Metal City - Hai Ina Ia Mai Ana Ka Puana

We learned from a three-minute record, baby, than we ever learned in school.

Because nobody even reads this site anymore - except my friends, who read more out of morbid curiosity and are, I'm sure, waiting for me to splatter my next psychological meltdown across the web - I can basically do whatever the hell I want here, with no regard for any audience. Not that I ever cared especially in the past - but, I must admit, I did a little. Now, no such considerations come into play - everyone abandoned me when they realised that instead of reading the witty, meticulously constructed hilarity of Metal City, they could be off reading empty-headed, chicken-brained idiocy by twentysomething girls about how much they love giving head, or what colour their nipples are.

Fine! See if I care, you motherfuckers. Go off and crank up the hit counters of morons who can't write, but are very good at talking about the joys of the pearl necklace they recieved on the weekend. Your loss.

But, at the same time, I can't help but care about you. And love you. Like Christ before me, I love you unconditionally- and despite the fact that you have turned on me, and crucified me through your neglect, that doesn't stop the fact that my heart radiates pure love. And, as such, I can't help but offer you this next piece of writing - a piece which will hopefully guide you through the stormy waters of your own failed lives.

There's A Darkness On The Edge Of Town
The Evolution Of A Middle-Class Record Collection
For Metal City, 2005

You don't have to tell me, because I already know. Life is a piece of shit - a slow, decaying shuffle towards the grave, punctuated only by extended bouts of abject lonliness, savage self-destruction, and the creeping, gnawing realisation that you are going to be as big a failure as your parents were - except that you won't get to watch anything decent on T.V to take your mind off it, the way they could. For the attactive, modern swinger living in this decadent year of our lord, 2005, we have not the simple pleasures of The A-Team, Knight Rider, V, Miami Vice, Magnum P.I, Transformers: Generation One, M*A*S*H, nor even something as innocuous and elegant as Star Blazers to take our minds off the cancer that is - even now - tearing into our lungs and brains. I know what you're thinking, young hipster - T.V is for shit. It is a brainless medium for imbeciles who should never have passed the third grade. Fie! You say this because you are, simply put, a cocksucker. 99.9999% of the world's population don't simply enjoy T.V - they LOVE it with a passion. They love it more than their spouse. They love it more than their dog. They love it more than themselves. And when they turn it on, and see nothing but endless, interminable repeats of CSI: Jerkwater, and another fucking detective show about a zany private eye with tourettes, they're thinking less about Must See T.V, and more about Must Open Wrists.

But, wait! While television may have failed us, there is something else out there to keep us from tasting the sweet, sweet steel of the shotgun. Your record play may be That Thing That You Listen To Maroon 5 On Before You Go Clubbing, but - in actuality - it can be so much more. I live my life at the mercy of the stylus - the sharp, crisp stab of the needle being my constant companion, as it burrows deeper into my brain, pushing aside my most vital organs on its slow, silky ride to the very depths of my being. I am a slave - not to the rhythm, you unimaginative fool - but to the sound. It is the SONG, not the SINGER that causes me to melt into jelly as the fluttering heartbeat of the music begins to emanate from the speakers. The music ceased, long ago, to simply be heard - it is entwined with my personal narrative and mythology. And, chances are, it is much the same with you.

Unfortunately, you are stupid - and you require someone like me to sit you down and explain to you exactly how these things work. So, please - relax, and let me take you on a guided tour through your life, your soul, and your records.

Birth - Age 5

Somewhere, somehow, a drunken scumbag with fear in his heart managed to slice your mother open with his stinking, steaming turd of a penis - and after a few moments of savage, teeth-grinding thrustage, he unloaded a torrent of life-giving slime deep within the rotting walls of your mother's reproductive organs. Nine months later, amid a flood of greasy fluid and thick, pulsing blood - you were born, and the first thing you did was to start making life hell for all around you. Not content with evacuating your bowels, bladder, and stomach into the faces and laps of all you come into contact with, you screamed wordlessly - your eyes bulging out and your fists balled so tightly that your palms bled. All around you wished that you'd ended up as nothing more than a stain on the floor of the abortion bucket and a series of angsty journal entries, but you're here, you're queer, and it's illegal to cut off your head with an electric knife and call it a day

During this period, you don't even OWN a fucking stereo - so you listen to whatever your parents are listening to. After people have reproduced, it goes one of two ways - they start listening to The Bellamy Brothers : Their Greatest Hits, because they realise that they are now officially Old and Praying For Death, or they get that second wind of teenage-hood, and they start listening to really shitty trance. Either way, these seminal (ha) experiences will sow the seeds of uncompromising hatred that will later lead to those endless fights when you're 16, where you threaten to leave home because your Dad's a cunt and your Mum's a bitch.

