Anchors Aweigh

Holly says you’ve gotta have something to even you out if you’re gonna make it in this business.

Then again, Holly says that the President of the United States of America is probably some alien clone farm experiment sent to earth to enslave us all, but he’s basically right about everything else, so we try and cut him a little slack.  We in this situation being the whole team: me (Derleth, that is), Layton, Clara, and Giggs.

Holly’s something used to be a couple pints of Kentucky Gentleman before lunch, but that was last year.

That was the Presidential campaign.  So for about eight  months out of the year, we looked the other way.  The year and a half we on the team before that was a different story.

Then one morning last December, Holly came into the office sweaty and rough as usual, bleeding yellow perspiration through the pits of his button-up Oxford, sat down at his desk in the reporter pool – Holly says that in order to lead a team of fucking journalists, you had better be a fucking journalist – and vomited a liter of brackish, bourbon-scented blood into his trash can.  After which he proceeded to fall asleep with his face still in the bin.
After that, Holly stopped drinking.

But he never forgot what he had taught all of us – in order to make it here, you’d better have something to hold onto, something to dig your broken, ragged fingernails into to keep you even every time this job pulls the rug, and the world connected to it, out from under you.

Since December, for Holly it’s been old Ramones albums.  Leave Home, Rocket to Russia, Animal Boy, Too Tough To Die, Mondo Bizarro, he had them all, and listens to them on repeat.  Every time he feels anything other than that frenzied, journalistic fever to tell the entire fucking truth, kids that we all feel – hell, it’s why we took the job working for Holly in the first place – we can usually find he’s locked himself in his disused office with an old turntable and a pair of four-foot speakers from the seventies again.

The soundtrack for the rest of Holly’s life usually consists of, like the Ramones, music that, played loud enough, would wake the devil himself – Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Flogging Molly, Monster Magnet, old stuff like that.

Layton’s something is a little different – he loves old detective novels.  Dashiell Hammett, Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, anything predating the widespread influence of the television featuring seedy characters and shady dealings, he’s there.  His collection is starting to eclipse his desk, the stacks of paperback novels lining the edge of it, making it look more like a pillow fort from when you were nine than the workspace of a professional journalist.  Holly berates Layton for being shameful and a goodfornothing slob, but the way he says it sounds like how old people curse their overpampered dogs in the most saccharine, affectionate way possible.

Clara and Giggs are lucky – they share the same something. And while Holly’s not the happiest that the something they share is a controlled substance, I think somewhere in the back of his head, he’s happy that it’s just weed, and not, say, fucking black tar heroin or vodka enemas.  Anyway, they’re both our resident techies, Clara and Giggs, and while they do some writing and reporting, their main concern is with keeping our personal rigs in top notch condition.  When they’re not picking apart my laptop or assembling a working electromagnet from old VCR parts, they’re usually out on the patio blazing one or four.

I think Holly would be more upset if it didn’t somehow improve the quality of their work.

And as for me?  I hate to seem so pedestrian, but my something is something pretty damn mundane, comparatively: I anchor myself to the world through the small pleasures of Peanut Butter M&M’s.

Before you ask, yes, I was a fat kid.

I know it sounds sick, but an entire half of my desk is dedicated to them.  Literally three full drawers full of bags of the things.  I’m always throwing them back, like Elvis and his painkillers, except I’m not wearing a white sequined velour tracksuit and ankle boots, and as far as I know, fat midwestern housewives don’t masturbate to their mental images of me.

I maybe go through two bags a day – not the little handheld packets, mind you, the party-sized bags.

More when I’m working on a story that’s really getting to me.  Like a lot more.  Like enough that I’m not comfortable sharing the exact number.

It’s actually getting to a point where I’m putting more chocolate and peanut butter in my body than I am water, and I cannot for the life of me imagine that that is a good thing.

But like Holly says, if you’re gonna make it in this business, you gotta have something.

On The Importance Of Mixtapes

“Now, the making of a good compilation tape is a very subtle art. Many do’s and don’ts. First of all, you ‘re using someone else’s poetry to express how you feel. This is a delicate thing.”
–Rob, High Fidelity

Here’s the thing about a good mixtape – it might be the best way I know how to communicate.

