“The foot feels the foot when it feels the ground.”
-Buddha-
“If you want to go east, don't go west.”
-Ramakrishna-
When I was in high school I made my first improvised ballad with a couple of friends. We called ourselves 200 year old wolf pussy because my mom had bought me the book of Snaps, and Tracy Morgan had the best one which was “Your Mother Smells So Bad She Smells like 200 Year Old Wolf Pussy”, and when we were trying to come up with a band name the book was right in front of us. This day and age the smell of 200 year old wolf orifice would probably be the only musk that a billionaire couldn’t afford.
The name of my first ballad was Margo, because I was a poor piano player playing even worse than that because at the time I was obsessed with how the worse you made things the better they turned out. Examples of this phenomenon are the Disney young adult film classic Midnight Madness, or every second of the movie Theodore Rex.
In a world seeking the very best burger available at a McDonald’s, perhaps it is the sandwiches we dumpster dive that taste the best in the end. Is there a difference between either palate? Anyhow in a moment of terrible fake singing with a friend in my basement the name Margo came out and I felt what love for someone I would never know felt like. I kissed a ghost.
I continued playing music poorly from my teens into my more than teens until at some point people accepted the poor music I made with the same type of sincerity I reserved for anything other than my music. The further you get from your truth the closer you get to someone else’s. I learned that the day that I had been playing my saxophone with the mouthpiece upside down for all 3 years I had been playing it. I started playing saxophone because bringing around a full PA and two turntables and a pile of records became very non intuitive to playing minneapolis living rooms filled with 20 year olds who seemed to be aged 40 to me because I was aged 18.
You are no bigger asshole than when you are self accepted young, because at no other point in your life do you wear reinfantalia as a gold medal. I could have worn a bib and a bottle without irony if I wasn’t too busy trying to figure out how to hide the smallest amount of weed I borrowed from a future trucker friend next to a handmade clay dildo I hid into a sock beneath my baseball card collection in my closet.
I didn’t have a door on my room in high school because my parents thought I might kill myself or them. I found my privacy the way any doorless human being does, by being caught with their pants down in awkward situations around people they wish hadn’t seen them this way. There are only so many times a man can be caught half naked in teenage coitus by his direct bloodline before he conditions himself to an anesthetized state of constant embarrassed awkwardness.
Sex is not love when you are a teenager. It is dairy queen if dairy queen were a strip show and you had unlimited frosty coupons. To that end, being caught having sex in front of a family member as a teen is either the first step to joining the C.I.A. or an excuse or why you keep watching Saved By The Bell : The New Years. I never thought I would think the world could use more doors but here I am.
I won a drawing contest in grade school, having drawn my mom a plate of bacon and eggs, artistic enough to get me, her and my aunt invited to a hotel breakfast at the westin hotel in downtown Cincinnati. The Philadelphia singing sensation that is known as BoyzIIMen showed up to the hotel lobby as we were leaving and my mom and aunt had me stand in line for 2 hours to wait and get their signatures. I had them sign a deck of football player cards because that was all I had in my backpack. Somewhere deep in my closet I have a linebacker’s rookie card that says “I’ll Make Love To You”. Life as a boy becoming a man listening to BoyzIIMen as though one day he might become one is confusing.
I played viola that year in my grade school orchestra. Initially I had chosen that instrument because literally no one else would. As much as I wanted to be a rockstar and play guitar and drums, I didn’t have the patience to be guitar playing drummer number 45 at the Montgomery Grove Junior High School. My decision proved fruitful as I found myself in a band with young nerdy beautiful dorks like me, and got to pretend all summer long that I would learn the theme to Last of The Mohicans and become Daniel Day Lewis. That year all the cicadas in town gave birth to themselves and left their rotting corpses piled across the grass. The summer scent was slowly cooking death skin and you couldn’t walk a step without a crackling crunching sound accompanying your gait.
The reality of grade school viola practice is endless hours starting at the bowtied tiny stache of a man who teaches you your finger placement and asks you to play greensleeves 40 times a week. You wonder if he wears the mustache because he likes the look, or if he has a lip problem. You stare your 11 year old self in the mirror and dream that one day you will have pubes. Then you move from one midwestern suburb to another midwestern suburb and remember that stranger kids don’t appreciate wooden string instruments. In an effort to cut your bully me scale from 96.3 to 74.2 you quit instruments and pretend that you skateboard. If you are lucky, one of the the girls who erases blood scars into their arms will passive aggressively flirt with you until you see them and their alcoholic mother on Sally Jesse Raphael’s talk show a couple years later in the “my child won’t stop dressing like Rainbow Brite” episode. Everyone at school will wonder if they dye their pubes.
Your parents aren’t happy. You can barely make it a month where the mid evening doesn’t become the hateful din of two middle aged shit bats banging their loathing off one another. You stare at your doorlessness and choose one of five vhs tapes to pretend you to sleep as you gain a backpacker’s appreciation for the hard meditative rest of laying neck forked on the tough flat ground of your bedroom. The best VHS tapes you have are re-recorded onto 3 times, collecting R-Rated films from decades of cable subscriptions your dad paid for to avoid you after his nights working on marketing processed snack art. The dreams of you at 8 are the dreams you have again at 88.
It is hard to know when the door you opened opened the door you walk through now. When my saxophone embouchure was finally corrected by an improvist tenor player I had the sheepish dickishness to pretend that I had played my sax wrong for years on purpose. I played it right wrong. I played it right wrong for 60 shows until my bandmates got tired of my mediocrity and demanded I take a real lesson and improve.
My first sax lesson was to find the letter D and play it, and only it for an hour straight. My next sax lesson was to play the harmonica instead. I then took my lack of knowledge and taught music to a bored class of 17 year olds on the southwest side of chicago. When I say teach I mean I brought buckets and harmonicas to them and we spent an afternoon realizing none of us were talented musically. They all graduated on time.
No one is born good at love. I believe in nature and nurture but also neature and noature. But I don’t see how any of us space babies could truly understand love in a lovelike sense at birth. We are instead born with fear. We exit the 200 year old wolf pussy and enter the world afraid and uncertain of what just happened. We scream and we cry and covered in blood we psychically ask for the tubes that connect us to our mothers to be cut. And with a snap it is done.
The adults who produce these rituals are obsessed with the idea they made you and that they will get to figure out exactly who you might be. They see you blanketed with a face full of smegma and say what a cute little astronaut you are going to be. But we are all just a wine night splatter painting attempted by some stoned drunk post grad hoping their art school debt pays off into a Chihuly internship. And so the glass of life blows.
"I never thought I would think the world could use more doors but here I am." hahaha yes