But, eventually, all parents convince themselves that their shit-stained progeny is a genius of some kind. Of course, this is total bullshit - and one of the mainstays of self-delusion that form the cornerstones of our cultural psyche - but, nonetheless, they will decide quite defiantly that since you managed to take a dump in an empty tin can rather than in Grandpa's face, you're Stephen Hawking. So, they'll try to encourage your worthless personal development by offering you educational recordings.

Sesame Street's 25th Birthday : A Musical Celebration will fit the bill nicely, and you will scream out in agony as giddy, psychotic Muppets howl their songs of learning at you. 'I Love Trash', 'Sing!', 'Rubber Duckie', and other anthems of the incontinent will fill your days and haunt your nights - the leering, crazed faces of Big Bird and The Cookie Monster driving you to the very brink of insanity.

For some, though, this kind of psychological warfare simply ain't enough to get the job done, and so - they have to resort to more direct methods. For the parent with the truly perverse taste in torture, nothing will suffice quite like the Read-Along-Record series of books, designed to take your youngster from amoeba-esque sack of worthless, drooling flesh, to a mental colossus of Norman Mailer-esque proportions. As a young boy, my parents loved to subject me to these records -
I would sit for hours with my book of 'The Story Of The Empire Strikes Back', and would listen to the sick pederast on the record, as he moaned out the plot of hit 80's movies with a voice that brought to mind an image of the living dead.

Age 5 - 10

During these formative years, your constant companion will be the sound of snapping bone as you are carted off to the military installation known as Primary School, where you will be incarcerated with several hundred criminally insane children who will torment you to levels that make Dachau look like Pina Colada night at the Chevron. Your fingers, wrists, legs, ribs, spine, ankles, and skull will all be fractured into tiny, sharp-edged pieces - and your sanity will continue to fray, your healthy, pink, fresh brain being slowly ripped apart like so much crepe' paper by the slashing, bloodstained claws of your peers.

Bruce Springsteen's Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J is, of course, the only soundtrack to this period that counts - a sly, intricate treatise on youth and growing. Through 'Growin' Up', you'll see yourself - a creature of joy and effervescence, poised on the precipice of utter failure and bitter self-loathing. You're 'Blinded By The Light', as the seemingly endless summer of your childhood gives way to the infinite winter of your decay. You'll find out that 'It's Hard To Be A Saint In The City' - but, at this point, pre-misery, you'll actually bother trying.

Of course, you'll also start listening to such trite shit as Bowie's 'Space Oddity' and 'Ziggy Stardust' albums, because - basically - you're an unimaginative shitkicker, and only the most obvious things will do. The ubiquitous Beatles will, naturally, rear their heads - but since you're living in the modern era, you'll only listen to anything post-1966.

Enjoy it while it lasts. Soon, you'll be listening to Pink Floyd.

Age 10-16

Ah, who didn't enjoy adolescence?

What? Nobody?

Exactly. Being a teenager is horrible - in two ways. Being a teenager is horrible because it is horrible TO BE a teenager, but being a teenager is also horrible because teenagers ARE horrible. At this stage in your worthless life, everyone hates you. Your parents hate you, your teachers hate you, your friends hate you, and - best of all - you hate you. And why not? After all, you are an ugly, spotty, smelly shithead who suddenly thinks that they're the first one ever to keep a little notebook full of really horrible poetry. At this point, your constant companion is the suicidal impulse which you vainly try to reign in at every oppurtnity. Fortunately, many of you fail in this endeavour - thinning out the population, and progressively causing a drop in the need for new Cure records.

At this point, you're one of two things - you're either a stupid nerd with big, ugly glasses and a hilarious-sounding half-broken voice, or you're a big, dumb lummox with beer on his breath and vagina on his fingers. Either way, the world would be better off if you were both killed in a freak train accident. You think you're SO fucking different - the nerd thinks he's so superior because he's so sensitive and articulate and headed for Great Things due to his academic diligence, while the jock thinks he's superior because he gets to empty his nuts into a fresh slut's guts every weekend, and he can drink a bottle of Beam without puking. You're both wrong, of course - the game of life has set a trap for you, and no matter how cool and radical you think you are, you're both going to end up in the same place - sitting on a stained, sperm-encrusted sofa, staring at The Wheel Of Fortune while your wife slowly loses her looks, your kids piss in your face, and you cry alone at night, thinking 'Oh God, kill me now, what the fuck happened to my life?'