I mean, sure, I’m a writer.  Sure, words are what I deal in.  That might be true, sure.  But half the time (more than half the time if I’m being really really honest with myself) I’m not sure that I have the capacity to properly express myself.  There’s a reason I write fiction – I’m better at discussing the feelings and motivations and pathos of people I imagine up than for me to properly and clearly discuss my own.  So I make mixtapes.

(Now seems as good a time as any to mention that I do make mixtapes for the things I write, but it’s different, because it’s more like I’m compiling a soundtrack for the story than assembling songs around a specific theme or idea or message.  More on this later.)

And yeah, there’s a really good chance that I started this when I was fifteen and saw High Fidelity for the first time.  So what?  Ten years down the road, I’ve kind of feel like I’ve somehow gotten a little closer to making pretty good mixtapes.

Especially recently.

And yes, there’s a very good reason for that.

Recently, I’ve put together five mixtapes that, by and large, I consider to be exceptional.  Of course, there’s a reason for this too.

Mixtapes have got to come from somewhere else.  They can’t be like a scrapbook one keeps around just in case they get bored and want to work on something.  They’ve got to have intent.  They’ve got to have purpose, otherwise what’s the point?  Without purpose, you’re back in ninth grade with your stupid friends making them a mix CD of songs you love, with no coherence or style.

You’ve got to want to say something with your mixtape.

Say it outright in the title or let the message float around unsaid in the songs, the author’s got to know why they’re making the mixtape in the first place.  That’s the important part.  The songs ON the mixtape?  Those are there to support the core message.  That’s not to say the songs don’t matter, because the songs most definitely fucking matter.  They matter because they’re what you’re using to get your message across.

Picking the right song is just as important to the message as the message itself.  You can’t very well say a mixtape means I Will Love You Forever, Sweety! and then proceed to fill it with Slipknot and Cannibal Corpse songs.  What are you gonna use on that mixtape from their ouvre? People = Shit?  Or maybe Rancid Amputation?

That’s not to say that you can’t pull from a variety of sources – quite the opposite.  On one particular mixtape, I used Semisonic, The Beatles, Nine Inch Nails, Van Halen, The Kooks, System of a Down, and Jonathan Coulton (among others) to form a cohesive whole.  The songs themselves will work if they fit the message.  The message is what pulls them together.

The message is, to flog an old phrase, more than the sum of its parts.  Because not only are the songs important to the message of the mixtape, but the order in which you put them is just as important.  The generally accepted rule is to start it off with a killer, then step it up a notch, and then cool it down by the third track.  The idea is to formulate a kind of flow to the mixtape itself.

Look at it this way:  everybody made the bad decision somewhere in their teenage years to buy an album on the merit of a single solitary song, and we were all disappointed to find out that the album was little more than a collection of singles in a scatterplot order, none of which really managing to live up to the self-styled hype of that single.  There’s no logic or order to it, and there’s certainly no flow.  Those are the worst albums out there, the ones that have no direction.  So not only does it matter that I put Ben Folds’ Kate on the mixtape, it matters that it comes after Mike Doughty’s Nectarine (Part One) and before JJ Grey & Mofro’s She Don’t Know.

By the end of the mixtape, you want your message to be completely and unequivocally clear.

So, those five mixtapes I’ve made this year?  They all have a message, and they all more or less say it – not that I’m all that subtle of a man in the first place.  In chronological order, they are (the ones in the parentheses are the message I was trying to convey without making it the actual title of the mixtape):

1. (I know we’ve only been dating for a couple of weeks now but I really like you)
2. (Okay, so it’s really sudden, and I know you don’t want to fucking talk about it, but I am in fact actually in love with you)
3. Play Me When You’re Having A Bad Day And Feeling Distant
4. (Holy christ, we actually graduated college)
5. Play Me When You Are Overwhelmed

Personally, I love these mixtapes, but that’s probably because I love the person I made them for.  Which seems beside the point, but it’s really not.  Because mixtapes are an act of creativity and affection and caring.  Sure, someone could make an I FUCKING HATE YOU mixtape, but it wouldn’t be the same, and it wouldn’t really work, since they’d still have to take care to craft and shape and organize it to make it fit the message.  It would still mean something to someone.

