I started writing this thing on November 24 of last year. I’m gonna be completely honest here and say that I’m most likely never gonna get around to writing about the rest of Louder Than Life 2023. Sorry if you were looking forward to that for whatever reason. Speaking of Louder Than Life, this year’s lineup has some real duds, but overall, it’s pretty amazing, and I’ll probably write about something at least adjacent to LTL2024 sometime before we actually attend the festival, but for now, I’m doing something else. I don’t really understand it, either.

Highlights of Days 3 and 4 last year include Run the Jewels, Turnstile, Green Day (those dudes know how to close out a motherfucking festival!), The Bronx, Jehnny Beth, and the delightful couple from Australia who chatted us up before that Pantera thing. That Pantera thing sounded good, by the way, and it was cool to hear those songs live again, as they were part of the soundtrack to my angry youth, but we didn’t stay for the whole thing. Sheila said Viagra Boys were great, and I’m really bummed I missed them, but they were overlapping with both Run the Jewels and Turnstile, and I couldn’t not see all that. They were both transcendent, by the way. Another highlight was talking to a younger dude who traveled from New Zealand just to see Turnstile. He got to experience them from the center of the rail, and I was very happy for him.

Anyhoo, I deleted the part where I mentioned how I don’t write enough, and the part where said I was still gonna write about the last two days of LTL2023, and the part where I promised I would do so before the 2024 lineup dropped, and I updated the first part, and lightly edited the whole thing for clarity, spelling, and grammatical errors. Not that any of it matters.

__________________________________________

My friend Chris and I made a book! He drew comics out of three of my dumb/mostly true/pretty funny stories based on my childhood, and he made them so much funnier. It’s called Speaking of…, and it’s a Certified Hoot.* 50 hardcover copies of were made for No Dice Books, and they’re beautiful, if I do say so myself. They’re also sold out. This is one of the things I had to update. If I’d gotten this post up in a timely fashion, you probably could’ve snagged one. Apologies for my delinquency. I was really unhappy at my job at the time, and I just didn’t feel like doing a final edit.

We had a softcover second edition printed too, and at it’s also beautiful, and with only 50 copies in existence, it’s technically just as rare. Its available over at the website, and I also have a few copies available for purchase directly from me. They cost 10 American smackers, plus an extra 5 bones for shipping (unless you buy one directly from me – duh).

If you bought a copy of Speaking of…, THANK YOU! If you’ve read it and enjoyed it, you should 100% check out Chris’ other stuff. It’s all so fucking good. Witch Shit! is on its own plane. It’s so goddamn funny and silly, and I think about it all the time.

The nostalgia that has accompanied the publication of Speaking of… has got me thinking about my childhood lately – like more than usual, even. My childhood seems “normal” to me, but what can that really mean? Alls I really know is it’s the only childhood I had, and it’s been on my mind lately. There was an episode of Bob’s Burgers a couple of months ago about bullying, and it’s one of those very sweet episodes of Bob’s Burgers that they do so very well. The result of all this is that I was thinking about bullying, and how fucked up bullying is, and then I realized that I was relatively lucky in that I wasn’t really bullied much as a kid. There were a few exceptions, though…

The first kid that tried to give me the business was staying at his dad’s house across the road for a few days over the summer. One day we were talking in the front yard, and he threw grass in my hair. I’d just had my bath and gotten dressed to go to kindergarten registration, and I did not appreciate his turd-like behavior. I related this information to him, and asked him to stop. He advised me that he intended to continue with the grass-in-the-hair bullshit, and punctuated this statement with more grass in the hair. I asked him again, nicely, to cease with his fool-acting. He once again did the thing with the grass. I indicated one final time, in a more forceful manner, that I would tolerate no more of his nonsense.

Unfortunately (for him), he’d gone too far to turn back now. He picked one more handful of grass and threw it at me, and I completely snapped. I started yelling and slapping and kicking at him, and he tried to fight back, but aspiring bully or no, he was only six years old, so he was not equipped to understand what was happening to him, and he didn’t let it go on for long before he ran back across the road crying. He told me he was gonna tell his dad, and I think I told him to shut up, then my mom made me come back inside. I honestly don’t recall ever seeing that kid again after that summer. I’m not saying he left town because he was scared of me or anything, but if one of my neighbors freaked out on me the way I freaked out on him, I’d do whatever it took to make sure they didn’t see me again. He definitely had no idea how scared I was about the whole thing.

Once I started kindergarten, there was a kid at my table who insisted on having his box of crayons on top of the stack, and he seemed like he might’ve been up to 23 years old, so I let that one go. I have no memories of him after that, so I have to assume it was an isolated incident, but we never came to blows, and I’m fine with that. I’m a lover, not a fighter.

My third experience with an aspiring bully was this kid who lived next door to us for a while when I was in second grade. He had an older sister, and I’m not sure what his parents did for a living, but I have a vague memory of them moving in, and a very distinct memory of the dad pulling in the driveway in his new Chevette, and grinning at me with a comically large overbite as he asked me “does the neighbors like it?” in the most southern Kentucky accent I can imagine (which happens to be one of my favorite accents, by the way). I do remember that the kid was a bit of shithead, and also that I sometimes hung out with him on account of his age and proximity, and because he had this really cool book about The Empire Strikes Back that had some exclusive behind-the-scenes photos. I’m not made of stone.

Basically, he was just kind of a turd to me most of the time in general, and then one day he kept trying to run me off the road while we were riding bikes. I complained about that during supper, and my dad quickly told me I should whip his ass. My mom was not on board with that, but Dad insisted that if I didn’t make a stand now, I’d be dealing with so much worse later. With regards to my aforementioned “lover not a fighter”-ness, my friend Jeff and I decided the element of surprise would favor me, so Jeff called him over to some other dude’s house around the corner and told him I wanted to talk to him.

We started to walk away toward the house, and I grabbed him, made one wild punch that I’m pretty sure didn’t land (I figure I’d remember if it did), then I freaked out and started yelling and slapping and kicking at him until he ran crying toward the house. The only visible physical injury he sustained was a cut next to his eye from running into the tailgate of the truck in the driveway while he was crying. I have no memories of him after that, although I’m positive that they didn’t move away that night.

Apparently there’s something to be said for losing your shit and yelling and slapping and kicking at someone who is bullying you. It’s obviously not gonna work on everyone, and it’ll likely get you severely injured (or worse) if you try it on the wrong person, but I have to imagine it would end a lot of dumb, avoidable fights early. I went 2-0 with it, and retired a champion. And my overall bully average was .666, which, in addition to being metal as fuck, would be an impressive average for any baseball player. Maybe I should make a series of training videos teaching my patented technique. I’ll call it Freakout!: How to Prevent Fights by Making Your Agressor Think You’re Off Your Nut. Order in the next hour and get a free bonus video, Thanks, You Too: How to Make Any Conversation Awkward in 15 Seconds or Less.

That’s all I got for now. Thanks for reading. And seriously, if you haven’t ordered a copy of Speaking of…, or any of Chris’s other stuff, do that now.

* Hoot certification by the Clockwise Circle Pit Hoot Certification Institute of America, est. 2019.