I find it uncanny that music has the capability of time travel. Sending one back to the very moment in time when they played that song until it was seared into their brain membranes forever. You can remember the season of the year, who you were in love with, who you were fighting with, the decor or set up of the room you were in, and all the feelings from that period jumbled up into that one song. And there are hundreds of songs, if like me you immersed yourself into music like it was air, that send one on that time travel loop. I'm currently going through my music collection and I've time traveled and remembered and seen so much again that, while it's not an unpleasant feeling, it is rather weird. I chose the above photo because most of the songs are sending me back to that particular time period. Between the ages of 18 and 21. Currently I'm listening to Stay With Me (Unlikely) by Celldweller. I played this song so much that even having not heard it for seventeen years, I still know it by heart. I still really like the song and I probably would have liked it regardless, but at the time the song was centered around a boy. I was a frequenter of a message board, when message boards were still cool, but starting to fall out of fashion. Most people on the boards never knew each others real names; they only knew me as Niya (short for Niya The Spy). I, likewise, only knew him by his screen name, which is on the tip of my tongue, but I... can't quite grasp it. I had the biggest crush on him, if you couldn't guess. He introduced me to Celldweller. He was also translating The Lord of the Rings into L33T. He only got as far as Frodo waking up in Imladris, but it was fun to read. Nageku! That was his screen name. Yeah, Nageku. A lot of weird and strange talk happened on that message board. I'm sure there were sexy XX boards out there, but this wasn't one of them. It was just weird talk because we were all really strange people. One of the guys drove through town and I met him (some of these guys were in their forties at the time, as was the guy I met). One of them, also in his forties, was cleaning out his dead dad's estate in Washington State and asked if I wanted a supposed haunted penguin ice bucket. Of course, I said yes. I still have it. I feel like my parents now. They'll have a story and be completely animated during the telling, then they'll drop off with, "he's dead now...". My story about Ghost Bear (the guy with the ice bucket) ends the same way. He's dead now. Has been for probably fourteen years now. Nageku, however, was my age, and no one knows what happened to him. I'm sure off living his life. Married, got a coupla kids now or something. Probably has some weird job that doesn't fit him, but does whatever he likes on the side, unless all the passions gone now. Ya know, like most humans. I do hope he's having a happy life though. Or how about the weird trippy-ness that was seeing Dax Riggs here in town. If you're unfamiliar, he was the singer for Acid Bath and Deadboy & The Elephantmen. I actually don't know how famous they were, like were they locally famous just in areas of the south, or were they huge? I was friends with this girl online, whom I'm still friends with & we send each other mail from time to time. She invited me to some show, because they/he were awesome and we could finally meet. The place was not even five minutes from my house, so sure! Turns out everyone I was friends with that were into hard music already knew both bands and liked them, which I found out later. A friend of mine even named his first son after him. So, it was really great meeting her and I'm glad I went, but it was strange meeting all of her friends though that she'd known forever. Actually in the middle of Dax Riggs' gig playing songs from both of his bands, this guy friend of hers drug me outside to sit in his car and hear the songs on CD because they were better, in his opinion (not acoustic versions). He then ripped me a CD with songs and brought it to me later on one of his trips to my coffee house. So fast forward about two years. This is when I became friends with the guy who named his kid after this rocker. And when I fell in love with the friend that came into my coffee house with him. Sometimes I got to play my music on the CD player (sometimes, much to the chagrin of patrons - like playing Rammstein or that one song about cicadas where a chorus of Chinese girls is singing). So, it's this Acid Bath/DBE CD. All these people are sitting around this one long table. I remember my mom being at the head of the table and I think playing cards with the Sister. That guy friend was there at the other end and his friend and I were on one of the benches together, but not sitting closely. We're both absorbed in our own things. We were both drawing. Dead Girl by Acid Bath came on and it was really weird. It was like we were both in some trance and just raised our heads at the same time and looked out into space and started singing together in perfect harmony. I don't know if people were looking at us, but I