Ten Years with my Debbie Dee

 

I can’t believe I’ve been with my wife for ten years. We got married in 2016, but we made sure it was on the dame date that we started dating on, in 2012.

2012 was a very different era. I was in Grad School. Deborah was a friend of my sister Erika’s. They had gone to school together, and I was four years older. She had just split up with her ex-boyfriend, and my sister played match-maker and set us up for a blind date. I had met Deborah on a couple of different occasions, when she visited my sister’s apartment, but I never expected that we would be together. My own love life had been nearly nonexistent before this; four years earlier I had a four month long relationship that had ended with us being incompatible, which I now realize since my diagnosis this year was because I was autistic, and she was neurotypical. Anyway for many years there was some doubt in my mind that I would ever be compatible with someone. I’ve always been socially awkward, shy and introverted. Being set up on a blind date by my sister was probably the only way I would have met the right girl.

Deborah had to deceive her father to come see me, because he was very overbearing. She lived in Stockton, California while I was going to school in Fresno, living in a dorm. She told her father that she was spending the night at my sister’s, and then my sister dropped her off at the Amtrak train station. I tried my best to be gentlemanly, offering to carry her luggage, giving her a kiss on the hand as she disembarked. It all went quite nicely. We hit it off from the get-go. The next year I rented us an apartment rather than a dormitory so we could live together. I proposed to her on our two year anniversary on a trip to the summit of Mt. Diablo, using a necklace I bought when I was in Armenia as we both preferred necklaces to rings. And in 2016, two years later, we were married. In the meantime I had to make a big decision, whether to follow her to Florida or not. And I did follow her there. We’ve been through thick and thin together these past ten years. We had our son together in 2019, after having been together for a little over six years. 

Deborah has been my guiding light all these years. She’s been an inseparable companion against life’s slings and arrows. We’re a team. It’s interesting to think how the decisions you make when you’re in your teens and twenties set the course for the rest of your life. And there’s no way to predict the outcomes. 

Anyway, we celebrated our tenth anniversary (the day after a hurricane at that, and not the first storm we’ve had to brave together in ten years) by going to a kratom bar, and getting kabobs at a Middle Eastern restaurant. We have a tradition of going out in our wedding outfits on our anniversary. After all why just wear it once? We also got some free baklava from the restaurant for dressing up. 

Top 6 Songs of the Month ~ SDWTD, Desmond Doom, Under the Rain

Time to regain any goth points I lost with that last blog entry! Well, I like to think being a goth is a little less strict than being a metalhead. I’m allowed to listen to non-goth music sometimes, right? Maybe not, I dunno. I’m just a poser. I can live with that.

Earlier in the month I came across a two part video series about goth music from Peru, from the 1980s to today. My wife is half-Peruvian, hence my interest being piqued. That led me to two of the songs on this list. It’s amazing how this style of music has spread to so many countries. I do wonder if there are any Armenian post-punk bands I haven’t come across yet. I continue to hear more from Georgia. 

I am still always bombarded with more music than I can get around to listening to because I’m subscribed to too many music channels on YouTube. So what I do is go to my subscriptions and like every song I see, and then go through my “like” list and listen to them all back to back and just unlike the songs that I’m not feeling. The list starts to become curated, until the next flood of music anyway. Which is almost every day. These are just the songs that stuck with me. 

Slow Danse with the Dead ~ Strangers in the Dark

Slow Danse with the Dead is back with a full EP, Strangers in the Dark. I always love when SDWTD does a full EP, if only because it takes me a while to save up enough singles to do a full CD mix. Even then I had room for another album on the CD after I got this one off Bandcamp, from the very next band on the list.

This is a spooky, dancey tune. The mention of “dancing down the corridor” makes me feel like this is some kind of sequel song to Ministry’s “Revenge”, the only other song I can think of with the word “corridor” in it. But that’s just my brain being weird.  I still need time to really sit and do a deep listen with the other tracks, this album is just a day old. It just so happened I was in a position to buy it immediately this time. Had a little extra money from a certain story contest I did very well in. Not that it’s expensive, I’m just always broke, and spend all my spare money when I don’t need it for food on music and VHS tapes. Anyway, enough stream of consciousness. (These are more like journal entries than actual reviews.)

Buy it here!

https://slowdansewiththedead.bandcamp.com/album/strangers-in-the-dark

Desmond Doom ~ Now That You’re Gone

Every once in a while, I’ll discover a new YouTube channel that just makes me feel like a kid on Christmas morning. Every Desmond Doom makes is perfect. I was led to the channel by the algorithm somehow, to a video that was of his newly-released album Surf Goth, which has a hilarious cover of a goth guy in a trenchcoat standing on a surf board. That’s what it feels like being a goth in Florida. The singer himself is from Australia. I’ve noticed that some of the guitar riffs in post-punk can sound a little bit like surf rock, or else the James Bond theme. So I think that’s what the album title alludes to. And then he’s got these awesome goth covers of “1979” by Smashing Pumpkins and “Tomorrow Comes Today” by Gorillaz, which were true contenders for this spot on my list. It’s hard to pick a favorite. 

