And Then They Ruined Everything

PROLOGUE: Hell City, Hell

PROLOGUE:

Hell City, HellGood evening, this is Sid Itious, guest DJ at WNYU 89.1 FM. I love a good prologue. It’s the equivalent of watching the roadies set up for a band. It builds anticipation, but sometimes it goes too far and feels like hell.

Even better than a prologue is being here with Kenn in New York. I now understand why people don’t own cars here: finding parking is hell. In fact, it’s what I really expect hell to be like—having to circle the block with a cumbersome, squealing, borrowed Oldsmobile that’s running low on gas, the AC isn’t working, and you can’t roll the windows down to see where the curb is. You’re late for an appointment and you need to park, so you have to keep circling. I envision people pointing and laughing as I pass for the gajillionth time.

OK, let’s get the hell theme going. Up next is a lovely little collaboration with Zeke picking up with the Supersuckers hitting “Hell City, Hell.” Let’s go!

FCC transcript WNYU 89.1 FM 11.25.2017 0103

File as: “Occult”

Unbidden. Trespassing as an unwanted guest was how I felt moving through my life, at least most of the time. My outlook on life wasn’t quite that stark perhaps, but it was certainly lacking a clear view as to the meaning of life or what I was destined to become.

Being dismissed by Kenn was bizarre, frustrating my clarity. Sure, friends clash, but this was different. Events had taken an uncanny turn, and I was now facing something never seen before, a standard that for us was higher than other people we knew.

My best friend Kenn and I no longer had a benchmark for the unusual. Although it was autumn of 2013, the event leading to my expulsion was a gig from 1988.

Through the convenience of time travel, we had returned from seeing a Tracy Chapman show in San Francisco to our hometown in Oregon within moments of leaving, without the aid of anything other than our love for music.

Time travel certainly started as odd for us, but we had been doing it for so long now that it had become more nuanced than strange. Naturally, benchmarking the unusual had become difficult. One such nuance was that we could only cross into gigs and couldn’t control when we returned home.

We had tried to extend our journey past rock ’n’ roll into sports betting, patent discoveries, and entry into the stock markets. Even with knowledge sure to profit us, it was not to be; inexplicably time travel never lived up to our dreams. It was a force of nature in its own right, one that would grant us access only to music. Ultimately music was enough for us and led us to meeting our heroes and others we didn’t expect.

Meeting a girl in a bar who changed our lives was unexpected, and things became increasingly strange from there. Unbeknownst to me, the conflict with Kenn and the challenges we would face were still gathering energy.

Despite the multitude of challenges that I had with finding friends, or fitting in, or getting along with my parents, at least I could take solace in knowing that Kenn and I were friends and that we’d always be there for each other. But even that didn’t last forever, and the trouble with time travel is that I can’t really say when things fell apart between Kenn and me. I would say it was sometime between 1988 and the present day, but closer to the present. Maybe that’s always the way: the past is always closer than it seems.

“Yeah, I’m good,” he said with a detached coolness. “I can clean myself up. I’m good. I’ll see you tomorrow. You should just leave.”

“Nah, it’s OK, Kenn. I’ll call in some pizzas and set up a record. Maybe a little Joy Division to start things off?” I offered.

“Actually, just leave. Leave now.” And with that, for the first time in our friendship, I was dismissed. Excused. Unequivocally told to leave.

Is that what hell was like? You might think searing fires of molten sulfur or waves of freezing rain fraught with pestilence and plagues. Whatever your imagination came up with, you could be certain that suffering would be involved. But being cast off from Kenn was the deepest cut. I suppose at the same time, being around him was never easy.

Kenn always had a conspiracy. He had asked, “You know why the government is so eager to prosecute obscenity in music?”

“Kenn, stop it,” I would often find myself saying. “Dude, look, can we just take our coffee and talk about this somewhere that isn’t so busy?” It was as though he were physically incapable of recognizing that the weight of people’s glares wasn’t a reflection of the whetted anticipation of hearing his views but rather the scorn from those who didn’t understand us. In a crowded café, derisive glares would cause me to squirm. It was bad enough that we skirted around the margins of society, but being overheard only served to gain the unwanted focus of others.

Undeterred, he would continue, always. There was always something with Kenn. “It’s the same as the War on Drugs. The government isn’t really after a solution; they’re not even worried about it. They just want some high-profile arrests and lawsuits so that when American voters heave themselves out of their La-Z-Boys during halftime, they can hear sound bites that their government is effective. People are stupid.” Kenn motioned his arm across the café, gaining momentum and passion. “Look at everyone else around us; do they really give a hot flash for what’s going on? Do you really think that they spare a second’s thought to their freedom, or what’s happening with the economy? Nope. As long as they can see some easy points go up on some clever-sounding stand for morality in music, then, like a cow with its cud, they’re happy.”

I never was particularly popular, unless you considered being a target for school bullies, but being Kenn’s friend never helped. Kenn had a precise view of life. His was a view that included a vast array of theories to explain certain facets of life. Conspiracy theories that often included reference to a ubiquitous “they” or “them.” Control was always being exerted by “the Man” at the behest of “the government.” Kenn considered these theories to be explanations, and I suppose I should concede that sometimes they even proved to be right.

I’ve given considerable thought to the conditions of hell in my time. My liberal arts education, a scholarship teeming with works such as Faust, Paradise Lost, and the writings of Joseph Conrad, informed my views of the conditions that the damned faced. Other works such as Moby-d**k or The Lord of the Rings placed me in greater proximity to torments that seemed never to end.

Hell wasn’t limited to bearing witness to Kenn’s antics; no, for me hell seemed to be everywhere.