That’s why I’ve always made mixtapes FOR people.  No matter what I say or how I act, or what comes of it, every real and actual mixtape I’ve made has been for someone, if I’ve given it to them or not.

Those five mixtapes?  They wouldn’t exist if I didn’t have something (or in this case, someone) to inspire them.

That’s the point I’ve been trying to make.  Mixtapes are like modern poetry – they’ve got to have a reason and a meaning and a message, they’ve got to have the right elements in the right places, and they’ve got to move fluidly.  Mixtapes have got to be inspired by something, like any other good piece of creativity.

Because if you’re going to make it, you had better damn well mean it.

Pax Americana

Ever since the war ended, things have been different.

Like there was ever any chance they wouldn’t be.

The oldtimers always made a point to tell us that war changes everything.  Touches everything.  Burns everything.  That when war comes – and it will come – there’s nothing you can do to hold it back.  There’s no seal you can put in place, no barrier you can build to stem the tide of war.  People are always going to think of new and horrifying ways to kill each other, there’s nothing you can do about it.  People are always going to hate.  These days, hell, for years and years now it seems like those words should be scratched into the Bill of Rights.  The Inalienable Right to Hate.  Carve it in ten-foot letters on Liberty Island, right where the Lady’s face used to be.

War’s always been a part of human nature – that’s something the hippies never got.  People are violent by design.  The only difference between society today and ten thousand years ago is the kind of weaponry we use.  From rocks and sticks to clubs and spears to swords to rifles to bombs to tactical nuclear strikes in a few millenia.  The future is yours to destroy.

For a while there in the early 21st century, it looked like we had done it.  We had destroyed the future with a grim finality, using the weapons of the zeitgeist.  Reality TV, fast food, pop music, fame, fortune, and everything that came with it.

Then came the election.  A nation’s long-standing dreams brought to fruition by the miracle of a galvanized youth vote.  For a second, the world brightened just a little bit, as hope had a moment’s reign.

But the timing was off, as is so often the case with these matters.  A preexisting war and rampant apathy proved to be too much, as it often does.  Within four years, hope gave way to fear and shame.  What was once the nation’s best chance became another mediocre footnote in the margins.

But it’s true what they say about the land of opportunity.  Second chances do exist here.

So when the state was threatened by a foreign threat brandishing new-gen hydrogen bombs, that very same footnote saw a chance to become the full-fledged chapter, or even volume, it had long dreamt of being.

So for the third time in ten years, the nation marched to war.

Red and white propaganda adorned every street of every city.  The alleys echoed with the thrump of combat boots and truncheons.  Government-sponsored hate rallies poorly disguised as town hall forums appeared everywhere.  Every other television channel became subject to government funded and produced programming.  Backs were slapped and hands were shook.  The skies and the earth blackened as fleets of planes blotted out the sun.  The draft was never reinstated, but enlistment benefits skyrocketed.  After a year or two, the youth couldn’t afford not to join up.  High-def cameras were installed on every street corner and every lamp post.

And after another two years, victory came to the nation’s shores.

Ticker tape parades were held.  Motorcades carried the returning heroes in domestic cars along every main thoroughfare in the country.  The war had been won, and for a fleeting breath of a moment, people thought peace had finally been beaten into the bones of the planet.  Surely prosperity was just around the corner.  The future had become a spoil of war.

Then they came.  Fifty by fifty,  eight feet tall and dressed in glossy silver.  They didn’t carry weapons, but only because they didn’t need to.  Bullets, blades and bombs did nothing more to then than scuff the sheen of their silver plating.  Punching holes in cars and buildings and women in children, they came the day our new heroes returned, unaware and unprepared.  Stomping through the streets like the heroes had done two years previous, they seized control of every city’s financial sector in under an hour.  By sunset, they had eradicated the military.

By sunrise, the nation was theirs.  His.

You see, while the eyes of the nation had been focused overseas where our heroes had been machinegunning little brown people, he had been working.  The man behind the goggles and the white lab coat had seen his chance.

The Doctor had recognized his moment.   A moment of glory, where there would be no war or pain or fear or choice.

And he was going to take it.

Ten years ago our worries were nothing more than how to fill our cars with gas and how to pay our medical bills and who would get punched out next on “Jersey Shore.”  Imagine that.  Imagine a world so simple.

