MAILING LIST SIGNUP
I finally got to experience the audacious incompetence of Spirit airlines myself by not experiencing it at all i.e. they cancelled the flight, not even providing a reroute to Orlando for the transfer flight to Montreal. And because the transfer is with Air Canada “it’s not Spirit’s problem” die Spirit die die die die die—With a very kind accommodating Kiwi employee named Arvin on the hunt for my refunds, and the full sleep-overnight-at-the-airport experience, I rebooked to fly to Philadelphia then transfer to Montreal.
My childhood enemy lives in Philadelphia. At least last I knew which was over a decade-half ago. Maybe he’s in another city now. Maybe he’s dead not unlikely. He got high grades and had potential but was a king piece of shit bipoc-traitor dirtbag and many agreed and even jumped him when he visited Montreal again. This was all a long time ago and I’ve since had many dreams about reconciling with him, but even the concept of breathing the same regional air as that spineless coward even after he was long gone from my life would nauseate me, so it has nothing to do personally with Philadelphia.
I got my first thoroughly terrible review of OPEN DOOM CRESCENDO on letterboxd and it couldn’t have been from someone more appropriately-named than Cold Nipples. Why did I seemingly start this piece so negatively?
I’m writing this to remember I killed my bad feelings with the kindness I’ve come across.
Everyone’s had/got trauma or lasting ill feelings. Everyone’s gotten fucked by Spirit or at least knows someone who has. But any irrational anxiety was all gone once I landed in Philly and was reassured by a great gal working at PHL airport that I was gonna more than make my Montreal connection. “Ye you gooood!! :D”
And all I’m able to dwell on anyway is how beautiful my first time in Chicago was.
And no airline, piece of shit, or cold nipple can override that.
I don’t have many people in my corner, especially relatively to my relative peers who somehow connect to people in ways I can’t get a handle on (I swear these pheromones). But I’m the one who got to meet who I’m convinced are the exact coolest kindest individuals living and breathing in Chicago.
Comfort Station has always been and still is a haven for outsiders. And yes I’m an outsider artist; Cold Nipples does not get to stick his cold nipples out as an authority on that.
I can’t properly articulate how being in that basically-open-hall house felt. But I can best describe it to when I was trying to sound conversationally interesting to Emily and decided to just shut up and take in the comfort of being there.
Without broken-recording as to how deeply I was moved—I was deeply moved. And I still am. This thing I’ve been saying, from as early as last summer to Monique—that this is what it’s all about—right there; right then. I mean it deeper and deeper with every singular person I connect with, through the thing I wanna give every person I connect with.
I wanted to stay.
I really, Really, genuinely wanted to stay.
But I’m sure a part of me is over-romanticizing my newfound mad love for the people I’ve gotten to meet and know through Comfort Film. How much more beautiful would life be if these temporal windows of meaning and affection weren’t such ticking clocks I couldn’t stop? It doesn’t change how much it meant and means to me.
The reality is that I live in a nationalist shithole (come at bill 96 hicks I’ll translate that in french for y’all) of its own language-identity-politics damnation. But I return to Montreal knowing more than ever who’s out there beyond Montreal and votre trou de merde that suffocates it. And that is more than any substantiated crowd or industry-standard platform could’ve given me.
And it’s this comfort I felt and that I remember to feel.
The view from inside the plane as it begins descending in Montreal reveals how we’re Sims-sized, and the space we take as everyday individuals will at most equate a blob here or a splat there on the overhead map. And unless you’re a mofo politician or soulless real estate mogul, you would in all likeliness be a smudge here or a dot there.
And yet, zoom into us, face-to-face with each other—and the thing(s) we give to one another fold the whole map and mean the whole world.
What Comfort Film has going is so beautifully vital. And it’s telling that when just about nowhere else will champion my alternative work, the Comfort gang would.
Regardless how far it goes, I know the time shared in these community-outsider-DIY spaces will mean the most.
It starts here, and it will always connect there most.
I’ll never forget or let go of that.
I’m so glad I came.
OPEN DOOM CRESCENDO 