This summer was rife with personal traumas irrespective of but amplified by the U.S election. The least direct of these was attending my 20 year High School reunion. Blackfoot High School is right on the edge of Shoshone-Bannock’s tribal lands.
Among my best friends during my time there were Joe and James; skateboarders and descendants of peoples inhabiting this continent before Columbus, or vikings, or whatever. Joe was the most beautiful being I had ever seen in my mere 14 years. Strong, graceful, poetic, I was captivated. James with his gregarious and irascible ways creating adventure at every turn.
I was as in love with Joe as my puppy brain could allow. It was he and my best friend however that got to it first and by some cruelly misguided sense of loyalty or friendship I couldn’t bring myself to pursue what all my other senses strongly urged. Crying myself to sleep at night instead.
James hooked up with a girl from a neighboring school who was discovered to have had adult relations at 16 with newly turned adult James. Just months after his 18th birthday with his long black braids and brown skin they must have thought he was just asking for a prison sentence sleeping with a nice white girl like that.
Joe’s cousin committed suicide while I was still in school. She was all ready to graduate until the school informed her she had insufficient credits for graduation. She was dead before the ceremony. Two years after I graduated, 4 after Joe had and only months after his younger brother did, Joe hung himself to death.
I don’t know what I expected going back; maybe looking proof that I’m not just a cynical misanthrope but society really is functioning on a highly compartmentalized scaffolding of cognitive dissonance or simply erasure of that which conflicts with their anemically amiable authoritarianism. I also wanted to dress up, show off, and drink too much.
At the reunion a mutual friend told a story he stole from Joe as his own. He and his wife all into some rockabilly style. The pre civil rights era nostalgia, gun fetishizing, and blaring dog whistles left me with a worse hangover than the rainbow shots.
This topic spoke to me because music feels more like my means of expression than most things. I mostly mistrust my words, my right to express my thoughts and feelings. I am afraid of my anger, of confrontation.
I hated this song for so long. One night at the house of that fateful girlfriend not long before the fateful birthday, an assembled group having just consumed a rather noxious marijuana joint were made by Joe and James to listen to it on repeat for what seemed an eternity. I distinctly remember losing my shit on the way home crying huddled and inconsolable. Have never really be able to enjoy the doors since. Putting this down and listening now is providing a bit the catharsis of the aptly named poster of this video.