Imagine a world not policed by Dr. Mephetic’s robot marauders.

Then you can talk to me about the “good old days.”

A Letter to The Editor

Somewhere in my head, there’s a picture of someone I don’t know yet.

He’s about forty five years old, and his thick, longer hair’s going gray at the edges of his temples.  Publicly, he grumbles about going prematurely gray, but everybody knows he thinks it makes him look dignified.  Truth be told, it does a little, not that anyone would justify his ego by telling him so.  The reading glasses covering his blue-yellow eyes ride lower on his nose than he’d probably like, but the fact of the matter is that he likes how he looks when he adjusts them, taking them by one of the arms and setting them higher, so they sit properly.  He does this about every ten minutes, maybe less.

He doesn’t have any facial hair, which is probably for the best, since he can’t really grow any – he never could.  He knows you know the type – when he doesn’t shave it just comes in patchy and prickly.  Used to be, when he didn’t shave he’d just have these soft patches of blonde nothing growing out of his lips and chin that he could shave off with a disposable razor and a little bit of hot water.  Anymore, he’s got to shave every day, because the patchy scruff has started coming in gray like the hair at his temples.

He’s still tall, tall as he was twenty years ago, though maybe these days he’s a little more tense around the shoulders, giving him a look of cultivated severity.  He’s clearly thinned out a bit from years previous, you can tell by his posture and the way his clothes fit.  If anyone had to guess, they’d say it’s probably due to too many late nights writing at his desk, with nothing but coffee and the stereo to keep him company, and not enough hot meals at the right times.  They’d probably be right.

He’s dressed like you’d expect, black shoes, faded jeans, vintage t-shirt that wasn’t so vintage when he bought it, ancient black overcoat fading into threadbare disrepair.  Hands in pockets thrust, he looks at you from behind those full-framed glasses with an arrogant smirk that suggests you came in just a second too late to get the joke.  When he takes his hands out of his pockets, you can see the ink stains cluttering his fingertips like random tattoos, blotches of oil-slick black and bleeding blues from where he spins his pens when he’s bored or thinking too hard.  He smiles slowly, a look that really makes the picture – he still smiles like he did in his twenties, like the cat that ate the canary.

It’s this smile that tells you everything you need to know about him.  Still arrogant.  Still clever.  Still a little mean and a little crazy.

Still selfish.  Still bitter.  Still sending the world hate mail.

Still the kind of guy that, for better or worse, is willing to pick a scab until it scars over, just to break it open again and start all over.

Still the kind of guy who’ll pull the rug out from under you if you blink.

And he is not scared of you.

the myth and mutation of superman

A perfect, blue-eyed baby boy drops out of the sky, unharmed, encased in a silver capsule, alien in design and in construction. Tearing a haggard, ugly scar across the Kansas landscape, leaving no stone unburned in its wake, this craft eventually loses momentum, coming to a halt on the Kent farm. Jonathan and Martha Kent, good, honest, hardworking American folk, discover this smoldering, oversized galactic bullet in their backyard and subsequently discover the perfect, raven-haired infant kept safe and warm inside. The Kents, maybe because they couldn’t have kids of their own, or maybe because they never really got around to it, decide to take and raise the apparent orphan as their own. They name him Clark and take him home, along with the mysterious craft he arrived in.

Fast forward some number of years.

Young Clark Kent, now a young man about his “home town” of Smallville, discovers he is possessed of certain amazing, otherworldly abilities. Abilities that, once harnessed and focused, can save not only Truth, Justice and The American Way, but can preserve whatever shreds of goodness are left on our tiny blue planet, orbiting our tiny yellow sun.

He’s super, man.

And that’s what he represents.

Hope. Redemption. Righteousness. Honor. Courage.

All from an alien.

The message, such as it is, is that these things don’t naturally occur on earth – not in any kind of enduring way, at least. We’re only mortal – we’re only human. We’re not perfect. But he is. Handsome, clever, thoughtful, strong, brave, moral, kind, fast, respectful, intelligent, generous, understanding, selfless, the list goes on. And on. And on.

The only thing he’s missing to complete the picture is a beard and a crown of thorns.