Of course, adolescence causes us to do all manner of stupid, shitty things. First and foremost amongst them is that we start taking really lame music very seriously. As an acne-scarred youth, you will suddenly realise that The Cure, Joy Division, and Nine Inch Nails are some very heavy shit indeed, because they speak to you and your inner isolation. Your isolation that you love. Your isolation that you crave. Nobody understands you like Trent Reznor. NOBODY. Nobody can see through the masks you wear the way Robert Smith can. When he sang 'As flicky as lips, as licky as chips' - he wasn't talking about chips, he was talking about the chips of THE SOUL. When Trent Reznor said 'Erase me! Erase me! Erase me!', he wasn't talking about an eraser - he was talking about erasing ME. Or him. But, ME TOO.

Of course, there is no greater testament to arrested development and the idiocy of the adolescent mind than Pink Floyd's ode to over-groped penis and self-absorbed stupidity - The Wall.

For those who haven't heard The Wall, or seen the moronic film, here is the plot. Once upon a time, there was this guy called Pink, who sucked. After his father killed himself because his kid was such a loser, Pink went to school and his teachers laughed at him because he sucked. Then he became a rock star, probably in a really shitty band like... oh, I don't know. Pink Floyd, or something. His wife left him because he's hung like a three year old, and he 'cannot communicate emotionally'. He sits in a hotel room and gets really pissed off, because he's supposed to be a big rock star - but they only have black and white T.V. So, he throws that motherfucker out the window and demands colour. A groupie shows up, but because he's a member of Pink Floyd, he cannot achieve an erection - so he throws a bottle at her. She leaves because he's boring and he's throwing shit around, and if she's going to be around dudes who do that shit, she may as well go next door and visit Ace Frehley - at least he has cool make-up. Then, Pink gets all boo-hoo and takes off his clothes and goes swimming, but he can't stop thinking about his wife and how she's probably knobbing Robert Plant. The central metaphor of the film is a brick wall - an EMOTIONAL wall, if you will - but, really.. who cares. In the end, Pink takes a bunch of drugs, but because he's not in Motorhead or Ministry, he can't handle them - so Bob Hoskins shows up and he immediately turns into Cereal-Man. Then, he has to go and give a concert - but, unfortunately, he's in Pink Floyd, so he starts abusing the audience because they have such shitty taste. He starts calling them niggers and queers and coons, all while wondering why his wife left him. Then, he turns into Hitler for no reason, and a bunch of skinheads go on a raping and killing spree, because he decides that there are too many damn nig-nogs in Lady Britannia, and he starts goose-stepping and generally carrying on like a moron. Then he puts himself on an EMOTIONAL TRIAL, where his wife and teachers get shitty with him because they're suddenly not on a rock album and have been transferred to an Anthony Lloyd Webber play. They decide that he sucks, and this lame music is giving them the shits, so they decide that the wall must be torn down so that they can escape and go to a Black Flag album or something - and the wall is torn down, and every teenager in the world simultaneously goes "Aaaaah, art.".

Then, of course, there's Springsteen's 'The Wild, The Innocent, and The E-Street Shuffle' - an album which celebrates your vibrance and youth, but which points to things to come - the crushing lows, and the anticlimatic highs that come with the onset of age and maturity. You will weep as Bruce tells you of the 'Incident On 54th Street', you will pump your fist in honour of the glory of being in love with 'Rosality', and you will cry yourself to sleep to 'The New York City Serenade'. The storm clouds are brewing - and you cannot escape them.

Age 16-26

Oh, boy. It's at this point that the crushing realisation that your entire life is a lie and you were probably better off becoming a suicide statistic at 15 finally sinks in. All the promise of your youth - the dreams of success and achievement, of love, of fame, or being Someone or Something finally come crashing down around your ears, and the only thing that keeps you comfort is the perpetual regurgitation of your hatred, impotence, and unfocused rage on your shitty website.

