Eulogy to Syphilis and Disorder
It seems pretty ridiculous to mourn over a pair of fucking shoes. They’re just shoes, right? And they’ve been around for nine years, it was really only a matter of time before they would have to be retired. So it shouldn’t be this upsetting, and it’s unlikely anyone will think it’s anything more than dramatic to cry while I watch the two-inch soles split and break away from my beat-up, black-and-white creepers.
And yes, they are just shoes. But it’s what they represent to me that makes it so utterly destroying, pushing at me where I already teeter on the edge of my breaking point. Cracks are running through me as I force myself to put one foot in front of the other. It was the whole reason I wore the shoes today, for the first time in something like nine months.
High school is never easy. I never had much confidence when I was younger, and high school was when I finally started listening to my own music, clawing at something to keep me grounded. Maybe that’s a bit dramatic, but who’s not dramatic about high school? Somehow, something about JRock and visual kei clicked with me around that time. Malice Mizer’s merveilles album was and still is my epitome of music meeting art, the concept of the album has come to mean something in my mind that is probably well beyond what those guys ever intended.
But it was the dark, heavy sound of Dir en grey that got me through some rougher times. An embodiment of anger and sadness and something sinister, and they were my first Japanese band, at least, the first one I got to see in concert. It was the same for a lot of the JRock crowd at that time. Whether they saw them in that first three-show tour that included the Wiltern, or their performance at the Family Values tour, or on the US tour leg following the Withering to death. album, they were the trailblazers.
I remember the Family Values Tour in 2006, where a friend and I went to an outdoor venue, to see them. It was a gloomy day, the ground was already damp from earlier rains, and just after Diru played, the sky let loose and poured. But we stayed and waited in line to meet Kyo and Shinya. I didn’t have my creepers then, but I wanted them, and I got them sometime in the fall, ordered online while I was living in the dorms for college, when my parents couldn’t control my spending habits. I broke them in bustling between classes, getting blisters, but eventually they became my most comfortable shoes.
February 2007, that friend and I braved blizzard conditions to make the trek to Chicago to see them. It was still fresh and new, to see a Japanese band, especially on a headlining tour, and the thing was to arrive hours early to line up, hang out with people, etc. I wore my creepers, and we got a little lost looking for the House of Blues-that was the first time, but not the last that I would see Diru there-and my trusty creepers fended off the damp of the slush and snow as we tramped through the streets of Chicago. Hours spent hanging outside the venue, Chicago living up to its nickname of Windy City as the snow blew in gusts. I had an idea that winter. I wanted to be a reporter for JRock.
I had my first gig at ACen in the spring, working for the still-young JAME, and I did a press conference and a live report for High and Mighty Color. It was my first anime convention, too. My creepers carried me through the confusion of retrieving my press badge and wandering the dealer’s room.
By May 2007, Project: JRock Events (USA) was up and running, and I had my first real gig at JRock Revolution. I managed to get a press pass to the two day event, and snuck off to Los Angeles for nearly a week, right before Memorial Day weekend. I wore my creepers.
We slept outside the Wiltern like a bunch of hobos. I met people in real life that I’d only spoken to online. I saw Miyavi around the back of the venue, and never would’ve imagined that eight years later, he would play a role in an American movie. I almost hooked up with someone in group’s hotel room, but got interrupted by a friend coming to get something he forgot. Some people know the story, I was blind with infatuation with the guy for a few years, and I wondered for a while what would’ve happened if we hadn’t been interrupted. In the end, I was glad I never did follow that through. We ate Denny’s nearly every day, haunting the booths as we nursed teas and coffees and cheesy fries. My parents asked when I was coming back from my friend’s house. I told my mom in a small voice that I was in Los Angeles.
I cried so hard when I got back home. It was probably a really dangerous thing to do, just pick up and run off halfway across the country to meet a bunch of strangers and see a concert, and I knew they worried. My dad barely spoke to me for a long time. I was 19, and it was the most rebellious thing I’d ever done. But I honestly had the time of my life, and really only regretted how I handled telling my parents about it. I always felt held back by them, my dad especially. I didn’t do many crazy things when I was young, but sneaking off across the country was something I lived for. My parents didn’t approve, wouldn’t have let me waste my time and money on these trips, but I had to do it.
