A Facebook Copypasta about High School

Yep, another of these dumb things. I like to get very long-winded, so I might as well do it in my blog.

Your SENIOR year of high school! The longer ago it was, the more fun the answers will be: 

(sure, okay; is half a lifetime ago long enough?)

1. The year: 

2003-2004

2. What kind of car did you drive?

I uh, still don’t drive anything. When I get behind the wheel of a car my anxiety goes through the roof and I just freeze up, forget left from right, even forget which pedal is the brake and which is the gas. I think it has to do with my autism, and inability to multitask, especially if mine and somebody else’s life is at stake. I can’t watch the road in front of me and watch the rear view mirrors at the same time, and there are so many little buttons and levers to keep track of. My brain can’t do it. I am actually mentally disabled. Most people can’t tell when they meet me (and I didn’t even realize it myself until somewhat recently), it doesn’t mean I’m not intelligent. But there are things I can’t do, driving is one of them. Working the only gods-awful jobs I can qualify for is another. And this is one of the many reasons I don’t live up to society’s standards for masculinity, or adulthood in general. Gods, I hate US society.

3. It's a Friday night football game where were you? 

At home, sitting in my darkened bedroom, rocking back and forth while listening to my mixtapes or metal albums.

4. What job did you have?

None, and I think forcing minors to work is wrong. As if school didn’t rob me of enough of my youth.

5 Did you party?

No

6. Did you play sports? 

Not at all, except when forced to in P.E.

7. Were you in the band?

“The band”? You mean like the school band class, or a cool garage band? Well, I was in band class during Freshman year. I played clarinet, but was never any good at it. My teacher was a lot nicer than the evil tyrant I had in Middle School. And during that year we went on a cruise to Ensenada, Mexico, where I bought my infamous leather hat. The next year my Freshman English teacher was starting a Creative Writing class, so I took that instead of band.

8. Were you a nerd?

Yes, but probably not the typical nerd. I didn’t play Magic The Gathering, when it came to anime I had only seen what was shown on Toonami on Cartoon Network. Those were the two main things nerds at my school were into. I didn’t even really fit in with the nerds in High School, not that I didn’t have friends.

9. Did you get suspended?

Not senior year. I got suspended Sophomore year when my math teacher wouldn’t let me use the bathroom and my rage built up to such a point that I drew him being cut in half with a chainsaw and fed into a wood chipper. The teacher saw it, and not only got me suspended but called the cops on me. They luckily thought the whole thing was stupid.

10. Were you sociable?

Not especially.

11. What was your school mascot? 

A stupid falcon, that was ripped off from some NFL football team. I’m not bothered to look up which team. The school should have been sued.

12. If you could go back and do it again? 

Okay, I really hated High School. But, I don’t think I could turn down a legitimate offer to travel back in time. I would take a lot less crap from people the second time around. Actually what I should have done is drop out and get my GED instead. That’s what I would do, maybe after I meet my current friends. I could also avoid some of the mistakes I made after High School, like going out with that girl who dumped me after four months (probably thanks to my undiagnosed autism), and getting that damned Creative Writing Masters degree that kinda ruined my chances at any kind of career outside of retail and call centers, and put me in tons of debt I’ll never pay off. You get punished for pursuing your passions in this country. And I could become a goth early, since I didn’t get into goth until my 20s. I could also try to meet my wife early, but then again with our four year age difference things might get risky once I turn 18. I only want to go back once though, no need to get stuck in a four year Groundhog’s Day time loop.

13. Are you still in contact with people from high school?

Yes, a few friends, particularly my friend Kris.

14. Do you know where your high school sweetheart is?

Didn’t have one. I was too afraid to talk to girls in school, especially after things really didn’t go well in Middle School; a certain bullying incident with a girl left me with severe trust issues. I don’t remember having a crush on anyone in particular during Senior year either. I just wanted to do my time and get the hell out of that prison. After I got out I started to wish I had a girlfriend, and that got me into more bad situations when I jumped at whoever showed the slightest interest in me and it always ended badly until I met my future wife.

15. What was your favorite class?

Creative Writing. Followed by German.

16. Do you still have your high school class ring?

What a waste of money! Luckily I knew that back then too. School “spirit” is just another way to instill obedience. Just like nationalism.

17. Do you still have your yearbook?

I threw them away. But now that I’m drawing a webcomic about High School I wish I had kept them. I do still have a yearbook from Middle School that somehow survived the purge.