“What do you mean you’re not going to law school?” my father, or maybe it was my mother, would start. “You mean next semester. Right? You’re not going next semester, but you’re going after that, right? Seriously. You’re wasting your life. And after all the school that you’ve completed, what? Are you just going to throw it away?”

It was sort of a fair question. I didn’t know what I wanted to really do, which was hell enough, but in trying to discover the missing piece, I had dallied through college, taking any number of courses that seemed interesting but easy. But what did I really have to show for it?

“Maybe he just needs to move out,” one of my parents would say to the other, initiating the sort of amorphous conversation in which their voices and views became inseparable. My indifference mirroring their contempt for my choices, eroding any bond that might have existed between us. Like letting go of a tether during a space walk, bodies in motion drifting apart without any reason or particular direction.

My parents threatened me with all sorts of punishments aimed at attacking my liberty. It was the usual battery of threats for the usual transgressions.

“You know, he’s just not being serious enough at school.”

“Well, you know he’s just wasting our money on [insert “beer,” “pot,” or “rock ’n’ roll”].”

“It’s not like he has any friends.”

“At least no decent ones.”

Being friends with Kenn. Not assuming my expected role. Not moving out of the house soon enough. Moving out of the house too soon. Not being a lawyer. Or an accountant, or a —.

My American parents. Patriots who vocally supported the fundamental freedoms incumbent to America, but yet somehow justified engaging in tyranny to abridge my freedoms.

“You know the Constitution says I don’t have to live under tyranny.”

“The Constitution doesn’t say you have to live here.”

“If you continue to threaten my liberty, I could offer your names to the congressional Committee on Un-American Activities.” What often seemed well strategized merely resulted in greater reprisals. I tried to plead my case, I tried to utilize the formal logic that I had been taught in my philosophy courses, but my parents were impermeable to such tactics. Hell was like that.

Threats and expectations became the materials from which my parents built my own personal Sisyphean existence. Depeche Mode had a Personal Jesus; I lived in the bespoke conditions of damnation, but for an occasional hall pass into the world of rock ’n’ roll.

Dante visualized hell as a place of personalized torment; not only did this concept of hell engage my imagination, it sort of appealed to me. I thought it actually might be my kind of place. You know, with members of all the best rock bands, the Ramones, the Cramps, the Beatles, the Divinyls, and really anyone who was remotely interesting paying for their sins, sins that I would later gladly die for. In fact, I was betting on the concept that a fitting punishment for these bands could result in an eternity of great gigs. But maybe not. Because for such a result to occur, I would have to be rewarded while the others were being punished, unless playing gigs was a reward, so then the Ramones would actually be in heaven. But why?

All of my philosophical inspiration came from the closing view of Dante’s Paradiso, where all the rewarded souls are gathered in a catatonic-like state of grace; I knew where I wanted to go. At least at first. As always, I wanted to be amid the smoke, haze, and noise that hell and rock shows share.

The problem arose from the ashes of the urban legend about the answer to a final physics exam question: “Was hell an exothermic or endothermic system?” A student answered by applying Boyle’s Law and the fact that he’d slept with someone who’d claimed that she would only put out once hell froze over.

Without knowing what either system was, an awareness of the exothermic/endothermic paradox dawned upon me as I was considering my own mortality. If Dante was right, then hell would be neither exothermic nor endothermic but rather characterized by a lack of order, except as required for the purposes of tormenting souls. Thus, any of the obsessive personalities such as lawyers or engineers who found themselves in hell would discover they were beset with randomness and unpredictability: clocks that functioned poorly, demanding schedules that were impossible to meet, and rules incapable of being complied with.

Conversely, all the anarchists would find unity and conformity at every turn, queues upon queues where their existence was choreographed to the second for the rest of eternity. These condemned souls would be free to act and behave however they wished but would be met with tolerance, understanding, and accommodation to such a degree that frustration would be overtaken by mind-numbing despondence.

Sometimes I merely thought that hell was just specific moments in my life. Being with Kenn was sometimes like that. But not always.

The latest of these experiences happened in 1988 in San Francisco, but the impact upon today was unmistakable. Kenn and I had crossed to see a gig and then remained caught in the past for a while, a while that ended up with him falling in love with a girl who was equally aggressive with her upright bass and her Taser. It was a remarkable sight. It was another example of how close we always seemed to hell, but also to a state of grace.

Always missing the bigger picture, I reached these conclusions while I was preoccupied by the fear that Armageddon and Judgment were at hand. I should have been considering the pending crisis with Kenn, my relationship with Pyrah, and the significance of my record collection, but it’s often the smallest details we overlook that lead to the larger crisis. The truth was that Armageddon, Judgment, Kenn, Pyrah, and my record collection were all related. As strange as that might be, the importance of my radio show also played a role.

I wanted to be like the guy in Paul Westerberg’s song “My Road Now”—you know, brave, so that people wouldn’t call me “chicken”—but instead Kenn and I became like the pair in David Bowie’s “Heroes.” Maybe this was fitting, because while I thought that parts of my life, or at least episodes of it, were hell, and while I didn’t know what the meaning of life might be, I understood that Kenn and I would endure Armageddon. We would face our Judgment. We would host radio.

How did it all start? Well, it started on very familiar territory for me: being thrown out of somewhere. Unbidden. But this time it was different; this time Kenn dismissed me.

He met a girl, and with Kenn’s words reverberating around my cranium as I walked away, I realized that I was truly unbidden.

PART 1

ISOLATIONIsolation:

A noun referring to the state of being separate from other like things;

A sense or state of being or existing alone; and

A form of punishment or deterrent used to control actions or emotions.

Isolation was a way of life, living in a small college town in Oregon.

Isolated from larger centers, we were distinguished by what we didn’t have.

“Isolation”: a song by Alter Bridge from the 2010 album AB III.

“Isolation”: a song by Joy Division from the 1980 album Closer.