Metal Matters

This post is an open invitation to anyone who wants to contribute to a future post, or number of posts on the subject of heavy metal. If this interests you, whoever you are, whether we know you or you live in Romania, the country with our second highest number of visitors (go figure), then hit us up. We'd love to hear from you, and you can be immortalized within these here ranks. How exciting!

METAL MATTERS

1. Before we go anywhere with this, I need you to profess your undying love for metal. So, let’s hear it. I want the person reading this to know without any question that you have a passion for the heavy stuff. I want the sort of person who might be totally uncomfortable, or maybe even pretty ignorant with metal to understand almost intuitively why someone else would feel so compelled to listen to this sort of music over any other. Don’t think of this as a sales pitch, think of it more as a testimonial to the sheer joy of heavy music.

2. When did you become a metal fan, and what were the circumstances surrounding this time in your musical life. Has it been a near-lifelong obsession? Were you a late bloomer? Was it a gradual process or were you hit over the head with it, suddenly?

3. Do you have a genre preference? How would you define that style of metal? What makes, let’s say, sludge so much better than power metal, shred better that goregrind, etc . . . 

4. Do you feel a sense of community with the metal world at large, or is this more of a personal sort of thing, almost something you keep hidden? 

5. How does metal fit into your musical makeup, and by extension, into your overall life? Does it overlap into other areas (work, your relationships, church service, workouts, etc . . .)? 

6. In what way, if any, does metal cause you problems (work, your relationships, church service, workouts, etc . . .)? In other words, if you’re, say married, does your spouse think you are a stunted child for being a metal fan? Does your boss give you shit for listening to “acid rain music,” and so on . . . Be honest.

7. What do you think about the role of gender as it relates to metal? Apply this concept to the presence of women in metal both in bands and as fans, and also the ways that masculinity, as well as femininity is expressed both by the bands and by the fans. In what ways has the historical “sausage-fest” of metal become more appealing to women (or has it?), and why? Do you see any sort of changes in metal in order to accommodate women (again, both as fans as well as band members)?

8. What about the politics of the metal world? Do you see metal as a rebellious form of music, or is it hyper-reactionary, coming across as almost ultra-conservative? Or, like most else, is it more of a grey area? If so, explain. How well do you feel metal is able to express genuine emotions at the risk of being camp or overly theatrical, or worse, at the risk of possibly presenting a veneer of empty-minded hatred and downright stupidity and intolerance? What takes place to counteract some of the mindless shock tactics and outright violence and ultimately shows metal to be a voice for whoever is expressing it, good or bad? Who represents the ugly side of metal? Who makes the fans of metal look like complicit (or, at least tacit) drones, utterly beyond sense and reason? And, beyond that, who uses metal as a true voice of transgression, leaving the listener with a broader sense of the world in which they live?

9. What is your hands-down favorite metal song? Band? Artist? Lyric? Why?

10. What’s next? Where does metal go from here? 

Mr. Whimpers

1

Let’s not denigrate ourselves here. These days it seems I can barely muster the strength to venture beyond BED -- KITCHEN -- COUCH, and back to BED.

Ever since M took her final meeting with Mr. Whimpers, my window of opportunity -- or what the rest of you might refer to as “will to live” -- has, uh, taken a bit of a hit in the ass. 

It’s okay though, we can handle it, we can adapt. There is a way out. But for right now we are doing best with BED -- KITCHEN -- COUCH -- BED.

Whimpers came to call on a dark and stormy night. I shit you not. It actually seemed darker than any other night, which seems ridiculous now since all nights are dark enough, relatively speaking. And yet somehow this night was darker. This night took your garden variety darkness and invited itself in to your parlor, literally. In fact, it was like you couldn’t get the shit off you. I feel uneasy at the thought of it now. And yeah, it was truly stormy. It came down in sheets. It tore Noah’s chapter out of the bible and wiped its ass with it. 

While I was outside closing the damn garage door, which always fucks up in an electrical storm, this creepy fuck shows up at my front door. M, as she always does to a fault, to a fucking fault, saunters right up and lets the guy in. I come back in, turn in to the sitting room, and am treated to the following. 

The power is out, so the light is out in the room, it’s clearly off, and still, when I look at this fucking guy standing in front of M, who is sitting in her plastic-covered chair, back to me, he is lit. I don’t know how, but he is lit, I can see his face. And I don’t like it. 

