areli raze i see a lot of myself in you. it gets a little eerie sometimes. you'll say something, and i'll think, "i was there too once. i was right there." in those videos you made, you tell me almost everything, even if you didn't make them for me. in my dreams you say more but tell me nothing. and i guess that makes sense, since you're dead and i never knew you. the dead only have something to say to your dreams when you're not a stranger to them. i wish it wasn't so. i think we would have been good friends, you and me. 150723 ... raze i'd almost forgotten you. i watched some of your videos the other night to make myself remember. in one of them, you talked about your mood being better. "knock on wood," you said. there was nothing made of wood anywhere near you, so you pressed your balled-up fists together and made the correction. "knock on whatever's available." i swear there's a video somewhere of me doing the same thing, only i'm knocking on my skull. you were three years younger than i am now when you took your own life. we might as well have been the same person. both angry. both depressed. both making music that couldn't sit still. both doing it alone. both feeling like no one cared about our art. or us. both trying to connect with other people only to get rejected and ignored over and over again. both terrified of playing live and embarrassing ourselves in front of an audience. both wondering what the point was. of anything. your vocal mic was the same microphone i sang into for five years. even your handwriting looked a little like mine. when you mentioned your sixteen-track, i almost expected you to move the camera so i could see the same digital mixer i've been using since i was sixteen years old. it's strange to see yourself in someone you never had a chance to know. stranger still to revisit that version of who you were when you're so far away from being that person you almost don't recognize them anymore. i don't think i could have talked you out of anything. but maybe it would have helped to have someone to talk to who knew what you were going through. maybe it would have helped me too. maybe we both would have felt a little less meaningless. three months before you died, you talked about an unsuccessful suicide attempt. you said, "i don't like things that much most of the time. that's why i didn't want to live in this world anymore. i really don't like it." i think that's where we're different. it took me a long time to figure it out, but i love this world, as flawed and fucked up as it is. i want to live in it for as long as i can. you stuck with your video diary until you weren't alive to film yourself talking to the camera anymore. mine fell by the wayside fifteen years ago, a few months after i started it. every day i shove my heart against these walls that are already red with the blood of other hearts and i add some of my own. your heart has been ashes for more than a decade. all that's left of you now are some moving pictures buried in a dark corner of the internet no one visits anymore. i still miss you. and i still press my fists against whatever's close enough to touch when i need to remind myself where i am, and why i want to be here. 220107 what's it to you? who go blather from