Death By Stereo

I’m listening to R.E.M.-Losing my religion.

I’ve been sneaky and silly and getting myself into all manner of idiocracy.

I’ve so far, in this life been a loser, and a winner. I’ve been a liar and a cheater and a thief. I’ve been good and upstanding and unimportant. I’ve been a father. I’ve played father to a sister and a daughter and a lover who needed help instead of love but I gave too much of what I didn’t have anyway.

My life hit a strange but familiar lull recently. I suppose one can say that in High School life was full of mixed tapes loaded with Punk Rock, and Metal. Some Industrial and 80’s music for good measure just to shake things up a bit, and bring me out of my self-important all knowing 14 year old mind and make me more like the rest of the kids at some point or another. There was no lull then but a punk beat.

Doot dat do do dat. Doot dat do do dat. Over and over as fast and clean as you can.

You can define me by the tapes that people dubbed for me. Old Punk Rock that can’t be found because the record labels have gone belly up because the scene stopped supporting it, or grew out of it, or maybe it just got stale.

What those tapes remind me of is Miller High Life that my best friends step father used to buy us on Friday and Saturday nights. Bottles of Snake Eyes and Cisco that we drank and sang old Mexican songs and Mid 90’s Rap to. We smelled like skate park and bus rides. We looked like shit with haircuts we gave ourselves and hair dye we bought from friends.

“Dude who the fuck vomited on my Dead Kennedy’s shirt?”

“You did fucker, you don’t remember?”

“Pfft, No.”

We didn’t care. We didn’t know what needed to be cared for and over time my tapes gave way to more CD’s.

After a time less punk and more rock.

Mellow, but edgy. I walked and held my CD player making sure it didn’t skip as I headed over to whatever class I was failing at the local junior college.

The beats gave way to Sonic Youth and The Pixies and guitars that carried and spoke to us rather than screaming with conviction.

Cute girls walked the hallways. I carried a camera and a notepad and drew in my design classes. I took the bus to the local music store that I worked at. I had moved on from bumming booze and bumping coke to being snuck into bars and having drinks bought for me by older gay men who thought I was cute and didn’t mind that I was straight.

I was clean cut, and smelled of the gym or whatever cologne I was wearing to impress my on and off girlfriend. The music I used to listen to was no longer a thing to get me excited but a tool for nostalgia.

Lets trade stories and remember the time that Operation Ivy played in the background and that one dude that no one liked boned his girlfriend in the back of my mothers Plymouth.

Lets get together and realize that at 19 I am working with 30 year olds and 20 something’s and I was thinking “Holy shit you’re 24? What the hell am I gonna be doing at 24?”

Eventually, I didn’t care about music at all. I didn’t care about the scene or the art or my friends. I was working. I was driving on my graveyard shift and I didn’t care what I wore and I was becoming less and more of myself every day.

I gave in, but to this day I can’t say that I know exactly what I gave in to.

I’ve given in to sin. I’ve given in to God. I’ve given in to pressure and to sex and to sadness and to joy. I’ve given in to love and all the things that come from that which if you were to ask me to describe what love is like, I would say that its Sin, and God, and Pressure, and Sex, and Sadness and Happiness all wrapped up into a nice, neat little package (laced with fucking poison).

Then there was no music at all.

I hated it.

I didn’t like that I didn’t stand for anything but making other people happy. I didn’t like that I took love and made it a means to an end and an excuse for complacency.

A funny thing happened when the music went away. So did all the love.

And when that was gone I was listening to whatever was on the radio. I didn’t care that it’s all watered down, and filtered into easy to digest little bits of FCC approved douche baggery.

I didn’t care that it was empty and shallow and meant nothing to me until the day when it all meant something again. It reminded me of something I once had. It gave me hope when I didn’t have any again. The funny thing was it was all the same shitty music that played in the background of a life that I had technically checked out of completely.

I get into conversations with 50 year old men about pop music from the 80’s, and stale tunes from the 90’s, and I talk to an older woman about theme songs from the 70’s. I offer an underground album to a co-worker and at some point I realize that the tapes are all gone. So are the CDs I collected. MP3 files have replaced it all and my life is reduced to a laptop.

Folk singers and their sad songs play in my head a lot more now. That is the rhythm of my life, but only when I think of what I lost. It’s a steady flow of smooth sound that wraps me up and holds me tight till I figure out what the fuck is wrong with me. Long enough for me to deal with loss. Damien Rice plays me to sleep.

And then I go out and get a drink and all of a sudden those New Wave tunes I used to hate have me dancing like a fucking idiot with a pretty friend of mine, or a girl I’m dating or maybe just a buddy I haven’t seen in a while. The smiths start playing and we dance as spastically as possible till we are all smiling and laughing and ordering more drinks.

Its in all of this that my life is unsure and feeble and I teeter on the edge of something I can’t put my finger on. It matters to me less though, and as time goes by its gone. After the next morning, after the alcohol I realize that just before passing out I’ve brought a bottle of water to bed, and I’ve made it a habit to avoid a hangover.

It works.

And I get up and I go for a run.

After the 2nd mile or so I am listening to my music as loud as I can and sometimes It’s the old stuff. Sometimes it’s the new stuff. Sometimes it reminds me of cruising the streets with my daughter in the back seat and she is nodding her head back and forth to something I passed by on the dial.

Shoe loves Modest Mouse and pronounces it “Moss Moush”.

“Moss Moush Papa!”

Or was it an import of “The Kooks”?

Or was it an old Tupac tune I have buried on a playlist?

Eclectic now. At 26 I’ve started collecting again and now I wonder if I’ll ever make a tape again. Or hell if I even have the balls to make a CD or a playlist for someone.

I’ve gotten to the point where there is so much I’ve listened to. There is so much that I have given in to that if I were to sit, and really map myself out by the silly beats and the parties and the music I’d simply stop existing because in that moment I have been defined by a soundtrack.

Fuck I’ve come so far.

I have written myself into a corner. I have played myself into oblivion. I have listened to so much that I begin to wonder how the fuck I’ve managed to make a life of listening to music when what I should have been doing is listening to myself. I need to make my own soundtrack and make it the best that I can.

I need to add to it continuously till the day I die.

I wonder if anyone will listen to it.