He is grinning from ear to fucking ear, and his skin is moving, almost rippling, but that can’t be right. Nobody’s skin ripples, right? It just isn’t something that happens. But I swear it was. And he’s got this idiotic hat, wide brim. And with his head oddly lit from some unknown source above him, and his head cocked down towards M, all I can see of him is his wide smile, and rippling on the cheeks. But that can’t be right. 

M, poor M, she is stock still, head tilted up at the fuck, and she is whimpering. It’s a delicate and fragile thing, and I don’t like it at all. It means a whole lot of bad stuff that I don’t want to think about, ever. 

As I step closer, very slowly, I round the edge of her chair and just catch for a moment that his feet are not touching the ground. Worse, the tips of his shoes, of his obsessively shiny shoes, are twitching very fast, like the movement of a fish when you stick the knife in and get ready to clean it. And that’s the feeling I get from this guy. he’s here to clean M, he’s here to devour her, he’s here to take all the light, leave only his own dark, sullied in the mud of the storm, mud that is not on his shiny shoes because they aren’t touching the ground. 

I don’t even know what to say at this point. 

I am virtually frozen at the impossibility of the whole thing. None of it makes any sense at all. The weather was bad. We felt uneasy. That was it. 

We pay our taxes, drop a couple small bills in the basket on Sundays. We do our part. I cut the grass, tip my waiter, use the self-serve lane. I buy American. 

So why us? Why M? What is there to say?

This guy, sharply and suddenly claps his hands together, and the sound is like a grenade. And I remember grenades. I did my service, I worked my way across France in ‘44, I marched into Berlin and the whole nine. I’m the real fucking deal. Yeah, so this guy claps his hands, and boom, I can’t see shit. All light is now gone. I feel something move not by me, but around me, like a fucking cold wind, and I am now on my knees. Not quite sure how I ended up down there. I just was. 

And fuck it all . . . I am whimpering too.

2

M stayed in that chair for a fucking week. I got her to eat after a couple days, but as far as the rest of what your body demands of you, well, figure it out. I had to throw the chair out after that week was up, let’s put it that way. 

She also had not a damn thing to say for that week save for one, and it was always at night when she was asleep -- she would wake me in my chair by muttering softly but repeatedly, “See you soon, see you soon, see you soon . . .”

And that was pretty much that. A week to the night later she simply got up out of her chair, went to the bathroom, showered, threw her clothes away, and went to bed.

I didn’t ask her about what happened that night, I was afraid to, to be honest. But one morning she just walked into the kitchen and plopped herself down in front of me. She was giving me that look. I told her the coffee was fine, not too bitter, and she just shook her head. 

“You were outside,” she said. “I heard this rapping on the door, not a knock but a sort of steady, even, insistent rapping. It was so slight that I found it hard to remember how long it had been going on. And you were outside, I didn’t know what to do, so I went to see what it was.

Just as I opened the door, the power went out. And still, for some reason, I can see its face.”

It. Why did she have to call him “it”? It doesn’t sound good at all. Why not “him,” because “it” is just no good. “It” confirms that something very bad happened that night and I don’t want that on my mind. I’ve put great effort into pretending I didn’t see the rippling, or the shoes, or the impossible light. I sure as fuck don’t need him to become “it.”

She continued. 

“It was grinning, and that was not good, but there was something else . . . there was this thing with his skin. I can’t explain it. It’s skin, it was -- rippling. I could see it clearly, it was shuddering, almost like fluid. It was so terrible, and I can’t even explain it. And there’s more. I noticed something moving near the ground. I looked down and I saw that this thing was literally hovering above the ground. I know, I know it sounds insane, believe me, I can’t even believe myself as I say it out loud, but I swear to you it’s true. And its shoes, they shined, they shined, I remember that, and what’s worse, they were twitching, almost blurred. I couldn’t handle it. I felt myself coming apart. I didn’t know what to do. 

And then I felt its breath on my face. 

I looked at it, I couldn’t stop myself, I felt a wave of terror down my upper back. I looked at this thing, this impossibly wide grin, and as I did this I felt it speak to me in silence.

“See you soon,” it said to me. “See you soon,” over and over, and yet it did not speak.

