BLUE ICE
2004. Your friend crystal meth showed up to even the score.
You were at such a desperate low point, you would have done just about anything to avoid the monotony of failure. This time with speed, you thought it best to avoid people and parties like the plague. Not hard to do. Invites were not exactly pouring in aplenty.
The sudden deaths of 3 of your most kindred spirited aunts had already buried you in compounded grief that year. And a maddening attempt to escape California by relocating to New York City pummeled your rising humility into some of that class-conscious poverty you'd grown so accustomed to. But it's one thing to be broke and eating cheap oranges and avocado filled tacos and quite another to live on pizza slices and coke. So you crawled back to San Francisco with $10 left to your name and your tail firmly tucked between your toes. Lame. It was difficult to forgive yourself for going back. So you made some more epic faceplants. Fucking up. You were getting good at that.
Broken-hearted because for years, you believed the easily forgotten non-slurring words of a blackout drunk whom you thought you were in love with. Those lovely intimate moments that you obsessively replayed in your head whenever you felt too depressed to deal with people, they meant Absolutely Nothing. It turned out you were having an imaginary relationship with yourself. He was not there. With you. At all. Even when he was in the same room fucking you. What? Who? He could not recall. The sober version of him that you hardly ever saw was cold, kind of an asshole. But the drunk version acted like being with you was always new and exciting. In his mind, It Was Always The First Time. And you stupidly rearranged all sorts of important things in your life around this flying circus illusion that was just ding-a-ling tinkerbells toy pianos and moth eaten tutus, but you kept heading head strong for that fall. So we fall. And that's all.
There'd be other imaginary loves as well. But you pursued these individuals because you felt Psychically Pushed to. You were so confused as to the meaninglessness of this -- Why Be Shoved Toward Someone Who Had No Love For You? It was a crack in the glassy-eyed delusions of youth. Trying to find meaning or draw patterns in the chicken soup of life when it does not need to prove anything to you. It's just soup.
Much later, it came into view, the obligatory shattering of a crappy midlife crisis averting truth. The Real Reason Was This: You were pushed toward them so that you would become vulnerable, get rejected, feel abandoned, be miserable and then learn -- because if it didn't fucking hurt, you'd Never Learn -- that you must stop looking for someone to be there for you, stop looking for someone to love you, stop looking for someone to save you, stop looking for someone to kill you, validate you, make you feel less ghost-like and drifting. Stop looking for someone to entertain that static fear, to avoid that infinite loneliness, to distract you from that prison you put yourself in with constant aggressive self-defeating judgements. Stop looking for someone. Look for yourself. Look At Your Self. Eew. That's something no one really wants to do.
Next, you received a nice friendly eviction notice from the big cheap black mold and music infected warehouse where you loved living with members of some now-famous bands like CrackWAR, RubberOCement, Erase Errata and Thee Oh Sees. When you moved into the huge commercial space, it was decked out with empty server racks, miles of ethernet cable, dimpled nerf footballs and a white board hanging all askew. These words were scrawled across it in dry erase marker: THINGS TO DO: Claim Bankruptcy, Get Drunk, Look For A New Job. Mistakenly, you thought the dot com bubble had burst. But no. It grew back. And worse. So much worse. So so so much worse.
All this, on the heels of having just crawled out from under the fallout of a disasterous, yet memorable, European tour that effectively disbanded 7 years of collaborative work and
hard won efforts. ALL FOR NOTHING. You helped create the anarchic electronic record label from the ground up, but after the big tour, all of your work had been whitewashed out of existence. Mere moments after you left the collective, the label received a worldwide distribution deal with Revolver and AK Press. It included the entire catalog except, of course, they had already erased everything made under your Deletist namesake. The humor in this is not lost on you, even if all else was: the vinyl test pressings and master recordings, scores of 45s, stacks of cds, piles of videos and films. A veritable ton of hard work, all tossed onto the book burning pyre, as it were. And we all know what happens to a dream differed.
It didn't help that you were initially fucking the anarcho motor mouth that was Marco from Glasgow. It was his idea to start this record label slash collective that other people often ignorantly called a cult. Marco would never admit to having fucked you though. He always covered your face with his hands to muffle your moans so that no one else in your crowded flop house would hear him humping you. Immediately upon zipping up his Ben Davies pants, he would sing a line from that Ultravox song, "This means nothing to me...Oh Vienna!" and laugh.
But if it weren't for your resulting disgust, you never would have been outraged enough to write record and put out your first song, "I Feel Weird." It went on a loop like this:
we laugh / have sex / he disappears / i feel weird / cut him off / dye my hair / i don't care / attitude / he responds / i abuse / we laugh / have sex / he disappears / i feel weird. etc.
For the next few years, he sometimes fucked you on the side. You let yourself think that meant something. But now you were just like Zack from the other side of that uselessly
cruel but opportunistic Luv Stick. Marco actually despised you for putting up with his domineering bullshit. He later married one of the other 2 females in the collective and moved to Italy. C'est la vie. C'est la fin. It was good that your eyes were gradually being torn open. So you chose to stay focused on all that you had learned about recording, mixing, performing, touring and releasing music -- that's what Really Mattered to you, more than getting screwed.
In those years prior to youtube's existence, so much of your hands on learning had to come from being with men in person. Which undoubtedly led to someone else getting head in exchange for the knowledge shared with yours. Visual-centric learning disabilities and confused sexual worth is probably what blocked your painfully obvious free access to Library Books.
Whoa, hey, on second thought, maybe the collective could have been called a cult since the women were the ones doing all the heavy lifting and dirty work. Though, by that definition, it could be called Any Job. But no one would have paid any attention to the label at all if it weren't for the intimidating Scottish front man talking it up. Ye Olde Patriarchal Stamp of Approval makes a woman's efforts fruitful. Admittedly, you went all pear shaped because lopsided shit like this Will Drive Anyone Crazy.
But what did you learn while wading through all this stoopid gut wrenching interpersonal gobbledeegook?
3 things:
It's a Man's World.
You Get What You Settle For.
And Living Well is most assuredly, The Best Revenge.
So it was death with braised death on it, smothered in death sauce, on a bed of death flakes with a light dusting of powdered death on top. It doesn't just come in 3's, it also comes in 6's and 9's.
It was actually easier dealing with the cancer caused finalities of your favorite family members dying than to grieve over petty creative severings and abandonment by those still living, by those whom you thought were your friends. Far more damaging to realize you were just a joke to everyone than to deal with cleansweeping death. It's all the living remnants left.
It's all that trying. Trying to be loyal to a group, to something bigger than only you. Trying to bite your tongue and accept others as they are, even though they won't do the same for you. Trying to make something that's worthwhile, or good, something that moves others to mutter the simple phrase "thank you." But it's also the fact that after all that trying, you'll still only come to being a small box of gray dirt whose songs and stories went unheard. Doesn't it make sense that this is why it became so important that your efforts mattered to those around you? That you listened to them? That they'd listen to you?
...insert cricket chirps...
Yeah, it hurt. Most deaths do.
Every single time you picked up the full roll of toilet paper that sat on top of the empty cardboard tube still wiggling in the holder, you'd push the roll onto the wooden dowel and say to yourself aloud, "Everything you do in life is completely meaningless, but it is very important that you keep doing it."
*u can call me ph!*
