Tis the Season- Day 5-The Smiths The boy with a thorn in his side

Who gives a shit that nobody's reading this, i'm not a quitter and i will push on til New Year's Eve, hell or high water and today is a special day, me all hopped up on pills and waiting for the snow, see today i will tell you about this band and really if you've been in the lounge long enough there's really no reason for me to say anything, Mozzer's a hero to me, a man i'd hug and hold on to as if my life depended on it but this is not about the homo-erotic response that one Steven Patrick Morrissey brings about, it's about the songs that made you cry and the songs that saved your life, as you lay alone on the bedroom floor....

In the spring of 1987 i was in some suburban mall, a junior in high school who was getting into trouble at the tail end of his hardcore/punk rock phase, i was with my sis and my mum and i had a fever, they didn't care and wanted to shop and while they did i lay on a bench in the mall and gazed at the fake trees hovering above me, mom i think felt a bit guilty and after hours of shopping her and my sis showed up with bags of shit and i asked if she would buy me this cassette called Louder than Bombs by a band called the Smiths, a band i'd heard a few times because there was some weird theatre girl who i had a crush on and at these parties they'd sit and smoke cloves and not talk to me cuz i played basketball even though i had on a flowered shirt and black leather shoes, a desperate attempt to win her love, an attempt that went nowhere, a girl that years later i found out had the same crush on me but alas just like a Smiths song we were destined never to be together, to shy and awkward to overcome our high school fears, but back to that fateful day, mom you see was worried that she was buying more rebellious music for her disenchanted son so she consulted my older sis who explained that the Smiths were not the Dead Kennedy's and that it would be okay, i remember laying in the back seat of the car and my sis popping in the cassette, it was warm for March and i alternating between feverish sweats and the chills and as i lay with my eyes closed and feeling the breeze and the sun simultaneously i heard this voice and this band and it was like i was being born again, of course my mother didn't realize that this band was just as subversive and punk as these other bands i listened to, Johnny Marr had her fooled, she thought it pleasant, i thought it was fucking brilliant and within the next two weeks i saved the money i earned working two days a week as a stock boy in a Thom McCann shoe store and purchased, The Smiths, Meat is Murder and the Queen is Dead, music i began listening to at 16 that some 24 years later means just as much and is just as relevant to my existence as ever,maybe even more so now, so tonight i give you The Boy With the Thorn in His Side, the lyrics echoing in your authors head for years, words he thought were about him at 16 and still does at 40, words that sum up his battle against the world, words that he holds dear to his heart with a cracking tune to boot... how can they see the love in my eyes and still they don't believe me, after all this time, they don't want to believe me, and if they don't believe me now, will they ever believe me....