think they were. It certainly felt like several pairs of eyes were trained onto us with mouths agape. Normally I would have been too intimidated and would have shut up, but I physically couldn't. We finished the entire song together and then just went back to our own drawings. o_0 I still don't know what that was about. Later, a few months maybe, I told him about a friends band playing, which happened to be at the same place that Dax Riggs played a few years previously. He showed up and brought a girl. A slightly taller, much thinner girl with long straight ginger hair and a green t-shirt. She was that cute-pretty girl next door looking type. We hadn't been together yet, my first time, by the time of the weird Dead Girl sing-along, but we had by the time of this event. I couldn't ever figure him out. He was so nice and dow eyed around me and when he spoke about me it was like the happiest moments in his life (which from personal experience is not how guys act around me at all, and they never act that way with other girls unless they really like them), yet he always had super bomb girls on his arm and we weren't exclusive in the slightest and he'd tried to tell me the he wasn't good enough for me. He left with me instead of the pretty ginger that night, though nothing sexy happened. Probably two weeks after this event, I went to see my guy friend who ended up not being home, but this guy that I had fallen for was there and said I could hang out. But when this mega gorgeous Amazonian girl showed up at the door for him (I mean it. Really tall, really thin, but also sort of curvy, large, pretty eyes and thick, dark, shiny hair cascading down her shoulders in soft waves), I was done. My heart could take no more. I loved him, but it was this parallel magnetic force repelling us and I was just kidding myself. It was that earlobe tugging moment in the film Garden State. I ran out the door, past The Siren and to my car with him calling after me, chasing me to my car. He was standing there by the road as I sped away with tears in my eyes, spilling out onto my cheeks. Later I heard he got married. When I happened to see them out once a year or two ago and I saw her, I was floored. He married me. All those girls he had trailing on him for whatever reasons were the complete opposites to my short 5'2", stocky, slightly overweight light olive toned body and my not ugly but certainly not mega gorgeous face; my non tattooed, stretched eared body. Yep, that's the girl he married. She may be nothing like me in personality or heart or feelings, but to try and desperately draw me in only to repel me farther away then to end up marrying someone who looks so much like me ten years later is just really shocking. It's weird and it does sting a little, because I can't help but thinking why I wasn't enough; why I wasn't good enough. But then the other part of me thinks that I'm not really made out for the whole love, coupling, marrying thing and that does not make for a good life partner; and well, it just doesn't really suit me. I don't know if I'm this way because I've always been repelled or if I was really the one doing the repelling, because deep down I knew I was this way. So, obviously these songs bring back both sets of memories. Though I was 22-24 during these two memories. So a quick jaunt back to that guy friend. Our friendship was starting, I think, to go separate ways about the time that I ran away from the love of my life. We became friends again later, then he married and we're friendly, but don't hang out anymore. But this was during our first time as friends. He made fun of me for liking Opeth. (Opeth also concerns that guy I loved, but I've talked too much about him already and this is a funny two-part story here). I had received these free compilation CD's in the mail. It's how I learned about Black Rebel Motorcycle Club & Chevelle. But so it had the song Harvest by Opeth. I loved it immediately. Not their songs do not sound like that one. They're way more screamo. But the album I purchased later I enjoyed. It was because of this album that he was making fun of me. So fast-forward to the second time we were friends. He loaned me two Opeth albums to rip, then called me in the middle of their concert just so I could hear some of it. Which though odd was really nice and a cool experience. But really, man? You're gonna rip on me for liking this band that eight years later you like so much that you have all of their albums and are going to their concert? Strange... but also amusing. Surely it wasn't me that got him into that band. That would just be too weird, right? Even more amusing. I was listening to that original compilation disc in the car with The Sister (I'd purchased one of Opeth's albums by this time). Harvest is playing and The Sister says, "Ooh! This! I like this! I want more of their music." To which I replied, "No, you don't. Really, you don't. Their other songs sound nothing like this." She didn't believe me. So, I switched the disc to the album I had. Not 30 seconds into the first song and she's