the toxicity of friday the 13th
Today started all wrong, but ended with a tidy bookend to a chapter of my life.
Forty dollars for printer cartridges, a whiny dog, and a smoking vacuum cleaner later I got a text from an acquaintance that he was no longer going to the System of a Down show tonight -so did I want his ticket?
As on the ball as I am lately, I actually had no idea SOAD was playing tonight. I generally shy away from any show at the Key Arena, opting for smaller, more intimate settings. This means that nobody I have been interested in seeing has been seen by me for several years because everyone got big and plays the key arena. So it goes. I've stopped looking in the stranger altogether, why read it just to find out that another of my once favorite bands is now selling tickets for a hundred bucks apiece when I can't afford it anyway?
Sigur Ros, ok -that was an exception. And Belle & Sebastian. But only because I am a fan of the Benaroya Hall.
Anywho, I've never seen System of a Down live even though every person who glances at my leather jacket asks because of the patch I've got on there. Frankly I usually forget it is even there, but people ask and I am transported back to a time 10 years ago.
A nerdy semi-shy little me gets a package in the mail from a boy in Colorado. In that package are cds, and System of a Down was on one of them...
and my ongoing anthem and "fuck the world" attitude was born.
My stereo was set to wake me up every morning with screaming. Even when I was out of town my alarm would spew System of a Down. My mom couldn't figure out how to turn the damn thing off and had to deal with the walls shaking at 6 am every morning.
My leather jacket grew patches, my skin grew scales, my heart grew a shell, and as "the war on terror" rolled up its sleeves I was making shirts, signs, and protested the war with the angriest anti-war music I could think of. System of a Down.
At the show tonight there were a bunch of young kids, early high schoolers. Being 10 years younger than me, they weren't quite at liberty to listen to System of a Down when I started 10 years ago. I can't imagine that this band has had quite the profound effect on them that it did for me, but who knows. At the time and the place it happened, it fit. In the scheme of my life and the world as I knew it, something fit.
Obviously these songs don't have the same meaning they did for me before. That slice of my life is over, and has been for a while. Had I been to this show 10 years ago it would have been a different show. Even 5 years ago. It did act as a perfect bookend though, with the recent shooting of Osama Bin Laden. Almost ten years of the war on terror... and our kids will ask us what the hell was happening these days.
After the day I had, screaming at the top of my lungs never felt so good:
"Somewhere between the sacred silence and sleep,
disorder, disorder, disorder!"
I went in tonight not knowing who the opening band was and found myself sitting around thinking, "hmm, this sounds like Gogol Bordello." Sure accordions give me nightmares but Gogol Bordello really took me back. It has been a few months since my subconscious instilled Stelth in any of my dreams and/or nightmares but like I said, a bookend.
I don't think I've ever experienced such musical closure before.
It is good.
Forty dollars for printer cartridges, a whiny dog, and a smoking vacuum cleaner later I got a text from an acquaintance that he was no longer going to the System of a Down show tonight -so did I want his ticket?
As on the ball as I am lately, I actually had no idea SOAD was playing tonight. I generally shy away from any show at the Key Arena, opting for smaller, more intimate settings. This means that nobody I have been interested in seeing has been seen by me for several years because everyone got big and plays the key arena. So it goes. I've stopped looking in the stranger altogether, why read it just to find out that another of my once favorite bands is now selling tickets for a hundred bucks apiece when I can't afford it anyway?
Sigur Ros, ok -that was an exception. And Belle & Sebastian. But only because I am a fan of the Benaroya Hall.
Anywho, I've never seen System of a Down live even though every person who glances at my leather jacket asks because of the patch I've got on there. Frankly I usually forget it is even there, but people ask and I am transported back to a time 10 years ago.
A nerdy semi-shy little me gets a package in the mail from a boy in Colorado. In that package are cds, and System of a Down was on one of them...
and my ongoing anthem and "fuck the world" attitude was born.
My stereo was set to wake me up every morning with screaming. Even when I was out of town my alarm would spew System of a Down. My mom couldn't figure out how to turn the damn thing off and had to deal with the walls shaking at 6 am every morning.
My leather jacket grew patches, my skin grew scales, my heart grew a shell, and as "the war on terror" rolled up its sleeves I was making shirts, signs, and protested the war with the angriest anti-war music I could think of. System of a Down.
At the show tonight there were a bunch of young kids, early high schoolers. Being 10 years younger than me, they weren't quite at liberty to listen to System of a Down when I started 10 years ago. I can't imagine that this band has had quite the profound effect on them that it did for me, but who knows. At the time and the place it happened, it fit. In the scheme of my life and the world as I knew it, something fit.
Obviously these songs don't have the same meaning they did for me before. That slice of my life is over, and has been for a while. Had I been to this show 10 years ago it would have been a different show. Even 5 years ago. It did act as a perfect bookend though, with the recent shooting of Osama Bin Laden. Almost ten years of the war on terror... and our kids will ask us what the hell was happening these days.
After the day I had, screaming at the top of my lungs never felt so good:
"Somewhere between the sacred silence and sleep,
disorder, disorder, disorder!"
I went in tonight not knowing who the opening band was and found myself sitting around thinking, "hmm, this sounds like Gogol Bordello." Sure accordions give me nightmares but Gogol Bordello really took me back. It has been a few months since my subconscious instilled Stelth in any of my dreams and/or nightmares but like I said, a bookend.
I don't think I've ever experienced such musical closure before.
It is good.