Tis the Season- Day 10- Pavement - Frontwards

Double digits, here we are, are you bored yet? I'm not, though i do miss rambling on in run-on sentences about the Wilderness Years but alot of this is torn from that same fabric, i also never thought it would be so hard to carve out time to do this each night but hey man i'm managing, through the booze and pills and smoke and coffee and x-mas cookies it's not so bad, apply ass to seat and type, i often wonder why people worry and take classes and talk endlessly about writing when it's basically a pretty simple process, of course it helps to live a little, give yourself a bit of inspiration but enough of the soapbox, the song dammit the song, and why no video today? well i want us all to concentrate on the lyrics now kids, i've always been a lyric man even if i do like guitars and bass and piano an drums and horn sections and whatnot but i'll shut up now and get to the point...

So let us go back again to 92-93, the fall the winter the spring and the summer, my last year of school involved much listening to Pavement, particularly Slanted and Enchanted and i'll admit to being one of the cool kids who was in on the ground floor with this band, The Hassler was another big fan and since he was my roomie we spent large amounts of time pulling tubes and listening to this band, i'm not sure when the Chicken, as we dubbed it, came out but i believe it was at the end of my sojourn into higher education, see that last year when i sort of took over as town pot broker i had what was called a cult of young boys all trying to be my friend, freshman and sophomores who tried to ingratiate themselves to me, some started dressing like me, some acted like me, some would attempt to steer young girls my way, some would steal shit for me as gifts and i believe it was one young klepto who stole the Watery Domestic Ep (the real name of the EP) right before i graduated and headed off into the oblivion of #4 6th St. OCMD...

Ocean City had a rep for being notoriously hard to score weed for some reason, hard drugs no problem but grass was always a hassle, so being the conscientious young man i was i arrived at the beach with 2oz. of weed, a vial of hash oil, a half ounce of mushrooms and a few hits of acid, be prepared as the Army commercial used to say, needless to say by having smoke early on i made many friends and connections and helped to keep myself clothed and fed, the visitors to my room always telling me to stop by their shop and grab some food or a shirt or what not, it's just the way it worked down at the shore, a barter system among the low-lives, and the Chicken would play an important role in this, see it was the sound of the suburbs, of white kids and the empty poems and plastic combs trying to get down and discover some meaning in a meaningless and vacant culture, we were shunning the shrubs and the shopping malls and getting down in the shit, or at least that's what i thought i was doing and Malkmus provided the soundtrack, the Chicken was just under 20 minutes long and seemed to be the perfect length to roll a special and shoot the shit in my sweltering corner room, what's a special you ask? a special is a fat joint that is rolled on paper with hash oil spread out on it, you heat up the sticky hash oil a bit and carefully apply a thin layer onto the rolling paper, add weed, let dry for a minute or two and smoke, believe me this shit packs a punch, a punch that would level the three to five people all huddled in my room, it was usually the Golden Boy, Hassler, me, one or both of the Young Turks, sometimes Skinhead Will or Diego, a wayward female now and then, we'd sit and smoke and listen to the Chicken and shoot the shit, talk about what was going down or the state of the universe, the Golden Boy would always amble up to my room and say, tell me something good, one day i asked why he always said that and he explained that he thought i always had some good and interesting shit to say, sometimes we had Shop Talk as the special was passed and the Chicken played, Shop Talk being the few of us who were having a nice run with the ladies and discussing their various merits, their strengths and weaknesses, how some of them got the Show and some just got fucked, basically the kind of shit a bunch of guys in there early 20's talked about when not talking waves or lack thereof, we were like a pack of semi-literate barbarians and the Chicken reminded us of our roots and let us think about where we might want to go, the soundtrack to some of the best times of that summer, when you hang out with your friends and relax and laugh and contemplate all the shit that was good, a simple life... so tonight i present you with Frontwards. enjoy.