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I Be Trippin’

/ Rev. Joel / 11 Comments

I recently said to my buddy Marcus (as wise a man as I’ve ever known) that I wasn’t writing much lately because I had too many thoughts in my head and I couldn’t decide what to write about, to which he replied “isn’t that what writing is for?” And so here I am on a cold, rainy Saturday, remembering that I started this particular blog with no preconceived notions about what it should be, which means that the fact that I can’t decide what to write about should actually be a benefit to this blog, if not necessarily a benefit to you good people.

Mrs. Circle Pit and I are headed south next week, to visit some friends in Austin, Texas, and I’m extremely excited about that. I lived in Austin from late May 2003 until mid-August 2006, when my first marriage fell apart for a variety of reasons (namely that I married the wrong person), and I haven’t been back since I left, also for a variety of reasons. My time there is well documented in my journals, and I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about revisiting those days in my writing, and this seems like as good a time as any.

A little background: in my early twenties, I decided I wanted/needed to move away from the area I’d lived my entire life. I’d recently watched Twin Peaks for the first time, which went a long way toward instilling a sense of both wonderlust and wanderlust, and I decided to visit my friend Kara in Seattle, in part because I missed her, but also so I could make her drive me to North Bend, where much of the fictional town of Twin Peaks is located in real life.

Everything about the trip was amazing and perfect, and I returned home determined to move there. Spoiler alert: it didn’t happen. If you know me at all, you know that I tend to be both indecisive and lazy, two things that are not good companions to determination. Instead I continued living in my parents’ house, delivering pizza part time, and saving approximately $0.00 toward any kind of life change.

Then one fateful day, my friend Matt got married. Well, the fateful day was actually the day before, when I arrived about 30 minutes early to the rehearsal. There I met Tara, best friend of the bride-to-be, bridesmaid, and all-around cool chick. I sweated my way through some long since forgotten conversation with her (and with the minister, whose conversational skills made mine seem good), and the next day at the reception, I slammed down two rum and cokes so I could work up the nerve to ask her to dance. She accepted my sweaty offer, and we had a nice time, and the next day I sweatily returned to delivering pizza part time while I lived in my parents’ house, where I continued to sweat.

A couple weeks later, fresh off his honeymoon, Matt called me up while I was working and dropped a knowledge bomb on me in a way that is so perfectly Matt. Our conversation – or at least my recollection of it – went something like this:

Matt: “Did you have a nice time at the reception?”

Me: “I did.”

Matt: “Tara had a nice time, too.”

Me: “Oh, cool.”

Matt: “Is that all?”

Me: “Should there be more?”

Matt: “No, I guess not. I’ll just tell Katherine to let Tara know you’re not interested.”

Matt is very good at talking in circles and speaking in riddles; it’s part of what I love about him. And while unrelated this particular conversation, he also likes to argue. I shouldn’t have been surprised when he decided to go to law school. Anyhoo…

Moving the story along: Tara and I started talking on the phone, pretty much every night, and we started making plans for me to visit her in Austin ASAP. Her involvement in grad school got me excited about college for the first time in a long time, and I decided to go back in school for something like the 300th time . I flew down to visit her shortly after the fall semester began, missing a few days of classes in the process, but I had an amazing time, and I fell in love with both the girl and the city. Suddenly, my wanderlust had a real and specific destination.

We spent time together over our Christmas break, and I flew back down to visit her over my spring break the following March. We attended the Bloodshot Records showcase at SXSW while I was there, and it was fucking awesome, and I also spent some time finding an apartment, finally settling on a one-bedroom place one block away from Tara’s apartment.

I had the most enjoyable and successful semester of my long and wasteful state university career (3 A’s and a B+), and moved to Austin less than one month after the semester ended. My dad, my brother, my cousin, and my nephew all helped with the move, which was an exhausting and miserable 18-20 hour experience that I wouldn’t change for the world. They left the next day, and just like that, I was 1,000 miles from home, seemingly forever.

