theriotbefore.com

I wrote the last entry during various brief spurts of downtime over the course of the two or three days that preceded it. Part was written in the van, part in a living room in DC, and a substantial portion was written at the mostly vacated student center of the University of Baltimore. Eager to find a quite place where I could write, I stumbled across the peaceful looking glass building while exploring the city blocks that directly surrounded the Charm City Art Space, the venue we would perform at that evening. I entered the large air-conditioned building, climbed a few flights of stairs, walked down a hallway that widened at its end and opened into an unoccupied student study area. I set up camp in a chair in the corner. The two walls that bordered the outside were made entirely of glass and from the third story where I sat it offered a nice view of downtown Baltimore, which, if you’ve ever been to Baltimore, you will understand what an accomplishment it is to get any sort of pleasant view of that city.

I sat there alone for nearly a half and hour until a slight stocky guy in his mid to late twenties with short dark hair, a red collared shirt, and a goatee, walked in and positioned a chair facing the windows, sat down, and promptly began working on his computer as well. He was entirely quiet and I didn’t really even notice his presence until he received a phone call about fifteen minutes later. Though I had been listening to music while typing, the quiet ambient songs from the first Broken Social Scene album didn’t do much to block outside noise when played through my tinny Ipod earbud headphones. So while it probably appeared to this guy in the room that I could not hear what he was saying, the exact opposite was the case.

Outside the sky, poetically foreshadowing the conversation that was to follow, turned gray and begin to rain while warm gusts of early summer wind blew the drops sideways onto the now empty courtyard below. I heard my companion question quietly into the phone, in a subdued voice that rang false with forced attempts at sounding understanding, “I am just confused. One minute everything was fine and then the next you were gone. How could you turn off that fast?” I quickly gathered that he was talking to an ex of his, the relationship most likely recently severed, his side of the wound still unhealed, hers, from what I could tell, quickly cauterized and already calloused. He was upset with what he perceived as her too quick recovery. Not being much for voyeurism, I turned up the music I was listening to and did my best to extend to this guy the privacy that he wasn’t aware enough to give himself. I felt bad for him and didn’t want to make a spectacle of his tragedy.

This sentiment lasted for an entire four minutes. I tried. Seriously I did, but like an ex-con near an unguarded, unlocked safe, my slightly atrophied good intentions just couldn’t prevail against temptation. I turned off the music I was listening to and disguised my rubbernecking by leaving my headphones on while hitting random letters on my keyboard—sldkfjiosockslkjksdjfso—which offered the illusion of typing but didn’t distract the mind like real typing did. I listened in.

This guy was most upset because apparently the girl had broken up with him and then quickly jumped in bed with someone else. He claimed this happened two weeks after their relationship ended, she claimed a month, but either way he was indignant with what he felt was a lack of respect on her part for their recently buried relationship. What fueled the injustice even more was not just that she had quickly jumped in bed with another guy but that she hadn’t jumped out of her ex’s bed. Apparently she never got in it, citing religious beliefs. I thought for an instant of John Cusack in “High Fidelity.”

By the time I heard this I had transitioned from fake typing to note taking. This is exactly what I wrote when I heard this last part: “OH SNAP!” Had this guy been better looking and tanner, I could have just as well assumed I was watching a new episode of the OC or something. It was just too perfect.

Not long after, the girl on the other end began to contest just how far she had gone with the new guy. But this really didn’t help the situation, drunk sex at least lacks intimacy, but “six hours of talking and kissing of wine and cheese” cuts even deeper and with a painful, calculated precision. The guy was visibly shaken. His earlier attempts at compassion had now dissolved, revealing a thinly veiled condescension that now crept into just about everything he said.

By this time I was having a really hard time keeping a poker face. It was just too surreal. I was watching the pilot episode of a new tv drama unfold right in front of me and it was getting more and more difficult to hide my enthusiasm. I wanted to fall on the floor and crack up laughing, not really at him, but more at the circumstances, at the situation I found myself in. I wanted to laugh because it was hilarious to be sitting in Baltimore clandestinely taking notes on someone else’s tragedy. I then wrote, “I just can’t believe he’s having this conversation with me sitting right here! You can seriously hear a pin drop. It’s dead still and he thinks my crappy ipod earbuds are gonna block out this juicy stuff? Good God talk about poor judgment!”