Then again, Charlie don’t surf and Jesus don’t fly. That we know of. That’s the thing about mythic power – it’s malleable. Over the years, Superman’s powers, thanks largely in part to the hubris of a variety of writers, have often been redpenned and correctional taped. Back in the day, Big Blue had strength enough to move entire planets, supergenius level intellect and memory, unlimited physical senses, the ability to fly at light speed, perceive the entire electro-magnetic spectrum, breathe in outer space and use something called “super-hypnosis.”

Come 1986, they decided to clip his wings in the interest of giving him a challenge, and to make it easier on the writer to do so. His power, mysterious as is, alternately explained by light from earth’s yellow sun, advanced Kryptonian evolution, or superdense cell structure, is in the end very fucking up for debate, depending on who’s behind the pen. Who’s to say that hasn’t happened with people’s old-school heroes?

Maybe Jesus could fly.

Or maybe he was a time-traveling cyborg who was so damaged in the crucifixion that it took him nearly three days to repair himself.

Think about a digital transmogrifier that can change water into wine and re-organize the atomic structure of five loaves of bread and two fish into a near-infinite nutritional feedback loop. Think about antigrav grip pads retrofitted with H2O treads. This is less a description of a celestial savior and more of a sci-fi movie monster.

If a man can walk on water and leap skyscrapers in a single bound and come back from the dead, then anything’s possible, however unlikely. A monster falls out of the clear blue sky and saves the world. Sounds like a bad joke, but stranger things have happened.

Just because they wear tights and capes and robes and sandals doesn’t make monsters any less monstrous. Just because they’ve got a winning smile doesn’t make them any less freakish.

So what happens when a monster that, after thousands of years of nothing but day-glo deities and synthetic superheroes, actually looks the part falls to earth with a sight to save us all?

How happy are we scared little earthlings to see our freaksavior then?

Shane Koyczan

The man speaks for himself.

Reassertion:

Nine days short of six months, a complete artistic overhaul (courtesy of one Mr. K. Dixon), and a severe reduction of my intarwubs-presence later:

I am *still* Matthew Lyons and this is *still* Lies and Chicanery.

And I have been watching you.

Oh, yes.

“Why I Hated Juno,” or “Some notes on whatever the hell Diablo Cody is doing to my language”

I’m not saying it was terrible.  I’m not saying that, not really.  I’m just saying that I hated it, hated the living, breathing hell out of it and everything it represents.

And here’s why.

I’m going to begin with the fact that I’m sure that Diablo Cody is a reasonably intelligent, talented, interesting woman.  I’ve read some archived blog entries from her now-famous “Pussy Ranch” blog, and I’ve got to say, she’s very candid and honest about her experiences without being awkwardly uncomfortable or piteous in the least.
So this isn’t about Diablo Cody.

However.

When Juno first came out, it was lauded from every possible source that the dialogue was both incredibly clever and ridiculously smart, especially when coming from a sixteen year old.
But it’s not.
At all.
It’s neither clever nor smart in the slightest respect.
All it is, if you really spend the duration of the movie listening to it, is fleeting moments of clever wordplay (“the cautionary whale”) interpolated with a nonexistent, unrealistic youth dialect and excessively referential, awkwardly phrased sentences. (“Honest to blog.”)
The fact of the matter is that nobody talks like that.  Nobody.
Especially not Rainn Wilson, who, in a boggling, useless role amounting to nothing more than a glorified cameo, seems to attempt to lend indie “Office”-esque cred to this dialect that is essentially abandoned by the end of the movie. (It doesn’t work, and for some reason, I still feel like going through it again to make sure nobody muttered “that’s what she said” accidentally-on-purpose.)
Now, I’m not going to fault anyone for trying out a new style of dialogue, or anything like that – not in the least.  My favorite movie is the neo-noir sideways-speaking Brick for christ sakes.   But the fact of the matter is that the only people who would buy this bullshit dialogue are the same people who would buy that bullshit plot-point that Juno’s dad (the inimitable JK Simmons) wouldn’t completely flip his shit the second his daughter announced his pregnancy. I don’t care how mature or clever or sarcastic Juno the character is supposed to be, no reasonable, caring parent is that nonchalant.
At least in Brick they used a pre-established style of speech – a dialect nearly eighty years out of date, but a pre-established one nonetheless.

