You know how sometimes a song just falls out of you and then the universe decides to fuck with you in the most perfect way possible? That’s what happened with “Geometric Shoreline.”
I wrote the thing maybe two, three weeks ago. It started as this hazy memory of a mushroom trip on a little rock peninsula sticking out into a reservoir up in the hills — wind whipping the waves, four of us shoulder to shoulder, hair blowing back like we were in some dramatic movie, feeling like the entire fucking planet was putting on a show just for us. I put it all in there: the high moon wind leaning in, the teaspoon rivers, the peninsula laughing, the whole “waves of oppression” bit that got instantly torched by the one guy in the group who could see straight through our white-guy profundity. I called him the Subcontinental Seer because he was from India and he had this way of just… seeing. And the song had that line in the chorus that felt like it belonged there from the beginning:
Subcontinental Seer smiles and sees us through.
I recorded a version, threw some trippy artwork on it — real mushrooms, cartoon mushrooms, shorelines, geometric patterns, the works — and dropped it on YouTube. YouTube took one look and said, “Nope. Too many mushrooms. Take it down.” So I had to rewrite the visuals, tone down the obvious, and put out a safer cut. The first version sounded like some lost Outlaws or Marshall Tucker Band track — loose, gritty, Southern-rock swagger. The new one came out more psychedelic bluegrass, which I actually dig. Songs do what they want. You just get out of the way.
But here’s the part that still has me cracking up weeks later.
Right around the same time I was finishing the song, I stumbled on this map of southeastern Wisconsin and there it was — the actual Subcontinental Divide running right through Menomonee Falls like some glacial middle finger to geography. Same word. Different continent. The song had already been carrying “Subcontinental Seer” for Sunil, and suddenly the planet itself was handing me the real thing: a low, invisible ridge that decides whether rainwater ends up in the Great Lakes or the Mississippi. I didn’t even know there was a subcontinental divide. I knew the big Continental Divide out west, but this one? It felt like the song had been waiting for me to catch up.
And that, my friends, is when the whole thing got stupidly funny.
Because the song also contains the single greatest spontaneous sentence ever uttered by a human being coming down off mushrooms.
We’re talking thirty-five years ago. A different trip, this one in Amherst. We’d been out hiking all day, got filthy, soaked, the usual. We get back to the grad-house busted mansion, strip off the wet clothes, and drape them over the woodstove because that’s what you do when you’re twenty-something and living like animals. The clothes come back to life stiff as corpses. Meanwhile we’re all coming down from the peak, so of course we’re smoking bong hits like it’s our job. The two brothers who were in medical school at the time — brilliant, hilarious, future doctors — are there, along with me. We’re in that sweet spot where everything is still a little funny but the edges are starting to sharpen again.
And out of nowhere, one of them — the one who always delivered lines like a surgeon with a sense of humor — looks down at his now-rigid, woodstove-crisped jeans and says, deadpan:“I bong-i-nate my bong-in in my rigor mortis haberdashery.”
We lost it. Hit the floor. Could not stop. The kind of laughing where you think you’re done, you’re actually crying, you try to breathe, and then thirty seconds later it hits you again like a second wave and you’re right back on the ground.
I still laugh about it thirty-five fucking years later. Just typing it makes me grin like an idiot.
Because think about it. This guy is in medical school. He knows exactly what rigor mortis is — the postmortem stiffening of muscle tissue when ATP runs out and the actin and myosin lock up like they’re never letting go. He’s learning how to pronounce it in cadavers and autopsies. And instead of using it for its proper, serious purpose, he looks at his stiff-as-a-corpse denim and decides the word now also applies to pants that have died on a woodstove and come back as formal wear.
Haberdashery. That’s the chef’s kiss. Haberdashery is the fancy old word for a gentleman’s outfitter — hats, ties, tailored jackets, the whole Savile Row routine. So he’s standing there in his resurrected, corpse-stiff field clothes like they’re a three-piece suit from a Victorian tailor. And the verb form — “bong-i-nate” — that’s him taking the casual act of smoking a bong and turning it into a medical procedure. Like he’s performing some kind of clinical bong-ination on the bong-in itself. It’s Latinized absurdity delivered with total medical authority.
It’s layers on layers of funny. The sentence is funny. The context is funny. The fact that a future doctor weaponized his professional vocabulary on a woodstove comedown while wearing dead jeans is funny. And then thirty-five years later some AI language model does a deep linguistic autopsy on it like it’s Shakespeare and that somehow makes the whole thing even funnier.
That’s the part that killed me when I read it back. The essay dissected the sentence with this top-shelf, scholarly precision — breaking down the -ate suffix, the taxonomic -in, the transfer of clinical meaning to domestic denim — and I’m over here crying because it’s all true and it’s all ridiculous. It’s like watching a heart surgeon perform open-heart surgery on a rubber chicken. The analysis is so good it heightens the absurdity instead of killing it.
And that’s the friendship, man. That’s what those years were like. Every sentence was a potential punchline. We were smart enough to know how ridiculous we were and dumb enough to lean all the way into it. Nonstop hilarity. Not the loud, forced kind. The kind where you’re just existing together and everything becomes comedy because you’re all tuned to the same absurd frequency.
