lynyrd skynyrd clowncar accident

regardless i tried to kill myself multiple times when i was 17 and around that time i would walk down the extremely barren sidewalkless highway of north georgia that my neighborhood directly fed out onto when i had walked around the neighborhood i was living in circularly for hours and got tired of seeing the same few things - i would do this after and before school or whenever because one of the conditions of me getting out of the mental hospital was that if i got stressed out i should listen to music and walk around rather than hurt myself - and i would listen to the midori song with a title like "i want to hear but i don't want to listen" on a deafening volume and walk up and down the high way in a gulch while semi trucks and f150s would go barreling down this sidewalkless highway in the hills & i would do that all the time OR i would sit in my room and stare at the ceiling with my phone plugged into a guitar practice amp doing the same thing

when i would sit in my bed on my LAPTOP though i got in the habit of just watching hella live performances of bands like i would watch the entirety of radiohead in lallapalooza or at gingleheim or googooboogoo all day i would watch and regularly did watch, drunk as fuck in the basement of my friends mom's house, every single front bottoms performance that had been recorded and uploaded to youtube, i would watch every band i could watch and when we were in the basement we would talk about all of us learning instruments & going on tour all the time & i was like No matter what i will invent a way to go on tour but i one night remember, on a lark, plugging in the words "midori live performance" into the youtube search bar and finding a video of what appeared to be the last midori live performance and i watched it in complete and total astonishment as i saw the coolest woman of all time climbing up and down amps and hitting herself in the head so hard with a microphone she was bleeding and curled over and shouting so hard it looked like she was going to die - the most insane woman of all time with song titles like "today my boy friend does not exist" where she would say things like "today my boy friend does not exist" (i knew this from reading google translate of the title even though at the time online resources about midori were relatively hard to track down and i dont think i was even able to find lyrics in kana for these songs because "second" was much less popular and was under a different label that "aratememashite hajimemashite midori desu" and i HADNT gone to college to learn japanese in class yet and even if i HAD mariko goto speaks in OSAKA BEN and i didnt even know what that WAS really yet because i didnt have FRIENDS that were into any of this stuff and i didnt watch ANY anime other than GAINAX ones and i didnt go on WEEB FORUMS to read about stuff like that i went on WEEB FORUMS to read about stuff like whether or not the fruit of life and the fruit of knowledge in evangelion were REALLY combining and what that meant for whether or not SHINJI was a PUSSY (he WAS - and IS - AND he should DIE!))

this was the point i decided that i had to go to college and learn japanese because that girl was on stage hitting herself in the head with the microphone so hard she was bleeding & if she was being like that over the songs and i could feel that without understanding what she was even saying then if i could understand what she was saying they might be the most beautiful songs of all time. i of course took japanese and german at the same time because as a 15 year old i probably watched eva 5 dozen times and thought asuka was "very cool" -

eventually my friend started driving me to school because we all started doing early enrollment at a college that was about a 20 minute drive from their house but a 40 minute drive from my house and my mom would drop me off at donut store parking lot 20 minutes from my house so that i could ride the next 20 minutes with my friend and he'd always give me the aux but it would play songs alphabetically from my phone meaning the first thing that would happen every single time i got in the car was the song AI NO UTA by midori would play, and every subsequent car i would get into for the next like 8 years would do this, and it would do it multiple times a day, and it would do it every day, and it would often be extremely loud and annoying, and i developed a habit of immediately shutting off car radios as soon as i got behind the wheel so i could choose my song first, because i fucking loved ai no uta when i was 16 but sort of got pavloved into thinking it was annoying by all of this

anyway when i started going to art school and inventing women i thought were cool to draw one of the things i did was start loading pimple with traits related to thinking dragon ball and midori were dope where as a parody of myself and the way i was acting when i was 16 and after meeting about 30 different animation students at SCAD who all would say stuff like "pool" by tricot would make a really good anime opening! and me always thinking to myself, secretly, "not as good of an anime opening as i thought yukiko-san by midori would make when i was 16 and my entire life was reading dragon ball and getting in arguments with my parents and girlfriend and listening to midori and imagining getting hit by cars" and so i designed a hoodie that i drew pimple wearing in some comics where she screen printed the word "DESTROY" in japanese onto the right sleeve because that's what mariko goto says in that song

but i remember i was like, at the time, as a 21 year old, thinking, "midori is so cool, it's so crazy nobody really knows midori yet still, but when i finish my million dollar web comic IP 'Manifesto' then this will be a very cool easter egg" - anyway midori Now is a band which a lot more information has been translated and exists and i didn't KEEP taking japanese classes because when i was 18 i got so SICK from having to sleep in an UNINSULATED SHACK OUTSIDE OF MY PARENTS HOUSE FOR A YEAR THAT I FAILED ALL OF MY COLLEGE CLASSES AND HAD TO TRANSFER SCHOOLS TO A PRIVATE ART SCHOOL THAT DIDNT HAVE JAPANESE CLASSES AND I THREW UP EVERY SINGLE DAY FOR A YEAR BECAUSE I WAS INHALING SO MUCH DUST AND NORTH GEORGIA DETRITUS AND SINGING SONGS SO LOUDLY ON MY GUITAR MY THROAT WAS SEMI PERMANENTLY FUCKED UP - culminating of course years later in me on the opposite side of the country, in portland oregon, getting tubes shoved down my throat to find out if i have a "GERD" and how many prilosec generics i need to take in a day which i ended up taking none of ever

