boring, dumb, and fine.

I guess I'm kind of a dick. Maybe it's because I live in Olympia and every other day a liberal-arts student hands me a dusty book of Latin American poetry that "totally changed" their "perception on everything" and I can't help but to roll my eyes. 

Sure, I've read some amazing books and I guess I do have a tattoo from a Roberto Bolaño book, so perhaps I'm just a hypocrite. If a piece of art is able to fundamentally shift one's way of thinking, it's either an amazing piece of art or the foundation of that person's thinking was built on sand. But again, maybe I'm just a stubborn, know-it-all asshole. 

Endless seminars on “what art means” at The Evergreen State College have left me jaded about the a-word, to say the least. Never has a painting stopped me in my tracks and poetry minus electric guitar puts me to sleep. The “art” that has had the most substantial effect on how I deal with this cruel, cruel world has always been music, punk specifically. Something about scrawny kids yelling over overdriven telecasters, I dunno.

And this is where I add my contribution to the Bomb the Music Industry! eulogies. I didn’t make it to Brooklyn to see the last show, sadly. But I did tear up while listening to “Saddr Weirdr” repeatedly while texting my friends that my adolescence is officially dead and that maybe it’s time to get a real job and not sell my car. 

The last time Bomb the Music Industry! “broke up,” I was almost arrested. It was my twentieth birthday and my romantic interest at the time had just ripped my naive heart out of my drunk-ass chest. We went to a hippy show for the sole purpose to be obnoxious and get kicked out. I did get kicked out, but that’s just because I was passed out in the back yard, coming to consciousness only to throw up the Steel Reserve and bum wine I had ingested earlier that afternoon. 

On my way home, I decided to flip off a series of cop cars cruising down the main street of my neighborhood. Next thing I knew, I was surrounded by four cops asking me what my deal is. I sat there on that street corner, in short-shorts and a Dangers t-shirt I had made into a tank-top, and loudly proclaimed to everyone on the block: “My (sorta) girlfriend just dumped me! My favorite band just broke up! It’s my birthday! Fuck off pigs!”

After attempting to calm me down and figure out how old I was, with little to no success, the cops said if I just apologized for calling them pigs I could go home. Obviously I refused. Miraculously, they let me walk home with the threat that I’d be immediately arrested if they saw me again that night. I assume they just didn’t want to deal with a black-out drunk, heart-broken philosophy student screaming at the top of their lungs “no justice, no peace! fuck the police!” in the back of their squad car. 

I can’t really think of a more fitting way to send off the band that changed my life. The band that put to a catchy chorus the anxieties that plagued me that other people just didn’t understand, man. Jeff’s lyrics always made sense to me, whether I was crying in a public restroom because 18-year-old me had issues or if I was screaming them with my best friend’s arm draped around me. 

Bomb the Music Industry! put into focus what I wanted out of music and by extension, my life. Fun. My friends hugging me while screaming their feelings. Authenticity. No pretension. No fucking tough guys. Or cool guys. 

Anything authentic is rare to come by in this disposable hell of a world that we’re supposed to find meaning in. You won’t find it at the cool hardcore shows with the kids in leather jackets leaned up on the wall outside, smoking cigarettes not saying a word. Or the arty po-mo shows where moving the slightest draws a room’s worth attention. But I always found it at those sweaty, drunk Bomb shows. 

Like my first real punk show in a log cabin where they let me play guitar with them. 

Like the time in Seattle they asked the audience if there was a place me and James could stay that night. 

Like the time they snuck 19-year-old me into a bar in Gainesville and I bought them all drinks and told them repeatedly how much I love them. 

Like the time I pretended to be in the Flatliners and snuck past a security guard to see them do a Weakerthans cover set. 

Like the time in Portland where Jeff changed the lyrics in “Side-Projects Are Never Successful” to “Jesse, we’re all born to be businessmen!” 

Like the time my high school band Haircuts opened for them on my 19th birthday in Montana, where James got kicked out, black-out drunk and naked, and rode a stolen children’s bike to the river where he threw his phone and shirt in the water and then proceeded to bike another 5 miles to a different town and passed out in a stranger’s apartment.