I found a job at an H-E-B, stocking the grocery shelves overnight. It was awful, and it remains the only job I’ve ever quit via the hated “no-call/no-show”. I also decided on a whim (after seeing a commercial on TV) to visit the local culinary school and see what they had to offer, as I’d long had in interest in cooking. Approximately 90 minutes later, they had me signed up to start classes in two weeks.

I won’t go into my experiences at school all that much, except to say that it was not a very good school (they’re actually no longer in business, as they were one of those shady for-profit schools that preys on people like the person I was in 2003), and the bulk of what I learned there was only indirectly related to cooking (Chef Leichter’s stories of cooking in New York City in the early 80s were hilarious and fascinating). I did gain a few things of note, however.

First, I got a job through the school, working full time at a cafeteria (the Harcourt Cafe) in a corporate office building (the Harcourt Building), making coffee, then going on to cook breakfast and lunch for the employees of a company that publishes textbooks for elementary, junior-high, and high school classes. I met some cool people there – both co-workers and customers (I also met some real assholes there) – and I have enough stories from my two-ish years there for at least one more full blog post, but I also learned a lot about cooking while I was there (way more than I learned in school).

Second, I made some friends at school that I’m still friends with today. I’ve lost touch with/completely forgotten about way more of my classmates, but I’m still in contact with a few of them, and they’re good people, and I’m glad that I know them.

The third thing of note that happened to me at culinary school was meeting Alison. She was in my class, and I’d noticed her early on, thinking offhandedly that she seemed funny and was cute, but that was that. We continued on with our schooling, finishing out our year by working together for six weeks in the school’s short-order style cafe. Next thing I know, I’m breaking up with Tara one week before we’re scheduled to move in together. I didn’t handle it well, but in my defense, I’d never broken up with anyone before. Tara was my first girlfriend, which I didn’t mention earlier only because it didn’t fit the flow earlier. I obviously should’ve broken up with her sooner, but I legitimately had no idea how to go about it.

I still feel bad about how the whole thing went down, and I don’t know if she ever thinks about me anymore, but if she does, I’m sure it’s directly related to what an asshole I am, and if that’s the case, she is not wrong about that.

Without a place to live, I ended up moving in with Alison right away, doing little to quell Tara’s suspicions of my infidelity (which for the record were unfounded, at least in a physical sense, though I’d certainly checked out of that relationship emotionally at least a month prior to the breakup). She drunkenly proposed to me on her birthday that August, and I stonededly accepted, and we were joined in unholy matrimony the following January.

In retrospect, I think that’s where we went wrong.

My family and my friends Kara and Katie all traveled down to attend the ceremony and reception, and a good time was had by most. I probably should’ve taken the raging migraine I endured on our short honeymoon as a sign of things to come, but I was too swept up in love and lust.

We kept on keepin on, me working full time at the Harcourt Cafe, her looking for work part of the time and doing who knows what the other part. Her employment status certainly added some strain to our marriage, but I believed in us, or I wanted to, anyway.

When our lease ended, we moved to the south side of town, into what I soon realized was a Section 8 apartment complex (when something seems too good to be true, it probably is). Many shitty adventures awaited us there, but there was a silver lining – Alison got a job! And it was close-ish to my workplace, so we could carpool!

Some of the shitty adventures involved Fred, our downstairs neighbor. Fred was unemployed and on disability, and spent most of his days and nights leaning on the stair railing drinking and smoking, making it nearly impossible for us to enjoy the out-of-doors, as he simply couldn’t not talk to us, or more accurately, at us. The memory of his drunken laugh still makes my skin crawl. His wife, Tammy, was friendly enough, but interacting with her always bummed me out; I could sense the sadness and regret in her eyes and in her voice.

Fred had a shitty mid-90’s Mercury Sable that he outfitted, bafflingly enough, with an alarm. It was a shitty car, owned by a shitty person, so naturally the alarm was shitty. Fred’s goddamn car alarm went off ALL THE DAMN TIME.