I snuck off to DC in the fall, to attend Anime USA. I told myself it was for my website. I was really just excited to see the person I was infatuated with. But it was also such an adventure, to brave twenty hours of Greyhounds and layovers, and staying with someone that I knew through another friend. I wasn’t even a big fan of Back-On, the band playing, until I watched their performance. I caught a drumstick, had it signed at some point. Interviewed the band. I think it was my first one-on-one interview.
I dropped out of school after that fall. I had been apathetic towards it to begin with, couldn’t figure out what to do with myself. Music and my website were what carried me through my days.
I can’t even remember every event I attended anymore. I have signed merchandise, concert t-shirts. Some events stand out in my mind better than others, I could probably find a timeline within my archives for JRE. But some things are still clear as day. I’ll never forget the Taste of Chaos, it must’ve been the summer of 2008, the visceral feeling of the speakers pounding into me as I watched Taka ooze sexiness onstage in all that leather, or MUCC’s Libra in all its live glory. I’ll never forget Otakon 2009, when we spent the first half of the week in Philadelphia looking for an apartment before shooting down to watch VAMPS. I don’t know how I didn’t suffer heat exhaustion, sitting out in the sun in all black, wearing a corset that only made matters worse. I wouldn’t tell my parents until a week or two before that I planned to quit my hometown for a city on the east coast, and an already strained relationship was probably shattered that day. I’m still trying to fix it, and I’m only recently starting to succeed.
Philadelphia brought me closer to all the east coast events. I shot up to NYC to Japan Nite. I was close enough to DC to go see my idol, Kaya, when he was announced for Anime USA. I shook so much in that interview, and he was so gorgeous, onstage and off. Maybe it wasn’t the best concert I’ve ever been to, but I wouldn’t have noticed, I was so high with elation.
I broke my ankle at Otakon in 2010, wearing my fucking creepers. I was walking, and talking, on the way to the Masquerade to see Yoshiki and Sugizo perform, a duet of violin and piano, and I didn’t see the curb. I’ll always claim it was a big curb, and it probably was. I was so close to the First Mariner Arena’s doors, and I just crumpled. I thought I had just rolled my ankle, but I couldn’t walk it off like I had in the past. I sat on a bench and someone called an ambulance as I grew paler and paler. I don’t think it hurt that much. Yet. I think I was in the emergency room for at least eight hours, alone, in an unfamiliar city. The worst part was that solitude. The second worst part was when the radiologist turned my ankle to make an x-ray, to make sure that I didn’t have more than one fracture. And then the next morning, even worse, was when I woke up and had to stop myself from screaming in pain caused by the swelling, so I wouldn’t wake my roommates.
I gradually fell apart in those two months that I was essentially on house arrest. My job wouldn’t let me work, for insurance reasons, and I was living off of the goodwill and charity of my roommates.
Sometime while I was still in the boot, I managed to get to New York City to see D’espairsRay. I can’t even remember how I got tickets, I must’ve bought them ahead of time, because I didn’t have a press pass, and I certainly didn’t have any money. All I can remember is how I headbanged so hard that my neck hurt for days, and I probably put my ankle through more agitation than I should have.
I essentially retired the creepers at that point, and my website. But I held onto the shoes, and every now and then, I might go to a convention or a concert, and slide them on. It was like visiting an old friend, the way they eased around my feet. The two inches of platform were something solid between me and the earth, when the earth wasn’t solid enough for my withered nerves, and I wanted to put a little distance in there. They gave me a confidence, a swagger, when I went to concerts and other events. Maybe they didn’t walk me through every single one of them, but it felt like they did.
So when I looked down at those growing cracks, and putting one foot ahead of another wasn’t enough, and I donned those shoes to put a little distance in between, something solid to stand on as I shook (it was me, not the earth shaking, even if it was all in my head), and they cracked, right down those two inches, well, I cracked, too. I turned right around and went home, to put that distance there somehow.
I know I’m in a good place right now, but I’m pushing myself so hard. I keep telling myself, it’s only until the end of summer. Then I’ll drop some of my work hours, so I don’t kill myself trying to pull double full time with work and school, and I’m sure I’ll make it through. But that doesn’t stop me from feeling frayed some days. That doesn’t stop me from wanting to feel just a couple inches taller, a couple inches more confident, in the shoes that carried me through such a significant part of my life. So yes, maybe I’m an idiot for crying over their demise, but today, I’m okay with that.
