(this is something i wrote in high school.  it seems likely that i thought it was really funny then, and when i stumbled across it earlier tonight i smiled, for reasons i’m not totally sure of)

Cast

A: main character
E: wife of A
I: daughter of A and E
O: burglar, attempts to rob A, E and I’s house
U: wacky neighbor of A, E and I

Setting: A, E and I’s living room

——————————————————————————-

Curtain Opens– A, E and I are sitting in their living room watching television on a Saturday morning/night. All are still wearing their pajamas.

A- I certainly do enjoy sitting in my own home on a Saturday morning night watching cartoons with my wife, E (motions to E), and my daughter, I (motions to I)!

(I nods, smiling.)

E- Yes, A, my husband, as do we!

I- Life is good!

(A and E nod violently, smiling)

(Suddenly, the door is kicked open-
basically a door just comes flying
in from some side of the stage)
(O comes in)

A, E and I– We are surprised and scared! Who are you?!

O- My name is O! I am a robber! I am robbing your house!

(A, E and I scream)

A- I hope you do not hurt us!

E- As do I! I mean, I, like, me, not my daughter, whose name is ‘I’! We will cooperate!

O- That sounds good! Now I will rob you!

I- I am young and do not appreciate the danger we are in! I will not cooperate!

(I runs up to O and punches him
in the leg and begins to run
around the couch)

O- Ouch!

(O chases her around the couch)

E- Oh my! What should we do?!

A- We must save our daughter from the inept burglar!

(A and E begin to run around the couch
as well, chasing O as he chases I)
(All four scream wildly as they run)
(U appears on whatever side of the stage
the door came from)

U- (obnoxiously) What is goin’ on?!

(A, E, I and O continue running and screaming)

I just thought I’d come over and see what is goin’ on! I mean, I, like, ya know, me, not the child, whose name is ‘I’!

(U tries to get into the circle, but
accidentally knocks down and knocks out O)
(A, E, I, and U stop running and
look at the unconscious O)

A- U! Your bumbling has saved the day!

U- I am outta here now!

(U runs as fast as he can off in
the direction he entered)

A- That was quite an adventure! I am-

U- (yelling from off-stage) When I said ‘I,’ I meant me my own self, still not the child, whose name is ‘I’! I myself am outta here now!

A- (yelling to U off-stage) We understand! Thank you!
(pause)
(to E and I)
That was quite an adven-

U- Was you talkin’ to me just now?! Ya know, when you said ‘you’?! Was that like ‘U,’ as in me, or ‘you,’ like you was talkin’ to someone else?!

(long pause, A is unsure what to say in response)

Hey! Are you gonna answer?! By which I mean ‘you,’ the person what I axed the question to just now, not ‘U,’ like what’s my own name like as if I was talking to myself over here!

A- Yes! We understand!

U- And ‘I,’ bein’ me, U, not da child, whose name is ‘I’!

A- Yes! You are clear, U! I, meaning me, myself, and not my own daughter, whose name is ‘I,’ did mean you, U, when I said ‘thank you’! However, for the sake of clarity, what I, myself, and not my own daughter, whose name is ‘I,’ meant when I said ‘Thank you’ was to give thanks to you, whose name is ‘U,’ rather than the exclamation ‘Thank U!,’ like I, meaning me, myself, and not my own daughter, whose name is ‘I,’ might say ‘Thank God!’ Both options would actually make sense in this situation, so I, meaning me myself and not my own daughter whose name is ‘I’ wanted to make sure that you, meaning ‘U’ whose name is ‘U,’ understood precisely!!!

U- Yep!

(loud gunfire is heard from whatever side of off-stage U left from)

A- That was quite an adventure! I am relieved no one was hurt!

E- As am I! Again, I mean ‘I’ as in, me, not like ‘I’ as in my daughter, whose name is I!

I- Me too!

A- Let’s celebrate our lives with something to eat!

E- But, A, we have no food to eat!

A- Not to worry E, my wife! We will just eat this wicked man who broke into our home!

I- (distraught) But father! This man is too big to fit into our oven!

A- (chuckles) Everything will be alright, my daughter! We will simply cut him up into smaller pieces!