Copy and paste...let's hear your story

Top 7 Songs of the Month ~ April 2023 ~ Death by Nature, Vestron Vulture, French Police

I was struck with inspiration for this month’s blog. I’ve been keeping records of my top songs of the month for a long, long time, going back to 2000 (and yet I was only diagnosed with autism last year, what a shock). I originally started it as an answer to the deeply flawed Top 20 lists I would hear on the local rock radio station I listened to. Before 2019 it was relegated to notebooks. I thought it would be interesting, after looking at this month’s list, to look at what I was listening to 20, 15, 10 and 5 years ago. Don’t expect a little essay on each song, but I might provide a bit of context, like where I was in life at that time. 

Lately I’ve been really into Spanish-language post-punk, from Central and South America, and California (that counts, right?). It just has this particular gloomy feel to it that I love, distinctive from varieties of post-punk from the US, Western Europe and Russia. Vestron Vulture was my introduction to this style, but I also really love Guerra Fría of Guatemala, and Death by Nature from Los Angeles. I don’t speak Spanish (other than the little bit of linguistic osmosis I picked up from living in California most of my life), but not understanding the lyrics has never stopped me from enjoying music before. But as usual I have a few songs from other parts of the world as well. 

Death By Nature ~ I’m Not Real

This is a band from Los Angeles, California is one I just found out about a week ago, and so far I love every single song. This song accurately describes what it’s like to have a bout of Depersonalization/Derealization, and there’s not enough music out there directly about that. 

There is another band out there with the same name, so beware. Look for the one spelled in all-caps. I don’t exactly see this song on Bandcamp, but here is their Bandcamp page.

https://deathnature.bandcamp.com/

Vestron Vulture ~ American Nightmare 

This song seemed like it got a quiet release, I only accidentally stumbled upon it when looking the band up on YouTube. It’s a single released on March 17. It is a melancholy song, not particularly political as the title might suggest. But perhaps it is just about how living and trying to survive in America has become a nightmare. 

https://vestronvulture.bandcamp.com/track/american-nightmare

Poison Dreams ~ Faustian Glow

This song came out in May 2021, and I think I did hear it when it came out, but this is one of those songs that laid dormant for a while and then clawed its way back onto my charts when I listened to it again when going through my YouTube likes and ended up enjoying it greatly. It has a Christian Death sound to it, and is in the deathrock genre. I like deathrock a lot more these days than I did in 2021

Poison Dreams is a band out of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and this song is off their EP Faustian Glow. 

https://poisondreams.bandcamp.com/album/faustian-glow-ep

French Police ~ Hildago

I hope ACAB doesn’t apply to the French Police because I really like this band. I’ve been hearing more from them in recent months and have gone on a binge of their earlier music. They are not from France, as I initially thought, but Chicago, Illinois. I thought they were following the grand tradition of French coldwave that dates back to the 80s with bands like Little Nemo. If you listen to this song you can see why I was fooled, it has that 80s coldwave sound to it. Very catchy, a little melancholy.

This is from their 2019 album Pedaleo Nocturno.

https://frenchpolice.bandcamp.com/album/pedaleo-nocturno

Memory Drops ~ No Queda Mas

Memory Drops is another Guatemalan band, like Guerra Fría, the other band from there I’ve been listening to. I found this to be a very beautiful song. It came out in January of this year, and translates to “All that Remains”. From what I can gather its kind of a tragic, dreary breakup song, but the tune just really stuck with me. 

https://memorydrops.bandcamp.com/track/no-queda-mas

Node ~  Cold Dream

Out of the goth/goth adjacent bands I know of that are from Armenia, Node seems to be the one with the most reliable output. Aside from the voice sample at the beginning this song is largely instrumental, with a laid back, dark trance vibe to it. I wonder if Node will be in attendance when Lebanon Hanover plays in Yerevan next month? That would be such an awesome concert to go to. Maybe that will inspire other bands too, help invigorate Armenia’s goth scene. 

This doesn’t seem to have an official release yet, but you can find their other music on Bandcamp.

https://nodeofficial.bandcamp.com/

  

Another Abyss ~ Liminal Space

This song caught my attention because I was just learning about what a liminal space is when I discovered it. Basically it’s a location that looks uncanny or makes you feel uneasy, characterized by mixed feelings of familiarity and unfamiliarity. Like a playground at night, a house with nothing in it, hallways that seem endless, things like that. It’s kind of popular with the young ones, so I’ve heard. Probably a reaction to the Covid lockdowns. That’s what the song is about too, mentioning a “transitional space” which is another way to define it. 

The song came out in December 2022, so it’s still new. I should like to hear more from Another Abyss.

https://anotherabyss.bandcamp.com/track/liminal-space

Top Songs of April Through the Years

20 Years Ago ~ April 2003

Oops, all Covenant/The Kovenant! It was my High School metal period and I was really into their Nexus Polaris and In Times Before the Light (the 2002 remake) albums.