Finally, frustrated that he couldn’t find sympathy on the other end of the line, the conversation began to devolve, leading the girl to call into question whether or not it was even worth having. The guy responded perfectly with, “No, not at all. I thought we were having a very productive conversation. (pause) What is it not productive because it’s not over wine and cheese?” Oh man! How awesome is that? I was ecstatic. Felt like going over and giving this guy a high five. I mean, even if you don’t think it was a good idea to say something like that, you have to appreciate the fact that he said instantly what most people would think of saying only hours later while laying sleepless in bed. It’s rare for jewels like that to be fashioned in the moment and I was proud of him. I think he was proud of himself too because after he said this, when she hung up on him and he looked at his phone to make sure the call was really over, he had a smug, self-satisfied smile on his face. He was a bee, destined to die, who at least got one really good sting in before the inevitable.

He tried to call her back, she didn’t answer, but it wouldn’t have really mattered to me. From my perspective the show was over and the credits were already flashing across the screen. In the background he pretended to casually return to whatever he had been doing on his computer while, I’m sure, all he could do was recreate the last half hour’s conversation over and over again. I packed up my computer, my journal entry far from finished, and walked out of the room.

I’m still a little disappointed that I probably would never be able to watch the second episode.

Brett

Last night in the van our on way to New Jersey, Garrett, Freddy, and I got in an argument. Not a fight kind of argument, we weren’t angry at each other, just disagreed with one another’s opinion and did our best to make our feelings known. This of course, is nothing new. Living in a van for nearly seventy days now has frequently forced us to choose between one of two options: 1) assimilate all our personalities into one peaceful, united mind, or 2) fight to the death. And, well, the first one sounds like something hippies would do. So we bicker a lot. In fact, to say that last night we got in an argument is a bit of a lie, we actually got in arguments. But there was one in particular that I’d like to highlight at the moment.

One of the reasons we bicker so frequently is that our personalities rarely allow us to see anything from the same perspective. Freddy, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, is an eternal optimist. He either has something genuinely positive to say or he makes it up. His ability to doublethink himself into a purely positive world would astonish Orwell himself. It’s a rare and rather disconcerting moment when Freddy isn’t raining sunshine down on just about everything we do. I on the other hand, consider myself to be cautiously pessimistic—always distancing myself from the disappointment of too high expectations, always coupling the possibly positive with the possibly problematic. A pseudo-intellectual buzzkill, if you will. Garrett, well, Garrett just likes to disagree with whatever popular opinion is at the time. He has a mind for stats and facts and is constantly using this resource to fuel his personal dissent—laying siege to his opponent, surrounding him or her with a wall of information until they tire and consent—to the point that, at times I feel his one and only true opinion is “I disagree.” Cory mostly just drives the van and thinks we’re stupid. Occasionally he chimes in on our disputes but only if they are in some way hip-hop or ghetto culture related.

Last night’s argument in question was silly, like they almost always are, and it dealt with whether or not the majority of the shows on this tour have been good or bad. Freddy predictably took the positive while Garrett and I, in a rare joining of forces, argued the opposite. In the ten or so minutes that the debate lasted we accomplished almost nothing. We are used to this. You know those mountain goat type animals on nature shows that repeatedly run at each other and hit heads? You know how eventually one of them “wins” though it appears that the only true winner is absurdity? Well, our argument was kind of like that, except that, unlike the goats, we don’t really ever make contact. We just run at each other, duck our heads, and miss by a mile. Freddy kept pushing the point that since he had enjoyed tour it meant that the shows went well, ergo, tour was good. His argument hinged on the idea that there was only one way to judge the quality of a show and that was by measuring the amount of fun one had. But I couldn’t accept that. I never can. In college I took an argumentation class and entered a bunch of debate tournaments and as a result I’m absolutely no fun to argue with anymore. I kept trying to define what we were arguing about. I kept trying to establish just what a “good show” was and then point out when those standards were frequently left unfulfilled. I tried to establish the fact that one can have a tour of mostly sub-par shows that still, when it’s finished, can be judged a success. But Freddy wasn’t having it. He could not accept that most of the shows on a tour where he commonly had a good time were not actually “good” shows. So, unable to even make contact, the argument ended with Freddy a little frustrated and hurt, thinking Garrett I weren’t enjoying tour, and me mad that reason had not prevailed.

