Words by Nips
*zniffff* “I always thought introductions were overrated.” Pinch the bridge of my nose as I lift my head from the dirty mirror. Jostle my nostrils between my chipped paint on cracked fingernails. The ash falling from my half-burnt Camel. “It always seemed more real gettin’ to know somebody through observation. Just bein’ there. Ya know?” The mass of half working guitar pedals blocking the gunked up view of myself in the mirror. Recycled mass of vomit culture drippin’ in bell bottoms and Hawaiian shirts. I never really asked Ig Byrd Brother and the Sweetheart of the Rodeo about themselves. Just knew they moved up here from Florida. But knew by the fuzz they reverberated in my bedroom during shows, they knew what I mean when I said this.
See. I had worked myself into this delusion my senior year of high school, I had to write the next great American semi-autobiographical existential crisis. I’ve written anthologies of half-baked drafts of this. Whether they be spoken into a tape recorder in my living room. Or scrawled on a pad of Tops rolling papers. But never got more of an inkling of characters. Characters facing this same dead end cliff hanger I’ve had waking nightmares of. And maybe because I never took the time to get to know them. Ask them about themselves.
But Keourac did that shit. I figured it would only be a matter of time before one of us figured out how to write it down. He saw what was happening before his very own glossy, bloodshot eyes. He was able to scribble that feeling into the margins of a fuckin’ scroll. And that was somebody’s kid. As much they didn’t want it to be. It could be anyone of us that immortalized this brief splice of life, exposose of space and time and the whole damn continuum. Somebody just needed to be there to document it.
So that’s what I set out to do. Document this shit. Document the trees growing through the brick of mildew drenched basements we go into for the sake of tone. Ballsy enough to walk up to an insect and smash it with our bare hands. Document the struggles of rolling a piano down a pothole filled alley. Document the rides home from a friend when we trip down the Lynchian rabbit holes of our psyches. This is what we fuck up our sleep schedules for! Cause all the pieces were there to jigsaw it back together. The vague glimpses of beauty in each other's humanity.
Maybe I just never had the free time to sit at length with myself. Just exist with myself. And come to terms with the cliffhanger at the end of my own road. Maybe it was just my own fear keeping me from doing it. But maybe I just never got to know the character’s enough. Never took the time to ask them about themselves. And get to know them beyond the vague glimpse of beauty I saw in all their humanity. How do you write a character’s ending when you haven’t even gotten to know them yet? Or if they’ve even gotten to know themselves. How do you write the ending when the story is still happening before your very own glossy, black hole pupils?
At the end of the day. We’d all prefer not knowing the ending instead of being let down by the sudden cliffhanger at the dead-end of the road.
How well can you really get to know someone when you only get the perspective from your window and not their eye view?
“I’m just merely observing.” Baby Audobahn the Mad Organ Grinder says this setting down a glass of home brewed yerba. Sparking a joint behind his synth dungeon. The son of the professor that got me looking at the world through a different camera. (And that joke only lands if you knew he was my film teacher. Because you don’t really know me yet.) “I don’t know the answers. I’m just observing. Just like you are.” The last of the scene not to be crippled by nicotine addiction.
Him and his roommate got me listenin’ to a lotta Neil Young records. “Everybody knows this is nowhere...” Neil’s voice warbles in my head as we smoke DMT on the beach. Trespassing under a boardwalk with a smiley face painted on it. During the pandemic of 2020. The whole world currently on lockdown. But we’ve been frozen at the border of nowhere and infinity for a while now.
We’re rippin’ molded wood from the roots of concrete trees to build our own isolation booth. Lightnin’ bugs in the house, our only light to the outside world. A room to be alone with the sounds and screams we make into the void. Hoping someone replies. Or there’s at least a slight echo. That we aren’t the only ones observing we’re trapped. No matter how many brilliant ideas we attempt to make this absurdity mean something. Anything! We don’t need an answer. Just the observation there’s another isolation booth screaming in the void too.
“I don’t wanna know the answer to that…” the Guilty Undertaker ashes into the piano from 1943 while taping the entire experience on a Fostex. A contraption I still wish was more than just a robot to me. Anything made before 1990 was meant to double as an ashtray. “Ignorance is bliss, yeah I like where I’m at.” They sing this song behind a new pair of sunglasses after shattering the old lens with a drunken foot. Shoelaces tied back together. And hearing this vocal track is comforting. It’s reassuring.
It doesn’t matter if anyone else ever hears that reel. It doesn’t matter if it was documented or not. It doesn’t matter if it’s a scroll of amphetamine folklore we taught ourselves. A 4chan urban legend. Or anything else. It doesn’t matter if the cliffhanger is the end of the story. Or if “On the Way There” is it’s own destination. It doesn’t matter if we can even get the answers. At least we know we’re not alone. And there’s a couch to crash on nearby in case a closed bedroom starts to feel like an isolation chamber. Freezing us in a moment of just merely existing.
We might all just be characters in our own semi-autobiographical existential crisis. Inconsistent. Incomplete. Our own gunked up reflection in somebody else's dirty mirror. But through the coke and fuzz pedals. Seeing fractal trace visuals of our own beautifully fragmented glimpse of humanity. The validation isn’t that somebody else reads our novel. Hears our screams. Or sees our mirror. Just that they too, like us, are trapped in their own lens of unassuredness. After all, it’s not our fault some fish decided to step outta water and now we’re all just vague inklings of characters to some nervous breakdown. Struggling to pay rent and make sense of it all. At the same damn time! We’re all just waiting for Ashton Kutcher to wholesomely flashback us to the 2000s and yell “punk’d!” on the cruel prank of existence.