Music Box at the Blue House

In case you don’t get enough of my bullshit already . . .

I have decided to start a newsletter because I find myself having too many thoughts for a twitter thread and not loving how my brain is slower than my mouth most days when I try to do a tiktok essay read aloud. Don’t worry, I write in a few journals, too. I don’t NEED a witness. But lordy do I like one.

My intention for this page is to share a bit of longer-form writing - something I’ve always loved to do but am no means a professional - interspersed with more in-depth music recommendations and thoughts on shows I go to and art I eat in general. My best friend just moved to a new country so I think I am feeling a little lost as to where to put all my feelings and thoughts when what used to be a weekly, hours-long hang with my best pal is now squished into a weekly facetime on opposite ends of different days across a few oceans. This week is particularly full of a big feelings and this is one avenue I’d like to toss them into.

I lost a dear, old friend this week. Her name is McKinley, but she went by Mak, and I first fell in love with her on MySpace. I was sixteen, almost seventeen, and on a mutual friend’s page I saw her striking face in their top eight. I looked through her photos on the verge of tears every night for weeks. She was effortlessly cool, beautiful, creative. She didn’t go to my high school but at that point neither did I, really. I was on the verge of liking sex more than volleyball. About to discover that my brother could by me Marlboro Menthols if I promised to give him clean piss for a job interview. Already driving to Kilby Court every weekend for whatever band was playing that I heard on 88.1, the college radio station in Ogden, UT. I was feeling absolutely feral with hormones and a desire for beauty and creativity and friends to share that with that I wasn’t finding in my school. I didn’t know how to be Mak’s friend, but I was consumed with the idea of trying.

To be honest I don’t know how I weaseled my way into that first hang out. But somehow I was invited to go to the hot pots - a dirty, slippery couple of pools of hot spring water up Ogden Canyon that has since been closed to the public when too many drunken teenagers fell to their deaths trying to make it up the treacherous climb - with Mak, her then boyfriend Morgan, and some other stoned teenagers. I was heavy with anxiety and insecurity in my too-tall body, wearing gym shorts and a t-shirt when Mak’s 90’s Subaru pulled up to my house. Windows down, filled with cigarette smoke, black dog in the back, disheveled and shirtless boy in the front seat. She got out of the driver’s seat and hugged me. Like we were old friends. Like we’d known each other forever. Like of course I found you on the internet and now I’m in your car. Of course.

Over the next several years, our lives crissed and crossed with each others. Finding each others hands at a party. Sharing cigarettes. That same summer, I smoked weed in her attic for the first time. I had never been high and a hit a giant bong thinking that because I had always been around weed that I was going to handle it like a champ. I did not. I barfed in the Grounds for Coffee parking lot while Lykke Li’s “Little Bit” played off of someone’s phone speaker and Mak rubbed my back and got me a coffee. Back in the attic, it felt safe and like home. It was basically a commune of ragged teens and twenty-somethings that we called the Blue House. Ask anyone in Ogden from 10 years ago that knew anything about friends or music and they have probably also been high in the attic of the Blue House.

Pictured are Devon and Blake, probably around 2008?

Mak was an incredible artist. She filled the walls and everyone’s arms and legs with her incredible portraits. She had just started stick and poke tattooing when we were around seventeen or eighteen, and I was afraid to get one. I asked her what I should get and she said “hmmm . . . apple.” I didn’t let her tattoo me but I did go to a professional the next week and got an apple tattooed behind my ear. That was me. The ragamuffin- adjacent but always nervous rule-follower.

She loved to surround herself with other artists. She would host regular backyard shows at the Blue House and other places that were always so happy, so joyful, so drunk and creative. I really couldn’t believe that I got to be a part of that time. Everyone always felt so much more sure of themselves than I felt. I couldn’t believe that Mak chose to let me into her life.

When I was eighteen, we were talking about renting a little house together. I couldn’t live with my mom anymore, and she and Morgan were wanting a change. We went to look at the little house in Ogden that I don’t remember, and after the tour we went back to the Blue House where we sat in the kitchen and she told me she was pregnant. So if I wanted to move in with her and Morgan, there would be another little life in the house soon, too. All that I felt was honored. It was before the thought of bringing kids into the world made my heart sink into my toes, and I just felt so lucky to be a part of her family.

The weekend that her daughter Lucia Luna was born, I moved into a house with them. It was me, Mak, Morgan, Lucia, two dogs, and my new kitten Rudo. We were all under twenty years old and the house didn’t have any doorknobs or fans or air conditioning. It had no shower, but it did have a bath and a kombucha mother in the cupboard. I remember one day when it was just Mak and I and she was trying to take care of her body so she could feed her new baby, we laid on her bed and talked about being lonely. About how even when you have the family and the dogs and the house, there is a hole in your heart that feels so needy. She left me a note that day about how much she needed that talk. I felt so close to her.

I didn’t live there for more than a few months, but it was during such a formative time in my life. I told her often that I loved her. Even when we got into our twenties and floated around to different states and loves and lives. Whenever I visited home, I’d hope to see her wherever I went. Sometimes we’d connect at a party or catch up over coffee when she’d bring Lucia to the coffee shops I worked at.

The last time I saw Mak was in February of 2021. She had just found a space in Ogden to start doing her tattooing professionally. Our incredible friend Devon was there and we sat in big chairs in her tattoo space in downtown Ogden and we talked about a friend we’d recently lost who tried to walk home drunk and froze to death over night. Devon read the Mary Oliver poem about Geese aloud.

It felt like we had grown up - together and apart and together again - so many times. That talk about the lonely needy in our hearts felt so far away, but ultimately the feeling never changed. I am grateful that sometimes we could fill it for each other.

I sat down to write about more than just loss today, but this one feels so big. We lost Mak this week. The impact she left on so many people is palpable. I walked down 25th street in Ogden last night after a concert and could see her sitting on every patio. Cigarette in one hand, Ludo on a leash on the other. My heart is broken for every person who loved her. Every person who loved themselves a little more because Mak loved them. I can’t imagine a world without you in it, and thankfully I don’t have to. There are pieces of you everywhere.

This one is for Lucia Luna. I promise to talk about music next time.