And it’s not even the fact that nearly everyone in Juno talks in this incomprehensible, nonsense language, which would be forgivable, save for the fact that the movie takes every opportunity to cram it down the viewers’ throats – much like the constant attempts to show Juno as a clever, individualistic aberration of a sixteen year old.  To wit: in the penultimate hospital scene, as Juno is giving birth, she’s visibly wearing quirky socks.
It’s not like Jason Reitman photoshopped in a big red arrow pointing at them, but they’re so loud and out of place that he might as well have.

But this is evidential of a bigger problem woven throughout the movie, whether intentional or not:  it’s not just the dialogue that the film spends it’s full 96 minutes cramming down the throats of its audience.

Case in point:  the hamburger phone.
The hamburger phone is a perfect example of this presumed, prefabricated hipness that the film not only champions, but espouses at every opportunity, in a desperate attempt to prove its own tenuous credibility.
Because it’s not enough to have a hamburger phone, no – that’s just weird.  It’s not enough to have the hamburger phone, you have to announce your hamburger phone, because somehow that makes it quirky and clever, and not at all a hamhanded attempt at subversion and wit!  Now shake the hamburger phone!  Shake it!  Shake!

Another facet of this desperate, overarching, masturbatory “tell me I’m clever, tell me I’m cool tell me I’m cool tell me I’m cool” ethic that pervades the entire movie, is the unavoidable aspect of the film’s music.
I mean, I”ll give Juno this: at least there’s a moment in which they bring up the very valid point of view that, you know, fuck Sonic Youth, but then they have to go and fuck that up by invoking the preexisting credibility of Patti Smith, The Stooges, and the Runaways.
You know who’s under 35, has never lived in New York, and still tells people that their favorite bands are Patti Smith, The Stooges, and the Runaways?
No good, zero-depth hipster sacks of shit.
Because again, it’s one thing entirely to love something, but it’s another thing entirely to advertise it.

But again, this is an aspect that would be completely forgivable.  It would be one thing if they invoked the punk rock legends and then did the logical thing and filled the movie’s soundtrack with them.  But that, apparently, would be too direct, and wouldn’t smack at all of that sour, metallic blood-taste of irony.
So what do they do?
They fill the soundtrack with these so-unclever-and-poorly-written-they’re-actually-clever-and-brilliant-again-right? lo-fi acoustic numbers by Kimya Dawson, Kimya Dawson As Antsy Pants, and Kimya Dawson As The Moldy Peaches.
And again, I’m not bagging on the entire soundtrack – I’m happy with the choices to use Belle & Sebastian and Cat Power’s version of “Sea Of Love” – I’m just bagging on the lo-fi crap.
And the hell of it is that people fucking bought it.
Well, maybe not people.  I should rephrase that.
Every stupid, childish, self-centered girl I know bought the soundtrack and played it to death, especially the Kimya Dawson tracks, not out of any particular love for the movie, but because, having absolutely no personality of their own (or perhaps deeply unhappy with their current personality), they wanted to somehow transmute themselves into Juno.
No such luck.

Even the three great performances in the film can’t save it. (None of them are Ellen Page.)
JK Simmons is great as always, just like in everything he ever does, despite the unrealistically zen-like calm he exudes at nearly every moment of this particular movie.
The other two brilliant performances come from Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner, who shine in their roles as opposing sides of this fantastically broken couple.
By the way, in a shockingly interesting coincidence, these three people are the only ones in the entire movie who actually speak as if they’re real people.

Juno is, in every way, a desperate, grossly unrealistic film that represents an uncomfortable, poorly executed attempt at fabricating one’s own hipness.
And I hated it.

But then again, I actually liked “Chinese Democracy,” so what do I know?

I Won’t Lie, I’m Here To Destroy You

Here’s the hell of it, though:
Some days, the world is absolutely and completely worth it.

Re: Epic Shit – A Love Song

Mmm.  Sweet tea.
Oh, hello there.  Let’s have a little talk, shall we?
I have some things I’d like to share with you.

I’ve come to another sort of revelation about myself.
I’m not sure how to exactly start phrasing it, so I’m just going to hit the ground running, er, rambling, and go with it.

