We do, Spin Doctors. We do.
No, this is a post about Tool. More or less.
Originally, I was looking for a picture of your standard "tool", as in "scumbag". This came up instead, and well, I felt you needed to be in the same mental place as me. For at least a second.
I was a sophomore in high school. Still had glasses, finally managed to ditch the braces, girls still didn't like me (far as I know). This was most likely due to the fact that I never talked to anyone (much less girls), was still in the habit of wearing the same smelly black hoodie for weeks on end (losing that thing was probably my greatest blessing in disguise since... actually, I can't remember anything earlier in my life), was a swimmer (not the greatest sport for getting your dick sucked), and was wading so deep in self-indulgent angst, I had to tilt my neck to breathe.
But I was visiting my sister for spring break! Well, a weekend of it anyway. Woo, party time, excellent. College bitches, booze (which I really wasn't into back then; shockingly, my Irish and German genes hadn't kicked in very much), and I don't know, somewhere that wasn't Oak Park. Oh, and no parents. Oh, and I got to take flights all on my own! Which is weirdly awesome. And, even more weird, WAY simple when your entire family isn't involved. Seriously, both flights I got all the way to my gate so fast, without a Gumbel Family Disaster, I had to quadruple-check to make sure I'd done everything right.
Anyways, I got to Pittsburgh, got to my sister's dorm, stayed there overnight, there was a party, I drank for the first time (green apple schnapps + 7-Up and a beer, if I recall), and... not much else happened; it was a fun trip, but nothing too crazy, sorry to disappoint.
Trust me, you're not the most disappointed one.
Something magical did indeed happen though! Did happen indeed? Did indeed... happen. Hmm. Those are both kind of really awkward. Well, at any rate, there was something cool that happened. My sister introduced me to Tool.
Let's clarify some things here. Tool is one of the two great prog-metal bands. The other one being Dream Theater.
Unless we're counting Rush. And we're not counting Rush.
My sister is a huge, huge, huge, huge, HUGE a capella nerd. And otherwise listens to like, Jason Mraz and Sufjan Stevens and Jack Johnson and yes, yes, I know. That stuff.
Hey, I kinda like some of "that stuff". See first sentence.
On a slightly different note, I never want to not look at this picture.
At that point, the hardest things I knew she listened to were Nirvana, Foo Fighters, and some Jack White-related things. Same tree, different branch, me and my sister. My sister and I?
So Vicarious (which happened to be one of the first songs I learned on guitar two years later) comes on her iTunes. Not on Pandora, not a friend's iPod, not a... a... I don't know, radio (lol wuzzat?), on MY SISTER'S FUCKING Itunes (is that correct? the inverse capitalization? no? oh, well, suck my balls, aPPLE), my sister who I've heard refer to Metallica as "death metal" and Evanescence as "emo". I may have made one of those up. Actually, probably not. Vicarious isn't even one of their slow, eleven-minute, droney, meditation-metal acid-voyage songs. It kicks you in the fucking balls. And I, as a sixteen-year-old whose definition of the heaviest band he knew being Slipknot (punch me later), was hearing this for the first time. I, of course, asked her who it was. She told me it's Tool (never even knew that was a band), she told me that "some of their stuff was kinda weird and scary" (again, very different tastes, she and I) but generally it was "beautiful". My sister described Tool as "beautiful". And I couldn't help but agree.
...YAY ABRUPT ENDINGS.
You need to know exactly two things about this show to get the joke. C'mon. You can do it.
No comments:
Post a Comment