The Calming Murder Before the Storm
As the 2025 tour season begins, an old man's fancy turns to thoughts of danger and antisocial activity.
“Isn’t it GREAT!”
Which/what?
“The feeling you get after working out!” She smelled like Aveda and her herbs and homeopathic medicines rolled across her unfinished wooden table top as she picked and chose that which would improve my life, according to her, “1000 percent.”
“I feel so clean,” she continued, in the face of some minor discomfort playing on my face. “After a really hard work out.”
It dawns on me briefly that, in the old hardcore days, when Whipping Boy had to endure the whispers of scenesters connected to the damning possibility that we were “jocks,” this is how people may have seen us. Glad-handing, hale bros well met who high fived each other to punctuate some sort of generalized life positivity. Or at least another rep.
Which was nowhere near the actual case. Physical fitness has never, ever been connected to any sort of positive life developments for me, outside of the obvious and consequent health benefits. No, it’s been a clearinghouse for the most horror full notions ever, so much so that whatever was playing on my face while I was doing it caused, once, a total stranger to ask me “are you a gangster?”
[E]ven before a latter day crazed consumption of steroids, I just assumed this is how you washed your head out. This and psychedelics.
No. It was leg day and I was softly muttering, murmuring to myself really, some mantra about “fucking showing them” and “first fucking, THEN killing” before shouldering 405 pounds and squatting low for a set of three.
It never dawned on me that it wasn’t this way for everybody else, even before a latter day crazed consumption of steroids, I just assumed this is how you washed your head out. This and psychedelics.
Years later, long after some of those same scenesters have died, as in actually died, I approach Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and weightlifting in still very much the same way. So if you roll up on me at 6:30 in the morning on any given morning you’ll find me in the pre-dawn dark of my driveway mumbling all manner of imprecations against enemies seen and unseen.
It’s so regular as to be not especially noteworthy and the only reason I even notice it now, as in today, January 5, 2025, is because the intensity has ramped up, aggressively, enough for me to notice. And being an astute fellow I followed the bread crumbs and though my fears of flight have caused me to not think too long or hard about times on my future timeline when I have to fly, I made the connection in two-steps.
I’ll be back on stage in February, doing four Italy-only shows with BUNUEL.
Now I don’t know how other bands prepare for tour. Which is strange given that I’ve talked to other people in bands about everything from “what is wrong with you Black people” to getting a wide variety of unguents and salves for pain killing from, usually, skateboarders who are into four decades of both music and skateboarding, and are playing against time.
It could be that whether or not I’m going on tour I’m still “ready”, very possibly because the key to survival is not “getting” ready but being so. However there’s something else happening here and it’s once you own the steel, managing to sharpen it is much more than necessary. And that’s largely a head issue, and of course if you maintain a distinction between what you think and what you say, you’d probably never talk about it anyway.
Because who understands it all, especially the thinker of the thoughts? It’s maybe enough for me to observe them and know that they’re connected to what’s going to happen in Italy in February, and beyond. BUNUEL goes out in both April (in Europe) and May (in the U.S.) before my family’s move to Spain in June.
And what’s happening in the head is what happened in the head when the songs on Mansuetude were sung for the first time. A notional policier on my life and what it’s been like away from the cute art pursuits. For whatever reason, call it a penchant for authenticity but like (maybe) Voltaire once said, a person is more effectively measured by their vices over their virtues. Virtues are what we think we should do. Vices are what we actually WANT to do.
So it goes when what’s bumping around in my head runs the gamut from my editorial time with John Wayne Gacy and Charles Manson to friends whose bids for everything from drug trafficking to murder drop in. Writers are vampires and having an avenue of expression that both manages to not rat anyone out and exorcises them from permanent places in my head? Well all I can say is that being in a band is a mitzvah.
However, the run up to the shows is a few weeks of dark weirdness as I try to line up the shows, with the songs, all while trying to traverse the very real world of gas stations, supermarkets and teacher’s meetings at the kid’s school.
While muttering in the dawn streets is one thing. Doing it at “back-to-school” night is something else entirely. The bifurcation generates enough heat to at least fuel the one if even not the other.
Which is where, when I attempt to answer Yow’s query about what IS wrong with me I come up with very little outside of the fact that taking my bad beyond nationwide, and well into international waters, is the kind of GREAT that my Aveda ex once spoke of. Looking around your prison cell and realizing exactly who it is you’ve chosen to break your bread with, and why? Knowing that somewhere (anywhere…everywhere) there are fellow travelers who will not deny you a bowl of soup is maybe…possibly, okay, probably one of the best reasons to embrace it.
It being the grind of wheels of horror and amazement that the world where we live is finite, as are we, and our finite is even worse, short, and now even shorter still. Like the monk in Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, the one who in screaming about an upcoming invasion of barbarians notes that they will destroy their vineyards, which will mean that they will not have wine for SEVEN years.
The monk tries to impress the need to defend the vineyards and the other monks, resigned to fate, leave it in G-d’s hands as they drop to their knees to pray. The dipsomaniac monk however grabs a displayed cross from the church top, breaks it off and uses the remnants to kill 10,000, or some incredible number, of the invaders, salvaging the wine, along with their futures as wine drinkers.
Yeah…those who are touring are monks like that one screaming out into the firmament that we’re going to fucking show them. And we will, and do.
So if I seem a little out of sorts for the next few weeks know this: yes that IS a gun in my pocket and YES, I am also glad to see you. Even more so if you manage to show up anywhere in Italy.
I’ll be easy to find. I’ll be right there. Muttering. So, approach with a certain amount of…um, caution? Yeah. Caution. Which is good advice, really, for just about anything down here on the toilet bowl we call Earth.
And for an extremely limited time only…the last FIVE Old Man Jiu Jitsu rashguards. Three are XS. Two are Smalls. This is all we have now. The price is $80. First come, first serve basis. Pay below if you are so inclined.
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