Here’s the album:

https://desmonddoom.bandcamp.com/album/surf-goth-ep

Potochkine ~ Eros

I don’t speak French, and Google Translate was unhelpful. But the voice of the singer is endearing somehow. Kind of cute. I like how she says “que tooiii” (twaaah).  This was one if those songs among the sea of other songs I listen to that got stuck in my head, earning itself a spot here. The album this song is from came out in March 2021, and it’s available on cassette. I love collecting newly released cassettes.

https://potochkine.bandcamp.com/album/sortil-ges

Under the Rain ~ Sitting in the Dark

Here is one of those Peruvian bands I mentioned earlier. They sing in English, so you would never know the band was from Peru just by listening to them. They sound like a UK post-punk band from the early 80s. In fact, I get the strangest feeling that I’ve known this song for years when I really only recently heard it. That familiar guitar riff. It’s like some weird de ja vu, Mandela effect sort of thing. 

But the album When it Burns Like Snow came out in 2015. The whole album is good, I listened through the whole thing. A bunch of songs on it are just as good as this one. 

https://undertherain.bandcamp.com/releases

Ahuman Age ~ Black Tie

Ahuman Age is a group from Italy. This song is very catchy indeed. I like it whenever the singer repeats “Every time I kiss your lips”. It’s infectious, I like it. This song came out in December 2021, on the album Disco Vampire. That puts a fun image in my head. Like of a historical fantasy book set in the 1970s about a group of vampires that prey on helpless dancers at the disco. 

https://ahumanage.bandcamp.com/releases

La Devoción ~ Isabel

Here’s my second Peruvian goth band this month. There were lots of others that I still need to get to, but immediately this song stood out as well as the other. I think what really made this song stick in my mind was the music video. A woman follows a man through a cemetery desperately trying to get his attention, but he doesn’t react to her. He then lays some flowers at a grave and walks away. To her horror she sees a picture of herself on the tombstone, meaning she’s dead. Stories about someone realizing they’re a ghost are pretty chilling, to me. 

You know I don’t think this band is on Bandcamp. I wasn’t able to find them. This song came out in 2002. All I could find was the band on Discogs.

https://www.discogs.com/artist/6619827-La-Devoción

Mixtape Reflections ~ Acoustic Anarchy

 

In around summer 2021, a chance encounter with the song “Get Born Again” led me to get reacquainted with the band Alice in Chains. As I binged on their albums, I kept coming back to their acoustic MTV Unplugged album. Sooner or later I maxed out on Alice in Chains, started getting into their contemporaries like Nirvana, Soundgarden, Stone Temple Pilots and others. Music I grew up with but hadn’t really properly explored. These bands mostly all had their own MTV Unplugged albums, or at least an acoustic performance somewhere to be found on YouTube. So in November of last year I decided to make a mixtape of just acoustic music. I dug up new things I hadn’t heard, of course, like performances from The Cure, Korn and Fuel, among others. Some are covers, like Denis Pauna’s Type O Negative acoustic album, or reimaginings. For example, the first song of the second tape is a rendition of “In Bloom” by Nirvana, made by Youtuber Riot Earth to sound like it was played at the Unplugged concert when it really wasn’t. At one point during the concert Kurt Cobain asked if anyone in the audience had a request, and someone shouted “In Bloom!” To which he replied, “How are we supposed to play ‘In Bloom’ acoustic?” Well, in this alternate universe, he plays it. Unfortunately there isn’t a lot of acoustic goth music out there, although I did remember William Control’s acoustic album.

So the mixtape came together, and it was a really nice tape to listen to and I kept coming back to it. In fact it became a good remedy for sleepless nights. I have chronic insomnia, and putting some soft, calm music on that I can sing along to helps. I love singing “Everlong” by the Foo Fighters, “Nutshell” by Alice in Chains, among others. Ever since my official autism diagnosis I’ve tried to unmask myself more, and one of the ways I’ve done that is by singing shamelessly. I liked the mix so much that recently I made a sequel tape. Now I had the hardest time coming up with a good title for these mixes. I called the first one Suren’s Songs Unplugged, but the title struck me as too corny. So I changed it to Acoustic Anarchy. Which is corny too but whatever. 

I made a YouTube playlist so I could listen to it on the go if I wanted. And I wrote this blog to show it off, mainly. I’m most likely going to make a third mixtape, but I want to give it a few months and see if I come across any songs I haven’t discovered yet. 

Here’s the playlist:

Acoustic Anarchy 

Side A

Alice in Chains - Nutshell 

Fuel - Shimmer

William Control - Cemetery

Nirvana - Something in the Way

Stone Temple Pilots- Creep

Soundgarden - Fell on Black Days

Alice in Chains - Would?

System of a Down - Spiders (cover)

Korn - Falling Away From Me

Linkin Park - Breaking the Habit

The Cure - A Forest

Nirvana - Lake of Fire

Side B

Foo Fighters - Everlong

Soundgarden - Blow up the Outside World

Fuel - Sunburn

Stone Temple Pilots- Big Empty 

Nirvana - Where Did You Sleep Last Night?

The Cure - Lullaby

William Control - Disconnecting

Alice in Chains - Over Now

Acoustic Anarchy 2

Side A

Nirvana - In Bloom

Denis Pauna - Love You to Death

Alice in Chains - Brother

Pearl Jam - Black

Korn/The Cure - Make Me Bad (In Between Days)

Nirvana - Come As You Are

Stone Temple Pilots - Plush

Goo Goo Dolls - Name

A-Ha - Take On Me

The Church - Under the Milky Way

Side B

Fuel - Innocent

Denis Pauna - Everything Dies

Alice in Chains - Frogs

Kat McKyte - Where Dead Angels Lie 

Nirvana - You Know You’re Right

Anthony Vincent - Heathens

The Church - Reptile

Local H - Bound for the Floor

Goo Goo Dolls- Iris