I drank a fully loaded caramel macchiato then went to a fancy music store I’d never been to before but had found online earlier that day and bought two books of Nirvana guitar tabs I still haven’t learned to play. Then I went around the corner and picked up a pack of smokes, specifically Winston Lights, because apparently that’s what Kurt liked to smoke, and I lit up one from the pack right away and began walking not knowing where I was walking to, breathing in the smoke without really tasting it, maintaining forward momentum in some kind of agitated trance I cannot to this day put my finger on, feeling the messy bundle of knots in my mind loosening up and then retightening again and again as waves of nicotine surged through my system to the beat of Grohl’s drums driving my increasing heart rate. And the chain of signals was impressive, starting with Cobain who in his head created some kind of nonsensical stream-of-consciousness- drug-induced- aching-soul- spill-the-guts-type of masterpiece and then went ahead and loaded up on guns and blew the very same head off with a shotty, supposedly after all his ideals for the nth time were invited, so to speak, to endure another round of heartbreak and violent reformation, and the voice of Cobain, now long dead, was somehow recorded, rasp and anguish and all, and that recording was somehow preserved on some kind of medium that was capable of storing and preserving and playing back such a thing, and now, decades later, that recording was somehow invisibly and on-demand disseminated to my smartphone, which in turn, again invisibly and wirelessly, transmitted that signal to my Bluetooth earbuds, which them earbuds forwarded to my eardrums and which my eardrums in turn, through some kind of machinery of their own, processed and then routed to my whatever-cortex and this cortex lit up like a Christmas tree, and that lighting up of it made me feel a certain kind of way that made me want to go out and buy guitar tabs and smoke cigarettes and maybe even blow my own head off if only so that I could perpetuate this feedback loop and inhabit another person’s consciousness for a little longer, a consciousness I could never really approximate with any kind of accuracy, no point of even trying, but this trying is seemingly still somehow something we all attempt to do, maybe because it reduces the feeling of absolute loneliness and aloneness of adult life, loosening those mental knots and giving a brief sense of relief, allowing us to take a deep existential breath and feel eternal for a flutter of an eyelid, before our head is kicked back down into the swaying shallows of the ever-incoming tide of knowing for certain that our time is going to run out.