Stop Your Messing Around

Ben Anderson was kind to me, even though I crashed my parents’ truck into his parents SUV. I envied his personal modes of transportation; he had a scooter (that is, a motor scooter) and a long board. That seemed to me to be the way to get around. The only problem was that I had to take my drum set around to a lot of places, and that would have been hard to do on a scooter. Well, that and the fact that I had to work for a long time to pay my dad back for my car, and spending money on another pricey mode of transportation just was not going to happen.

So a scooter was out of the question, but Ben helped me to build my own long board, which was how he got his long boards, by building them himself. The process of building the long board was a difficult one, because I didn’t bother to design or plan any part of it. I just took a large piece of plywood and started cutting it. The eventual finished product was a goofy shape with little bits of griptape stuck to the top and a checkerboard bottom with a rude boy silhouette. I named it “Rudi” (quotation marks included), and I rode it all over Provo.

Except down steep hills. That scared me. All the cool kids with long boards liked to ride them down a series of steep hills throughout the town, but I did not want to get seriously injured. Heck, I didn’t want to skin my tender little knees. So I stuck mostly to level ground.

Then there was Spencer. One day, July 2nd to be exact, Spencer, Aaron, and I went out to an area where two LDS chapels were built in the same parking lot, a parking lot that was constructed on a large hill. It was a popular area for long boarders to go and test fate. Spencer stood on “Rudi” at the top of the hill and took off. He disappeared behind one of the churches and we didn’t see him for a few minutes. When we finally spotted him, he was stomping back up the hill carrying “Rudi” under one of his arms; his other arm he held at a right angle next to his body. When he got close to us, he threw the long board to the ground and angrily said, “I think I shattered my wrist.”

I don’t remember what my first thoughts were, but I’m certain that among those thoughts was, “Oh crap! What about the band?”

Aaron and I took Spencer to the ER at the hospital. I felt very grown up speaking to the receptionist and acting like I was responsible in some way for his well being. X-rays showed that he had indeed severely broken his wrist and he required whatchamacallits in his wrist to help fix the bone. Um, rods? Really big and metal tooth picks? I honestly cannot think of the term used for those things right now.

Thus began the Shattered Wrist Period of 1999, a period of very little music production or performance, but also a period of lots of bonding and friendship strengthening. So, you know, good stuff came of it.

Two Nights, Two Shows, One Campout

The passage of time is such a weird thing to think about. One of the most fascinating lines from the Book of Mormon is Jacob’s comment about this very thing, “the time passed away with us, and also our lives passed away like as it were unto us a dream” (Jacob 7:26). To Jacob, I say, I hear ya, brother.

My point, by the way, is that it feels like it is very difficult to fit everything into a day that I would like to. Inevitably there will be four or five major things that I wanted to accomplish any given day that I just did not get around to doing. This was not a problem for me as an eighteen year old. In 24 hours I could accomplish everything. For example…

There was a cancer benefit thing scheduled for June 25th at Mountain View High School, and Rash was put on the agenda of entertainment for the evening, along with Provo’s popular comedian, Johnny B. At some point the members of Rash decided that we did not want to do this show, and so instead of telling the people in charge that we were canceling the performance, The Rasta Smurfs showed up and played instead.

Our show wasn’t well received by the crowd. Everyone but around eight people left when we began playing. A lot of the people who were there were expecting Rash to play, and I tried my best to convince them that my new band, which I enjoyed being in more than Rash, was even more fun, but I wasn’t terribly persuasive.

After the show we cleaned up, took all our equipment to my house, went to 7-11 and bought some firewood, and then we drove up Provo Canyon to find a campsite to spend the night. The campsite next to us was occupied by a group of people who were enjoying large amounts of pot and alcohol, and they came over to our camp and talked with us. They were very friendly.

The next day, after we all slept less than three hours a piece, we hung out and then took all our equipment to another show. I’m not sure where this one was played, but we played with Chump, The Kindertones, Arrogant, and Magstatic. The crowd at this show was much more into our style of music and cried for an encore, but we had played our entire set list and didn’t have anything else to play. I wrote in my journal that I was excited to see the video of the show. I don’t know where that video could be now.

We didn’t know it, but this would be the last show we would play for over a month, and that because of a devastating accident that I will write more about next time.