Neighborhood kid rides his skatebard down the sidewalk? There goes Fred’s car alarm.

Thundershower rolls through? There goes Fred’s goddamn car alarm.

Garbage truck collects the trash at 5 in the morning? There goes Fred’s motherfucking car alarm. And naturally, Fred was always passed the fuck out when that would happen.

There are many more stories about our year living in the ghetto, but I’ll save them for another time, because I don’t have all day. Suffice to say, the stress of living there (along with with stress of our 20 minute commute to work taking over an hour on the return trip because of the goddamn ridiculous traffic in Austin) definitely added more cracks to the foundation of our union. When that lease ended, we moved back north.

Our new place was much nicer, and it was located such that I could ride my bike to work, which was nice/essential when my car (my beloved 1994 Kia Sephia that I’d driven down there, as well as all over the midwest before I moved to Texas) wouldn’t pass the mandatory state inspection for registration. Alison got a new job somewhere around that time as well, and things were looking up. We moved in on a cold, drizzly February day, and the next morning, I walked out the front door and down the stairs to look around the parking lot, only to slip on some ice on the bottom step, bust my ass, and spill my coffee. Like that honeymoon headache, the incident should’ve set off warning alarms.

Time marched on, and Alison started talking about this new friend from work who she thought would be a good match for our friend Leah. She arranged for the two of them to come over and hang out one night, and there was no obvious chemistry between them, but looking back with that perfect 20/20 vision afforded by hindsight, I can see the faintest beginnings of what eventually culminated in Alison leaving our house to stay with him while I spent my last two weeks in town packing up my stuff and waiting for my dad and my cousin to drive back down and help me move back home, because she and I now resided in Splitsville, USA.

I wrote a poem about us:

You never changed your maiden name

I never got that matching tattoo

Neither of us ever did a goddamn thing

We said we were gonna do

I spent my last week there staying with my buddy Steve, who also let me keep all my shit in his garage while I worked out my notice at my job. In the early evening hours of August 18, 2006, my dad and cousin arrived in a rented van, we loaded up all my worldly possessions (aside from some junk I left behind on purpose, in part so she’d have to deal with throwing it away or otherwise figuring out what to do with it), and drove up to Waco, where we stopped to stay for the night. Next morning we lit out for home, taking a very long, not-even-remotely-on-the-way detour to Springfield, Missouri, so they could see the Bass Pro Shops National Headquarters. Given the situation, I was in no position to protest their decision, but to say I was unhappy about adding a couple hours of drive time to what already seemed like a 15,000 hour trip would be putting it mildly.

At any rate, we arrived at my parents’ house very late on August 19th (or possibly very early on August 20th), and Dad drove me to Bloomington the following afternoon and helped me unload the van into my new place, and a brand new chapter of my life began just as quickly as the last one had ended. That chapter may or may not be related here another time.

Long story short, I’m now happily married to the love of my life (going on 10 years!), and in just a little under 68 hours, I’ll be back in Austin for the first time in 13 1/2 years, and as I mentioned previously, I’m very excited. I’m gonna visit Austin Books and Comics and Waterloo Records and Amy’s Ice Cream and maybe Magnolia Cafe and I’M SO EXCITED! Also, I won’t be at work, and that’s definitely a bonus.

I do hope I don’t run into Tara or Alison, but it is a possibility, because as far as I know, all my ex’s do, in fact, live in Texas.

Thanks for reading, y’all. Until next time…

Disappointing You is Getting Me Down

/ Rev. Joel / 3 Comments

The last few years have been tough, friends. On June 29, 2016, my oldest sister was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She fought like a bastard against nearly insurmountable odds (the five-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer is a mere 9%), and managed to live about 4 months longer than her doctor estimated, but it finally overtook her one year later, on June 29, 2017.

My relationship with her, while not terrible, was not necessarily great prior to her diagnosis. She was married to a loudmouthed know-it-all jackass conman who was almost certainly cheating on her while she was dying, and when he was around, the whole family operated on a scale ranging from uncomfortable to angry. His presence made me want to be around her less, and the influence he held over her by virtue of paying attention to her (her first husband, while not a bad guy, was not so good at that) was distressing to say the least.