The thing is, I think we were both right, and I think we were really trying to say the same thing. There have been a lot of disappointing moments on this tour, we’ve played to crowds the size of which I could count on my hand more times than I can count on my hand, but none of us really view that as a failure. It’s just part of where we are as a band, just something we have to suffer for a while, and I have routinely been impressed with how well everyone has managed to not get overly discouraged when the situation was anything but encouraging. At the heart of both of our arguments was the same sentiment: we still had a good time, enjoyed ourselves, and thought this all worthwhile, even if we played to a nearly deserted room (if we played at all) and left empty handed. At the heart of Freddy’s denial was his desire to protect this tour from any sort of negative associations that could possibly taint what he wanted to protect. Garrett and I, while disagreeing with Freddy, were arguing in a way that attempted to put distance between the way we judge each show individually and how we look at the tour as a whole. We were both doing the same thing really, but still managed to disagree. I have a feeling that this dysfunction will probably never really be alleviated. Oh well.

Speaking of enjoying tour, from our time in Cleveland to a show in upstate New York, we were lucky enough to again play a handful of dates with Endless Mike and the Beagle Club. These guys are some of the most fun people we’ve ever toured with, eight solid guys who are all great musicians and instant friends. It would be impossible to go through everything that we did in those short five days, but it would also be a tragedy not to mention our show in Olean, NY, namely, a band we played with and, more specifically, one of the members of that band.

When we first arrived there was a guy at the show who was wearing a black shirt with white lettering across the chest that read, “Dancing Derek.” This wasn’t really out of the ordinary, just a shirt I thought, and the only reason I even noticed him was that he wore his sunglasses indoors. I always keep an eye on people who do that. But once the first band begin to play, I realized that Dancing Derek was more than just a shirt logo, it was a description of the wearer of the shirt. The guy with sunglasses on and the Dancing Derek shirt was Derek himself, and as soon as the first note rang out, he began to live up to his shirt. The thing is, Derek wasn’t really dancing. He didn’t really move in time with the beat. Instead, he just kinda mimed completely absurd stuff to music, calling it dancing because, apparently, miming is for dorks, or maybe his rhythmic miming of baseball, curling, and driving a car is just too much for that limited genre to be able to contain. He’s bigger than a mime, he’s a dancer!

To be honest, Derek’s novelty wore off really quickly and he just kinda got irritating. I wanted to watch bands, wanted to play in my own as well, but it was really tough to do with this guy pretending to shoot flaming arrows all over the place. Luckily, Ashley came to my rescue and quickly fashioned some Dancing Derek blinders for me, thus preventing me from being distracted by Derek, and allowing me to maintain my composure. They were brilliant.

Luckily I didn’t need to use the blinders because Derek stopped dancing while Endless Mike played and continued to abstain during out set. He re-emerged later as the main dancer of his own band, whose name I didn’t catch, but whose stage presence I couldn’t avoid. Along with Derek dancing like a maniac, there was a guy dressed as an aquarium (he just stood there by the way, never once said a word), a guy in a full body leopard print suit that was anything but modest, and the drummer wore a plastic galactic vest of sorts.

The thing is, while they appeared to be funny, and while the guitarist was actually quite hilarious on the microphone, I still am not quite sure if they intended on being a joke band or not. I guess that just makes them even more hilarious.

Not to be outdone by Derek, a few of the members of Endless Mike displayed their incredible dancing skills just a few days later. We had just finished playing out last show with them and, on the way to Connecticut we stopped at a gas station at around 2am. Earlier that day we had all just got another argument with Garrett who, surprisingly, disagreed with everyone else that Rage Against the Machine was a good band. Shocking. So, while we were filling up I turned Rage on and the Endless Mike guys wasted no time showing their enthusiasm for the band.