When I was a little kid, just starting to try and figure out what kind of music I liked, I quickly developed a special affection for over-the-top, cheesy-as-hell metal bands like Twisted Sister, Alice Cooper, and the like.
It’s important to realize that inside my easily influenced little brain, these guys were something along the lines of THE PINNACLE OF BADASS.  It was like, “Shit yeah, sixth grade, I’ve got my combed hair and my shoes that my mom helped me pick out and I love my grandma, and my little cubby drawer in the classroom, and…  and… and I WANNA ROCK! I WOULD LIKE VERY MUCH TO ROCK! HOW ABOUT YEAH?!  HOW ABOUT FUCK YEAH, GRAMMA!  LISTEN TO THIS SHIT!!  TURN IT UP, PLEASE!”
I was such a tool.
(I like how I use the past-tense on that.  Was.  Haha.)

Anyway, this went on until seventh grade, wherein I developed deep, scarring senses of shame and conformity and realized that listening to Twisted Sister made me a total fucking douchebag in the eyes of my peers.
Enter 1998 and 1999 in pop culture.
I started wearing nothing but polo shirts and jeans and asked for Eve6′s debut album for Christmas and started listening to Green Day and Eminem and still combed my hair and played in the school band and developed a fleeting, shallow crush on Kalie Bozich, not because I was particularly attracted to her at the time, but because everyone had crushes and there were school dances to think about and oh my god are those those boobs things I keep hearing about?  Holy shit, dude!
It was an interesting time to be me.
A miserable, stressful, frightening time, sure, but interesting nonetheless.

Eighth grade was pretty much a duplicate of seventh, save the facts that we were allowed to use alcohol burners in science class (I dropped a lit one on a desk once and ignited the entire surface of said desk.  To this day, I maintain it was an accident.) and we weren’t allowed to carry around our backpacks because of that whole Columbine thing.
So that was one less way the studentry was allowed to express themselves in a prejudicial, cruel fashion.
Oddly enough, I was actually relieved.  Wonder what that’s about.
Anyway.
I was still totally obsessed with listening to the kind of music that would let me be accepted by the popular kids (an obsession that never came to fruition) and my polo shirt collection had only grown, seemingly in direct correlation with my douchey late-90s CD collection.
At this point in my life, my crush-laser had switched focus from Kalie to Ali Meidinger, the on-and-off “girlfriend” of my pal Tony Reedy – their relationship consisted of her kicking him in the shins a shit-ton.
(Little did I know that this was a perfect metaphor for nearly all romantic relationships further down the line.  Simpler times.)
Also, Tony had gotten me started on a little band from Australia called AC/DC, and my hair was slowly tiring of being combed every day.  I mean, it still happened, but the regularity of it was wavering.
But the important part of all of this is AC/DC.
The first song I ever heard by AC/DC, and interestingly enough, the first song that I ever heard that made me feel like a true-blue badass, was Back In Black.  We were in the back of our friend Jason’s mom’s minivan, and Tony had his headphones with him.  He put on Back In Black and handed me the headphones.
After exactly four minutes and sixteen seconds, I remember saying something along the lines of “Holy fucking shit” and Jason’s mom getting really mad.
I count this as one of those rare defining moments in life.

Skipping forward a bit, no more than a handful of months, along comes high school, completely changing the game and packing a whole new litany of horrors and dramas and emotional scars that I won’t get into unless absolutely necessary, or if I think I can make two of the three people who actually read this blog uncomfortable.
Sorry.  Off topic again.

Thanks to high school being such a brand-new clusterfuck, I was once again forced to evaluate what would and wouldn’t get me ridiculed and ostracized by my peers.
But that was the catch – there wasn’t anything I could listen to or say or do that wouldn’t automatically make me an outcast or a freak.
There was no winning, and though I didn’t know exactly how to articulate it at the time, that similarly meant that there was no losing, either.  With the social bar being set so low for me and my friends, as long as I showed up half the time and managed to not poop myself from stress and fear, I could chalk high school up as a sort of weird victory.
It wasn’t Freaks and Geeks, but I can understand why people identify so much with that show.

