||||rock and roll strikes back (dot com)

I, along with Alan Baird and Joel Matthews, are standing front row center, baking under the merciless stage lights directly above our heads. We had been drinking the entire day. I had also popped some painkillers while Alan and Joel smoked themselves silly. Full of booze, drugs and excellent Asian cuisine, the three of us were on an expedition this night. Our current stop was a warehouse that was empty save for a stage, a couple of fantastic cars (I didn’t get close enough to see the make and model, sad to say) and a surprisingly large crowd.

A few blocks down, the Flobots, one of Colorado’s many musical embarrassments, were playing an outdoor show that no doubt sucked. We weren’t here to see the Flobots. The Flobots are for the fools, the schoolkids in the midst of struggling to find their own identities let alone their taste in music and the Melissa Lovelies of the world. While the ‘Bots are playing to the Web 2.0 Generation, the three of us packed ourselves into this toaster oven of a building to see Air Dubai. Air Dubai are, to put it in simple yet backhanded terms, the Flobots done right. A blend of hip-hop and rock and roll topped off with freakishly energetic performances, they’ve more than earned their spot as being one of the hottest acts in the state. At least good enough to impress a group of apathetic judges at the Hard Rock Cafe and win a one night battle of the bands contest.

The stage is set. It’s show time. With barely even a hello, the six members of Air Dubai immediately rock out, to everyone’s delight.

(more…)

I’m in the house of a stranger. Or so I think, at first. In the garage, where I entered, is a television broadcasting the news. The Eastern Bloc has entered a civil war. Again. I switch off the television and enter the house proper.

I make my way to the main bedroom, where I meet a figure who has her back to me. I know who this person is, I just ask for her identity for customary sake. Sure enough, upon turning to face me, I recognize her immediately. It’s the same woman who’s appeared in my recent series of recurring dreams. As always, I’m hesitant, yet also excited to see her again. I begin our conversation by showing off a new t-shirt I brag about having to purchase from an online clothing store in Japan. It’s bright red and sports the logo for Flower, Sun and Rain. Flower, Sun and Rain is an obscure Japanese video game about a man who repeats the same day, over and over again, like a surrealistic Groundhog Day. How appropriate it is then that I’m wearing that shirt here. This woman, I guess we can still refer to her as my friend, is wrapped in a bedsheet and nothing more. I should also mention that she never stands up or moves around; she’s only seen in a constantly shifting reclining position.

She asks me if it’s true that war has broken out. I grimly inform that yeah, yeah it has. As someone from that part of the world, I thought she would have some sort of emotional reaction to this news. Instead, she just nods her head and rolls onto her side. I move my face closer to hers and ask her, as nervous as I’ve ever been, if we could ever be friends again.

She just laughs at me and replies, “James, we’ve always been friends!”

It’s pretty easy to forget what you have. It’s pretty easy to feel as though the shit has hit the fan and the world is crumbling around you. I had one last jag of horrible nightmares that drove me into a new realm of insanity. The final dream was simple, yet the most horrifying of them all: walking along a nondescript hallway, minding my own business, I encounter that woman again. I ignore her as best I can; I’m tired of her and her bullshit. Silently, she approaches me and shoves me to the ground as hard as she can. Flat on my back, I can do nothing but watch her leave, as quietly as she entered. This woman hasn’t shown up in my sleep since then, thankfully. My dreams have been rather hum-drum, but I’ll take that over recurring torture any day.

I’m relived that I’ll never see her again. On the other, strange and masochistic hand, I feel sad that I’ll never see her again. After all, you’re close to someone for so long and then, suddenly, it stops. Almost overnight, somebody I trusted and confided in more than anyone I’ve ever known; someone who considered me to be a “little brother” does a complete 180 and decides that no, James, I don’t like you anymore. In fact, I hate you. I hate her, too. I think. I never thought that being able to finally get a good night’s sleep would be so confusing and bittersweet.

(more…)

It’s three A.M and I find myself sitting in a very uncomfortable chair. This chair is the kind of chair you would expect to see at Your Local Thrift Store, finding itself unsold, slowly degrading each time you see it. It’s covered in this bumpy, ugly orange material with almost no padding between both it and the apparently fossilized wood cruelly molded into the form of this torture device. I’m afraid to stand up out of it, though. It may have given me Scoliosis.

