Odin, who was around before I was born, originally had a Taiwanese name. My sister and I anglicized it to the name of the Norse god once we were older.

Lots are drawn by chance to decide an outcome, and it was my lot not to be born a Jew.

In the Book of Genesis, “Lot” fled with his family from the wicked city of Sodom. When his wife looked back, she was turned into a pillar of salt. This story can be interpreted as a cautionary tale warning the faithful not to cohabit with the fallen.

The “asleep” voice in the doublespeaker set narrates a dream that confusedly melds the familiar setting of Los Angeles with the foreign sights of Taiwan. The dream begins with me crawling out from the dusty space beneath my bed at home. Having been absorbed in my drawings, I’d stayed down there well into nighttime.

Tref is Yiddish for anything that isn’t kosher. In Sasha’s world, certain everyday foods weren’t meant to be eaten. So it could also be inferred that certain boys in her everyday life weren’t meant to be dated.

The cobwebs trailing from my clothes happen to snag some drawings of mine that were attached to the refrigerator, causing them to scatter onto the floor.

The Buddhism of my upbringing didn’t make much sense to me, partly because it clashed with the various faiths of my classmates. At the same time, it didn’t make any more sense for them to be right, and my parents wrong. So with all beliefs equally suspect, I could only conceive of the universe as a limitless stretch of cold, empty space, in which we live and die to no greater concern.

For this song, I wanted to capture the disorienting cycle between days spent living among the foreign and nights spent dreaming of the familiar. So I used a literary technique I invented called doublespeaker rhyme, in which two sets of lyrics that rhyme syllable for syllable are panned hard into opposite speakers in the recording. It’s the audio version of a cinematic split screen.

When we landed in Taiwan, my aunt presented me with a box of pastels. They were more powdery than crayons and thus ran out quickly. By the end of our trip, I had to make do with the least used colors. Which is a fitting metaphor for my overall state of discomfort throughout the trip, since I was forced to rely on my least used skills, like speaking Taiwanese.

The “awake” voice in the doublespeaker set echoes my thoughts as I lie on the floor mat, unable to sleep. The vastness of the universe, while terrifying, also suggests unlimited possibilities. Yet somehow, being with Sasha isn’t one of them.

Everyone else in the house is asleep, snug under their blankets. Of course, sheets are also used to cover the deceased.

As a child, I dreaded sleep. The nightly ordeal of swapping out my reasoned thoughts for irrational dreams felt as burdensome and frightening as a blood transfusion. And yet, things always seemed better in the morning because of it.

In Greek mythology, ichor is the golden blood of the gods.

Taiwanese buildings at the time made heavy use of iron bars and stone slabs, as I recall. My grandmother’s house felt like a mausoleum adorned with alabaster carvings.

Paracelsus was a 16th-century alchemist who believed that nature is made up of four elements, each personified by a mythical creature. The salamander is the elemental of fire.

Writing doublespeaker rhyme was daunting, so I would come up with silly challenges, like mentioning each Paracelsian elemental.

My grandmother’s house at night was pitch black. When I woke to use the bathroom, I had to tiptoe to the door with only a sliver of moonlight peeking in from underneath to guide me.

Like most amphibians, salamanders begin life underwater, then lose their gills and develop lungs to live on land. I always wondered if this process of metamorphosis feels as harrowing as it sounds, when breathing becomes the new drowning with no explanation or warning. Because that’s what falling asleep seemed like to me.

In Greek mythology, the river Styx separates the living from the underworld. At night in my grandmother’s house, the stairs leading down to the first floor seemed just as foreboding.

The crescent moon is shaped like the blade of the scythe wielded by the Grim Reaper.

The word “Oriental” wasn’t a pejorative when I was growing up. It’s even printed on my birth certificate. It became politically incorrect at around the same time that “queer” was being reclaimed by the gay community. The latter tactic always made more sense to me.

A shibboleth is any signifier that distinguishes an ingroup. The Book of Judges tells of a battle where Israelite warriors scoured the plains after their victory, asking stragglers to pronounce the Hebrew word for a stream. Because the enemy tribe lacked the “sh” sound in their dialect, they would out themselves by pronouncing the word as “sibboleth,” just as I do here in the recording.