June 2nd, Or the Day I Bought an Operation Ivy CD

It seems a little remarkable to me that I did not purchase my Operation Ivy CD until after The Rasta Smurfs’ first practice.

Then again, maybe it’s not so remarkable, since it was likely the influence of the other band members that drove me to make the purchase in the first place.

Anyway, I felt the obtaining of this CD was important enough to write about it in my journal. This was a big step for me in my life as a punk rocker. Prior to Op Ivy, most of the music that I owned was much newer, recorded with decent equipment, and sounded nicely mixed and put together. None of the music in my personal library could be called “raw.” Operation Ivy changed that.

Everything about that CD was raw, the music was loud and distorted beyond the melodic distortion of, say, Green Day or even the newer Rancid albums. The vocals were angry and completely unrefined. The rhythms were loose, I’m confident in guessing that the drummer did not use a click track while recording. I absolutely loved everything about that album, but there were two songs that I was particularly fond of.

The fist song that I really liked was Tim Armstrong’s “Bad Town,” I really liked the beat, the starkly-contrasting-to-the-rest-of-the-album-clean-guitars, the saxophone, and the perceived message that I got from the lyrics, which was a message of pleading for violence to be done away with.

My other favorite song was “Missionary.” Just a few weeks after getting the CD, I submitted my mission papers to my bishop, two months and three days after buying the CD I got my mission call, and five months and 22 days after buying the CD I entered the MTC, “on my way to save the world.” I would blast that song in my Mazda while driving to work, and sing the chorus with intense feeling. At Jesse’s refrain, “MISSIONARY!!” I would scream along and picture myself in a white shirt and tie, walking the streets, talking to people, and spreading the Good News of the Gospel.

I could not understand the lyrics of the verses, by which I mean that I could not decipher exactly what Jesse sang. Had I known what he was saying, though, I still would not have understood what he was saying. At that point in my life, I was unaware of such things as the Crusades or the Inquisition, or (closer to home) the Mountain Meadows Massacre. I did not know that there had been, throughout history and up to the present day, people who would commit the most awful violence conceivable on other human beings in the name of The Prince of Peace. To me, religion was, and still is, a way to learn to treat others with kindness and compassion, and to live in way that was happy and peaceful. I couldn’t wait to get out and begin to share with people the things I knew that brought me so much happiness.

I knew that the song was not an anthem sincerely promoting the efforts of Christian missionaries; I knew this just from the way the song sounded. But that didn’t stop me from turning the meaning of the song into something that inspired me toward my own personal goals. All the music that I loved and listened to was that way for me. I would take whatever positive messages from the songs that I chose, whether or not I spun those messages from the original intention of the authors. I didn’t know precisely the lyrics of all the songs I listened to, but I knew where all the f-words were, so I could mute those on my car stereo while listening. I was straddling the worlds of punk rock and missionary preparation, intentionally and unintentionally making compromises to suit what was really important to me. I never really related to what these people sang about, I didn’t understand the lives they lived and the things they saw, but I acted like I did.

A List

Haphazard list of shows that I went to in 1999:

• Skank Patricks Day featuring My Man Friday, Insatiable, The Kindertones, and The Solutions. I loved this show, especially The Solutions. They had great on stage banter.
• MU330 at Wrapsody. The lead singer was wearing a Neal Diamond shirt, and a very large man who played trombone sang a version of “Close to You,” and also jumped in the crowd at one point doing what he called the power skank (he danced in the mosh pit while wielding a chain saw).
• The Slackers. I think this was at Wrapsody as well. This time the entire horn section jumped into the crowd and marched during one of their songs.
• Warsaw. I only have vague memories of this, but apparently they covered “Intensified” by Desmond Dekker.
• Sidewize (Aaron’s band before The Rasta Smurfs/CBA!). Earlier in the year, my seminary teacher had asked me to take his younger sister, Diane, to her high school’s Senior Prom. We went and had a great time, and she later asked me to her high school’s MORP (a girls’ choice dance in the late spring). It just so happened that MORP was the same night as the Sidewize show, and I somehow convinced Diane and her friends to drop me off at the show so I could watch Sidewize play, which they did and then picked me up later to finish the date. It reminds me of the time in 1998 that I, again, somehow convinced my scout master that I needed to leave a campout a day early (I must have faked being sick). The reasons for me wanting to leave were twofold, first, we were planning on hiking Mount Nebo the next day and I was too lazy to try that, and second, there was a Hepcat show that night that I really wanted to go to. So … yeah.
• Just Add Water. The same day as this show, Aaron and I made plans to go to California in June to play a show with the Kindertones and he was going to teach me how to surf. That didn’t happen. Neither of those things.
• I had planned on going to a Bosstones/Offspring show, but missed it.
• On June 12th I went to “a punk show” but I didn’t list any of the bands that played. I must not have been very impressed.
• Warped Tour. My favorite performance was by My Superhero. I also enjoyed Less than Jake, Blink 182, Buck-o-Nine, Pennywise, and The Vandals. This was a lot of fun, but it was overshadowed by my memory of the really incredible experience that I had at Warped Tour ’98, an experience that I will now write about in great (mediocre) detail. Warped Tour ’98 was scheduled for the same weekend as John Beck and Matt Nelson’s stake’s youth conference. They were going up to Utah State University in Logan to stay in the dorms and have a multi-stake youth conference. I concocted a plan whereby I would drive up to Logan in my own car and join them at youth conference (something that really wasn’t allowed), and then take the two of them with me on Saturday morning to Salt Lake to go to Warped Tour (something that really REALLY wasn’t allowed). When I presented this idea to my parents, they were skeptical, if by being skeptical it meant that they said, “There is absolutely no way you will get permission from their leaders to do that.” For whatever reason, I did get permission from their leaders, and I went to youth conference with them, where I met a personal doppelganger named Isaac from one of the other stakes. We all went to a fireside/testimony meeting and a big dance where one-night romances were begun by at least half of the kids there. I slept on the floor of John and Matt’s dorm room, then on Saturday we got up, had some breakfast, and then left the youth conference for Warped Tour. At the concert I got to meet some of the members of the band, Less than Jake, before they went on stage. I requested that they play my favorite song of theirs, but Chris, the lead singer, told me they wouldn’t have time to fit it into their set list, but he offered to play it for me after their performance. True to his word, as he was coming off the stage, I found him and he took me with him to their tour bus, found an old acoustic guitar, and played “Shotgun” for me. I will forever consider this one of the most cool things anybody has ever done for me. And that is why, as cool as Warped Tour ’99 was, it could not really compare to Warped Tour ’98.
• July 21st, yet another show with unnamed bands.
• July 26th, I did not go to a show this day, which was Spencer’s nineteenth birthday, but I did list in my journal what he got for his birthday, quoth, “He got 25% off blue hair dye at Taylor Maid, pink sunglasses, green nail polish, and a pirate coconut head.”
• The Hippos and Slow Gherkin at Veterans’ Hall in American Fork. We doubted whether or not this was really The The Hippos who were playing at this tiny little venue in the middle of American Fork, but it really was, and it was amazing. The band hung out with the crowd before and after they played. The keyboard player, Rich, was super cool.
• Tilt, Throwaway Generation, and One Man Army at Kilby Court. It was loud and the moshing was violent, especially for one skinny guy with long stringy hair who kept going back for more punishment. I wondered in my journal where he went after the show, as in, where did he live and sleep?
• Skalloween with Jeffrie’s Fan Club. I liked it enough that I bought a JFC t-shirt that I wore on p-days throughout my mission. The guitar player gave me a hug.
• The Aquabats and The Hippos at Classic Skating in Sandy. We were thrilled to hang out with the guys from The Hippos again.
• Suicide Machines (and Suicidal Tendencies, but we left before they played) at DV8, maybe, some club in Salt Lake. This show was on November 17th, one week before I entered the MTC. The lead singer said he was sick and therefore he had taken a lot of Robitussin. They were great live.

The list is done now.

Birth of the Smurfs

May 31st was the first practice of the Rasta Smurfs in the basement of my house. My dad called the room we practiced in “the production room.” This was probably because it was first conceived of as a room where he would produce artwork and photography (it is adjacent to his dark room where he could develop photos by hand from negatives). However, for the last few years of that decade, most of what was produced in that room was music and/or noise courtesy of me and my friends.

Over the years, Dad had come to really like Rash’s music, which was very much not punk rock. So when Aaron, Spencer, Landon, and I completed our first loud, punk-ridden practice, he told me that he didn’t enjoy it very much. That hurt my feelings a little, because this was a dream come true for me to be in a punk band. Much to his credit (and I cannot emphasize this enough) the music grew on him and eventually he made bumper stickers and business cards for us. I know I didn’t express my gratitude for his support as much as I should have.

