I recently ran into a curious object in my possession, which is the notebook that I used to communicate with people during the prolonged enforced silence of my recovery from throat surgery nearly five years ago. Being totally silent for a long time is an unpleasant thing, particularly when all you’ve wanted for nearly a year is to have your voice back the way it was, and it’s so close that you can taste it. The book is strange because it consists mainly of one side (my side) of conversations that were happening otherwise out loud. Reading this book, one performs a sort of archeology through which missing voices and contexts are filled in. One thing that struck me while I read through it was how mad I was at everyone around me. It wasn’t because of anything they had done. I think I was mad because of how sorry everyone seemed for me, and because if I told them how I really felt about conducting conversations on paper, about coughing up black shit all summer, about losing my sense of self to an injury, I would have been begging for pity, which I really wanted, and hated myself for wanting. So in these halves of conversations I’m trying to be really nice, and upbeat, so everyone can say “what a good attitude” but it’s transparent when I read it now that my attitude was pretty awful, and that I’d have preferred everyone else to evaporate. My attitude is a soft inscription across the whole document. I think the point of this song is that sometimes you just can’t fake it.