I’m sitting here listening to somebody tell a joke. It’s not a very funny one, though; it’s one of those extremely racist jokes that begins with the classic, “I’m not racist, but…” and ends with a paraphrased form of the heavy metal catchphrase, “Kill ‘Em All!” I guess it would be funny if I were like, fourteen years old and retarded. I’m not. I’m a grown man bending my bones like wire in this awful seat wondering about the type of company I keep. My brain and I have a conversation. I ask what we should do now. “Take a drink,” is the answer, and Lord, is that ever a hell of an answer.

The bottle in my dominant hand (that would be my right one) reaches my lips and gives me a kiss sweeter than that of any woman. A mixture of finely brewed poisons breaks off into different squads infiltrating my brain and my stomach and the tips of my fingers. The small group in the room with me are laughing at the joke. One of them turns to me with a fake smile and quietly tells me a rhetorical question (the tone did not end with a question mark), “Jesus Christ, was that horrible or what!” Nobody knows just who the hell the comedian is, or how he got here, but since it’s three in the morning he won’t be going anywhere so hey, let’s just humor the poor bastard. Suddenly, I worry less about the company I keep.

Time passes. The jokes about minorities have come to a thankful end. The asshole with the terrible sense of humor is passed out and given looks of scorn and some harsh words by passerbys that are unable to reach him in his deep sleep. I thought I heard somebody call the guy a “faggot.” I hope that was ironic.

His slumber was a sign of things to come. Things are winding down. What had been, before all this mess, a lively gathering of friends, associates and slightly tolerable folks, has now become a parade of tired eyes and numb limbs moving about as if underwater. I don’t watch much television, other than the channel that shows nothing but old movies. Sometimes you get gems like Rashomon or something with Audrey Hepburn. The rest of the time you get poorly made mysteries or alleged comedies starring complete nobodies who were only slightly less of a nobody even in their time. I always seem to notice something when I come to get-togethers like these: those movies always seem to have small parties in large homes attended by well-dressed, pretty white people tossing back martinis and calling each other “darling.” Time is cyclical. We are no different now than we were then. A bunch of white people downing shots of Jaegermeister and Grey Goose and cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon in expertly coordinated outfits engaged in conversations of absolute inanity. I think I may have crossed that fine line of self-parody.

The thought, combined with the liquor in my system, causes a negative reaction in my stomach. The bathroom is occupied, so I have to dash out the back door and lean my head over the balcony three stories high. The brown (or orange, hard to tell in the darkness) sickness violently smacking the pavement below is the only sound I hear. My eyes are closed, half out of drunken shame, the other half from my body’s reaction. When it’s all over, I haphazardly wipe my mouth with the sleeve of my jacket and lean back against the wall. All I can think is, Jesus Christ, I don’t think I’ve ever felt so alone.

Good things don’t last forever.

Part one ended with my mood going into an upswing, finally finding a show that didn’t make me hate myself and the end of my recurring dreams that only served to make me look and feel like an anti-social asshole.

Part two begins as such: my dreams have come back. Like the brooms in Fantasia, they only become stronger and grow in number the more I try to fight them. Lately though, they seem to have changed in terms of the events that transpire. Recently, I actually managed to get the attention of the woman I had been seeking out. Rather, she had found me. A non-chalant stride was followed by a standard, “Hello, James!” My unsure and nervous tone of voice could only respond with a stammered, “H-hello, um, Ella?” Suddenly, she breaks down in tears and repeats endlessly, “James! I’m so sorry, James!” I pretend to not know what she’s apologizing for (“What are you so sorry about?”), instead letting her cry on my shoulder, knowing that everything will be okay now.

And then I woke up, shooting up into a sitting position that’s seen in so many cliched television shows and/or movies. Things are not okay now. I don’t like this. I don’t like having these dreams every fucking night. I don’t like feeling like some kind of creepy stalker who just can’t let things go. That was then, this is now, yet my subconscious seems unable to successfully process this information, leaving me to relive things I would rather not.

(more…)

I probably shouldn’t write these things when I’m in a foul mood. Problem: I tend to be in a foul mood more often than not.

