Other Bomethius
Are We All But Stories

As I contemplate familial dysfunction and the various stories that make up our individual and collective arsenals of conversational material, it strikes me that though we may experience the same situation, it'll shape each of us completely differently. Two brothers, sons of drunks, grow up such that one is a drunk and the other never drinks anything—they both have the same answer as to why: "My father drank."
In the same way, we each embody a short glimpse in the memories of the people that have really known us. Those memories live most vibrantly through stories——just so, we embody an even lighter glimpse in the memories of people that know us only through such stories.
To a large degree we are the story that is being told... But to a larger degree we are not. Sure, we may have mistreated someone, or we may have been hilarious to be around for the short interval in which you were there... But who were we really? Very few people, when actually pressed to answer this question, can answer it with a story. Stories conflict, they change their shape, their tone. They are improvised and reapportioned and locked up, and freed with alcohol... They are complicated and disastrous, and entertaining. We call the Colosseum barbaric, but perhaps we further a greater disservice around dinner than the romans' bloody reprieves ever did. We are so quick to remember the adjectives that were so concretely attached to a story we heard about some distant friend or family member long since lost to time or clear memory... What are the ethics of memory? Anywho. I wrote a song.

Performance and Recording by Jonathan Hodges

Lyrics:
Today you are becoming the story you'll be. An entirety composed in a few minutes.

Repeated, rewritten, and sung... you'll never know all the things you've done.

Mournful, hysterical, embittered... didn't you choose how you'd be remembered.

Interlude

Anecdotes armed with adjectives few,
sprawled across the room
They paint a wretched portrait for all to hear
The unsettling tale of doom.

If you and I had really but met, would we have thought this much of about it?
Would you have given us something (anything) to suffer for?
Or would you have taken what little was left?

Life and dark often meet, would you have been my light?
The world is full of stories untold.
And it seems all the worse for the ones it has known.
Don't you wish it had known yours?
Don't you wish it had remembered you?
Don't you wish it had remembered you?
Don't you wish it had remembered you?
breath of mortality