recoiling into herself and wanting me to make the horror stop. Still makes me laugh thinking about it. Added some Garbage into my computer during this whole going through music event that's been happening for the past four days, and that was another time machine, specifically the song Vow. I can vividly remember leaving our coffee house in the middle of the evening (nine or ten). I was wearing a hoodie and it was raining. I grabbed the keys to The Sisters sporty Probe and took off into the night, slipping the self-titled Garbage album into the CD slot. Time jumps from that moment to me on this back road behind one of the main highways. I was driving past ruined and long forgotten industrial buildings, the headlights shining on the patchy road through the rain. This song was my new anthem. There's a lot of black in the swirling eddy of memory; clothing, heart, feelings; and I wasn't going to be stepped on anymore. It's not that I was sweet and nice at that age (I was seventeen during this time travel memory); wearing my Stompin' Boots (my dad's Marine issue combat boots) and I was already starting to tell people to fuck off. This song reminds me that I really stuck it to them after this. I always really liked R.E.M. since I first heard them in about 1987 or 1988. So, when the new album Reveal dropped back in 2001, I went out and purchased it. I actually wasn't all that pleased with the album. After forcing several, several listen throughs I only came away with three songs I loved. You could keep the rest. All The Way To Reno (You're Gonna Be A Star), She Just Wants To Be, & Imitation of Life. There was a guy I liked and I thought liked me during this time. I do not feel that he liked me or cared for me in the slightest. But I couldn't (probably didn't) want to see that. He was completely different from the guy later who I did fall in love with. This guy was careless with my heart and kept throwing it in a blender just to see what it would do. The other guy? He did hurt my heart but it never once felt like it was on purpose. It seemed like he was going out of his way to not hurt me, only to end up hurting me. Two completely different caliburs of men here y'all. I had found this really great low-sitting, green vintage swivel chair for $3 at a thrift store. In perfect condition. I loved it. He'd come hang out in my room and slouch in that chair with one arm draped over the back and swivel it. (Incidentally THE guy visited my room once. He was very reverent and asked if it would be OK to enter even after I said, "Come on y'all!". He didn't touch anything and didn't pry or peer and was interested in anything I showed him). This swivel chair guy, if you hadn't guessed by how he was sitting in that chair was sitting in it like he owned it. He acted like he owned my room and everything that was in it. He'd pick up my journal when my back was turned and just start reading. He'd try going through my things. No respect. So, to make a long story short, swivel chair guy busted up in our house drunk one night while I was asleep and raped me. In my own bed, in my own house, they very things he'd already laid claim to without so much as a by-your-leave. I hated him and I hated myself. I hated anything that he had tainted. The chair was one. I had to get rid of that chair because all I could see was him sitting in it, owning it, lording over me and my bedroom, swiveling in it. The other was the song, Imitation of Life. I was playing the album for him (because he hadn't heard it) the first time he sat and swiveled in that chair. Somehow the two things; him and that song, became intertwined, so if I tried listening to him I just remembered what he did to me that night and how horrible he'd been (and how I allowed it) before that. It's been seventeen years since I last could listen to that song. I'm glad to say that he's not my first thought when the song comes on. Though all of that did flit through my mind during the song; I did remember it, but I no longer hate myself for what happened and I no longer hate him, because I've since learned that I no longer have time to care to think about him. He's unimportant. Plus Hate leads to Fear which leads to the Dark Side if Star Wars taught me anything. Instead my first thoughts were the actual purchase of this album along with Weezer's Green Album. Then coming home and going into the living room and firing up the dial-up to get on the aforementioned message board and putting the CD's into the CD player that I had sitting on a dining room chair I'd brought in there. The day was sunny and warm and was a good day. It actually made me happy to remember that bit of my dad, when before all I could remember the evening when I played the CD for him in my room and he swiveled the chair. The last story starts with Garrison Star. I had a friend who introduced me to her music, of which What I Wish For and 18 Over Me are the only songs I still like. That time traveled me back to so many memories interlinked that I'll let all of that be the final section of my Time Travel Music post.