An explanation is in order. I’ve been having a recurring series of dreams off and on (mostly on) for the past month and a half. They tend to follow the same pattern, with subtle differences each night: I’m either back in my old high school or my old job, sometimes both of them are in the same building. I attend classes that I have never taken before, not done the assignments for and in some cases, don’t even know where they are in the building. My goal here is not to learn, though. I keep my eyes open, as I am looking for someone.

The imaginary classes let out and I rush to my store. I always have to sneak in, since I no longer work here and there’s no way any of the managers would let me in. The person I’m looking for is always here, constantly moving from place to place. This person in question is a friend of mine who I recently had a falling out with (in reality, not a dream). We had been pretty close for a good three years before she suddenly had a change of heart and decided that she didn’t want to be my friend anymore. No reason was ever given as to why she suddenly vanished from my life, which is probably why I look for her here. Every night, I manage to find her just as she’s walking into her office and I always follow her. No matter how much I wave my arms around and yell out her name, “ELIDA! ELIDA! ELIDA!” She never looks up at me. Sometimes she’ll get up and walk away from me, moving at a speed no normal human could ever hope to achieve.

Then I wake up. Grouchy. Angry. Frustrated. It is how I start my day nowadays. The dreams are always so vivid as to be real. Lately they’ve even become somewhat lucid, allowing me to control some of the events, at least until the end. As mad as I am about our friendship ending, I’m even angrier at Elida [XXXXX] for this horrible bullshit series of dreams (I’m too old to use the term, “nightmare,” so I won’t).

The previous paragraphs were both an explanation and a justification for my previous diatribe that made me sound like a bitter old man. I’m not such a foul, elitist prick like I make myself sound.

Luckily for me, this is not an article about The Alan Baird Project, a band surrounded by extreme abuses of the word “talent.” I won’t have to suffer through retarded teenagers trying too hard or “if the Foo Fighters and the Sex Pistols beat the crap out of Journey.” No, this time things will be different.

(more…)

About two years ago, my sister passed away. It was the wrong place and the wrong time; a liquor store robbery that went awry. She was among three other casualties: the kid behind the counter, a leather-skinned carpenter who dropped most of his paycheck there and the robber himself, later shot to death during a police shootout. It was on the news for a couple of days afterward. Once the world moved on to its next tragedy, that was the end of it.

I hate to admit it, but I never felt a single twinge of emotion the entire time. It wasn’t out of some need for macho bullshit machismo or whatever. I just could not feel a thing for the event, for the murder or even for her. As far as I was concerned, she had been dead for some time.

Now, I’m not a cold human being (necessarily). I still feel pain and loss and sympathy and empathy and all that. It was just hard to feel for someone who had done everything they could to ensure that they would earn nothing but your eternal scorn. Someone who’s gone and completely fucked things beyond any and all repair. If the subject of her death were to somehow come up in a conversation, I would have to pretend to be affected. I would make empty claims of missing her and wishing, if only for a day, to have her come back. It was a stupid thing to say, but it worked. I always felt sick afterwards, hating myself for feeling the need to fake my own humanity. I wasn’t a monster for Christ’s Sake!

I remember what caused our rift. She was young. I was younger. We were bright, but as young adults in the early to late twenties, things go wrong in the brain and suddenly you find yourself as dumb as a post. I was born with a cocktail glass full of mental problems, unlike her. She spent her years taking large bites out of life, whereas I took baby steps through the most basic and menial tasks. I wasn’t retarded or anything, I just so happened to be growing up in a time when learning disabilities were finally being diagnosed and treated.

Eventually we both grew up and found that aside from our appearance, we had nothing that related us to one another. I spent my days aimlessly drifting from one bar to the next with my hipster friends, drinking hipster drinks, having sex with hipster women and listening (sometimes ironically) to hipster music. I had no purpose. My sister got married and had a kid at a relatively young age. I always saw myself as the “cool” uncle, you know?