(A, E and I laugh heartily)
(Curtain closes)

END~

as a general rule, i’m against of the use of quotes to communicate one’s identity or personal philosophy. like using quotes from famous people as email signatures or at the start of a journal or a personal motto or the like. the whole idea just seems suspect. like, anything that’s catchy and punchy enough to stand on its own as a quote is unlikely to be complex enough to, on its own, communicate an idea that’s thoughtful enough for me to feel comfortable co-signing. no matter how brilliant it is, on its own it will be shallow and inadequate as an approach to life, you know? like you’re trying to express the unpredictable beauty, horror and chaos of life on a fucking bumper sticker. even SHIT HAPPENS doesn’t seem adequate.

there’s an amazing quote from James Baldwin about humanity that i’ve always been very enamored of because, when i read it, i immediately and instinctively felt that, as much as anything i’d ever encountered, it was something that i always knew was the truth. i actually almost made it my email signature at one point, but even that seemed inadequate. this probably says more about me than anything else (like how everything is mostly talking about me, however incompletely and inadequately), but every time i come across a clever, insightful line that immediately hits me as some perfectly crafted expression of reality, i’m immediately uneasy, and i want to question not only the quote itself, but my own self for being so taken with it in the first place.

honestly, i’m even uncomfortable taking a whole work and saying that it’s somehow a perfect representation of life or a person, even the actual person who wrote it, let alone another person. i guess i’m just really dubious about the idea that all the complexities and contradictions of life, or of a real human being might be somehow communicated through a single quote or even an entire single work of art.

that being said, this shit right here is all of me:

A-higgedy-hoy there matey, I giggedy-gots to flow
My Saturday nights are live-er than Joe Piscopo
So yo, siggedy-save the bait for Charlie Tuna
See I be the boogie banger, like Esiason’s the Boomer

there’s nothing else to be said. tbh. ngl.

good to meet you.

Faith No More was my favorite band when i was in high school.  even after Pavement (or R.E.M., depending on how i felt on a particular day) became my real favorite band, i still kept saying it was Faith No More.

they put out an EP when i was a sophomore called Songs to Make Love To (which is a great title, if obviously inferior to Big Black’s Songs About Fucking).  it had great cover art, with the silhouette of two rhinos, one mounting the other, framed against a setting sun (even if, again, Big Black’s record is superior in that regard, as well).  it’s pretty much a lark, with only four songs that bear little resemblance to the band’s usual sound.  there’s a pleasant, but boring cover of “Easy” by the Commodores, a silly polka song that Mike Patton sings in German, a cover of the Dead Kennedys’ “Let’s Lynch the Landlord” done as a waltz, and a straightforward cover of the theme from Midnight Cowboy, which also appears on their record Angel Dust.  it’s pretty much a nothing, just a fun little oddity.  but i bought it, and i did my best to love it, because it came right after Angel Dust, which was (and still is) my favorite record of all time.  really, beyond simply being habit, Angel Dust was the reason i kept calling Faith No More my favorite band, long after they had ceded that distinction in my heart and mind.

i had become a fan of Faith No More in junior high, when their record The Real Thing came out and was popular.  it became popular on the strength of the song “Epic,” which merged rap and metal and featured a terrible video with a fish flopping around on the ground, hands with eyeballs in their palms, and an exploding piano.  they were on Saturday Night Live.  i taped it.  i said they were one of my favorite bands, though, honestly, i think i said that because my other favorite bands at the time were Guns n’ Roses and Metallica, and all my friends who i talked to music about said their favorite bands were Guns n’ Roses and Metallica.  i think i just needed to latch onto something that wasn’t already claimed by seemingly everyone else in the world, and Faith No More was it.

since they were one of my favorite bands, i set about buying up all their records i could find (pre-internet, in a smaller town) and patiently waited for their next record.  which was Angel Dust.

when Angel Dust came out, i had moved on to high school, and, as one does, i began to try to figure out who i was and who i wanted to be.  i had no fucking clue what the answer was to those questions, but i did know who i didn’t want to be, and that was every single person i was friends with in junior high.  i didn’t want to be them or be around them, and i quickly shed all of my old friends so i could get about my business of being disaffected.  music-wise, the advent of grunge and rise of alternative rock helped me start to identify myself further (though i never really got past the phase of defining myself in opposition to others until well after high school).  into this solipsistic void, Angel Dust appeared.

i did not like Angel Dust at first.  it was one of the first CDs i ever owned (after AC/DC’s Razor’s Edge, Guns n’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion I and II, and right before Pearl Jam’s Ten (i actually bought it in one of those stupid cardboard long boxes that CDs were originally sold in), and it was, in retrospect, too much.  the songs were too dense and too weird to appreciate.  i knew i liked “Midlife Crisis,” the record’s lead single, so i listened to that song on repeat and mostly ignored the rest.  i listened to the following song, “RV,” occasionally, because the lyrics and vocal performance were interesting, but i rarely went beyond that.  i wanted to like it, i really did, but it was just too strange.  i wasn’t the only one who felt this way, with the record being referred to (in retrospect) “one of the more complex and simply confounding records ever released by a major label.”