Somehow I found I was sitting in the chair, with no idea how I got there. It felt as though I was in a waking nightmare. It was all so impossible and still I knew it was actually happening. 

Its shoes twitching, this was the first thing I noticed. It was hulking in front of me, I looked up. Its head brushed the ceiling, and again was the terrible light. 

And it was then that I saw its eyes. I saw its eyes, damn you, I saw its eyes. And its eyes looked directly into me.”

I was stunned. I was frozen. I had no idea what to think. I noticed I had dug red grooves into my palms with my fingernails. Her story was almost unbearable. 

She went on.

“In its eyes I saw things that have taken the life from me. I saw things that force me to question it all, everything. Nothing I have ever known can be trusted. In its eyes was the sum of all madness, the end of all that is good, and the end of all that has meaning.

It was right. He was right. He will see me soon.”

That night I dreamt of a terrible flood. I was leading a group of faceless people across a pregnant river, a raging river, utterly black. There were stones that just barely broke through the madness and I stepped from one to the next to lead the way across. As I worked my way through the black I noticed huge shapes moving just below the surface. As I looked back to find those for which I was responsible, all I saw was the thing, its face alight, arms at its side, and all around it everything I had ever known was being absorbed into its body. And then it looked up . . . and I saw its eyes. I ran.

M was gone the following morning. I never saw her again. But before she was gone forever I received a call from her. 

“Is that you,” she said. “are you there?”

“Yes, yes,” I cried, but then realized she wasn’t talking to me.

I wasn’t even breathing. 

And then I heard it, a sound I will never be able to accept, and something that will undoubtedly lead me to the edges of sanity. She was whimpering. And then there was a clap. And she was gone. 

3

So, ever since, it’s been BED -- KITCHEN -- COUCH, and then BED. It’s been all I could muster. I simply have nothing left in me. But I will pull through. I have to. What’s it been now? Two years? Fuck. Two years. It’s time to move past this and make my remaining time my own. I refuse to let Whimpers take whatever I have left in this life. I owe at least that much to M.

That’s funny though. As I sit on my bed I notice under the closet door the toes of a shiny pair of shoes. And here’s the rub. They’re twitching. 

They Do Not Deserve You

It's so very late. I should be asleep, but I'm not. I'm wide awake. I'm exhausted, spent, wiped out, empty, done. yeah, all of that, but wide awake. I am letting the late great Ronnie James Dio along with Black Sabbath cradle me in its beauty; I'm listening Children of the Sea live, and it is a motherfucker. Supposedly Robert Plant and Bonzo went to a London club to catch the hot new thing (Black Sabbath) and all Plant could say was, "Wow, this is terrible." What a pretentious cocksucker.

I am butt-up against a page-turner and I don't like it. The boat is drifting down a current most foul and I didn't even buy a ticket. That's no fucking deal at all.

I can't drink enough tonight. There's not enough in the house. I'd go Sterno at this point. It's that bad.

There is a room a short space away and within they are wrapped in slumber, and they are at an emotional impasse. And a stone's throw from there I sit and I record my feelings in a pathetic attempt to tie this moment down for the future so that I (alone) can revisit this day and never let it go, and then I can get on with my life.

You absolutely have to get on with your life because by my calculations this is it, ladies. This is fucking it. Imagine spending the lion's share of it in fear. That is a tragedy and a slap in the face of plain good sense.

You ought to know that the stuff is in short supply.

You have stripped your words bare and shed them of artifice and cloaked them in a sheen of self-defense, of glory. But there is no glory in the disease that coats you like a cheap suit. You spew anger with callous disregard for tact or taste because that's just what you do, but did you know that anger is a shade of clarity with which I am intimately familiar? Did you know that your brand of anger pushes beyond the borders of humor and hurtles itself directly into the province of glee? Didn't, did you, you fuck? Did you forget that whenever you summon the forces of true rage you are walking into a neighborhood which does not fucking care about you in the slightest because you are nothing?

Didn't know that either, did you?

You claim to sweat pain and yet you are nothing but a catalyst for all of ours. It's singular, your contribution, but you know what? That's not a nice thing to say, and you are way beyond deserving of kindness. Let those who are bigger than me bestow that worthless gift upon you. I will remain content to consume you from within.

Consider it an act of mercy.

Your first, and your very, very last.