Death is Real

An excerpt from an essay on death, historical time, and the music of Phil Elverum

I’ve been up since 3:30am today. There was a chipmunk in my bedroom. (My childhood bedroom; I’m visiting home.) As my mother and I were chasing it around the house at 4am, we discovered a second one just watching us, like a kid plopped in front of a television set watching “Tom & Jerry.” Or, like Jerry watching Tom & Jerry. I couldn’t fall back asleep. The chipmunk infestation triggered my OCD. I took out my OCD workbook. (Thank God I brought it.) The prompt asked me to write out some of my current obsessions. I wrote down thirteen; five of them were related to houses: infestations, deterioration, fires, trees crashing through roofs.

After working in my OCD book for half an hour, I took a shower. In the shower, I was reminded of the first “mental health” essay I wrote after all this began. (By “all this” I am referring to this prolonged period of mid-life crisis / mental health crisis that I have been enduring for the past two and a half years since I turned 40 years old in the winter…