if this had been another band, it probably would have ended there, with just that single song remaining in the back of my head while the record and band faded away.  just a story of a band i use to like for a little minute.  but i had sort of claimed this band in junior high, so i was more invested that i might usually be.  also (again, in retrospect), i think there was something about the fact that Angel Dust seemed to be met with total and complete disinterest by everyone else that made me want to like it.  i barely saw the video for “Midlife Crisis” on MTV, and when i did it was almost exclusively on Headbanger’s Ball, and they were never on 120 Minutes (which had already become my preferred show).  (they performed “Caffeine” on MTV’s afternoon live show, which i was frustrated to miss because i couldn’t get home from school in time.)  it was like they had gotten too weird for everyone, which is more or less how i felt about myself at the time, so i think that made me want to like them enough not to give up on a record that, otherwise, i probably would have given up on.  it became a matter of principle: people don’t like Faith No More anymore, and i’m not like people, so i need to like Faith No More.  after a couple months (during which i listened to lots of the regular stuff that teenage white boys were listening to in 1992), i redoubled my efforts and tried my best to love Angel Dust.  this time, it worked.

Angel Dust is like the exact opposite of Songs to Make Love To; it’s more like Songs to Set Your Teeth On Edge To.  the music is dark, heavy, dense and dramatic.  much of the record is hard and up-tempo, but i can’t imagine anyone pumping their fist to this music.  it’s not a record that offers any release– if anything, it produces anxiety in the listener.  the songs smash together disparate styles of music, but the overall sound of the record is remarkably consistent.  it’s dramatic, confrontational and aggressive, and it seems to have no interest in producing any kind of catharsis for the listener, because, while the aggression is ever-present, it’s the exact opposite of thoughtless.  you can’t have fun, because you have to sit up, pay attention, and try to understand what in the exact hell going on.  Angel Dust overwhelms you and pummels you.

that being said, it’s also fascinating and rewarding.  after i was able to adjust myself to what the record does offer (rather than what i went into it expecting), it’s as deep and rich as anything i’ve ever heard.  Angel Dust definitely isn’t for everyone, but the cult following the record has is more than deserved.  i still listen to it regularly, and i will still occasionally discover something , some sound buried underneath the cacophony, that i haven’t noticed before.  every song on the record has been my favorite at one point, except for the cover of the Midnight Cowboy theme, which, again seems too straightforward and almost like an opportunity for a listener to come down after the whole preceding ordeal of listening to the rest of the record.  it’s not a nice record, and it makes you work hard to appreciate it.

sometimes, the record doesn’t seem like it’s even interested in the fact that someone might be interested in listening to it.  one of my favorite stories about Angel Dust is one that i actually just learned relatively recently, after the band reformed and released a new record.  for years (decades, i guess), i had wondered about the lyrics to the song “Be Aggressive,” which is about homosexual sadomasochism as a metaphor for i don’t know what.  Mike Patton is screaming “I swallow” over and over, but i could never figure out what the song was actually about.  after i had purchased tickets to see the reformed band perform in Dallas, i was just on the internet looking at various things written about them, and i stumbled across this explanation of “Be Aggressive” from the band’s keyboardist, Roddy Bottum (who, apparently, wrote the song’s lyrics): “(The lyrics are about) Swallowing. It was a pretty fun thing to write, knowing that Mike was going to have to put himself on the line and go up onstage and sing these vocals.”  so, contrary to my expectations, the song has no deeper significance; swallowing a dude’s cum is swallowing a dude’s cum is swallowing a dude’s cum.   this anecdote is perfectly in keeping with the persona the band created for itself: they’re more interested in doing what’s fun to them, even to the point of fucking with the audience.  (they also had a famously testy relationship with each other, though this example seems to be more about mischief than hostility.)

i suppose that’s why i identified with it so strongly in high school.  it kind of lines up with who i thought i was.  i listened to all the stuff everyone else was listening to, but, underneath all that, i was complicated and intimidating.  fools didn’t know what to do with me, because i wasn’t playing the same game they were.

at this point, i have to admit that, as much as anything, i love Angel Dust for nostalgic reasons, but whatever.  (i’m old, so nostalgia is a component of much of the shit i love.)  my tastes have moved on.  my favorite musician is Lyle Lovett, and i mostly listen to hip hop.  but i still love Angel Dust, and if you ask me what my favorite record is (which not nearly enough people do), that will still be my answer.  it’s still intense, chaotic, and brilliant, and there’s still nothing like it.  like i wished i was.  like i wish i am.