Here’s the thing with the Endless Mike guys dancing. It was endless. When I tried to turn the music off after I finished taking the video, they got mad. So I left it on, went into the store, and when I came out, THEY WERE STILL DANCING! By this time they had each assumed a role of one of the members of the band, including the person playing the part of bassist climbing up onto our van and shaking it.

With guys like that along, even when the shows don’t go amazing, it’s hard to get discouraged. Luckily for us, most of the shows we played with Endless Mike were amazing. We sadly parted ways with them the day after, with the knowledge that we’d see them at our Richmond show a few weeks later.

I’ve realized recently that no one in America has the internet. It’s all a huge lie. And it’s a lie that makes it impossible for me to update this thing regularly. Which means I have to, when I do stumble across internet access, sit around for hours typing about what happened two weeks ago. Good God people! Get the internet and make my life a little easier!

Brett

The sober dread in Brian’s voice echoed in my ear, opened the door to the abyss in my stomach, that hollow, empty cavern that grows from the back of my throat and expands down through my gut. The pain from bad news is so heavy I have trouble believing it is intangible. It must be something. It cannot simply be an idea. Ideas stay in the brain. Pain sinks. It dives down, expands, pushes until I don’t know if I am hungry, sick, or empty. But it’s a terrible, ironic emptiness. An emptiness that fills. That spills over. That particular emptiness grew in me from nothing to something in a second. I had answered the phone just moments before, happily. I am always happy to hear from Brian. Ever since the first day I talked to him a little over two years ago, when he called to tell me that he was starting a record label, that he wanted to release a The Riot Before cd, I’ve enjoyed talking to him. He’s such a sincere, optimistic person. And when I saw his name on the screen of my phone I smiled, answered it, greeted him enthusiastically. But my enthusiasm was stopped short when it was left unreciprocated. Something was wrong. I was worried. Brian gathered up all the strength remaining in him, the remnants left after most of it had been used in creating his own internal abyss, and he asked, softly, apologetically, if I had a moment. I said yes. I wanted to scream no. I wanted to be selfish. To hold onto my moments and keep them safe from the unknown pain I knew was coming, foreshadowed in Brian’s shaken, whispered words. But I said yes. There was nothing else to say.

Ben, Cayce, and Joe had been killed. Driving home. In West Virginia. In a car accident.

The phone rested against my cheek, supported only by my thumb, the strength in my hand plummeted down into my gut, I could no longer grip anything. My hand shook.

It’s shaking now.

I looked at the passing scenery from a place ten feet behind my eyes. And I drifted further and further behind. Though I sat just a foot or two behind Cory and Ashley, in the second bench of the van as we drove through the streets of Cleveland, I was no longer there. My mind could not keep up with all the information my eyes sent it. It could barely remember to tell my eyes “blink.”

I stayed on the phone a minute longer with Brian, both of us desperately trying to say something else. Drowning in the injustice that is language in the throes of tragedy. How can just a few words be enough? How can one or two words describe the end of three entire lives? It should take hours, days, months even. Not moments. It’s not right. It’s so insulting what language does to us. How it’s so scarce when we need it so badly, right when we need to surround ourselves with a protective layer of words, it just disappears. I held tight to a few syllables while the rest plummeted down, deep into that growing hole in my stomach. A few stopped short. Formed a knot at the back of my throat.

They’re there now.

All I had left was “that’s terrible.” Like a foreigner just learning English, armed with one phrase that will always be inadequate, I repeated it over and over, hoping that somehow it would work. But nothing worked. Everything was broken. Abandoned in the ongoing implosion.

I had just seen Ben, Cayce, and Joe a few days prior in Columbus, OH. Ben played songs on his acoustic guitar and sang under the name Mancub. He was young, 18, but had already been performing for years. We played with him for the first time a year ago in Virginia Beach, and I was immediately impressed. On stage he had a quiet confidence, an at times bashful demeanor which, as he stepped side to side, sliding a foot out then in, gave a sincerity to his songs of protest and personal revelation. He and Cayce, his girlfriend, were nearly inseparable. In fact, from the moment I first met them at that show at the beach, up through seeing them around town—both had moved to Richmond to attend VCU—I don’t think I ever saw them apart. They were together last week when we met up with them in the small, rural town of Carlinville, IL, to play what was supposed to be the first of three shows together. Also with them was Joe, Ben’s best friend and, at least on this trip, accompaniment on stage, playing mandolin and slide guitar. He was friendly and comfortable, all three of them were really, and the instant I met Joe I liked him, jumped right into conversation without any awkwardness.

