I spent a good part of this morning at Council Crest, a city park at the highest point in Portland, where you can stand on a cobblestone dais and, rotating your body, can see a 360-degree view of the city. Just off center, slightly down the hill, there’s a park bench. That’s where I sit and watch the city like TV. From there, the city doesn’t look grandiose or breathtaking–it looks diminutive. It looks as small as it can feel on the ground.

While I sat there this afternoon, staring out over all that nothing, Sleater-Kinney’s “What’s Mine Is Yours” came on my headphones. Have you heard that song? It’s just stellar. It was followed by “Start Together,” my favorite track from ninth grade.

My brother was the first person to give me a Sleater-Kinney CD. He brought it home when I was in seventh grade, still hazy from Grateful Dead records and trying to seem erudite with Paul Simon. Things were falling apart at home: Dad was becoming increasingly erratic and more unabashedly abusive. Things were going to shit at school: junior high relational aggression had a stranglehold on all of my friends, and particularly on me. Call the Doctor sang all of that back to me in a way that was as urgent as how I experienced it.

And looking back, most of my favorite and most political records were introduced to me by my brother. X’s Los Angeles; Bikini Kill’s Reject All American; Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. The weird thing is that while those records were formative for the politics I have today, and while they have stayed with me as my politics disentangled and were fortified, my brother’s politics have changed drastically. While he still listens to much of the above, his views have taken a turn–not so much for the conservative, but for the absurd and the xenophobic. He has become anti-choice and anti-immigrant; he debates the need for continued racial justice work; he doesn’t think discrimination takes place based on sexual orientation or gender identity; and more and more, the hypotheses he posits in our discussions sound like bad punchlines. (Recently, in a disagreement about how divorced politics’ end products are or aren’t from individuals’ daily lives, he argued that Roe v. Wade “could be overturned tomorrow and it wouldn’t really impact anybody. I bet no one would even notice.” It almost doesn’t matter how you feel about choice–that comment is just ridiculous.)

It wouldn’t be so bad if those political discussions weren’t synecdochic stand-ins for our relationship as a whole. I don’t know whose expectations were first skewed, but now our understandings of one another have become so unreasonably adjusted that we hardly recognize each other. But here we are, wearing this relationship like an ill-fitting suit. It cuts us off–we can’t feel our hands, can’t breathe freely. We just take our sharp, shallow breaths and wait until we can get out of whatever we’re in. What a sad, silly way to live.

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