Thu, 19 May 2005

feign suprise
At what age did I realize I was never going to become a mover/shaker in the online world? The same age as I realized I was never going to become a mover/shaker of any stripe, I suppose, which would be 24, not too long out of school, vaguely aware of usenet and email and irc via dormant vax accounts, living out of a van while playing shitty Ohio clubs that are now long gone. I was in Akron, high on mushrooms, when I heard a voice tell me that I would never be a rock star. I knew this, of course, and would never publically confess to any desire for any stardom whatsoever; we were post-punk noise merchants, after all, no more important than the crowd and all that crap, and certainly I never wanted to be famous in the proper sense. What I wanted was for the right people to know of me, to be able to connect my name to something I had done: “Oh yeah, her, she put out that ep, I remember her”. I wanted to be well-known enough to be able to walk up to people and have them know me just enough that I wasn’t a complete stranger, that they knew of me, in a vague sense, just enough to hold up the initial fragile structure of a conversation. I wanted to be well known enough that if I ended up putting out a new album, years later, some kid in Akron would hear about it, and be all jazzed, like when you see someone you thought was dead or insane of addicted step out of a crowd, settled and stable and glowing. The voice told me that would never happen, and I walked around Akron for hours, in the middle of the night, watching the snow and mumbling “I’m never going to be a rock star”, over and over. The next day we played our final Buddy Holly’s Drummer show and drove home, and I didn’t pick up the guitar again for three years.
(12:12.05.19.2005) [/ana] #