One day, she sent me a letter. In it, she referred to me as nothing more than an embarrassment to the family. “Everybody in this family has become a success. We’ve all made something of our lives, while you mooch off of everybody without any shame!” I had no idea what she was talking about; we grew up on the poor side of town raised by a single parent, our mother, who barely managed to get by cleaning houses for a living. The bar had been set so low that any one of us could tip toe over it and become something just in comparison. She continued on this tirade of my various failings in life, ending her note with a simple message: “I do not ever want to see you again.” There was no signature at the bottom. Just that one heartbreaking statement.

I wrote a letter back, asking just what the hell her problem was. I never heard back.

Then she died, and I didn’t care. Some time after her death, my mother and I had been invited to her house. Her husband and daughter were going through her things and felt that we should take a look as well.

I did my best to avoid most of her crap. Let them reminisce on their own, I thought. A small box, no bigger than a shoebox, caught my eye. The design was of a cartoon dog I absolutely loved as a kid. That dog would just talk to anyone, he didn’t give a fuck who was listening. Curiosity getting the better of me, I popped the box open. What was this?

Cards. Lots and lots of cards. Christmas cards. Birthday cards. Valentine cards. Just about every holiday had a card representing it somewhere in here. I opened up the first card on the stack. It had my name on the inside. I looked at the next one. It had my name on the inside! I looked through at least a couple dozen more. These were all for me! I went back to the first card, reading the message inside this time.

“I’m sorry.”

That was it. A box full of cards full of apologies that had never been sent out. I was so pissed off that I wanted to burn this fucking box. I wanted to burn every fucking box. I knocked the cards over like a child having a temper tantrum, spilling them all over the floor. I sat down, my mind a blank, trying to figure out why she would go to the trouble of getting these cards and then not send them out. It was bullshit!

Next to my feet, a small note had managed to escape the mass of cheap Hallmarks I had knocked over. It was a doctor’s note. More accurately, a prescription. It was some drug, damned if I could pronounce the name, meant to help with patients diagnosed with…bi-polar disorder!? Suddenly, things began to make sense.

I wasn’t mad anymore. I don’t what I was. Sad? Disappointed, if at myself than nobody else? It was foolish, but I felt as though there was something I could have done; should have done, to help her. Instead, I let my pride and my bitterness affect me and not bother to keep on her. Keep sending those letters back asking for answers, rather than refusing to acknowledge her existence. Even if it were a fruitless endeavor, I should have tried something!

Of course, I know now that that probably would have accomplished all of nothing. I took the box of cards home, instead, where they sit in a drawer on my computer desk. I pull them out, every now and again, and just examine them. Look over every detail, like a detective, combing over every individual fiber, just to see if there was something I hadn’t noticed before. The cards are always the same.

I never did figure out a reason why these were never sent to me. All I could do was speculate: was it the bi-polar? Was she embarrassed? Did she not think I would accept them? She might have been right on that last one, actually. Whatever the reason, I have them now, taking them from the small corner they had been tucked away into another small corner to be tucked away, a reminder of the shitty hand life likes to deal you.

I miss you.

I woke up next to crumpled up napkin containing two barely legible notes written upon it: “How are we doing?” “Welcome to America.” I had no idea what they meant, why there were written or if I were the one who wrote them. My bed for that night had been an ugly carpet covered in several mystery stains. A throbbing beat of pain and annoyance rang throughout and my head and my extremities; my arms, in particular, felt as though I had been lifting weights well above my own limits. I was a sore, defeated and confused man lying on a dirty floor. My only company was an empty couch and the owner of the apartment, a short, stocky man with long, dirty hair and unkempt stubble, looking more like an up and coming pro wrestler than the smiling man humming to himself, fixing a cup of coffee.

“Good morning, sweetheart!” he yelled out in a sarcastic tone. I was too grumpy for this shit, but I wasn’t going to be rude or anything. Getting kicked out would have been a bad idea, especially considering that I had no idea just where the fuck I was or how I had even gotten here in the first place. Instead I waved him off with a simple, groggy, “yeah, yeah…”

It felt like an eternity for me to stand up and get my bearings. The patio door was open, leaving us (leaving me) to suffer through the cold air that only seems to blow in at the worst time.

“Do you mind if I close this?” I asked.
“Go for it. Would you like a cup?” The owner was holding his cup of coffee up to illustrate what he meant.