1. The Kovenant ~ From the Storm of Shadows

2. Covenant ~ Planetarium 

3. The Kovenant ~ Towards the Crown of Nights

15 Years Ago ~ April 2008

2008 was a weird time for me musically. I was getting out of metal, hadn’t fully embraced goth yet, and I went into a 1930s jazz  period. It was my early 20s, a time of soul searching. I also really liked the Gangs of New York soundtrack that month. 

1. Cab Calloway ~ St. James Infirmary 

2. Big Bad Voodoo Daddy ~ Who’s That Creeping?

3. Finbar Furey ~ New York Girls

10 Years Ago ~ April 2013

And One had been a mainstay for me for years at this point. The song “Und Wieder” is beautifully hypnotic, really give it a listen if the only song you know from them is “Military Fashion Show”. And for most of the year I was really into Light Asylum and Zombie Girl. “IPC” is still awesome. Really doesn’t feel a decade old.

1. Light Asylum ~ IPC

2. And One ~ Und Wieder

3. Zombie Girl ~ Creature of the Night

5 Years Ago ~ April 2018

Now we’re really in “that doesn’t feel like that long ago” territory. My musical tastes were almost what they are today. In the intervening years though, I have only come to understand the song “Medication” even better, with its “I am sad, even though I am on all the meds” chorus.

1. William Control ~ Cemetery (acoustic)

2. Hante ~ Empty Space

3. We Are Temporary ~ Medication

A Night of Nirvana with Nirvanna, the Nirvana Tribute Band

 

Sometimes I miss living in the Tampa Bay Area, because I got to go to so many concerts of my favorite goth bands. I would go to like three or four concerts a year. Tampa has a thriving goth scene and I took full advantage of that. But then in 2019 we moved to Rockledge on the eastern Florida coast. Nothing but boring suburban people driving either golf carts or twenty foot tall pickup trucks around. Nowheresville. It reminds me of the town from Edward Scissorhands (which incidentally was filmed in Florida). Not even the obscure underground bands I love would play anywhere near Brevard County. Nothing interesting ever happens here. They do have pro wrestling shows sometimes, and actually a cool local theater that puts on plays and occasionally shows silent films, but that’s about it. Orlando isn’t that far, and a lot of bands play there, but it’s far enough to where we would need a babysitter for our kid and have to spend more money on gas on top of the concert itself; it’s a 45 minute to one hour drive depending on traffic. That’s the other reason why my days of going to concerts all the time came to an end by the way, parenthood. 

But you know what, one day something DID finally happen here. I usually hate seeing ads when I scroll through Facebook, and I do my best to ignore them, but one happened to catch my eye. Nirvanna was playing in Cocoa, the next town over. I did a double take. Then I noticed the extra “n”. Ohhhh. Clever. (The band later explained that it’s pronounced “Nirv-annah”, like the announcer says at the beginning of their music video for “In Bloom”). So it’s a tribute band. The tickets were affordable enough, $15. So I decided, eh, why not? You win this time, capitalism. You got me to CONSUME. Ever since then I’ve gotten ads for other tribute bands playing all over the country too. I’m not flying to the other side of the country to see a Pearl Jam tribute band, Facebook. 

First, I suppose I’ll give some background about what led me to the point where I would go to a concert of a Nirvana tribute band. It was a long series of events. Firstly, Nirvana has always been there in the background of my life. Nevermind came out when I was five years old, and “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was playing all the time on MTV. I grew up listening to rock radio stations which of course played their music. My first ever mixtape had “Lithium” on it, and they were regulars on a lot of my old mixtapes. But I still never really dug deep into their discography until the last couple of years. Followers of my blog may know that I’ve been on something of a grunge/90s alternative rock binge the past almost two years, returning to the music of my childhood after years of being into metal and then goth (which is still my number one genre). Alice in Chains was the band that lured me in after I heard “Get Born Again” for the first time in 20+ years. After listening to all the Alice in Chains I could find, I moved onto Nirvana. I had really only heard what was played on the radio up to that point, but for such a relatively short-lived band there are tons of demos, bootlegs, live shows and even good fan-made music, and after listening to Nirvana for over a year now I’m still finding new stuff. Songs like “Heart-Shaped Box”, “Sappy”, “Dumb”, “Something in the Way”, “You Know You’re Right”, they all really speak to me. I like music that’s dark, thought-provoking and emotionally powerful, mostly regardless of genre. I’ve gotten to know about Kurt Cobain too, his life, his art and his philosophies, and I find him really relatable. I feel like we have a lot in common. A fellow tortured artist. But I know there are millions of people who feel the same way. 

