Numb

PTSD, Poetry, and an Untold Story from the Vault:

I was today years old when I figured out how to use image captions on Substack. Anywho, this is me on a sketchy fire escape on an old building in Los Angeles. This was part of the “Quarantine Blues” photoshoot, just before the song came out.

There was a song I wrote, recorded, released, and then… wiped away from the internet.

It was called NUMB. I wrote it in 2017 after somehow being resurrected from the living dead. Long story.

I had just returned from New Mexico. I had been pulled out of hell and revived in my time there, but coming back to what was then home (Oregon), I had the strangest experience…

I couldn’t feel ANYTHING.

I wanted to go back to New Mexico. I wanted to go back to the people in the desert, the ones who understood: The poets, artists, soldiers, ex-gang members and junkies. People who had lived just as crazy lives as I had, survived and seen just as much as I had (and in some cases, much more).

It was there that we were all reborn together. We all showed up to the last house on the block with zero will to live, and left that place feeling alive. We went through that threshold together.

I remember standing in a circle, smoking cigarettes and talking with my friends out there. I thought to myself, “I don’t want to go back to Oregon. I don’t want to go back to the relationship I’m in or anything back there. I just want to pack my car, and drive as far East as possible.”

Coming from someone who at that time had only lived in Oregon their entire life, the Western corner of the US, packing my car and driving as far East as possible was… a bold thought.

Funny thing is.. I actually wound up doing it, it’d just take a few more years.

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The Point Is:

I felt nothing when I went home. Nothing. I thought myself a monster because I couldn’t even feel love.

The only thing that made me feel alive was chaos. And there wasn’t any.

Things were slow, and they felt artificial. I felt like an alien.

I felt completely untethered to the planet. I would be driving around the same city I grew up in, and wouldn’t know where I was. It was not home anymore.

I didn’t connect with the same people, places or things. Nothing made sense. I had just been brought out of hell, what was this about?

When you go through some shit, you change. When you come out of some really intense shit with a certain group of people, then all of you are separated to different parts of the country, your heart feels split apart, as if little pieces are still with them. You feel nothing toward anything or anyone else.

So, this was the first song that was recorded when I came back.

The PTSD and depression I struggled with before going to New Mexico was so severe, I wasn’t making any music at all. While I was out there, that fire came back, and I remember writing 17 songs in one month.

What I am going to share with you here is part of that song, Numb. It was written when I came home, my only way of describing how I felt, because people expected me to be fine, or fixed, or THE SAME as before, and I was not.

I didn’t know how to explain what was happening, but I no longer fit inside that puzzle if you catch my drift.

The song is not released anywhere because shortly after I released it, I decided it was WAY too vulnerable, and deleted it from all streaming platforms.

Recently, it had been coming up in my mind, not sure why. I wished I could remember the lyrics. I wished I could somewhere find the song.

Then, in tonight’s studio session, as we work on a totally different project, the following happened, and I found it:

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