In addition to her lazy shitbird husband, she left behind three sons (the youngest of which – who we’ll call “F” – was born with severe developmental disabilities). The two younger boys (F and “J”) were adopted half-brothers with the same birth mother. They’re only about 2 years apart in age, so they were kind of raised together no matter what, with the result being that J was treated as if he, too, needed help constantly, and with everything he did.

I think having two people who were totally dependent on her for survival helped my sister cope with life.

At any rate, F and “Z”, the oldest son, went to live with their dad (Husband #1) after her death, while J came to live with Mrs. Circle Pit and me while he finished out his senior year of high school. The year following my sister’s death was a challenging year for my family for a lot of reasons, but personally, being a sudden surrogate parent to a teenage boy who wasn’t raised with the capacity or inclination to think or do anything for himself made my first year without her much harder than it would’ve otherwise been. Thankfully we had my parents (especially my mom), and Mrs. Circle Pit’s family to help, otherwise who knows how this story would’ve ended.

And speaking of my mom, after years of health issues brought on by a lifetime of heavy smoking (which she had given up 13 years prior, after her first heart attack), she went into a coma brought on by cardiac arrest, and after two days of watching her health continue to decline, the ragtag band that makes up the rest of my immediate family made the unimagineable and excruciating decision to take her off life support. She passed minutes after her breathing tube was removed, on June 29, 2018. I’m certain she died of a broken heart.

If you’re keeping track, that’s 3 major and majorly terrible life-altering events on the same godforsaken day three years in a row.

I opted to not be in the room when they took Mom off life support, but I did go back in the room afterward, and that memory will forever live in my brain as perhaps/hopefully the most surreal experience of my life. I had become accustomed to a wide variety of noises in her room over the prior two days – lots of beeping, humming, whirring, the steady *kkkkkhhhhh-SSSHHHHHH* of the oxygen being forced into her lungs – and the absolute, utter, void-like silence that greeted me the last time I saw my sweet mother outside a casket hit me like a freight train, and frankly, I haven’t been quite the same since. It was a difficult decision to walk into that room, but it was something I needed to do, and I don’t regret it.

What’s the point of all this? Contrary to how it may seem, I’m not trying to make you sad, dear reader. I’m just laying down a primer coat on which to paint a thing about how music has quite literally saved my life many, many times over the past few years. Music is undeniably my religion, and has always been the most important thing in my life after family and friends, so it’s always played a role in keeping me sane, but I don’t know if I would’ve survived these past two years especially without some of the songs I’m gonna share with y’all now.

I plan to write more about Sturgill Simpson another time, but what you need to know for now is that I got to see him live the night before the last time I talked to my mom in person, and his show was absolutely fucking life-affirming, so I already had him firmly on my side going into the maelstrom. I saw the face of God while Sturgill and his band played that night, and his music (in particular his third album, A Sailor’s Guide to Earth, which he wrote as a sort of letter from the road to his then-infant son) provided the soundtrack to those days in the hospital and days, weeks, and months after Mom’s passing.

“Breakers Roar” in particular reminds me of the days leading up to her death, especially in the final lines. I can clearly picture myself sitting in my car in the hospital parking garage when those lines presented themselves to me so vividly.

Bone breaks and heals
Oh, but heartaches can kill
From the inside, so it seems.
Oh, I'm telling you it's all a dream.
It's all a dream
It's all a dream
It's all a dream
It's all a dream
It's all a dream

The third-to-last song on the album, “All Around You”, has been speaking to me since the first time I really paid attention to the lyrics, which happened at some point during those 2-3 days in the hospital (the timeline in my memories is unreliable at best – grief and lack of sleep will do that to you). I’m gonna share the lyrics in their entirety after the video, which is (obviously?) not the album version, but which is my very favorite version of this song that I’ve heard yet (it’s actually one of my favorite versions of any song I’ve ever heard). The original is great too, as is the video, and I highly recommend you check both of them out.