Referring to myself here as a “Gentile,” or non-Jew.

In poetry, a couplet is a pair of lines that share the same meter and typically rhyme. Sasha and I were never a couple, of course. But perhaps we were a couplet?

As I wander outside in my dream, the road’s uneven surface causes a passing rickshaw to jounce abruptly.

Being in Taiwan at the time, I was unable to attend Sasha’s bat mitzvah party.

The bat mitzvah is a coming-of-age ritual for Jewish girls who’ve reached twelve years of age.

While the two doublespeaker voices seem to operate independently, they plant subtle ideas along each other’s path, much as our conscious thoughts affect our dreams and vice versa. In this stanza, for example, the mention of a staircase by the “asleep” voice precedes the plummeting spoken of by the “awake” voice.

Like his namesake Ishmael, the narrator in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is an outcast. While the former was banished to the desert, the latter wanders the wilderness of the ocean. It’s to these metaphorical dunes of the ocean that I now flee as well.

Being an illegitimate son, Ishmael wasn’t to inherit the house of Abraham, but God promised to make him into a great nation. Coming from a less favored lineage myself, I could only hope for similar recompense, as I was not to marry into Sasha’s house.

At our middle school, students who completed two years of French were eligible to attend a summer program in the city of Paris. This excited Sasha, and so it excited me as well.

In Greek mythology, the Trojan War began when Paris, the prince of Troy, eloped with Helen of Sparta.

Since the drum parts I scored for this song were far more advanced than what I could play, I had to try several workarounds. I ended up recording the kick, snare, and toms in separate takes from the cymbals.

A rondel is a verse form that originated in French poetry, but it can also refer to any round object, like a ball. “The apple of one’s eye” is an Old English misreading of a Biblical Hebrew idiom that more accurately translates to “the ball of one’s eye.” My hope that I could be the object of Sasha’s affection was based on a similar misreading.

Uncertain of whether I’m asleep or awake, I recall the Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi who, upon waking, couldn’t be sure if he was then a man dreaming he was a butterfly, or now a butterfly dreaming he is a man.

Due to another misreading, the phrase “man’s swelling” in Biblical Hebrew entered the Western lexicon as “Adam’s apple.” And so an apocryphal tale began that when Adam ate the forbidden fruit of knowledge, a piece lodged in his throat to mark all his descendants with a reminder of their original sin. Similarly, my knowledge of where I stood with Sasha left me to feel a permanent lump in my throat.

Eris was the Greek goddess of discord. As revenge for not being invited to a feast attended by the other gods, she tossed a golden apple labeled “for the fairest” into their midst. When Paris was asked to judge its rightful owner, he chose Aphrodite, who rewarded him with the hand of Helen.

Odin’s remains were taken to the Humane Society, which offers pet cremation services.

In Greek mythology, Pandora was the first human woman. Upon opening a box given to her by Zeus as a wedding gift, she unwittingly released all the evils that now plague humanity.

The undine is a female nymph and the Paracelsian elemental of water. The term originates from the Latin word unda, meaning “wave.”

Hope was all that remained in Pandora’s box. But upon having the hard truths of the world revealed to me by Sasha, I’m left to feel as hopeless as ever.

In Hippocratic medicine, the spleen was thought to induce melancholy. But in modern speech, it’s a symbol of malice. I suppose my resentment toward the bullies had a bit of both.

Wandering the beach in my dream, I notice a steel whistle that was likely dropped in the sand by a lifeguard. Its shrill cry to warn of danger is now forever silenced. An omen, perhaps, that some dangers come without warning.

The Cumaean Sibyl was a Greek prophetess who was granted immortality but not eternal youth. T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land begins with an epigraph in which the Sibyl, hanging in a jar, is asked what she wants most. She replies that what she wants most is to die.

To prevent beachgoers from wading in the shark-infested waters, barricade tape has been tied onto the barbecue grills that line the shore.

Like cellophane, Sasha’s intentions were transparent. I could always count on her to sympathize with my anger toward the bullies.

In the writings of Paracelsus, the sylph is the elemental of air, often depicted as a fairy with wings of gauze.

But also like cellophane, Sasha couldn’t reflect warmth where none was present. If I couldn’t be the better person in dealing with the bullies, then there came a point when she would need to keep her distance from me as well.

