exe.reboot

Last year I did an in-depth dissertation of my favorite band Green Day's 2000 album Warning last year. In that for its closing track Macy's Day Parade, wrote on its themes of acceptance where the banality or once ran from and loathed is oddly what becomes longed for, an existential egress from the end of what seemed a journey into sight and sound. A ballad away from the Jackass infused with lyrics, simple in interpretation of this longing and understanding it, taking heed away from the album's title track and serenading into an optimistically saudadically poetic number with this acceptance, in an aspirational fashion:

"Give me something that I need

  Satisfaction guaranteed

  Because I’m thinking about 

  a brand new hope

  the one I’ve never known

  ‘Cause now I know

  It’s all that I wanted…"

Even if, "the night of the living dead is on his way, with the credit report," the difference in thieves and crooks (psychic vampires, for the satanically inclined) have been relatively figured out, even if sometimes in the hardest ways. It reminds me of another solemn number by the genre-bending artist Poppy off her seminal 2020 album I Disagree called Nothing I Need which similarly sings in encouragement of taking a ride into— what at times, can be perceived as awry— acceptance— or strange— realisation regarding once held aspiration, dreams, wishes, hopes, goals, whathaveyou in subjectively used vocabulary:

"Everything I thought I wanted

 I can see it's nothing, nothing I needed"

And in spite of what can be likened to lusting for it at one point, it doesn't matter anymore for whatever reason...

I can use many-a-label to describe my entity: writer, journalist, archivist, oddity enthusiast, Satanist, fly on every wall, Neurotic Nihilist, erratic eccentrically ecclectic egoist... really they all fall under one or two of the same words mentioned in the brief list. I would however scribe that as much and in spite of writing the aforementioned dissertation of Warning mainly in referendum to myself, and with Emil Cioran's concept of solipsism and projection, I didn't quite wholly consider it all to that end. Such is rather a unique bit, given I would prescribe myself as highly aware and understanding of my own being; crediting it in a large way similarly to Patrick Bateman's obsession with music as a conduit where I myself find a common ground in introspective information with media. Rare it is that I don't have some sort of CD spinning on my stereo (which currently docks the 2005 album from Mindless Self Indulgence, You'll Rebel To Anything as I write/type this up) or coming into my brain at the highest possible volume through bluetooth connected headphones; blazing through hundreds of thousands of hours of tracks and various interviews and podcasts on innumerable topics which inevitably intersect at some odd end or another; or watching film after film and reading book after essay after article both physically and digitally. I've been across the country: from Tucson to Chicago, to Arizona then the Windy City again and again; through tornado alley through and with liaisons in Montana, finding myself on the border of Washington state, then again to the dry desert heat. To There And Back Again by plane, train and automobile— using a pointed reference at the start of this sentence as it is the second title of JRR Tolkien's book The Hobbit (or in his incredibly crafted mythology, book by the hairy footed halfling who travelled to The Lonely Mountain), and in Peter Jackson's screen adaptation of the work where Gandalf remarks to Bilbo Baggins that, "the world is not in your books or maps, it is out there," as well as prior in this introductory chapter and in both book and movie in his introduction in greeting the son of Belladonna Took his name and how, "Gandalf means me."

Going back to the album Warning, it its ninth track Jackass and how it relates to Uncle Rico in the movie Napoleon Dynamite; and the state of stasis in this solipsistic-in-misery/memory verity. Prison is in the mind as good ol' Charlie Manson wisely once noted, as stasis is just that. It's nonsensical to be in this plane of existence where nothing heals or grows in a Great Big White World of what 'used to be' with love for oneself and one another as Marilyn Manson sings.

What spurred as initial inspiration for the dissertation of the album was a remark I made whilst talking to myself in the mirror of a recording phone screen, that Warning is the We Are Chaos of Green Day. I still feel that idea to be true in its statement, however in that it's rather akin to Mechanical Animals as well. The unisex sibling to Antichrist Superstar weaves its web of narratives, and within the fugue of its tales is that of the cold and blank smile from this dissociative being playing playing the suicide king trying to regain a semblance or symbol of soul after the grandiose all-encompassing self-annihilation and new beginning in hindsight of The Reflecting God. With that however and like in the single The Long Hard Road Out of Hell, it's essentially and (neurotically) nihilistically living fast and dying so too; or more clearly stating my point here by quoting from the recent (at the time of writing and typing this) album ending number Sacrifice of the Mass and movie Oppenheimer:

"The greater the star, the more violent its demise"

Maybe in that it is or was forced attrition in an unconscious as much as conscious manner. Knowingly moreso prior in the wake of devastation and after thought to be escaping from, but everything's eventual— even in evasion. Out of the frying pan and into the fire, onto another pan and more fire following up which makes such likenable to the speech from Macbeth stating:

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury

Signifying nothing

Idiot, overreaching jackass or typical adolescent overextension; Icharus flying too high and believing in never coming down. Peter Pan Syndrome, but in that we have the movie Hook and return to it in that—instinctive drift it would seem; and what truly differs this here from the process of over-intellectualising it which formed Neurotic Nihilism? Not terribly much, I can't help myself but to do so. The real difference is gained further perspective and that all I know is that I don't know, and I find that incredible from the bottom back to the top of the slide into a barrel— a wide open road that's not too fuckin narrow.