The Rasta Smurfs’ first few songs included originals by Spencer, Aaron, and Landon, and a cover of The Cure’s “Friday I’m in Love.” (By the way, when I told someone recently that as a kid I played drums in a punk band, her response was, “Oh, you mean like The Cure?” I didn’t know what to say, so I just said, “Well, we actually covered a Cure song, so yeah, sort of.”) The songs were loud, fast, and for the most part, silly. Initially, my favorite songs to play were two of Aaron’s songs, “I’m Sexy” and “Somebody Here Smells Funny.” The reason these two were my favorites was because of the drum parts, which switched from a rocksteady ska beat to a super fast punk beat throughout each song. Also, I thought both songs were really funny. Spencer’s “Someone’s Type” was really fun too, and I really loved the backup vocals I got to sing on it.

For some reason during this time I was desperately trying to find a second job, and I applied at a number of places, but did not end up getting many offers, and the offer I did get (at Hot Topic) I turned down. I guess I wanted to try to earn more money before my mission, or I wanted to stay busy, or something. Thinking back on this now, this desire seems utterly silly.

The Rasta Smurfs’ first gig was with Joel Pack’s band, Strange Itch, at a bar in Salt Lake City called Area 51. It was on June 15th, just slightly over two weeks after our first rehearsal. Why do I refer to it as Joel Pack’s band, you ask. Because that’s all that I remember about it, and the reason I remember this is that I was once in a class with Joel in middle school. He lip synced to a Red Hot Chili Peppers’ song for a project in that class.

My memories of the show at Area 51 center mostly on what happened before we played. Just before going on stage we went in the bathroom, stood in a circle with our arms around each others’ shoulders, and I said a prayer. This may well have been the most enthusiastically spoken prayer of my life, as we bounced up and down with excitement while I prayed and my voice raised two octaves as I closed it. I’m sure it was really profound too, though I don’t remember what I said. I imagine it was something like, “We are SO grateful to be here at this, um, place, and that we get to play music. Bless us to ROCK! and to have fun!”

I recorded in my journal that night that the crowd at Area 51 “accepted us.” I do not know what this means. I also noted that I was writing at 4:00 in the morning, so I shouldn’t expect me to have made much sense.

4 Months Short, 4 Months Long

I guess it all depends on the events of periods of time, and how we remember them, that makes time feel shorter or longer to us. And age makes a difference too. These days, two years goes by like a dream, whereas when I spent two years as a missionary, it felt like so much went on in those two years that an eternity of experiences were squished in there.

It was effectively 8 months from the time that I met Aaron to the time that I entered the MTC. And for the sake of context, these 8 months could be split into 4-month halves; the first half could be characterized as the end of Rash, and the second half as the rise of Cute Band Alert!. (Note the punctuation in the name of the band–I wonder if all these years I have been abbreviating the band name wrong, and it should have been CBA!?)

And these two 4-month periods could also be broken down into smaller sub-time periods, um, something like this (time periods are approximate, except when specific dates are noted):

Period 1 (March/April)-Late Rash Period

Period 2 (May)-Pre-Rasta Smurfs Period

Period 3 (May 31-July 2)-Early Rasta Smurfs Period

Period 4 (July)-Shattered Wrist Period

Period 5 (August)-Transitional Period

Period 6 (September)-Middle CBA! Period

Period 7 (October)-Late CBA! Period

Period 8 (November)-Post-modern CBA! Period

Coinciding with the time that Aaron and I began to make plans to start a band (note: from my perspective we were starting a band, but Aaron and Spencer had already been in a band, so really, I was just joining their band), I began to lose interest in Rash. I felt that Aaron and I had a lot more in common than Brad, Russ, and I did. There is a distinct trend in my journal writing from the Late Rash Period of me mentioning that any time I hung out with people from my high school, I felt out of place. I thought that I had suddenly become different from them, or that I had always been different from them, but now that I had somebody with whom I shared a lot more common interests, I could see it and feel it more.