And yes, they are just shoes. But it’s what they represent to me that makes it so utterly destroying, pushing at me where I already teeter on the edge of my breaking point. Cracks are running through me as I force myself to put one foot in front of the other. It was the whole reason I wore the shoes today, for the first time in something like nine months.
High school is never easy. I never had much confidence when I was younger, and high school was when I finally started listening to my own music, clawing at something to keep me grounded. Maybe that’s a bit dramatic, but who’s not dramatic about high school? Somehow, something about JRock and visual kei clicked with me around that time. Malice Mizer’s merveilles album was and still is my epitome of music meeting art, the concept of the album has come to mean something in my mind that is probably well beyond what those guys ever intended.
But it was the dark, heavy sound of Dir en grey that got me through some rougher times. An embodiment of anger and sadness and something sinister, and they were my first Japanese band, at least, the first one I got to see in concert. It was the same for a lot of the JRock crowd at that time. Whether they saw them in that first three-show tour that included the Wiltern, or their performance at the Family Values tour, or on the US tour leg following the Withering to death. album, they were the trailblazers.
I remember the Family Values Tour in 2006, where a friend and I went to an outdoor venue, to see them. It was a gloomy day, the ground was already damp from earlier rains, and just after Diru played, the sky let loose and poured. But we stayed and waited in line to meet Kyo and Shinya. I didn’t have my creepers then, but I wanted them, and I got them sometime in the fall, ordered online while I was living in the dorms for college, when my parents couldn’t control my spending habits. I broke them in bustling between classes, getting blisters, but eventually they became my most comfortable shoes.
February 2007, that friend and I braved blizzard conditions to make the trek to Chicago to see them. It was still fresh and new, to see a Japanese band, especially on a headlining tour, and the thing was to arrive hours early to line up, hang out with people, etc. I wore my creepers, and we got a little lost looking for the House of Blues-that was the first time, but not the last that I would see Diru there-and my trusty creepers fended off the damp of the slush and snow as we tramped through the streets of Chicago. Hours spent hanging outside the venue, Chicago living up to its nickname of Windy City as the snow blew in gusts. I had an idea that winter. I wanted to be a reporter for JRock.
I had my first gig at ACen in the spring, working for the still-young JAME, and I did a press conference and a live report for High and Mighty Color. It was my first anime convention, too. My creepers carried me through the confusion of retrieving my press badge and wandering the dealer’s room.
By May 2007, Project: JRock Events (USA) was up and running, and I had my first real gig at JRock Revolution. I managed to get a press pass to the two day event, and snuck off to Los Angeles for nearly a week, right before Memorial Day weekend. I wore my creepers.
We slept outside the Wiltern like a bunch of hobos. I met people in real life that I’d only spoken to online. I saw Miyavi around the back of the venue, and never would’ve imagined that eight years later, he would play a role in an American movie. I almost hooked up with someone in group’s hotel room, but got interrupted by a friend coming to get something he forgot. Some people know the story, I was blind with infatuation with the guy for a few years, and I wondered for a while what would’ve happened if we hadn’t been interrupted. In the end, I was glad I never did follow that through. We ate Denny’s nearly every day, haunting the booths as we nursed teas and coffees and cheesy fries. My parents asked when I was coming back from my friend’s house. I told my mom in a small voice that I was in Los Angeles.
I cried so hard when I got back home. It was probably a really dangerous thing to do, just pick up and run off halfway across the country to meet a bunch of strangers and see a concert, and I knew they worried. My dad barely spoke to me for a long time. I was 19, and it was the most rebellious thing I’d ever done. But I honestly had the time of my life, and really only regretted how I handled telling my parents about it. I always felt held back by them, my dad especially. I didn’t do many crazy things when I was young, but sneaking off across the country was something I lived for. My parents didn’t approve, wouldn’t have let me waste my time and money on these trips, but I had to do it.