School will climax in an orgy of unadulterated, completely legal violence - and your body will be literally rebuilt as a scarified, organic monument to the ravages of physical abuse, and their impact on the already fragile, bleeding mind of the adolescent. You'll never recover from the kaleidoscopic nightmare of brutal beatings and savage lashings that your teen years have brought, and although you'll initially see your wounds as badges of honour that you have Been Through Shit, Man - eventually, they'll simply become absorbed into the patterns of self-loathing and sickening shame that are the songs that adulthood sings to you, softly in your sleep as you toss and turn with tears in your eyes.

University will, of course, lead you nowhere - since you know nobody, and cannot call on nepotism to save your worthless bones from a life shackled to the mediocrity that you always swore you'd fight against. Eventually, the system will break you - and you'll either stare at a terminal in an office in a building in Nowhereland for the rest of your life, or your mind will split open and you'll simply become an overweight, unshaven basket-case, incapable of any kind of normal, sane, rational thoughts. You'll be crippled by paranoia, insecurity, and you'll simply drift off into inertia - unable to progress or develop, instead simply waiting for the warm, welcoming face of the Reaper to slowly drift into view. As his scythe swings through the air, you'll sigh and smile - the sweet release that you've so long craved finally coming to you.

Bruce Springsteen's 'Born To Run' and "Darkness On The Edge Of Town' will illustrate both sides of your late-teen/twentysomething experience. While you always thought you were 'Born To Run', you'll find that you can only run so long before you're Born To Pay - and that's when you work at the 'Factory'. You'll contemplate those long, crazy days of your youth when you ran with your friends on the 'Backstreets' - and you'll cry when you realise that they are exactly the same kind of failures that you are, and they never escaped the 'Darkness On The Edge Of Town'. You'll want more than anything to ride the 'Thunder Road' - but instead, you'll end up 'Racing In The Streets', consumed by your own self-pity. And, ultimately, as in Springsteen's 'Adam Raised A Cain', your life will be the same as your father's: "Daddy worked his whole life for nothin' but the pain, and now he walks these empty rooms looking for something to blame."

Of course, your tastes will mature - where 'The Wall' once brought you solace and legitimised your nauseating self-absorption, your Pink Floyd experience will revolve around 'The Final Cut', where you'll stop whining about how you hate yourself, and you'll start whining about how your kids hate you, Thatcher would have hated you, 'the nips' took your job, and there's nothing left for you but to 'hold the blade in trembling hands, prepared to make it - but... just then the phone rang, I never had the nerve to make the final cut." Yes, you'll even fail at suicide.

And you'll still listen to shit like The Cure - but it'll be the poppier stuff. After all, isn't 'The Lovecats' cute? Like shit it is, but you're an idiot - so bouncing about at the office Christmas party while you babble about cagey tigers will be the high point of your otherwise bleak existance.

But, then again, you're getting older - so it's time to start listening to old people's music. You'll realise that The Eagles really could write proper tunes, and that you prefer McCartney to Lennon, and that Bowie was just super once he stopped all that weird nonsense in Berlin with Brian Eno and got back to fabby hits like 'Modern Love' and 'Let's Dance'.

Death is closing in.

Age 26-40

Eventually, you'll end up having sex with the one she-beast that doesn't make last night's dinner tickle your epiglottis every time she takes her bra off, and in a moment of complete and total insanity, you'll allow her to commandeer your sperm-bloated testicles in order for her to satiate her debased, twisted biological urges. Nine months later, you'll be plastering your best fake smile across your suicide-fogged face as you stare between her veiny thighs and into her gnarled, twitching genitalia as her loins spit out a wormlike slug that will immediately proceed to piss in your face, vomit on you, and steal your wallet. You'll be talking a load of bullshit about 'the miracle of birth' - when in actual fact, the only miracle taking place is that you haven't taken a load of buckshot in the cerebral cortex, with a note that reads 'I DIE AS I LIVED - ALONE'.

You'll sell your awesome Torana for some sensible station wagon, and you'll cart your nagging, howling bitch of a wife around the country so that you can look at an almost incalculable number of incredibly boring things, while your bastard kid spits and shits and vomits and tears stuff up, and you have to pretend that you don't want to park the car in the garage with a hose running from the exhaust to the window. You will have ugly sex with your revolting wife, and as you thrust and pump emotionlessly into her cold, cold body - a tear will form in your eye. She'll wipe it away, thinking that you're overcome with sensual joy - but, in reality, you'll be weeping for the corpse of your life, that seems to dance with re-animated glee. You have become the walking dead. And, as you watch Nightline with a cup of peppermint tea - staring over at the flabby, distended body of wifey, it will be all you can do to avoid simply vomiting in your lap, and crying uncontrollably at just how much of a mercy death would be.