Recording vocals in doublespeaker rhyme proved to be trickier than expected. When singing, we tend to shorten or elongate syllables to adjust for phrasing and consonant clusters. And so the two voices would sound disjointed once heard together. To perform the syllables in perfect sync, I came up with a system of notation that somewhat looked like medieval ligature.

In my dream, I see myself adrift on a buoy as it bobs in an ocean filled with sea serpents. But who’s to say that this “boy” isn’t also bobbing through life, oblivious to dangers lurking everywhere?

Those who wander a prison yard must always be on guard against getting stabbed with a shiv. As luck would have it, the schoolyard was already preparing me for a lifetime of such vigilance.

Shivaree is a European folk custom in which a raucous crowd serenades a newlywed couple. And sitting shivah refers to a period of mourning in Judaism after a family member dies. My bad luck not to be born Jewish, in other words, has cost me any hope of spending a lifetime with Sasha from marriage until death.

Pining after Sasha was like trying to stare at an off-center floater on the surface of my eye. Despite my frantic efforts to bring us closer, her inner world always remained a fixed distance apart from me.

Watching the waves rise and fall in the ocean, I recall the traveling carnivals that came to town in my youth. Every summer, their amusement rides would rise up to reshape the skyline. And yet, they’re now being dissembled in my memories with the transience of ocean waves.

As a child, I suffered from night terrors related to my fear of death. My mother tried to comfort me with the promise of reincarnation, but this only filled me with greater dread. It wasn’t just death that frightened me; it was a lifetime of hurtling toward it. All that reincarnation offered was more rounds of the same.

And yet the thought of being stuck with a soul forever, an inescapable fate promised by the faiths of my classmates, felt no less disturbing.

The end goal of Buddhism is nirvana, or release from the cycle of rebirth. But this was just death on a grander scale, which confirmed my intuition that one shouldn’t want to live in the first place. So why do we?

Neither heaven nor nirvana sounded all that pleasant, yet they were the best offers available, which confused me. Why wouldn’t their appeal be self-evident to even the most thickheaded child?

Most maddening of all, one has no say in being brought into this world to begin with. Given how distressing the certainty of death must always be, it just seemed like there should be an option to opt out of this whole mess.

The tortoise defeats the hare in Aesop’s fable, but only because the hare falls asleep. Similarly, while tortoises live for over a century, I had them beat in longevity so long as I didn’t sleep on choosing the right faith.

The Book of Exodus tells of how Moses led the Israelites out of slavery. By parting the Red Sea, he allowed them to escape Egypt on foot.

The sea closed behind Moses and the Israelites, drowning the Egyptian army in pursuit. Unfortunately, the certainty of death following me at every turn can’t be overcome so easily.

As I make peace with the inevitable, the ocean begins to feel calm and inviting. But my dream is also ending, and I expect to wake soon in the comfort of my bed.

It isn’t just Odin’s unused cat litter that was swept aside. Gone is any chance for him to sire a litter of his own.

T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” examines themes of stunted growth and missed opportunities. Its narrator bemoans that while the mermaids may sing, they don’t sing for him. Likewise, while my resignation has turned the fearsome sea serpents into smiling mermaids, they still don’t smile for me.

Wednesday means “Odin’s day” in Old English, and I was born on a Thursday. So my day literally begins where Odin’s day ends.

The gnome, a small humanoid who lives underground, is the Paracelsian elemental of earth.

Powerless to change my condition, I can only confront all that remains unknown. Like a garden gnome with feet firmly planted in the lawn grass, I stand motionless and grin faintly in hope for the future.

“Monday’s Child” is a nursery rhyme that predicts a child’s fortune based on their weekday of birth. As Thursday’s child, I’m promised to have “far to go.” And indeed, the distance I have left to cover feels depressingly vast. Still, I’m now one day closer than when the day began…

As it became clear that Yearling’s Bobtail wouldn’t get any attention from the music press, I moved to New York City to regain my bearings. There, I reconnected with Sasha, and we started dating. She put me on the conversion path, while I volunteered to study Hebrew. It was exactly the all-consuming self-reinvention I was hoping for. But we didn’t last. Though I wanted to mend my old ways, my behavior lagged behind my intentions.