----~~oOo~~----

I've been making myself pancakes for breakfast lately. Not the quick-mix kind where you just add water, but the measured-out-flour-and-baking-powder kind that requires actual mixing and attention. The kind that necessitates cleaning a bowl, a whisk, a measuring cup, a pan, a spatula. All for myself, alone, at 8:43 in the morning.

Pancakes exist in the collective unconscious as a weekend food, a family food, a this-is-what-love-looks-like-on-Sunday-morning food. They feel performative without an audience, like slow dancing in the living room, or buying yourself flowers.

And yet, I keep making them, day after day, with the same embarrassing dignity that I'll probably feed birds at the park with if I make it to 80. If birds and parks make it to then.

Maybe it's because I've been working so much lately; endless hours on music that no one has heard, on a cartoon no one has seen. Work that exists in a quantum state, simultaneously real to me and nonexistent to the world. I send these creations into the void, and the void, predictably, sends nothing back. Does work exist if there's no external validation? If a songwriter composes in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a career?

9am, about. I scroll through social media over these semi-carefully prepared pancakes. The algorithmically curated highlight reel of everyone else's existence seems designed specifically to highlight the gaps in my own. Here are people making better art, telling funnier jokes, surrounded by friends who all seem to share some greater understanding that I've been excluded from.

Do I have friends? Of course I do. But the friendship of adulthood is different; dispersed, scheduled, sometimes just contained within text. I remember summers where friendship was an uninterrupted current, a shared consciousness that required no planning or effort. Was that real? Have I mythologized my own past to make sense of my fractured present?

Meanwhile, the world spins on without me. People travel. They pair off. They have kids. They have transcendent experiences while I sit in my room arranging notes and colors in sequences that might amount to nothing to nobody. The weight of potential failure hangs over each waking moment like a guillotine. And worse than failure; mediocrity. To have tried so hard and produced something just alright.

Time accelerates, the clock ticks on noticeably faster. Years blur into indistinct shapes, their boundaries dissolving like butter in maple syrup. I can't remember if that conversation happened two years ago or six. I can't remember the last time I did something that wasn't in service of these invisible labors, something that would constitute an actual memory rather than just another day at the desk.

Occasionally reality breaks through, usually in the form of bad news. A phone call about someone who ran out of time. A reminder that the clock is ticking for all of us, that perhaps spending days hunched over a keyboard basking in monitor glow isn't the best use of our brief moment here.

And beneath it all, the terrifying possibility that the real motivation for all of this isn't artistic integrity, but an intensely desperate desire to be loved. To be seen. To matter. Is that shameful? Because it feels shameful.

George Pasles, an artist I look up to, once said that "to be a songwriter, your fear of humiliation has to be less than your need for attention." I think that's true for all creative output. I think those levels oscillate rapidly every day.

So, I make pancakes for breakfast. Sometimes with blueberries. Sometimes I wonder if I'm engaging in some kind of elaborate self-comfort or self-deception. Sometimes with chocolate chips. Or maybe the pancakes aren't symbolic of anything at all. Maybe they're just fucking pancakes. Maybe I just like the taste of them, the process of making them, and I've built this entire psychological infrastructure around what is essentially just a preference for not eating cereal.

Maybe the search for meaning itself is the problem, this constant need to narrate every small choice into some grand statement about my life and my purpose. I don't know. I just know that tomorrow morning I'll be back at the stove with the measuring cup and the whisk, performing the same set of movements in the same order, talking to no one, being seen by no one, and feeling somehow both hollowed out and filled up by the whole experience.

I don't really know if this means anything at all.

----~~oOo~~----

osmo@cosmicosmo.co