I snuck off to DC in the fall, to attend Anime USA. I told myself it was for my website. I was really just excited to see the person I was infatuated with. But it was also such an adventure, to brave twenty hours of Greyhounds and layovers, and staying with someone that I knew through another friend. I wasn’t even a big fan of Back-On, the band playing, until I watched their performance. I caught a drumstick, had it signed at some point. Interviewed the band. I think it was my first one-on-one interview.
I dropped out of school after that fall. I had been apathetic towards it to begin with, couldn’t figure out what to do with myself. Music and my website were what carried me through my days.
I can’t even remember every event I attended anymore. I have signed merchandise, concert t-shirts. Some events stand out in my mind better than others, I could probably find a timeline within my archives for JRE. But some things are still clear as day. I’ll never forget the Taste of Chaos, it must’ve been the summer of 2008, the visceral feeling of the speakers pounding into me as I watched Taka ooze sexiness onstage in all that leather, or MUCC’s Libra in all its live glory. I’ll never forget Otakon 2009, when we spent the first half of the week in Philadelphia looking for an apartment before shooting down to watch VAMPS. I don’t know how I didn’t suffer heat exhaustion, sitting out in the sun in all black, wearing a corset that only made matters worse. I wouldn’t tell my parents until a week or two before that I planned to quit my hometown for a city on the east coast, and an already strained relationship was probably shattered that day. I’m still trying to fix it, and I’m only recently starting to succeed.
Philadelphia brought me closer to all the east coast events. I shot up to NYC to Japan Nite. I was close enough to DC to go see my idol, Kaya, when he was announced for Anime USA. I shook so much in that interview, and he was so gorgeous, onstage and off. Maybe it wasn’t the best concert I’ve ever been to, but I wouldn’t have noticed, I was so high with elation.
I broke my ankle at Otakon in 2010, wearing my fucking creepers. I was walking, and talking, on the way to the Masquerade to see Yoshiki and Sugizo perform, a duet of violin and piano, and I didn’t see the curb. I’ll always claim it was a big curb, and it probably was. I was so close to the First Mariner Arena’s doors, and I just crumpled. I thought I had just rolled my ankle, but I couldn’t walk it off like I had in the past. I sat on a bench and someone called an ambulance as I grew paler and paler. I don’t think it hurt that much. Yet. I think I was in the emergency room for at least eight hours, alone, in an unfamiliar city. The worst part was that solitude. The second worst part was when the radiologist turned my ankle to make an x-ray, to make sure that I didn’t have more than one fracture. And then the next morning, even worse, was when I woke up and had to stop myself from screaming in pain caused by the swelling, so I wouldn’t wake my roommates.
I gradually fell apart in those two months that I was essentially on house arrest. My job wouldn’t let me work, for insurance reasons, and I was living off of the goodwill and charity of my roommates.
Sometime while I was still in the boot, I managed to get to New York City to see D’espairsRay. I can’t even remember how I got tickets, I must’ve bought them ahead of time, because I didn’t have a press pass, and I certainly didn’t have any money. All I can remember is how I headbanged so hard that my neck hurt for days, and I probably put my ankle through more agitation than I should have.
I essentially retired the creepers at that point, and my website. But I held onto the shoes, and every now and then, I might go to a convention or a concert, and slide them on. It was like visiting an old friend, the way they eased around my feet. The two inches of platform were something solid between me and the earth, when the earth wasn’t solid enough for my withered nerves, and I wanted to put a little distance in there. They gave me a confidence, a swagger, when I went to concerts and other events. Maybe they didn’t walk me through every single one of them, but it felt like they did.
So when I looked down at those growing cracks, and putting one foot ahead of another wasn’t enough, and I donned those shoes to put a little distance in between, something solid to stand on as I shook (it was me, not the earth shaking, even if it was all in my head), and they cracked, right down those two inches, well, I cracked, too. I turned right around and went home, to put that distance there somehow.
I know I’m in a good place right now, but I’m pushing myself so hard. I keep telling myself, it’s only until the end of summer. Then I’ll drop some of my work hours, so I don’t kill myself trying to pull double full time with work and school, and I’m sure I’ll make it through. But that doesn’t stop me from feeling frayed some days. That doesn’t stop me from wanting to feel just a couple inches taller, a couple inches more confident, in the shoes that carried me through such a significant part of my life. So yes, maybe I’m an idiot for crying over their demise, but today, I’m okay with that.