| You built yourself into a brand, gave it your best and drank your own Kool-Aid,
|
| believed your own hype, and now the party never ends
|
| You were sitting in an airport watching a man yell at his children
|
| You wanted to grab him by the collar, lift him up to the heavens and scream, «This is who you all are
|
| You people won’t just learn to live»
|
| Your flight landed and you drove home
|
| The first thing you did was put a sprinkler on the end of a hose
|
| You then climbed up on your roof using an old rickety ladder, and began nailing
|
| the sprinkler onto the top, right above your bedroom
|
| And every night, a timer goes off at 9 pm and the water turns on
|
| And you thought to yourself, «Maybe I don’t live with her anymore,
|
| maybe I’m not under her roof, maybe she won’t be here anymore, but if she
|
| lives through a storm, I want to feel the rain, too.»
|
| One morning you woke up and your mother asked, «Why are you still smoking pot
|
| and playing punk rock?»
|
| She begged for you to come back to church, and you replied, «Drugs are a
|
| guaranteed experience
|
| With religion, sometimes I found a home and sometimes I just found a bunch of
|
| bigots.»
|
| It’s nothing new, the same story everyone tells
|
| I only believed in my mom 'cause I was afraid of hell
|
| The next day you had a show at a dive bar, and you thought you saw your dad in
|
| the crowd and the whole time you were on stage it’s all you could think about
|
| You wondered why you were so angry
|
| That the girl from the night before didn’t follow you on Twitter
|
| Somehow in your reptilian brain you created a bond between women and rejection,
|
| and now you hate them, but you don’t know it
|
| Because your hate doesn’t manifest as violence
|
| It manifests as you trying to control them
|
| Or saying you’re trying to protect them
|
| As these realizations finally entered your mind, you thought
|
| «When did this happen, when did I become so jaded? |
| Was it when she left,
|
| when I lost the perfect woman? |
| Why don’t I understand them? |
| When did women
|
| even become a 'them'? |
| Why am I like this?»
|
| But the show is still happening, so you snap out of it, smoke a Marlboro Red in
|
| the bathroom
|
| Drink a cheap energy drink and sing Radiohead’s «Creep» in your head as you
|
| walk toward the greenroom
|
| Your buddy Chris brought ketamine-infused joints, so you took a hit
|
| As a promoter entered with cleaning solvent, as he began to wipe down a table,
|
| his phone rang, he saw a picture of his girlfriend on it, showed it to the
|
| band and said, «Let me introduce you to my problem»
|
| As the promoter took the call, Chris turned to the others and continued on over
|
| a speech he had most likely prepared the night before, but would soon deliver
|
| as if it was an original thought happening in the moment
|
| He said, «When a band changes their sound, the fans blame it on the label,
|
| saying that they’ve been forced into a corner to be more marketable,
|
| not realizing the band just grew up
|
| But people know more about the band than the band knows about themselves and
|
| people in the same way»
|
| You looked around and saw that everyone was elevated, and said, «I have to leave»
|
| Then began to skate home, and once you got there, the first thing you did was
|
| turn on the sprinkler
|
| Laid on the hardwood floor, called your mom and left a voicemail and said
|
| «Part of love is suffering when you lose it
|
| And I lost who I am» |