So, there I was, an automatic outcast in a brand new environment.
So what do I do?
I say fuck polo shirts and fuck Eve6 and fuck Green Day and fuck the popular kids and fuck the teachers. I’m gonna start wearing black t-shirts with slogans printed on them and I’m gonna use a sharpie to write shit on my jeans and I’m not gonna wear any shoes that aren’t Vans and I’m gonna buy a skateboard not comb my hair at all anymore and ditch class and maybe I’ll even wear a hat even when I’m indoors and you know what else fuck the lot of you, like it or not.
In another phenomenal coincidence, this is about the time in my life I discovered punk rock, ska, and death metal.
(This was before I had made the acquaintance of one Mr. Francis Albert Sinatra.)
Because if I was going to feel like a reject, I discovered it felt pretty goddamn good to act like the kind of reject I thought people were thinking of me as.
(This might be a good time to mention that I barely graduated high school.  I mean, my mom was holding her breath up until the point I actually had the diploma in my hand, and even then, she double checked to make sure it wasn’t a fake.)

But I also made another very important discovery about this time in my life – those ridiculous metal bands I listened to as a kid?
Those guys were fucking awesome.
Dear Dee Motherfucking Snider – I do want to rock.

Anyway, here’s the point, finally – by the time I made my rediscovery, it wasn’t just Twisted Sister and Co. anymore.
It wasn’t just about rockin’ anymore.
No, I had discovered a bunch of mean British dudes with loud, screechy, almost operatic songs about all of the Forgotten Gods and malevolent psychics and war and the doomsday clock and gruesome massacres and Greek Mythology and the apocalypse and the FUCKING DEVIL.  This was music that somehow combined the ridiculous opulence of my early favorites and the Drop-Kick Badassery that listening to AC/DC made me feel exploding out of my every orifice.  In my opinion, I had discovered a nearly perfect band.
I had discovered Iron Maiden.

And this is the point I’ve been working toward for the past hour or so of garbled intarwubs-incoherence.
In discovering Iron Maiden/rediscovering 80s metal in what I consider to be a large part of my formative years, I had unwittingly already outlined a big part of who I would grow to be.

A big part of this came in the form of my instant and enduring love of Tenacious D.
But that’s not what I’ve been getting at here, not entirely. (“The point is, I love The D.  The end.”)  That’d be bullshit, I know.  I’m about to get to the point.
Iron Maiden outlined a lot of what I’ve come to actively listened to in the years since the first time I heard “Run To The Hills” – sweeping, intricate guitars, catastrophic crescendos of harmony, thundering drums, and lyrics of such content and sung with such madman’s passion that they MUST SOMEHOW DEFY THE WILL OF GOD HIMSELF.

Their songs tell these horrifying, almost Lovecraftian tales of horror and madness and tragedy, and do so with gleeful fury.  Each song is a tale in and of itself, and these songs taught me to appreciate sweeping, horrific narratives in mediums other than music.

And it’s not entirely just to do with their music, either.
Something has to be said for their album covers.
There’s something to be said for nightmarish pyramids, a mummified torso floating above an arctic sea, skull aflame and holding its own heart in one outstretched hand, and a cyborg corpse gunning people down with a fucking ray gun in a darkened futuropolis.
There’s something so gleefully, frighteningly evocative about these images that I can’t help but feel that seeing them in my teenage years is partly to blame for me gravitating toward fantastic, incredible stories and concepts.

Thanks in no small part to Iron Maiden, I adore ridiculously complicated and bloody horror movies and retro-throwback metal and sci-fi fiction and extravagant TV shows much more than I think I would have had I not been listening to burned copies of Powerslave and Seventh Son of a Seventh Son and Number of the Beast and Piece Of Mind as I was busy reading and hating the world in tenth grade.

Am I saying that I wouldn’t have loved Dune and Slaughter-House Five and A Canticle For Leibowitz and a bunch of others had I not been listening to Iron Maiden when I first read them?
Of course not.  They’re unbelievably good books.
But am I saying that I wouldn’t have enjoyed them as much had I not been listening to Iron Maiden at the time?
Very possibly.

Look, everybody has bands and groups and singers that kick their memories into high-grade nostalgia mode.  It’s okay to admit it.
I’m admitting my nostalgia right here, and I know that nostalgia’s kind of an inherently flawed thing anyway, I know that.
But what I’m saying here is tonight, Can I Play With Madness played on my iTunes and I got the sudden, incredible urge to spend the next twenty-something hours rereading Dune.

Can you name one thing in your life that can do the same kind of thing to you?