So, first and foremost my first memory was that right after she introduced me to this music I went with my parents to Colonial Williamsburg for Spring Break. I was seventeen. You might think this is the nerdiest Spring Break, but I'd been wanting to go there since I was really young. So, the memory is that we're on these scenic driving loop that's attached to Jamestown and I have my headphones on listening to 18 Over Me on constant repeat. Then I was suddenly reminded that I saw Garrison Star in concert. The Sister and I went to see her and she was signing autographs and all we had were these Camel tins and we got her to sign those (we no longer have those though). Then that made me remember that this friend wanted to take me to The House of Blues in New Orleans to see Fiona Apple. Anything I said, she countered. "I don't have that kind of money." "I'll pay, my treat!" "I'm not eighteen yet." "I'll get you a fake ID." And she did. She paid and had me a fake ID too. I did like Fiona Apples music, at the time she only had the one album, Tidal, out. It was an OK enough experience, hanging out with her and her long-time guy friend, getting in somewhere with a fake ID, hearing Fiona Apple. However, I absolutely hated the crowd. They were all sweaty and slithery like they were in heat and on drugs. I am a very 3 Feet of Fucking Personal Space, Goddamnit! type of girl. Some guy kept trying to rub up against me, touch me, and lick my face. Some of the other guys and girls were so close their auras of personal space were touching my friend on the other side of me. It was terrible. But I had completely forgotten about both of these concerts until hearing this one song. The Sister had to remind me of two other concerts. It was really Voodoo Fest in New Orleans. She'd gotten tickets for me for my birthday. I was so excited that Stone Temple Pilots would be playing and I was excited to go. We mainly stayed in the middle stage area that was sparsely populated and brightly lit by autumn sunlight. We can not remember for the life of us any of the other people who played that stage because it was more than just two, but we can only remember Ben Harper and LIVE. So, that's two more people. When it was time for STP to play, we left the hippie grotto as we called it and went to the right stage. The entrance was so tiny, and beyond that it was slam packed with a thousand people (I honestly do not think that I'm over exagerating) and it was really dark like they were in an auditorium (but they weren't. There was no structure or tent, it was all open air, except for slight covering over the stage areas). We couldn't have gotten in there without passing, literally, through people or crawling over them. STP had just started. I stood there, knowing I would absolutely not go in there, but also wanting to hear them. So I stayed for two minutes, then The Sister tugged at me and when I looked back her little flower tree loving faerie spirit was begging through her large eyes 'Please don't make us go in there." "Don't worry. I don't want to go in there. I just wanted to hear them for a minute." "So we're not going in there? We can go back to the happy, safe place?" "Yes, we can go back." So we did and I heard STP live for about three minutes. There's no way I would have tried pushing my way in there. The entrance really was barricaded by bodies packed into the space. We would have died in there, I'm sure of it. Plus, if the Fiona Apple show was any indication of how I don't like being crammed next to humans I don't know, I probably would have punched people and screamed, "back up motherfuckers!" before dying of a panic attack. Which made me think about the concerts I almost went to and am pretty glad I didn't attend. First was The Family Values Tour. All the main heavy bands of the era like Orgy, Limp Bizkit, and Incubus. It was like metal Lollapallooza or Woodstock, headed by Korn. I heard about it right after they'd played two hours south of me in Biloxi. I was so upset to have missed it. Why? Because Rammstein was in the tour. Rammstein! Honestly that's the only reason I was upset to have missed it so close to me and wanted so badly to go. So, my two guy friends who were also into Rammstein said they hated missing it in Biloxi too, so they were going to catch the tour in Atlanta. They wanted me to go to, but knew I didn't have all the funds, so said they'd pay what I couldn't. Somehow though my mom found out that I'd be traveling six hours to go to a concert with music she did not approve of, alone with two guys and absolutely forbade it. I I know why. She thought we'd end up having all the mad sex. To take a cue from the film Clueless, "As if!" They weren't ugly guys. They were good looking, but to me they were table lamps. To them I was just one of the guys. No sex would have been forthcoming. So, they went without me and got the only autograph for me that they could, that of the lead singer Till Lindemann. I still have it. But this got me thinking that I probably would have enjoyed actually being at this concert as much as if peering into the right stage area for STP at Voodoo Fest. I also had the chance to see Bush and Marilyn Manson as they both played in Jackson while I was in high school. While I probably would have fared well at the Bush concert, I also was never too upset over missing that one. Marilyn Manson though I was upset over. The ticket had already been purchased by my friends mom when somehow my mom found out (I don't know, did my friends mom call her?) and I was on lock down for months, seen as some sort of flight risk. But again, I don't think I could have handled the audience at the Manson Antichrist Superstar tour that I was to attend. Which leads me to my final, final bit. The other concerts I actually did attend. My very first one was Tom Petty in 1996. The tickets were, again, a birthday gift from The Sister. He was touring his new album Wildflowers and though The Heartbreakers were still his band, this is when he dropped the & The Heartbreakers from his celebrity title. Ani Difranco is the only other person I've ever seen in concert. Saw her twice actually. On tour for Little Plastic Castles back in 1998 at the Saenger in New Orleans. Very low key. There were more people at Tom Petty's show (larger venue as well) but even that was pretty low key. Saw her again about ten years ago at Tipitina's in New Orleans, which is an even smaller venue (bar) than the Saenger had been. It wasn't an official tour. She spends a lot of time in that city and just played there. I mostly sat outside and listened, because it was cooler out there and there were no pushy people who were upset that she wasn't angry anymore.
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AuthorA girl from South Mississippi who finds herself in exploration. Archives
November 2019
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