d204 is a project where i take a list of eighty songs that i wrote & record whichever one comes up when i roll a d20 & a d4

the song

can’t relax, can’t sleep
tried meditation, tried counting sheep
but my eye has a twitch & i don’t mean to complain
but i’ve developed an itch in the middle of my brain

the vlog

further thoughts

i mention this in the vlog, but while it’s true that i’m still a bad sleeper, & i do occasionally have bouts of genuine insomnia, it really is nothing like it used to be. i almost entirely credit adhd medication for this. it doesn’t entirely regulate my schedule, but nothing else has helped as much. well, embarrassingly, pokemon sleep is also a contributing factor, but none of this would be possible without methylphenidate.

engaging with my old work makes me INCREDIBLY GRATEFUL that it’s not as bad as it used to be. i’ve written… like… an enormous amount of poetry etc about not being able to sleep & going insane because of it. it is a very common throughline in my work starting at a very young age & i do not miss it.

here’s the oldest version of the song that i can find online, posted two days before my birthday in 2010. i might have a demo from right after i wrote it hidden away somewhere, & i even mention another version in the description of this video, but that would involve some serious hard drive digging & it isn’t a guarantee. please, as always, be gentle with the 18-year-old-youtube-musician of it all

i believe remington the ukulele died a tragic death when my cat beauty tripped me as i was carrying it & my options were to fall down the stairs or step hard on the ukulele or the cat & i chose remington to die.

it’s interesting that i was still singing the song with “she” pronouns, despite having been out as non-binary for a little while at this point. it’s honestly entirely possible i hadn’t settled on pronouns yet– i tried like every constructed pronoun under the sun at the time before admitting that i’d just wanted to use they/them the whole time but was being weird abt the grammar of it (which i only cared about for me; everyone else was Valid but i was Not, obviously, of course). also, i used to be SUPER touchy about updating the pronouns i used for myself in songs because it felt like i was somehow “disrespecting” the version of myself who wrote it, which… is……. silly. i always had a weird gender; i just didn’t know i could do anything about it until 2009.

anyway, i decided to unlist the 2018 pymoob youtube version of this song because it’s just too slow!! why did i record it so slow!!! but my look in it is pretty adorable with the blue lips & a shirt that i bought in the kids section of value village so here it is if you’re curious to compare:

my dad did NOT think me wearing this shirt was funny btw, & he was wrong.

there’s also a version on an EP from the-year-of-monthly-EPs, of course. i hadn’t listened to it in a while & i thought the addition of piano was something i was doing for the first time for this d204 version, but nope, there’s a little bit in here too, though definitely different!! lmao. i also use she/her pronouns in here!!! in 2016!!!!! i think that was just me being weird about not having explicitly discussed Gender with, like, my dad, who always listened to my music. there are still people i haven’t talked to about it, but not in a way where i’m… hiding it. it just hasn’t come up & also it is boring to me now in my old age.

breaking news: at the last minute i went to go see if i’d tweeted about my ukulele dying so that i could pinpoint the date & i sure was still using ze/hir in 2011 so i DEFINITELY hadn’t settled on pronouns in march 2010. oh my god. ok. incredible

anyway, the picture is lost to link rot, but confirmed that this was how remington met his end:

RIP remington, gone too soon, etc