Anyway, the night of April 7th. I had been suffering from gout all week, but I was still determined to go to this concert even though I needed a cane to walk. The venue, The Attic, was a place I had probably walked past many times but never noticed, hidden up a narrow staircase above a bar, in a nondescript corner of Cocoa Village, the touristy area of Cocoa. Due to my gout and back pain I needed to secure a spot, but because I didn’t arrive early enough, a barstool was the best I could get. The crowd was small, maybe 25 people or so at most. A lot of Gen X people in the audience, older than me, and a few younger people. The general vibe of the show was kind of like a pre-fame Nirvana concert. Like seeing them in 1989, except for some of the song choices of course. Like if you watch this old concert, it was a lot like that. The lead singer was a young man who pulled off a good Kurt Cobain cosplay, wearing the big sunglasses and snow hat, a green sweater and ripped jeans. He did a good job sounding like Kurt Cobain too. Not 100 percent, but he clearly has studied how Kurt Cobain sings, down to the slight “yodel” vocal pitch shifts that was his style.

The band was open to requests many times throughout the show. I was too shy to request anything myself. I thought about requesting “Moist Vagina” just to see peoples’ reaction but ultimately chickened out. They weren’t able to play everything requested though. Someone kept requesting one of their more obscure songs, “Mr. Mustache”. The band knows 52 Nirvana songs, but they haven’t learned them all yet. I think they were later unable to play “Sappy” either, another one which never made it onto an official album, which was a bit of a shame. The three of them did well with what they did play too. I had to remind myself how Nirvana sounded live versus how polished they sounded on the albums when making comparisons. They sounded closer to the live performances obviously. I really liked how they nailed that scream after the bridge in “Drain You”, that was definitely a highlight of the performance. There was a nice mixture of high energy moshing songs and the slower, drearier songs such as “Something in the Way” and “You Know You’re Right” that are my favorite. The much-overlooked debut album Bleach was well-represented, along with songs they were obligated to play like “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Lithium”. 

A lot of the banter between the bandmates were direct quotes from some of the more famous Nirvana concerts. There were a lot of little easter eggs for those of us who have binged through old Nirvana concerts on YouTube that most people probably wouldn’t catch. The singer began “About a Girl” by saying “This is off our first record, most people don’t own it.” just as Kurt Cobain said at the MTV Unplugged concert. When they reluctantly played “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, they instead started playing “More Than a Feeling” by The Pixies, just like Nirvana did at the 1992 concert in Reading. They also talked smack about Axl Rose, which is very in-character, and talked about the rivalry they had backstage with Guns n Roses at the 1992 MTV Music Awards. We also got the inspirational quote from the booklet of the Incesticide album, wherein Kurt Cobain explicitly tells racists, sexists and homophobes not to buy their albums or show up at their concerts. Being in the unfortunate part of Florida that I’m in, I was wondering if that quote would anger anyone in the audience, but it was met with cheers, and anyone who didn’t like it kept their mouths shut. Toward the end of the concert they wanted everyone to come up to the stage, and I felt a bit guilty for staying in my seat but with all my aches and pains it just wasn’t happening. Leave the mosh pits to the young whipper-snappers I guess. 

In the end I got to hear most of my favorite Nirvana songs, the only way you could ever hear the songs played live these days, by impersonators. But you know, there’s nothing wrong with impersonators, particularly of bands that aren’t active anymore and never will be. It was a lot of fun and I’m glad I went. I will be paying attention to any concerts that might come through this small town from now on thanks to this. I wouldn’t mind seeing Nirvanna again one of these days.  

Suren’s Poetry Corner ~ A Gulag of my Own Making

 A blog exclusive that I’m not sharing on Facebook. Whoever sees this will just have to stumble upon it. 

I have been awake all night, with an enflamed toe joint that I’m pretty sure is gout. Like shit, I missed the part of yesterday where I kicked a brick wall barefoot. To get around, I’ve been using my grandfather Suren’s cane. The grandfather I am named after, who escaped from a Soviet gulag. In my slight delirium, it inspired this poem, and I jotted it down before I forgot it. Kind of free verse. With some tweaking I could make it into song lyrics. But I’m not sure if I’ll use it for anything.

In a gulag of my own making

But how do I escape?

Young and old at the same time.

A victim of my addiction

Suffocated by my ceaseless pain.

Can my suffering even compare to yours?

Two souls passing in the night.

Viewing each other through a barrier.

You left your book and some pictures

Looking dapper in black and white.

My inheritance was your name,

A legacy I could never live up to if I tried.

I would rather have a grandpa than a legend.

I’m left to imagine what you’re really like.

I’ll never know what you’d think of me now,

Maybe that’s for the best, 

Afraid I’m rather disappointing. 

I use your cane, you’re my strength

Even though I barely met you.

Left me behind for the afterworld

While I’m left on this rock to suffer.

You served your time in the gulag

Now I’m serving mine.