There will be days when the sun won't shine
When it seems like the whole world is against you
Don't be afraid when life is unkind
You can let go of the pain if you choose to
'Cause time slips away and skies fall apart
Revealing to all a universal heart
Glowing
Flowing
All around you

There will be nights that go on forever
Like you're alone, lost at sea, never to be found
Just know in your heart that we're always together
And long after I'm gone I'll still be around
'Cause our bond is eternal and so is love
God is inside you, all around you, and up above
Knowing
Showing
You the way

Time slips away and skies fall apart
Revealing to all a universal heart
Glowing
Flowing
All around you

So Sturgill helped me truck along through a pretty dismal second half of 2018, and I entered 2019 feeling much better about things in general. The fact that I had a shitload of live music on my docket earlier this year didn’t hurt at all. Since March of 2019, I’ve seen the follwing bands/artists live (sort of in the order that I saw them):

  • Metallica (First time!)
  • Clutch (Ninth time?)(!)
  • Big Business (So good!)
  • Death Angel (Fifth and sixth times! A force to be reckoned with!)
  • Mothership (Major fuckin riffs from Texas!)
  • Overkill (First time!)
  • Eyehategod (Second time! Unfuckingdeniable!)
  • Iron Maiden (Third time! The fucking greatest!)
  • Crowbar (First time! So heavy!)
  • Corrosion of Conformity (Second time! Much better than the first!)
  • Sacred Reich (First time! I never thought I’d see the day!)
  • Savage Master (Kickass traditional metal from Louisville, KY!)
  • The Mountain Goats (Unbelieveably good!)
  • Anti-Flag (“Die for your country, that’s shit!”)
  • Suicidal Tendencies (Third time! Suicidal for life!)
  • Ice Cube (I danced so hard I fucked up my back for a week!)
  • Andrew W.K. (Friendliest circle pit I’ve ever seen!)
  • Guns ‘n’ Roses (The band sounded great, but Axl can suck it!)
  • plus lots of local openers
  • I might be forgetting one or more others.

Judging solely by that list, 2019 has been a hell of a good year, and that’s mostly true. But while a surface view of my emotional state the past year or so would indicate a relatively stable, happy individual, these past few months I’ve been stricken with a pretty heavy case of sadness and dismay (malaise, if you will), the cause of which I can’t quite nail down. I hesitate to call what I’m experiencing “depression”, because that seems heavier than what I’ve been feeling, but I can’t say for certain that it isn’t depression. Whatever it is, it’s trying its damnedest to hang on, and I wish it would fuck off already.

Seeing Suicidal Tendencies live back in September (at an outdoor festival where I legitimately thought I might die from heatstroke or dehydration or exposure or dust inhalation or some combination thereof) reminded me how fucking good and important their music and message are. That quote from up yonder at the top of this page (“Life can be hard. Be harder.”) was gifted to us from Cyco Miko that day.

I was on a major ST kick up until about 2-3 weeks ago, and as he has done many times before, Mike Muir played a major role in helping me get my shit correct. I plan to write more about Suicidal Tendencies in the future as well, but for now, a few of the songs that kept me going…

“You Can’t Bring Me Down” is likely the band’s best-known song after “Institutionalized”, and for my money, it’s one of their best. It’s the opening track on their 1990 masterpiece Lights…Camera…Revolution!, and it serves as their show opener to this day.

The album prior to Lights… was something of a breakthrough for the band, and the addtion of rythm guitarist Mike Clark brought about the completion of their evolution from hardcore punk to thrash metal. I didn’t hear most of 1988’s How Will I Laugh Tomorrow When I Can’t Even Smile Today until about 10 years ago, but I definitely remember reading about it in magazines when it came out. I can say with certainty that I’m a better person for having finally gotten into it.

