These instrumentals were started over the first third of 2023, when I'd taken to saying to people: "I probably should have anticipated, once we started getting dogs, having some of my life periods defined by looking after an aging dog." It hadn't really crossed my mind... just like I'm sure our dogs never thought: "At some point I'll have to deal with being old."

When I was 13, I wrote one of my first short stories, in which a woman paints herself clear (the story also includes a scene where an airplane nosedives and its nose blooms so all the passengers fall out... infamously, a friend's father secretively suggested to me, a 13-year-old boy, "It's like an ejaculation, right?"). That's kind of what I've been desiring with Oscar (who also was a 13-year-old)... paint him clear.

So many thoughts of his recent state. It feels sometimes like I've lost who he was before. But when I try to return to some place in the past, I feel I'm creating a hierarchy of Oscars. I don't want to contribute to that, at least not intentionally. I want a complex, deep, flexible memory of Oscar, not one where part of my journey with him is, in essence, out to eradicate the rest. It might take time for that to congeal... for snippets of my short-term memory to be integrated into the larger web of long-term... whatever this thing we call "memory" is. All the memories are painful right now... and sweet. Long-term, I don't want to lose any of the sweet... even what will always likely be a painful sweet.

These songs weren't composed with the idea that they were becoming a document of the times. But that could be said about all my musical compositions. That is nonetheless how they "function" (a concept as hilariously stick-figured as "memory"), for me at least.

After we said good-bye to Oscar (on April 14, 2023... my 54th birthday), I started leaning into all the places I was tempted to shrink from. I wasn’t trying to get anything "over with.” I wanted to be… not even learn to be… with it. With learning to be with it, with learning the limits of my ability to be with it. To experience it.

I'm grateful for the process of writing my Master's Thesis back between 2013 and 2015, which resulted in a text called, "Stewarding Experience: Re-presenting a Journey Toward and then Away from Identifying as an 'Addict'." In it I developed a concept, which, as the title says, I dubbed "Stewarding Experience." What followed the colon was just an example of the process. Now I'm doing "Stewarding Experience: Re-presenting a Journey with and then without a Beloved Being."

After a week, I felt ready to wade into and then listen through the, what felt was, very little musical output I made over the final 4 months of Oscar's life. Along with continuing to develop and master the tracks, I started to tackle naming them. Once I decided (after much perseveration) on the album title, "Oscar," the track titles and the order of the songs mutated and evolved in another "stewarding experience" process.