And it is at moments like this that Bruce Springsteen's 'The River' and 'Nebraska' seem to speak to you. Albums about what happens when the money has run out, the fun has gone, and there's nothing left but the withered husk of what you used to call your hopes and dreams. You'll do anything to find another life - gambling what little money you have left in 'Atlantic City', 'Johnny 99's plan of murder, and you'll despair at the realization that 'Mister, the day when my number comes in, I'm never gonna ride a used car again'. Hope turns to crime, and you'll find yourself 'driving a stolen car, on Eldritch avenue. Each night I wait to get caught, but I never do.' Everyone has left you - 'Independance Day' was a long time ago, and you'll weep because there 'ain't no difference what nobody says, ain't nobody like to be alone'. And then, finally, you'll hear about the 'Wreck On The Highway' - and you'll realise that it doesn't matter what you do, there is only one possibly end to the story: painful, tragic death.

You're old now, so you'll start listening to shit like Michael Crawford. You'll also listen to early Neil Young - before he got all weird and depressing - namely 'Harvest'. You won't listen to Bowie anymore - even this powerful, muscular rock and roll of 'Blue Jean' will be too much for you - you're more interested in Sting or Peter Gabriel. You need to connect to your youth somehow, so the old man music of Pink Floyd's "Dark Side Of The Moon' will allow you to feel like a rebel at least once a month.

Soon, though - death will come to claim you.

Age 40-Death

And so, the twilight years. You've waited so long for them - an ache in your soul that can only be satisfied by the total erasure of your blood pressure, and the non-dilation of your pupils. As you race towards the finish line with both arms outstretched, you can smell death coming. Hopefully, your spouse goes first so that you can get in a few fun years before it's Morgue Time, but if not - you'll have a lot of fun trying to get her to kick off. Bursting paper bags behind her head, over-salting her dinner, and the good old-fashioned pushing her wheelchair over a cliff will fill you with the joy that you've been denied for so long. Your body, once youthful and virile, is now nothing more than a sagging, liver-spotted parody of a normal human being. You look more like a hessian sack full of smashed up bones and half-dead entrails than a living, breathing entity - and your great joy in live will come through your ability to produce a solid bowel movement. Your days will be spent watching the television, and the clock - praying for death to come swiftly and painlessly, but it won't. Due to so-called 'doctors' and 'the medical profession', they'll stretch your failed, worthless existance out as long as it will go - laughing at the tears in your eyes as they dangle death in front of you like a carrot on a stick. Eventually, you will be dragged to some anonymous isolation-tank in a faceless suburban hospital, surrounded by machines designed to stop you from achieving your one true dream. Your kids and their kids will show up to 'pay their respects' - and as you look into their sick, sad eyes, you'll see yourself: the cycle has commenced anew, and another generation will know the crushing, brutal inanity that is life. That is the one thing that will send you to the grave with a smile on your lips - the fact that although your life has been nothing more than a sick experiment in pain endurance, your kids are going to suffer the exact same thing.

Springsteen's 'Ghost Of Tom Joad' will be your send-off into the infinite, summing up your life with a succinct-yet-knowing understanding of just how futile your every move has been. 'The highway is alive, tonight...', Springsteen will sing, 'But nobody's kiddin' nobody about where it goes. And I'm sittin' here in the campfire light... searchin' for the ghost of Tom Joad.' The lonely call of the owl in the night air, singing out his song of sorrow and emptiness will carry you to the grave, accompanied by Springsteen's reminder of how every pore of your being was filled with biting despair and bitter defeat. You'll 'come home in the evenin', can't get the smell off my hands - lay my head down on the pillow and drift off into foreign lands...'

And he'll sum it up for you. Because, at the end of the day, you need an epitapth - something that explains it all. Explains where you came from, and exactly how you got here. And apologises.

Every cloud has a silver lining, every dog has his day, She said, "Now don't say nothin', If you don't have something nice to say." The tough, now they get going, when the going gets tough - But for you, my best was never good enough. Posted by David at April 15, 2005 03:17 PM | TrackBack