Album opener “Trip At the Brain” is one of my favorites, and is a textbook Suicidal song – lyrics combining positivity with confessions of human error, all packed into a fast, explosive earworm of a motherfucker of a song. Plus the video features a cameo by John Cusack!

One more from Suicidal, this one from 1992’s The Art of Rebellion, their most commercially successful album (it peaked at #52 on the Billboard Top 200 album chart, and has been certified gold by the RIAA). You might’ve heard “Nobody Hears” on the radio back in the day; it’s one of only two ST songs to reach the Billboard Top 40 (the other is “I’ll Hate You Better”, from the same album).

"I'm screaming inside, why can't you hear?
Nobody hears
You're looking right through me like I'm not here
Nobody hears"

My Suicidal kick morphed pretty seamlessly about 2-3 weeks ago into a Hip kick. I plan to write more about The Tragically Hip another time as well (oh, I’ve got plans, friends), but here are the basics:

  • They formed in Kingston, Ontario, Canada in 1984.
  • They had the same lineup from 1986 until 2017, when they broke up following the untimely death of their lead singer/lyricist/all-around amazing human being Gord Downie, who died from a brain tumor at the age of 53. Fuck cancer so hard.
  • They were massively popular in Canada, but were mostly unknown in the United States. (Their final concert in 2016 was broadcast and streamed live by the CBC and was watched/listened to live by 11.7 million people. It’s amazing and you should watch all of it.)

Though I’ve been aware of them since at least the mid-90’s, I sadly didn’t start getting into The Hip until about two months ago. A casual mention on Letterkenny (which you should be watching) finally compelled me to visit Google Play Music, where I clicked on the most popular song there, “Wheat Kings”, from their massive and massively important 1993 album Fully Completely. It wasn’t what I was expecting, but I loved it immediately. Unconventional vocals coupled with jangly chords are one of my primary musical weaknesses (the other being unconventional vocals coupled with badass riffs), and while Gord’s vocals are much more unique on other Hip songs, “Wheat Kings” stands as a master class in jangle.

Reading up on the band, and more specifically about Downie’s cancer diagnosis and their final tour, has helped my mental state as well. The way Gord Downie continued to face and fight each and every day until his passing has stood as an inspiration to me, as well as a reminder that no matter how shitty things may seem to me in the moment, they could certainly be worse. You’d think that the challenges of my previous three years would be enough of a reminder of those things, but you’d be mistaken. Being human and all, I need pretty constant reminders regarding what does and does not matter in this life, and Gord Downie’s story, like my sisters’, serves as one of those reminders.

Downie’s lyrics, too, have really had a major impact on my life over the past couple of months. Here are a few of my current favorites…

“Fiddler’s Green” was inspired by Downie’s young nephew, who died of a heart condition during the recording of the band’s second full-length album, 1991’s Road Apples. According to the great and infallible source that is Wikipedia, “Fiddler’s Green is a legendary afterlife where there is perpetual mirth, a fiddle that never stops playing, and dancers who never tire. In 19th-century maritime folklore it was a kind of afterlife for sailors who have served at least 50 years at sea.”

I’m particularly taken by the line “the same wind that moves her hair moves her boy through Fiddler’s Green”. I think of it when I sit on my porch swing and the wind moves the chimes my mom gave me.

The second album I listened to was 1996’s Trouble in the Henhouse. It’s a great album, and quite honestly sounds as much like the year 1996 as I can imagine anything sounding, in the best possible way. “Ahead By a Century” is one of the band’s best-known songs, was the last song they ever played live, and was the most-played song on radio stations across Canada on the day Gord Downie left us to walk among the stars.

"No dress rehearsal, this is our life..."

My absolute jam this past week or so has been Fully Completely. The entire album really is amazing, but if I had to narrow it down to three favorites, I suppose I’d go with the bouncing opener “Courage (for Hugh MacLennan)”, “We’ll Go Too”, and the aforementioned “Wheat Kings”.

"There's no simple
Explanation
For anything important
Any of us do
And, yeah, the human
Tragedy
Consists in
The necessity
Of living with
The consequences
Under pressure
Under pressure

Courage
My word
It didn't come
It doesn't matter..."