In reality, I thought it was cool to be hanging out with someone who was not in high school, who lived on his own, and who was from CALIFORNIA. I never admitted this in my journal, but this is absolutely the truth. Ever since I had become friends with Heath Orchard, a kid who moved to Provo from CALIFORNIA during my sophomore year, I felt like I was out of place in my home town.

It was all so pretentious, and soon enough my group of friends from Provo High fused with my new friends from CALIFORNIA. (Actually, not everybody in the new group was from CALIFORNIA; Texas, Oklahoma, and plenty of other states were represented as well, but you know.)

But this feeling of separation from my high school friends drove me to try and spend a lot more time hanging out with Aaron and a lot less time practicing and performing with Rash.

The last few months of Rash were filled with a lot of frustration. We would plan to play shows and then they would get canceled, or we would drop out of them, or they just wouldn’t go very well. Two shows in particular illustrate this.

The first was on the night of high school graduation. The seniors from Provo High had an all night graduation party at the school, and Rash was supposed to play in one of the gyms during the party. We brought all our equipment and tried to get set up, but when it came time to sound check, things didn’t sound good at all in the gym, and instead of trying to figure it out, we just kind of stopped… No one was coming in to watch us anyway.

The other was the last show that Rash played. It was scheduled for a night in July and it was going to be in the cul-de-sac by my house. Plenty of people showed up for it, including a lot of kids from school. Aaron, Spencer, and John Baird also came. I wrote in my journal that Brad spent the entire show sitting on the ground only half-engaged in playing his guitar, and Russ was reclined in a lawn chair playing bass. The kids from school spent the time talking to each other and not paying much attention to the music. Aaron and Spencer, on the other hand, danced and had a two-man mosh pit. I had a feeling of “good riddance” at the end of the night.

But to be fair, my heart was not as into Rash as much as it had been either. I had moved on emotionally, as it were. And as for the kids who came and socialized most of the time, they had just graduated from high school and had probably thought they might not see each other for a long time, so this was kind of like a really quick reunion. Besides, they had heard all of Rash’s songs dozens of times; we were not offering them anything new. In spite of all of this, though, it was difficult to know that this chapter in life had come to an end. We had a lot of fun.

That View from on High

Sometimes to my memory, the place that something happened holds almost as much significance as the event that occurred there. Going to a place like that has a powerful impact on my mind, on my emotions, and on my psyche.

There is a house in Provo that does that for me. I couldn’t tell you now what street it is on, or necessarily how to get there, but I could find my way there without much trouble. It is a relatively small house, just a main floor with a couple rooms, small kitchen, and a basement that wouldn’t really be much to speak of.

Except that it was where my friends John and Bethany lived. And we hung out there a lot, especially during the Summer of 1998. Big things happened there, like recording the Spice Girls’ song “Wanna Be” over and over again on a cassette for someone’s gag birthday gift. Fleeting teenage romances began there, and doubtless ended there as well. I loved that house.

But John and Bethany’s family moved out of it and into a new home in Springville. 

Somehow, though, I found my way back to that house in March 1999.

My memory fails me, as do my journal, photographs, and song lyrics, as to how I first met Aaron Bench. The only thing I’m confident of is that it was through hanging out with Mimi. What is clear is that by March 21st, which was a Sunday, I hiked the Y with Mimi and Aaron, and afterwards I went and hung out at the place Aaron was staying, which was a small house inhabited by members of the band called The Kindertones.

It was John and Bethany’s house.

It felt somehow appropriate, in a weird way, that I would be hanging out there again, and that on that day big things were happening. 

The big things happened up on the Y, while looking down on Utah Valley. Aaron had been to one of Rash’s shows, and he and I talked about music. I confessed to him that since I began playing the drums I had yet to be really satisfied with the experience, and that was because the style of music we played in those bands was not what I really preferred. I wanted to play punk rock.

Aaron told me, with some measure of excitement, that he had a buddy who was moving up to Utah in the Summer from Lancaster, California, and that they were planning on starting a punk band, but they needed a drummer. Right there we made plans to create a band patterned after the likes of Rancid, Goldfinger, and Operation Ivy. 

I was thrilled with this idea, but also a little skeptical, because I had made plans with plenty of others in the past to start punk bands, but those plans had never panned out.

These plans, though, did work out.

Redemptive Quality

If you want to make a[n] historian really happy, give them a primary source to the time period they are researching. Primary sources are, to be simple, artifacts from the time that is being researched. This is as opposed to a secondary source, which is something written about a particular time period, but not actually produced in that time.

