Music plays while I try to wake up, while I try to dismiss the magnetic pull of my bed. Some part of my brain tries to convince the rest of me that the freaky dream stories still need to be resolved, that I should go back to bed to find out if the chickens make it out of the swimming pool safely and without messing up the marshmallow garden too much. The dreams' details burn away like morning mist and I try to find my glasses and a towel. I know that I'll spend too much time reading that new zine I got in the mail yesterday and will have no time to fix breakfast.
Music plays while I'm driving the car. I drive in a daze and choose to stop at the gas station closest to home. I get a Dr. Pepper from the fridge, feeling grumpy and vaguely hateful towards everything in the store, even the soda I'm about to buy. I spend too much time digging for money in my pocket, then return to the car. The music is Trail of Dead, or Boy Pussy USA, or Dismemberment Plan, or the mix tape Beckett left in my room 2 years ago. Every hearing of the songs etches them a little deeper into my brain and carves up a larger chunk of my heart. I get sentimental about the songs and the moments that I associate with them.
Trail of Dead means wild nights with slightly insane, very stylish kids in the streets and at parties. It's getting offered valium and taking it and all the things that wouldn't have happened without it (falling in love with a geek boy, too many blackouts, getting kicked out of Club DeVille). It's dancing in a near-empty dance club and still having fun cuz it feels like we own the place. It's meeting Jason for the first time and talking for hours over Mickey's at the Bates Motel. It's an article in my zine about violence as performance. It's Conrad and me stealing beers and drinking them on a curb. It's seeing them play live and feeling certain (and almost scared) that one day thousands of strangers will be just as excited to see them as I am. It's "A Perfect Teenhood" full of "fuck you"s and the hypnotic strains of "Clair de Lune" keeping my emotions cranked to 10.
Dismemberment Plan is seeing them play to five kids in California in 97 and loving them even though I didn't know that one should call their music "angular" or that they were on the same label as Jawbox. It's playing their 7" for my best friend and her hating them and not wanting to play it on her radio show. It's traveling 4 hours to see them in Denton and then getting blasted and not making a very good impression when I met them. It's Travis laughing at me from the stage when he recognized me half a year later at one of their shows. It's dancing to "!" With my 3 year-old nephew in my room. It's all the twisted scenarios in the songs and twisted emotions I get from them set to bouncy rhythms and up tempos that make you want to dance and cringe at the same time.
Boy Pussy USA is a few days of summer in Olympia WA. I met a tall nerdboy outside of YoYoAGoGo and I gave him a Woozyhelmet tape. A couple of days later I saw him at the Women's Mud Wrestling event. He was wearing yellow goggles and sitting with a teenage girl. He gave me his tape and she gave me a zine. I listen to the tape and wish that we had talked all day and become best friends. It's tape hiss and whiny vocals with good drumming and songs with mysterious content ( "I don't want to be you" or is it "I don't want a beer" or could it be "I don't want to pee, uh") that make me smile and think about good stuff. It makes me think of 50 degree days in July in a little town where it seemed like dork rockers ruled the world.
Don't get me started about the Beckett mix tape. I miss Beckett. Okay I have to say something so I'll tell you... it's him zonked out on Dramamine on my floor while I'm drunk and me checking him to make sure he's still breathing, it's me tattooing his whole forearm in one sitting, it's him getting naked at parties, it's the two of us walking down 21st Street together talking real talk, it's him failing out of college and going back to Ohio. It's half songs from bands I can name and half songs that I wish I knew more about.
When I get off from work I'll get in the car and pick up where I left off. Maybe this time it will be The Need or Dallas Kids or maybe some Daniel Johnston.
December 10, 1999