So now the song has both Subcontinental Seers in it — the one who called out three white guys on a windy peninsula, and the glacial one in Wisconsin that I didn’t even know existed until two weeks after I wrote the chorus. The high moon wind is still leaning in. The Seer is still smiling. And somewhere in the background Paul is still bong-i-nating his bong-in in his rigor mortis haberdashery, and we’re all still falling apart laughing on the floor.
The song knew more than I did when I wrote it. That’s the best part.
Subcontinental Seer smiles and sees us through.
I recorded a version, threw some trippy artwork on it — real mushrooms, cartoon mushrooms, shorelines, geometric patterns, the works — and dropped it on YouTube. YouTube took one look and said, “Nope. Too many mushrooms. Take it down.” So I had to rewrite the visuals, tone down the obvious, and put out a safer cut. The first version sounded like some lost Outlaws or Marshall Tucker Band track — loose, gritty, Southern-rock swagger. The new one came out more psychedelic bluegrass, which I actually dig. Songs do what they want. You just get out of the way.
But here’s the part that still has me cracking up weeks later.
Right around the same time I was finishing the song, I stumbled on this map of southeastern Wisconsin and there it was — the actual Subcontinental Divide running right through Menomonee Falls like some glacial middle finger to geography. Same word. Different continent. The song had already been carrying “Subcontinental Seer” for Sunil, and suddenly the planet itself was handing me the real thing: a low, invisible ridge that decides whether rainwater ends up in the Great Lakes or the Mississippi. I didn’t even know there was a subcontinental divide. I knew the big Continental Divide out west, but this one? It felt like the song had been waiting for me to catch up.
And that, my friends, is when the whole thing got stupidly funny.
Because the song also contains the single greatest spontaneous sentence ever uttered by a human being coming down off mushrooms.
We’re talking thirty-five years ago. A different trip, this one in Amherst. We’d been out hiking all day, got filthy, soaked, the usual. We get back to the grad-house busted mansion, strip off the wet clothes, and drape them over the woodstove because that’s what you do when you’re twenty-something and living like animals. The clothes come back to life stiff as corpses. Meanwhile we’re all coming down from the peak, so of course we’re smoking bong hits like it’s our job. The two brothers who were in medical school at the time — brilliant, hilarious, future doctors — are there, along with me. We’re in that sweet spot where everything is still a little funny but the edges are starting to sharpen again.
And out of nowhere, one of them — the one who always delivered lines like a surgeon with a sense of humor — looks down at his now-rigid, woodstove-crisped jeans and says, deadpan:“I bong-i-nate my bong-in in my rigor mortis haberdashery.”
We lost it. Hit the floor. Could not stop. The kind of laughing where you think you’re done, you’re actually crying, you try to breathe, and then thirty seconds later it hits you again like a second wave and you’re right back on the ground.
I still laugh about it thirty-five fucking years later. Just typing it makes me grin like an idiot.
Because think about it. This guy is in medical school. He knows exactly what rigor mortis is — the postmortem stiffening of muscle tissue when ATP runs out and the actin and myosin lock up like they’re never letting go. He’s learning how to pronounce it in cadavers and autopsies. And instead of using it for its proper, serious purpose, he looks at his stiff-as-a-corpse denim and decides the word now also applies to pants that have died on a woodstove and come back as formal wear.
Haberdashery. That’s the chef’s kiss. Haberdashery is the fancy old word for a gentleman’s outfitter — hats, ties, tailored jackets, the whole Savile Row routine. So he’s standing there in his resurrected, corpse-stiff field clothes like they’re a three-piece suit from a Victorian tailor. And the verb form — “bong-i-nate” — that’s him taking the casual act of smoking a bong and turning it into a medical procedure. Like he’s performing some kind of clinical bong-ination on the bong-in itself. It’s Latinized absurdity delivered with total medical authority.
It’s layers on layers of funny. The sentence is funny. The context is funny. The fact that a future doctor weaponized his professional vocabulary on a woodstove comedown while wearing dead jeans is funny. And then thirty-five years later some AI language model does a deep linguistic autopsy on it like it’s Shakespeare and that somehow makes the whole thing even funnier.
That’s the part that killed me when I read it back. The essay dissected the sentence with this top-shelf, scholarly precision — breaking down the -ate suffix, the taxonomic -in, the transfer of clinical meaning to domestic denim — and I’m over here crying because it’s all true and it’s all ridiculous. It’s like watching a heart surgeon perform open-heart surgery on a rubber chicken. The analysis is so good it heightens the absurdity instead of killing it.
And that’s the friendship, man. That’s what those years were like. Every sentence was a potential punchline. We were smart enough to know how ridiculous we were and dumb enough to lean all the way into it. Nonstop hilarity. Not the loud, forced kind. The kind where you’re just existing together and everything becomes comedy because you’re all tuned to the same absurd frequency.
So now the song has both Subcontinental Seers in it — the one who called out three white guys on a windy peninsula, and the glacial one in Wisconsin that I didn’t even know existed until two weeks after I wrote the chorus. The high moon wind is still leaning in. The Seer is still smiling. And somewhere in the background Paul is still bong-i-nating his bong-in in his rigor mortis haberdashery, and we’re all still falling apart laughing on the floor.
The song knew more than I did when I wrote it. That’s the best part.