I’m not sure why “We’ll Go Too” jumped out at me one night while I was listening to the album at work, but I’m glad it did.

"Museum's locked
And it's long since past closing
You cannot know
You cannot not know
What you're knowing

What can you do?
They've all gone
We'll go too..."

And here’s a live version I highly recommend:

“Wheat Kings”, like much of The Hip’s work, is very much about Cananda. More specifically, it’s about the wrongful conviction and eventual release (20 years later) of a man named David Milgaard. It’s an interesting and infuriating story.

"Twenty years for nothing well that's nothin new, besides
No one's interested in something you didn't do
Wheat kings and pretty things
Let's just see what the morning brings..."

As much as it pains me that I took so long to come around to The Tragically Hip, and to think about the fact that I’ll never get to see them live, I know myself well enough to know that I wouldn’t have appreciated them back then anyway. Like many amazing and mystical things, they presented themselves to me when I needed them most.

Again I ask: what’s the point of all this? The answer, as usual: hell if I know. I just had some shit on my mind, and I wanted get it out. I suppose if I had to draw a conclusion from all this – a thesis statement, if you will – it would be that music is fucking important. It’s the true universal language, and without it, so many lives would be hollow, or worse, non-existent.

What are some songs that help you make it through the hard times and the bullshit? Share them in the comments, won’t you?

Thanks for reading, friends. See you next time.

Open This Pit

/ Rev. Joel / Leave a comment

Did you know that 95% of the time, circle pits move counter-clockwise? It’s true! It’s science! And as seen in the video below, they even run counter-clockwise in the southern hemisphere! What the fuck does that have to do with anything, you ask? That’s a fair question, and I’ll answer it in time.

Until then, welcome to Clockwise Circle Pit! I’m your host, Rev. Joel. You might recognize me from my other blog, Stay Heavy (“All heavy, all the time.”), but you also might not. Either way, I was finding my self-created boundaries for that blog to be a bit stifling, re: my writing. For whatever reason, I haven’t been moved to write as much about heavy music lately, and since my blog is about heavy music, I just haven’t written as much. That seems silly, even to me – like, it’s my blog, why not just do whatever I want with it, right? If you don’t like it, you don’t have to read it.

But rules exist for a reason, people!

The fact is, sometimes what’s on my mind isn’t necessarily heavy, musically or emotionally, and sometimes what I’m listening to isn’t musically heavy at all. I thought about it for a while, then I didn’t think about it for a while, lather, rinse, repeat, and ultimately it seemed sensible to give myself a different outlet for those ideas and thoughts.

If you’ve read anything on Stay Heavy, it should be crystal clear that I will never not love heavy music, and I don’t plan to abandon that blog anytime soon, because it’s somehow still getting between 10 and 30 views per day, even though I haven’t updated it in over two months. I may still post there when the subject calls for it, but as of this moment, I plan to give most of my new posts a home here instead.

To answer your question from earlier, here’s what the fuck this has to do with clockwise circle pits: it’s been clear to me for the bulk of my life that I see things differently than most people. I’ve been misunderstood by “regular” people since I was a little kid, and I’ve always been drawn to outcasts, weirdos, and misfits. They often seem to be drawn to me, as well. Clockwise circle pits are uncommon in the world, and I am, too.

To all the weirdos, freaks, goobers, ding-dongs, oddballs, and awkward motherfuckers out there, I hope you’ll jump into this Clockwise Circle Pit with me. I’ll be figuring it out as I go, and it’ll be confusing at times, but we’ll make it work, and hopefully we’ll have some fun.

Now that I’m thinking about it, the rules for life are kinda like the rules for a circle pit, Clockwise or otherwise:

  • Have fun.
  • Don’t be an asshole.
  • If someone falls, help them up.
  • Don’t pull someone in if they don’t wanna be there.
  • Stay hydrated.
  • Nazi punks fuck off.

Let’s open this fucking pit up!