Favorite Artists…
Who are your favorite artists at the moment? What are your favorite songs currently?
“I’m roaming through the hills all alone. I’m trying to find my direction home. A question of space, a matter of time. I’ll follow the stars until the first light.”
- Dallas Green
Music has always been my undying love. A timeless escape from the realities of a world that can rarely measure up to the boundless gleam of my free-flowing dreams. One moment I’m in the throes of love, toes gently engulfed in the warm Summer sand, sun gleaming, her eyes batting softly as she rests her head on the center of my chest. The Light. Six minutes and five seconds later I’m rested on a couch, my hand placed lightly on your thigh. Our physical connection remains unflinchingly real - but you’re not there. I’m not there. The curses we uttered, the blood on the covers… can we ever return? Litost. Five minutes and twenty one seconds pass, and that all fades into the ether. A pain far more severe encroaches on my thoughts. My mother is gone, never to return. Each climactic note pierces through the gated cage purposed to protect my ailing heart. My entire world crumbles into dust. Maggot Brain. These are some of the journeys travelled on a wave of organized sound.
Reality is fake. Dreams are for real.
“Growing up in Versailles was like growing up in a museum. It’s beautiful but everything great happened in the past.”
- Thomas Mars
My name is Kevin Lazaroff, I’ve lived 19 years on planet Earth, and quite honestly I have no idea where the future will take me. Let me start with why I’m writing this in the first place… I’ve spent the last two weeks in the hospital, at times closer to death than I truly understand. A 3AM 911 call may have saved me from an early demise but the true finality of these events has yet to fully process. I was released yesterday, granted a new lease on life by whomever it is you believe watches over us. God, an energy, pure fucking luck, who really knows.
A couple hours before my discharge one of the nurses, a twenty-something year old black man named Felix, approached me and asked me to speak to him on the hospital wing’s patio. We sat down at a brown metal table and he began talking to me about what he sensed was a commonality between the two of us - a similarity in perspective as pertaining to the outside world. The only difference is, he was looking at it from the other side of the mountain.
Anxiety and depression had consumed his consciousness. A lack of confidence had dominated his every action, his every moment of existence. He was on a self-destructive path, reliant on the reassurance of others for his own sense of security. He was attempting to take the weight of everyone else’s battles head on, oblivious to the fact that he was doing so without the strength of foundation to support even his own woes. On top of that, the entire concept of solving the problems of others was so narcissistic in nature. He failed to grasp the reality that life wasn’t so centered around him. Not only was it not his responsibility to remedy this turmoil, but he didn’t have the right to impose his own solutions on freethinking beings.
Yet this wasn’t a self-deprecating confession. No, these were the troubles of a past that no longer haunted his thoughts. A pornography obsession, twisted sexual desires, an inadequacy complex… He had no reservation in revealing the reality of his previous exterior.
A long, comfortable silence followed in what felt like the first calming pause in a lifetime full of racing thoughts. I looked up at him for the first time since the beginning of the conversation and he looked back at me. All of a sudden he broke the silence with a terrifyingly simple question… One with the most complicated of answers, that is if there is any answer at all.
What does God mean to you?
… And to that I ponder, what is in store for the future of Versailles?
