Thu, 19 May 2005

known
I have four brothers, and of the five of us, I was the only one who was never in a band. Perhaps it’s because I was second-youngest, and because my three older brothers were all so well-defined as musicians, that I felt following behind them would be the surest way to lose what little identity I had. I would tag along with them on school nights, pretend to help wire amps or sell t-shirts, and watch them build a noise which caught everyone unaware, every time, of how much music could change your life, even if only for a few minutes. I knew I couldn’t do that; I could pick up the guitar and play well enough to fool people at parties, but there was a sort of switch inside people which the right frequencies, the right words, the right volume could turn on, and open them to some greater thing, and while I knew what that felt like, I had no idea how to reach that point. I knew I never would.

If I did not join a band, I did not know what else to do. I probably could play football, technically, but it didn’t much grab me, and I wasn’t going to become a drama geek, and I could never get my head around the idea of a car as being anything more than a way of getting from place to place. I tried being a genius, but of the two types of genius I was aware of (the endlessly-working genius, and the gifted from birth genius), I knew I was neither. The closest I ever came was a short-lived fad of wearing a lab coat to school and cackling like a sleep-deped muppet. I started to see the rest of my life as being fundamentally similar to all that had come before. I would be a face in the crowd, that kid at the party no one knew well enough to dislike. Besides, everyone knew I could get them into shows, and I could always get booze, and that’s all it takes to be quasi-popular in high school.

I decided, then, to become a snakecharmer. I would initially perform at parties, and open for local bands, playing primarily for name rocognition and beer. Mostly beer. Since I had no competition, I knew that the only hard part was getting people into it, so before I even had my first escape planned I started working on my banter. I knew I didn’t want to do some kinda retro trip, and I knew I didn’t have a lot of money for a proper cobra, so I initially tried to build a fake snake out of springs and socks, but this resulted in a very poor performance concluding with a whiskey bottle to the right temple. There was no question that I would need a real snake, and that snake had to really be deadly in order to the performance to work. Luckily, I knew a guy who knew a guy who worked for animal control.
(12:24.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #