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Concert Reflections, vol. 2

Second night: better than the first. Fewer asinine guys in irono-mullets, more rock. It was all-ages, which I think improved the energy basically because the people on the floor were less fucking drunk. Akimbo was good, A Storm of Light was good, Converge was good, but Neurosis was less a band than a force of nature.



At the end of the first show, Scott Kelly, after screaming the last line of "The Doorway" headbanged into the mic three, four times, and on the final hit the microphone broke off and flew into the crowd and blood was streaming down his face and it mingled with sweat and dripped onto the guitar and he crouched above it and ripped its strings off as a huge dissonant primeval interval of feedback rose to a profound roar.

A Storm of Light, Converge, & Neurosis concert reflections, vol. 1

A few things:
1. Fuck, i hate hardcore kids.
2. The lead singer of Converge had his balls directly in my face about five times.
3. Neurosis fucking crushes everything.
4. A Storm of Light was also badass.
5. Steve Von Till is my guru.
6. Apparently the thing to do if you're a hardcore kid at a show is to throw both your arms up and alternate between clenching your fists and semi-hugging the person in front of you, while violently thrusting your pelvis in sync with the music.
7. I'm not joking, this happened to me all goddamn night.
8. I hate being covered in sweat when very little of it is actually my own
9. The fact that you're wearing a polo shirt and tight pants and have tattoo sleeves and a pseudo-mullet does not mean that you are cool. It means that you look like a retard.
10. Fuck, i hate hardcore kids.

More on this subject later.

Í Gær

The wind picks up and I'm taken back to when we used to sit outside by the water tower, before it became a repository for potentially carcinogenic cell phone transmitters, and we would sit and we would look. We drank beers, the wind blew and it was February and freezing but we drank regardless, holding them in blue hands savoring the internal warmth. We would drive to capitol hill for the beer, to a convenience store that didn't card or maybe just didn't card us, and it was a trek and had to be done with more than one person, someone to buy the beer and someone to circle around the block because there was never any parking. When we were done we would carefully stack the empty bottles back in their case and leave them for the maintenance crew to pick up in the morning. We always said that when we turned 21 we would buy a full case of beer and leave it with a note, thanking whoever cleans it up for picking up our trash for four years. We still haven't yet though.
I remember being fifteen or sixteen and trying to smoke weed at the water tower in the midst of a downpour. Her first time, and we felt like seasoned veterans even though we had only smoked maybe seven or eight times before. The rain came down at angles and the wind howled and we huddled for warmth, coaxing the flame from the lighter.
On my sixteenth birthday party, the water tower had some type of violent rupture, and sprayed water in a graceful ten foot arc from the side of the top disc, cascading down onto the grass. We ran through it and I had had four or five beers and felt as though it had happened specifically for me, a birthday present.

Thank you, mr. Earle

Me, I wasn't even tryin',
you could say I was content.
She went through my life like lightning,
blew out the other end.
And I still taste her kisses, smell her perfume in the wind,
and if I could you know that I would do it all again.