Over the following days I had the privilege of hanging out with these three, friendly, people, all wiser than their age hinted at. Cayce, who had normally been quiet and reserved when we had first met, opened up and revealed herself to be smart, funny, and one of the most self-assured 19 year olds I’d ever met. It was really a pleasure. In Bloomington, IN, after a show fell through, we all went swimming at a nearby public pool, walked around town, and stayed up late talking on a back porch. The next day in Columbus we played an acoustic show in a park on campus followed by a late night game of foursquare. It was a blast. And when the next morning came and we had to go our separate ways, our van to Louisville while they headed over to Lexington, we did so eager to see each other soon. We hugged and made plans to see each other a few weeks later when we played in Norfolk. Ben and Cayce had promised to show us around town, take us to their favorite burrito place, and we were going to try to get Ben on the show. The beach is always a questionable place to play, we’re never really sure how the shows are going to go, but knowing that Ben would be there, I was really looking forward to it.

Three days later I was on the phone with Brian trying to grasp the fact that I would never see Ben, Cayce, or Joe again. When I finally got off the phone the van was quiet, Cory and Ashley sat still, aware that something awful had happened, dreading hearing the news I had to tell them, that I did tell them, once again facing the painful reality of my inarticulate grief. We drove back to the house we were staying at in a gloomy silence, punctuated occasionally with short sentences that failed over and over to put to words our pain. A pain that over the last few days has been anything but steady, it comes in waves, rising and falling, overwhelmingly present and then almost entirely absent.

I don’t understand death. I handle it poorly. It’s so entirely finite, so absolute, and how am I, a person who has so far only known existence, only awoken to life, supposed to grasp the opposite? It’s impossible I think. I can only see fragments but never the whole, my inability to truly understand adding confusion to tragedy.

So I guess I won’t try too hard to understand, and instead I’ll be thankful that I had the chance to meet these great people when I did. That I got to see Ben play music, something he loved and was exceptionally good at, with his friends who, really, were just about everyone he ever met.

I’ve thought a lot, prior to this, about how a person can manage to be guiltlessly cheerful in spite of all the suffering and tragedy in the world. I write a lot of songs that deal with the injustice around us (and what is death, especially of the young, if it is not unjust?) and I’ve struggled with where that leaves me and how I should live my life. I’ve felt guilty for having fun, for laughing and being carefree when so many others don’t have that luxury. Then I pictured, of all things, a newspaper littered on the ground. See, a newspaper has in it, written all over the pages, some of the most depressing and tragic information about our current world. Wars, death, political corruption are all there. And yet that littered newspaper, in spite of all the weight, the heaviness of the information on its pages, is still light enough to rise up and float in the softest of winds. And I guess, though it’s extremely difficult to do, we are supposed to be like that newspaper in a way. We are to treat our burdens seriously, give our tragedies the space they deserve, but to not let that weigh us down to the point that we can’t enjoy life, that we can’t be swept away and carried along by a happy breeze. And, well, that image helps me a lot. For a while I had a hard time picturing myself having fun on the rest of this tour. I felt guilty. Felt I was being disrespectful. But now I don’t think that’s true. I think that it’s possible to mourn sincerely and appropriately, and to also enjoy the great and wonderful things life offers.

We still have two more weeks on this tour and they are two weeks I have been looking forward to for a long time. We have already met up with our good friends Endless Mike and the Beagle Club and we will join The Gaslight Anthem shortly. Both bands play phenomenal music that inspires me, and I don’t want to miss out on that. I think that would be wrong to do. So I have decided to enjoy myself. To enjoy being around great people who make great music. I will grieve too. I will do both. I will take on the heaviness of this world and then defy gravity as best as I can.

Brett