i wanna directly respond to this but it’s a long text and i can’t sleep took my meds too late so lemme respond bit by bit  firstly would you mind sharing the playlist from the way you described things i’m thinking the flaming lips maybe “ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space” by spiritualized i’m curious and sharing would help commiserate your friends’ memory stranger or no stranger  also one thing about growing up with maybe it’s adhd or maybe it’s just me is that i kind of always feel like a stranger to myself i’m kind of just existing and whatever thoughts and emotions hit at the moment are what’s there— it’s like i’m just terrible at remembering or having a sense of continuity of self over time   so i think it’s fine to be strangers since i’m basically a stranger with myself most of my life anyway    anyway i reverberate a lot with the way your post reads like a somewhat variable and disjoint word salad that somehow makes sense as you read through it all what though did you mean by your cv looking more and more like a comic book is that not a good thing too puffed up too many masculine figures in tight tights kinda curious what you were conveying by that   the general vibe of this post reminded me a lot of this book i read “the magic mountain” by thomas mann i was living in philly and going through some shit and had read a murakami book where the main character drank a shit ton of whisky and read this book in the book itself that weirdly inspired me to go buy the book and i made some friends by reading the magic mountain and going out to bars which eventually got me out of my funk    something about reading books and talking to strangers feels v adhd or add to me i can get to know a completely stranger hella well for no real reason or even without really trying at some random cvs or dollar store or local college coffee shop but struggle to do shit like remember to show up to my psychiatrists’ appointments on time or remember where i put my keysglasses   just last week the dude at the trader joes’ checkout was impressed since i remembered this random specific killers’ lyric not mister bright side ha—in my head it seemed not so out of place since the killers are a pretty popular band from the early 2000s and the cashier and me were just randomly chatting and both seemed in our 20s just made me think in retrospect now damn i guess most people throughout the day don’t actually know most of the bands as associated with the early 2000s like the killers panic at the disco as grouped by a general pattern or vibe of music meanwhile on that same grocery trip i’d thrown away my fucking car keys along with my facemask walking out and had to go back and dig through the trash to get it    i don’t know if there’s any generic outliers for childhood stuff that immediately makes me go “this dude or person has adhd and they’re my kin” but books and stranger-talk is probably it