Street’s Bulletin

2/16/25

Typing to get my fingers warmed up for tonight. I am terribly behind on writing work. Text I need to annotate, stories I need to edit, information to absorb. There’s always more. I’m coming up with ideas faster than I can realize them, and its made me realize how many stories I’ve written and not gone back to sharpen. I owe them life, and whenever I get a chance I’ve got about six that need to see the light of day. Two Metallic Oblivion stories, one Knight Family narrative, a very political drama that only gains relevance in my heart, and a project I did a while ago that makes me unhappy every time I look at it. I hope that this week will liberate me from the burden of not having the work done.

This new Weeknd record is really good. He might be one of the only gothic voices in rap/hip-hop/RnB. I mean gothic in the true sense, where the subject matter is truly dark, mysterious, speculative of death and humanity, not whatever the hell Playboi Carti has going on. There’s also an urgency and gloom to PinkPantheress’ music, which is why I love her so much. Songs like Reason and Another Life are depressing and examine how love and death intertwine in a very interesting way. These two portray life and love under a grave light, and while I like PinkPantheress’ sound more, The Weeknd does a lot of excellent worldbuilding, especially with these last three records, to capture the darkness of fame, how a fast lifestyle can consume one's soul, and how love can be a prison.

My favorite tracks (even though I should save those for a proper review, but it doesn’t matter)

  • Wake Me Up

  • Baptized In Fear

  • Timeless

  • Take Me Back To LA

  • Big Sleep

Though I’m still getting acquainted with the record, so I’ll have more thoughts after a while. Ask me about it again in a week I’m sure I’ll have more to say.

I started doing reviews every Wednesday on the ScribeAve Instagram page. I started ScribeAve with poetry and film reviews, though I felt the reviews distracted me from writing fiction, so I stopped doing them so much. They also distracted me from watching movies casually, but I still enjoyed talking about what I watched. I also used to do book reviews on my story, but I got tired of the format even though I have a bunch of unposted reviews. That also took away from the experience of reading.

Before I wrote reviews just to say what I had to say, and now it’s an exercise in brevity. How much of my opinion can I put in a single paragraph? It’s a balance between expressing my opinion without putting much effort into the review itself. They also color the page and keep me consistent, so it’ll be fun to see how long this era of reviewing things lasts.

I’ve had more time for reading recently, which has made me very happy. I try to squeeze something in whenever I can, whether it’s the news, a poem, a post on Substack. Mindfulness has never been more important. Improvement in all forms is necessary. The world feels like it’s dying, and I’ve been very angry recently about a lot of things, but there’s a reason to keep going. It beats inside of me, loud some days and softly others. I can’t name or identify it, but I know it on nights like these, when progress is the only option. Maybe it’s because I don’t know anything else. If I don’t write I’m not me. I don’t know what I would do if I couldn’t create a thing. Probably just die.

Keep the people in your community close. Life is hard right now. But isolate, if you feel you have to. You can’t help others until you help yourself. And keep literature close. I had a dream last night that someone threw away a book and I either got very upset or very violent. Maybe both.

It’s a nice night for Minako Yoshida. I recommend her 1977 album TWILIGHT ZONE. Such a beautiful voice. Goodnight folks.