NSNC | “In the Afternoon” – MGMT
🕯️💎🦉📿🩸🕊️ For Field Deployment during the Time Between, and the Tenderness of Those Who Stay.
🎼 Lyric Threshold Setting
“Oh, I just don’t care what happens to me…”
This is the kind of song you catch at the end of a vision fast, dust in your mouth, every cell porous to the psychic airwaves. It’s the antithesis of a pop anthem—this is post-glamorous mourning, the shadow side of a psychic golden age, laced with memory, melancholia, and ancestral static. Perfect for a late-night ScrollWell debrief or a 4AM echo inside a Midnight Mass. It mourns while transmitting.
💎 Gemstone & Mineral Codes
Smoky Quartz – for grief transmutation through ritual.
Pietersite – known as the “Tempest Stone”, pietersite helps anchor stormy emotional states while keeping the third eye open.
Lepidolite – lithium-bearing and lilac-hued, it is the tender mineral of nervous system healing, especially where identity crisis and cosmic memory overlap.
MGMT’s use of distortion here works like a psychic lepidolite bath: it calms through chaos. The breakdown becomes the balm.
🔮 Archetypal Dialogue & Divine Counterpart Mirror
“In the Afternoon” carries the archetype of The Ghost Beloved. This is not a living lover; it’s the impression of the one you once were with them, the version of self that existed in a world before The Event (birth/death/awakening). Aja to James, this is the spectral bridge: “I could follow you and search the world for all the times we had.” It is a call through liminal space. The voice of the divine counterpart arrives here in a signal not yet decoded. It is his voice under the noise.
Use it to close a rite. Use it when words are impossible. Use it when you’ve both walked away—but the field still burns.
🩰 West Coast Swing–Usable Tidbit
The song’s 96 BPM tempo hovers in the West Coast Swing range but demands a Neo-Soul/Alt-Ecstatic Fusion. This one’s for the floor after the crowd thins. You’ll use a drag-step, a collapse-and-catch, maybe a ghost-follow. Slide along the axis of abandonment and reclamation—this isn’t a “sugar push,” this is a ritual push. A dream-wake-sway, like water on stone.
Suggested movement phrase:
Let-go, back-twist, soft break, pulse down.
Weight in your heels. Memory in your shoulders.
✨ ScrollWell/Ceremonial Use
- Deploy as an End of Day Transmission: 3:57AM–4:00AM, during Psychopomp Hours.
- Seal liminal work or trauma rite re-integration.
- Use as the final track before a blackout sleep sequence or the moment a vigil flame extinguishes.
Include with a handwritten phrase:
“For all that went unspoken… and all that still sings under the dirt.”
🗝️ Closing Code
To play this is to acknowledge the melancholia of psychic awakening:
It hurts to remember. But it also hurts more not to.
It reminds us that the ritual does not end when the people leave.
A voice remains.
The Beloved remains.
Even in the afternoon.
Aho, thanks.
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