I don’t recall the moment that we settled on Casual Observer as a name. What I do know is the feeling I was trying to capture in suggesting it, an emotion that gripped me in adolescence and has never entirely left me.

To put it bluntly, I was (and still am, to an extent) the kind of person who gets lonely in crowds. The bigger the party, the more I began to detach, feel isolated, and start taking mental pictures of the scene around me. “These are the things we do to fill the time,” I would often say to myself, whether at a wedding or a funeral or a birthday party. I realize it’s a morbid reflex, but a reflex is what it is. I don’t really know where it comes from, this feeling that I’m a crasher even at events to which I was invited.
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