The two of us sat at his small, three and a half seat dinner table, drinking poorly made coffee (Coffee is not that hard to make! How can it be possible for somebody to fuck it up?) while we discussed the events of the night before. My memory had become nothing more than a series of blurred photographs depicting events that either 1) actually happened or 2) are things that my subconscious unintentionally made up. For all I know, I could just be an amnesiac instead of a drunk.

Brushing an errant strand of hair from his eyes, the owner began asking me things. “Hey! Whatever happened between you and, um, what’s-her-name? You know, the redhead that you were palling around with last night? I thought for sure you guys were gonna end up fucking!”

The exposed slideshow of photographs began speeding up in my head, struggling to find out just who this guy was talking about. An abridged series of events unfolded: I could remember smoking cigarettes with this woman, pausing between drags to make out. Now I’m sitting on a couch, discussing the philosophical and cultural aspects of Final Fantasy X while she’s sitting across my lap, both arms around my head. The last thing I see is her getting pulled up from the floor to her feet by her designated driver, a clearly agitated man with a Napoleon complex and an unflattering jarhead haircut, and taken home. I yelled to the shut door, “DANGER CLOSE, OSCAR MIKE! THERE’S A TANGO OVER BY YOUR BRAVO! STAY FROSTY! Jesus Christ Call of Duty fuckin’ sucks, man!” I was left with a head full of questions, hands full of regret and a penis full of frustration.

I could remember the girl’s minute details moreso than her basic appearance: a cute, conservative spackle of freckles on the bridge of her nose, dark hair highlighted with four brilliant streaks of red and piercing green eyes that could and have captivated the attention of every weak-willed man who has ever gazed into them. Thinking about it started to turn me on all over again. But then I remembered where I was and kept those feelings to myself. That last thing I needed was to try and hide an erection in front somebody; that shit is always the worst.

“Ha ha, yeah man. I can just like, barely remember her! I can’t believe I got that fuckin’ hammered last night!” I lied. Like my arousal, I wanted to keep her all to myself. It had now become a journey for me to find this woman who’s name I can’t remember and whose appearance is only tangential to me at best.

Though really, who was I kidding? This was just a regular night. Ladies like her come and go to places like this and get hit on by guys like me. A never ending chain of events in our young lives. Get drunk, get laid and forget all about it in the morning. Sometimes I get worry as to whether or not I’ll ever grow up and do something with myself. I can’t keep this up forever, you know.

“Hey, um, hey, do you think you’d be able to give me a ride?” I ask.
“Sure. Where do you live?”
“I’ll give you directions on the way.”

I’m in the back of a run-down van getting stoned with The Alan Baird Project, the third best band in the state of Colorado. Their quality as a band had been decided by a panel of archetypical anime businessmen obscured in hard shadow after an eight hour ordeal involving the worst examples of local music I’ve ever seen. People who had as much business picking up an instrument and calling themselves musicians as I have putting on a set of football pads and calling myself Troy Aikman. This panel of mongoloid fools blind, dumb and deaf to the world are known as The Colorado Music Buzz, a publication that does such a fantastic job of promoting local talent, I had never heard of this magazine until I had been forced to listen to the cacophonous stylings of what Denver had to offer.

(more…)

I’ve been taking night classes in a bad part of town for the last few weeks. While I’m a classroom taking notes on something, one of the other students bursts into the room with bad news: one of our fellow students has been murdered. I run out to the crime scene immediately to see just what’s going on. The student is a young woman. She had been stabbed repeatedly in the face and upper torso while pressed against a wall, as evidenced by the bloody trail leading from it, cascading down to her body. Next to the blood is a note with a small message scribbed, barely legible:

this whore has been taken care of

I pull out my cellphone and call up my ex-girlfriend. After informing her of what happened, the two of us decide to investigate the murder. Once she arrives, she begins arguing with me over an old bracelet she had left behind at my apartment. Strangely, we fight one another in fluent Japanese. I guess so as not to draw attention to ourselves.

“That bracelet! I want it back!”
“Okay, but I think we have more important things to deal with.”
“NOW, GODDAMMIT!”
“Alright, fine. You know, you’re making a scene?”

We then decide to drop the investigation. Instead, we go to a local cafe and brag to one another about our individual skills at Street Fighter IV.