A Gout Out for the Mix Tape Universe

Stream of poop 3…while listening to Nada Surf’s Let Go

The business world is cold and brutal and anti-social. It’s self driven and curt. It’s impersonal to the point and arrogant. I never joined the military due to my heart problem and thank God. I probably would have. Not because I knew anything about what it was all about. I would have done it out of ignorance and the simple fear of my humble past of…how else would I get myself out of A-Town? Nada Surf’s Let Go is flowing out of the boom box in the kitchen. He is falsetto-ing “What else can you do but go on?” This song is about watching fruit flies “form jerky patterns like snowflakes in the air.” I guess somehow that observation made him think of a friend he had to let go out of his life. This is something that’s been on my mind for the last week or so. Last night I dreamt that I finished my psychology final. My teacher Lana gave it to us but I was in some strange room I never had been before. I finished the test and as I walked out down this long corridor of a building that felt more like a mall than a school my old friend E. Mon*** was leaving class. He calls out to me and I try to avoid him. Finally we connect and for the first time since the beginning of our friendship…he seemed genuinely interested in me. I’ve tried to relate to my friends like E. I’ve sold out in my life and attempted to relate to my peers by playing a little Grand Theft Auto. A game where you fuck prostitutes and gain health to continue to shooting cops on the street…no it’s not utterly morbid. Then when you’re done, if I remember correctly, instead of paying the hooker for your fun 60 seconds you shoot her? Needless to say, it’s really something that I guess one could find the sick humor in for a few minutes but it’s by far nothing I could play for hours with my buddies. It’s just that my friends never seemed to embrace my culture…Nada Surf snatches my attention again I catch the end of a verse “…to see why you cry.” people associate this band with emo? I don’t really understand the concept of emo music. I guess there are some bands I have heard and my knowledge of the generality was good enough to label the band properly…but seriously out of all the damn shows I’ve been to and I’ve been to millions…I can only peg one band that I saw in that last year as emo. They sounded a lot like early …Get Up Kids.

Nada Surf-
“On a plane ride
the more it shakes
the more I have to let go”

The point I wanted to force…is that the business world is cold. But it’s like a stylistic identity. I associate it with someone hating the blues because it has four chords. You can’t really deviate much from the four chords in the blues…it is what it is. It has little nuances like that damn flattened third…those guys love that sound. Jazz cats came around and weren’t’ satisfied with limited harmonized palette so they made all this chord substitutions and the birth of the Jazz Blues came about. But see once people came in and changed it they stopped calling it the blues. It was something different it was the Jazz Blues.

Nada Surf-
“I talk to missionaries when they are standing at my door
They tell me what I should be reading I still don’t see what for
We both stand there politely
Trying to change each other’s core.”

In stream of conscious mode it’s so damn difficult to get the point across. I need to learn the damn game of the business world’s heartless conventions. Even Taoists and the inventor of the Taoism believed in the cycle of life of contributing to the “real world” before submitting ones life to one of no obligations one of utmost freedom off in some secluded remote forest to take on the next spiritual stage of life. I guess in our country we created one such opportunity and it was called retirement. Now as people in our culture grow older…they have seemed to have lost that freedom…out of greed we’ll keep our parents/grandparents working past the day they are shitting in their diapers….O.K. enough.

Nada Surf…”I’m just a happy kid stuck with the heart of an old punk.”