i was very convined all of this would matter some day and i would say a lot of this stuff to anybody who i talked to in the course of having conversations with them about our lives and interests and when AI NO UTA by midori would play on my car radio and i had a new passenger i would usually have to say something about how it was the first song that always played in my car and it did start with really loud and annoying drums but they were the coolest band of all time but i also was very convinced none of it would matter and i became instilled with a lot of different, bespoke, fear of "none of this will matter" based drives and ways to make all of this matter and i drove myself insane threading and needling various different references and signifiers of things like "the thing that represents the point in my life where i was trying to kill myself this way" vs "the thing that represents the point in my life where i was no longer trying to kill myself this way" but every time i tried to make stuff, stuff didn't work or if it did work i wasn't sure things mattered or didn't matter regardless,

this is a show about alienation and its effects on the parasitic non-haute-bourgeoisie / consumer aristocracy. {Matt Johnson} didnt know that thats what its about, and that (the fact that he didn't know) is why it is so rich. the core tension at the heart of ntbts isnt actually about their relationship or fame or music but about the fantasy of totally unalienated labor that the band represents to him.

this hit me the hardest in The Buena Vista Social Club, a very sweet and funny episode. the ending montage is basically the first time we see [matt] enjoying interacting with people other than jay, on his own, in Cuba, a country marked by poverty but with the kinds of social relations only found on the margins of capitalism or outside it to some extent. it serves as a little glimpse into that contradiction at the heart of the show (the veil gets pulled back a bit in Viceland too in their interactions with homeless people and street musicians? but it seems moreso played for laughs there).

[{mMatt jJohnson}] is constantly alienating himself from the social world via fiction and metafiction, both its [{consumption}] and its {creation}. but more than anything else, he fears the alienation of his labor. in Cuba, he experiences kindness, welcoming, surpassing the language barrier, intertwined with the shock of meeting people who have never seen an iPhone, meeting a man who sets fires and herds cattle, dancing with a group of kids who welcome him in. he's from Queen Street.

he's apart from jay for just a day. he's torn away from his little world - immersed in a revolutionary proletarian culture, surrounded by people who welcome him in despite the language barrier and his obvious commodification of their culture. he's torn - he's inspired by the promise of fame, he realizes he misunderstood the situation, he says these are just some stupid cuban dancers - he puts down the phone and looks and for a second he gets it, or starts to. and i think he might even realize what makes Cuba Cuba, and what makes its art and culture so greatly different from what he's used to in klanada.

and the realization shocks him, and [he] misses jay, so he goes back home. he goes back to toronto because unalienated labor & the material comfort he's used to are irreparably at odds. {He} goes back to insisting, in interviews and podcasts, that klanadian culture is just the nicest, the coolest, people are so good to you. (thought shamelessly ripped from @petrodragonicapocalypse <3).

expand scope. matt's control over jay, his dramatic highs and lows, his suicide attempts and time-turning, at the thought of jay leaving him, it's all inextricable from his discomfort with the idea of alienated, or even socially-organized, labor. jay getting a job doesn't stick in matt's craw so much because it would take jay away from him - compare his reaction to jay having a girlfriend (upset, lashing out, misogynistic) to his reaction to jay wanting a part time job as a jingle writer (suicidal, life-ruining, show-ending) - it's because it would merge their little self-contained u/dys-topia with (alienated, albeit non-exploited) labor.

it's the link between his watsonian deepest fear (losing jay) and [matt from ntbts]/{Matt Johnson}'s doyleist deepest fear (being proletarianized, no longer being [a trust fund kid LARPing as a] {a famous and well-regarded} self-sustaining artist, having to work the same kind of menial job as the people [delivering his pizza and showing him around clothing and tech stores] {hanging around in the background, sometimes almost prop-like, in everything he makes})

everything about [matt] and jay's life is sustained by the labor they abhor. they get food delivered, they pester customer service workers, hell, the money in matt's trust fund didn't come from nowhere. this is nothing out of the ordinary for a good old artist-story. where it becomes especially interesting, though, is the fact that they have nothing to show for it. they are parasitic (in the political economy sense, not the Nazi sense, don't have a cow, man!) without even cultural output to show for it, just a constant spinning of wheels. {Matt and Jay}, on the other hand, bear a similar economic and social position without the futility and stagnation.

for all that Matt's work is intentionally harshly self-critical, i think that recognition of the petit-bourgeois (and thus slowly dying) nature of Artistic Individuality is beyond his grasp. he imagines his idea of “making it” as being disconnected from fame and fortune per se - less about money and more about “self-expression” - but still this desire for self-expression and self-dissection is ultimately just as bourgeois a goal as if he were in it for the money in the first place, and this is the one part of his process that he’s not self-aware of.

"it's cogent, but because his sole goal is "making it" (even if hidden behind characters, the fact that this is the central premise of ntb is absolutely a reflection of a real feeling in real life matt and jay), everything is kind of secondary. so if he "makes it", if he gets the attention and the funding and the license to do what he loves, he views everything that led him there as necessary and proof of the truth of his worldview" -phyrex h. @phywreks, 2026