We Go Way Back

SCENE: The Conversation Pit/ Rehearsal space of a campus house. The furniture is soiled, any ornamentation, carpeting or furnishing has been stripped, the windows boarded up, to make the space more amenable to loud rock and roll and sloppy drinking. Amplifiers line the walls. Vintage recording equipment, Guitars on stands, a half-dismantled drum set. The room is lit by a neon "Miller High Life" sign.

Yogi and Taylor - Early 20s.

Henry and Fitzy- Mid-20s

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Fitzy, Yogi and Taylor have just returned from a bike ride, sweaty and clothed appropriately.

They all drink Genessee beer out of cans.


Henry: Are you guys brothers or...?

Yogi: Pretty much.

Taylor: We go way back. Way back to sharing women and...

Henry: Oh yeah.

Yogi:... drinking whiskey.

Laughter.

Taylor: I'll never forget that, dude. We're riding our bikes though, we were like, what, 14? Riding our bikes in Grove City, just ridin' around and then Yogi's like, "Hey, look girls, you want me to rape you?" They're like, "You can't rape the willing." Dude, we did U-turns...

Yogi makes the sound of screeching tires.

Taylor:...got their numbers, she was at my house the next day...

Henry: How old were they?

Taylor: Fuckin' Yogi was like, "Hey loosen her up so I can fuck her next." All right. Fuckin' popped my cherry on this bitch. Then I'm like, "You gotta go, I got plans today. I think Yogi wants to see you." She goes down, wouldn't fuck him cause she was sore. I was like "Yeeeeaaagh!"

Laughter.

Taylor: He fucked her, what, two days later?

Yogi: Yeah, we banged. She's hot.

Taylor: She was.

Yogi: She's like two years younger than us.

Fitzy: So she was 12?

Taylor: Like 8th grade.

Yogi: Like 13.

Fitzy: Oh, that's good.

Taylor: It was sweet.

Yogi: It's what I-- Dude, I been, I've been hittin' it since I was 12.

Taylor: Yeah bro, every time I get this chick, like I'll meet a chick at the bar. I'll be like, "Hey, you remember such and such from high school? Yeah, I just banged her last night." Yeah it's like, "yeah she sucked my dick." I'm like Mutherfucker.

Laughter.

Taylor: Every time.

Yogi: Every, every girl, like he he used to like these girls and like, he like, "Hey man, I'm talking to..." I was like, "Man, go ahead, I fucked her."

Fitzy: Remember them--

Yogi: Every time.

Fitzy: Remember the postal hoes?

Yogi: Dude, yeah, I fuckin' rode butt naked in front of'em.

Henry: Who are the postal hoes?

Fitzy: These, these trails out, out on the West Side we grew up riding at. There's all these, In Lincoln Village, There was all these... girls, these hoes, would just hang out, like groupies.

Yogi: Us dirtbag BMXers sweatin' our balls off, would get our dicks-- Like I remember Fat Steve gettin' his dick sucked by that girl and she threw up all over him.

Fitzy: Oh yeah!

Laughter.

Fitzy: In the back... It was so funny cause like Westland is just down the street and all the football jocks would like come by and they'd be so mad that us dirtbag shitheel bike riders are getting all the trim. And they ain't gettin' shit.

Smile

"What is so defeating is this everlasting good-spiritedness, the application of enthusiasm against loneliness. The expression of the force that seeks to go with the grain--actually to become the grain--is, everlastingly, a smile. But the smile is a lie, and it makes people glum. And the glumness then flows against the grain, being confident of its bit of truth: that there is a lie in the smile. In our time, nearly all art has been made from glumness and has had very little to do with power, because it feeds on this tiny bit of truth: that there is a lie in the smile.

It's so little to feed on. That little bit of truth. Feed on it only and you go mad. Nourished by just that little truth, how can you have strength to resist your enemies? The smile, for instance?

How lonely white men are. They are not the grain that goes with the grain, nor can they bring themselves to die their hair green. They thought they would have both things: the flow of history, because they knew history; and the edge, because they had talent. But history belongs to children, and the edge belongs to adolescents, so they have neither. What they have is a kind of superior whining, and the one freedom they have been able to make use of is the freedom carved out by certain adolescents to make an aesthetic out of complaint. So this is what they inhabit now: a tiny space where they struggle toward a sense of history and a sense of edge by refining their whimpers."

-George W.S. Trow Within the Context of No Context

Airy Nothings

I have been recording some music in the attic over the past few weeks. My goal is to have an album featuring between ten and fifteen original songs recorded by the time I graduate (August 24).

I've written the songs over the course of the past few years. Most of them are basically just fragments. I usually get bored with a song and leave it wounded rather than kill it off completely.

I find it really hard to write lyrics. Music is such an ethereal thing, writing lyrics for a melody is like trying to pin a butterfly to the wall while it's alive and fluttering around. Most of the songs are fairly typical love songs, but I think my style is becoming a little more sophisticated. I feel like a lot of music serves to keep us in a kind of permenent adolescence. There's a lot more to write about than holding hands and heartbreak. I guess pop music is particularly effective when dealing with these subjects, but I'm trying to write about something else, not politics, but just anything interesting.

I am using Apple's Garageband and a Blue Snowball microphone for drums, organ, percussion and vocals, as well as an iMic USB input to record the guitars. I think the guitar amplifiers on garageband are basically shit, but I can't seem to get a good sound any other way.



If somehow you manage to find yourself all the way out here on this little internet outpost would you please be so kind as to visit this link to here some of the music.

Here's a tentative track listing:

1. Mushroom Cloud
2. I Like the Way Your Pants Fit
3. Static Electricity
4. Let's Stay Up All Night
5. I Want to Wake Up Next To You
6. Hall of Mirrors
7. Marilu
8. Black Rainbows
9. Tattered, Shattered, Broken and Beat
10.Girl With Her Feet on My Dashboard
11.Supersonic Narcissist