After I had a taste of counter-culture, I had a giant problem with living in my house. It seemed like there was a giant truth outside the door that didn’t play by the same rules inside. Outside there were brilliant colors or dark heavy rain. Inside there was silence and heavy cotton wads inside my ears.
This isn’t something you should know.
I don’t know whether I just have extremely sensitive ears, but for as long as I can remember, I could hear conversations that weren’t in the room. Word for word. I’m watching television and listening to my parents talking in the bedroom. I’m lying in bed. I can hear people talking as they walk down the street. I feel their footsteps a block away. When I was a teenager, I started using fans as white noise. Some static sound waves to distract my ears. This would help me sleep when I finally could sleep.
This isn’t something you should feel.
After the first concert I went to, my ears were ringing. As I went to sleep that night, I couldn’t hear anything but the steady tone of tinnitus. It was very comforting. I felt warm and safe. I slept easily which is rare for me.
They confuse themselves with fear.
After my first punk show, I could barely hear anything. I sat on the concrete against a hurricane fence listening to the tone. My friend Denton sat next to me talking. I watched his lips move. I didn’t care what he was saying. A police car drove by. The punks were milling about. Denton and I weren’t very good punks. We both had long hair. I remember the punks could be just as toothless as any redneck. “What are you guys rockers?!!?!” Holding his rock and roll fingers up. Denton was always good natured and friendly, “Yeah man. Whatever you say.” People are always trying to scare each other. The punks were succeeding in scaring the cops. The looks on their faces as they drove slowly past. This wasn’t New York City. This was downtown Houston.
It keeps you near. It keeps you near.
When you stick a bunch of words on a page, it’s like this giant commitment to meaning. There are all these things that I want to say. And my own yearning is so tied up in everything that I want to be saying. I would figure that at some point I’d catch a break. But it’s also just as likely that it will just keep coming at me hot and heavy like thick syrup in a giant water gun. I could also say there is nothing here that isn’t my own doing. My chaos is my own. My catalysts dissolve in a hail of precipitation, and I still have no idea what I am saying.
This isn’t something you need said.
But it’s always nice to think I am getting somewhere. That I am not waking up every day for nothing. That when I walk out the door I am closer to something called success. But when I look closely at the underlying philosophy of this daily assumption, the whole concept falls apart for me. What the hell is success? Why do I do anything? ‘Why’ turns into lists…
Your list gets longer every day.
Why does music turn into anything at all? It’s just a bunch of noise. That’s the beginning of my step back from the abyss. Music is meaningful a priori. But the genres and lists and the music we become attached to. Why does some music never attach to people and other music becomes a phenomenon?
Confusing love with disarray.
I made this CD before I left work of about 10 MP3’s of 10 different bands and listened to them all on the way home. I chose the MP3’s after listening to 10 second snippets. I had never heard any of them before. I had just about given up on the whole CD when this song came on. It snatched me away from wherever I had been.
It keeps you near. It keeps you near.
I wonder sometimes about all the things that I question. I seem to question the fundamentals of almost everything every day. It isn’t something I talk about every day. But it’s something that dominates my thought process. I think people would get pretty tired of me if I talked like an existential nutcase every day. But every day I am searching for meaning in everything I do. Why do I do it? Why do I get up? These are really important questions for me. These questions lead to other questions. Not answers. I am not interested in the structurural discourse of society in this internal discussion. I don’t want the concrete direct answers that society makes up and regurgitates over and over again. I want the wonder in the question itself.
To think that someone somewhere…
It’s amazing to me that people felt so uncomfortable with not having the answers that they started making them up. That we told these made up answers to each other so much and so totally that we assumed the answers were a priori. It seems obvious to me that it’s the questions and the wonder that are a priori.
said that this should begin.
All Girl Summer Fun Band is a band I really want to see live. There’s something kind of 60’s pop about their approach to punk. Like maybe a little Nico or Nancy Sinatra mixed with our hardcore with some Clash thrown in and a little hint of the Bangles. I love the abrupt changes and the timing. There is no slop here. This is a tight approach to some fast music. And then a laid back pop vocal floats on top. We are at the mercy of her questions. She doesn’t seem to need any answers. And I wonder how far from the original intention I am here. The one thing that I’ve always loved about punk is how close the philosophical context is to the aural metaphor. But the point is emphasized by the lack of gravity necessary to accomplish this state of wonder. AGSFB seem to add something new to this state of being.
This will never end.
But it also seems obvious that we would be afraid of our own wonder. Because the answerless world is infinite.
This will never end.
