, step mom, step dad, and step sisters are all team Penny. Her village is massive and she will always be lifted up and if that’s my only accomplishment in life then fuck it that’s it.

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I started writing this in July of 2019. I think there is a lot to be said about how time and change are the only constants and although right now my heart seems like it is completely empty… i’ll get up tomorrow.

Its going to suck. I don’t WANT to do it…

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But I will do my best for as long as I can.

F*ing Grief

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”

— C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

I haven’t showered in weeks. Don’t get judgey, I’ve washed the bits; I don’t smell like a dumpster I just feel like one.

As someone that has never really gone long without some kind of depressing thing happening in their life I’ve spent a lot of time thinking back, like puddle jumping back in time trying to find the first time.

I think of Jennifer, she was a childhood friend, her baby sister had a hole in her heart and we played detectives with the twins from a block down. She was the first person I knew that died. Jennifer was always the adventurous type, she was the girl that made the boys run off not because we had cooties but because they were scared of her. She was fearless. She died in a car accident. Her dad let her drive their van while sitting in his lap, her foot got stuck on the gas; they hit a tree, she went through the window and he ended paralyzed from the waist down.

When my mother told me about her dying, I just thought that death was a “see ya later” kind of thing… like when she would go off to summer camp. She never came back and I kept her obituary in a diary for years.

SO many other things happened after she died and for the longest time I thought I might have been cursed. It started with busting my lip on the driveway after getting my shoelace stuck in the peddles of my banana seat bicycle I was learning to ride, continued with being raped by my babysitter’s son and continuing with the twins turning violent enough that I carried around a rusty blade I found in my backyard.

That was all before 1st grade.

We moved and with a new school came new friends but I still remember feeling sad. I think even then I was depressed but no one thinks that an elementary school kid can be depressed. They are just kids, what do they have to be depressed about?

The summer before I started high school my brothers best friend died in a house fire set by his sister.

Brandon was 10 years old and had two sisters, lived with his great grandmother and aunt who had custody because the oldest and middle children showed up to the hospital multiple times with broken fingers and other injuries.

I think a lot of people feel like they should have seen it coming. Jessica, the middle child, had just gotten back from a 72 hour psych hold because she had cut the inside of her leg from knee to pelvic bone with a pair of sewing scissors. But hey…what do kids have to be sad about?

It was the screams that woke me up, when I looked out my bedroom window I could see the house on fire, flames licking the window frames and then the sirens and lights but I could still hear Joyce screaming.

Brandon was dead before the fire department arrived and for a week after the fire his mattress stood like a burned out monolith in the front yard.

That night I crawled into bed with my mother and I begged her to stay awake with me because I knew we wouldn’t wake up the next morning.

We went to Brandon’s funeral and all I remember is my brother putting Pokemon cards on his casket and Jessica’s smile.

High School was a fucking nightmare, I had identity issues both physically and emotionally. I bound my chest, I wore my younger brothers hand me downs and even tho my hair was super long I never wore it down.

I fell in love with a girl and although my mom was pretty supportive of my feelings I didn’t talk to her about them, I didn’t really talk to her about anything because she had so much going on herself that I just didn’t want to add to it…. but when you are so confused, so sad and so hormonal all you do it ADD to IT.

I graduated high school but I spent most of my senior year couch surfing, mostly sleeping on the golden brown couch on the second level of the coffee shop I worked at after school. I did lots of stupid things during this time period, including but not limited to a LOT of drugs and then I went off to college.

Time has a funny way of mashing itself together when you’re trying to numb the pain of its passing and I thought I might have reached a new beginning when I was finally able move into my dorm at UNT.

I had my own room, my classes were amazing…except for math, my professors seemed to enjoy my company and helped when they could when it came to getting books for class. I had friends that I went dancing with, classmates that worked with me…. and I finally felt like I could be some small part of the real me.

When I got the call I was on the sidewalk out front of my favorite coffee shop joking with my friend Cassie about some silly life event.

“Mackenzie? Chez is dead. She jumped off a building.”

I know I screamed, but all I really remember was the seam in the sidewalk and that my tears were making puddles in the cracks.

“Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.”

— C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

With Chez dead it was hard not feeling like things were yet again crashing down. I wasn’t allowed to visit her grave so I buried a Queen of Hearts playing card where she landed. Morbid, yes. I lost my mind in the time that followed… and in response, on my 18th birthday, I hopped on a bus and headed east.

Introduction

I think with every new adventure there should be an introduction.

I can't really say that this is new, I have been working with and around social media for over a decade but finally realized that I want to do more, I want to make a career out of this whole social thing and here it is. 

mlwcomedia: orgainically grown social

I want to help small businesses navigate the tepid waters of the social media world. I want help them grow and reach new customers but I am not a huge fan of the "Pay to Play" model. 

You can grow a following without it costing you an arm and a leg.  And we are here to help.  

New Beginnings

This is a test!

Are we ready to begin?