Wikipedia is a secondary source. I guess.

When I decided to begin this journey back to the year 1999, I did so thinking that I would mostly write from memory. However, as I began to dig a little in the archeological area of my basement, I came upon a rich collection of primary source material that has been very helpful. This material includes journals, photographs, concert posters, drawings, and song lyrics. Many of these source materials are things that I have exclusive access to, thus making me the envy of all 1999 Cute Band Alert and Friends Historians (though Spencer’s collection probably rivals, if not exceeds mine).

It’s a pretty specialized field of study, I’ll admit.

So it is that I will quote or paraphrase often from one or more of these primary sources in my explorations of this time.

I joined the Art Club at Provo High during my last semester as a senior. I joined because the Art Club had planned a trip to Los Angeles to see an exhibit of Vincent Van Gogh paintings that were on tour and were making a stop at the LA County Museum of Art, and I wanted to go to Southern California. Not necessarily for the art, though that was pretty cool, but mostly because the trip was planned for early March, and I was tired of Utah’s winter weather. And, of course, I thought SoCal was the greatest place on the face of the earth.

According to my journal, I was really looking forward to this trip, and to the concert that Rash would play the Monday after we got back. It was around this time that Rash had reached the pinnacle of our musical capabilities and of our popularity. I referred to the concert as “the best show we’ve had musically ever.” I was really excited because my seminary teacher came; also I used the concert as a means of asking Mary Cox to Provo High’s Senior Ball.

And Mimi came, and she brought her friend, Janelle. After the concert, I talked with the two of them, took a picture with them, and made plans to hang out.

One day in March there was a talent show in Seminary. Rash performed our biggest hit in each period, and with each successive performance we added more and more musicians to the band, so that we had a piano and horns and Mikey playing a hand-held fishing game, and probably kazoos, and things. But John Beck and I also performed at the talent show. We did Sublime’s song “Boss DJ.”

We also played this song in our photography class, and a freshman girl, Colbie, really liked it. Colbie was very punk rock, and the entire semester I had wanted to get to know her better, but I was (and am) shy. So when she began to pay attention to me after singing this song, I somehow used this experience as inspiration (as well as Bad Religion and Adam Sandler) to write this:

“You Only Like Me for My Voice”

You only like me for my voice, and I know that.

I know I got an ugly face,

Yeah I ain’t got no stinkin’ place

In any girl’s heart ’cause I’m such a bore,

Dull’s my name in fun and more.

And that’s because my personality is crap,

I’m about as interesting as Dad taking a nap.

But when I open my big mouth and let a note fly

That’s when people say, hey maybe I like this guy.

You only like me for my voice, and I know that.

My hair color is a constantly changing.

Zits on my face are only rearranging.

I’m tall and lanky and clumsy too,

I have a bit of trouble just tying my shoe.

I’ve got scars all over, one on my knee,

If I couldn’t sing, no one would like me.

You only like me for my voice, and I know that.

But what if one day I’m a singing along

And my voice cuts out right in mid-song,

And it never comes back, what would I do?

Probably never ever talk to you.

I guess it never occurred to me that she might be shy too, or that talking to a senior boy was a little intimidating.

Whatever. This song became my personal theme song, and I sang it often.

Menswear

I worked at Sears for five months, give or take. My reasons for applying there were, of course, entirely selfish, and had a lot to do with a girl. I had been working for Teriyaki Stix for over two years, and I told myself that I didn’t want to work in fast food all my life. When you’re 18, two years feels like all your life.

Also, Natali, a former Teriyaki Stix coworker, worked at Sears now. She and I had been on a date once to her high school’s girl’s choice spring dance. At the dance I saw a very large young man dancing with a much smaller young lady on his shoulders. “That’s how they always slow dance,” Natali told me. “Her arms can’t reach his shoulders if she’s on the ground.”

I wanted to work with her again. She worked in the Jewelry department.

I was hired in the Men’s department by the department manager, a guy named Jason Ware. Jewelry was just around the corner from Men’s. I quickly learned all about shrink-to-fit Levis, the difference between dress shirt fabrics, and that one of my coworker’s favorite hobby while on the clock was to hide in the middle of the round clothing racks and read. I also learned to loathe Bing Crosby’s Christmas music.

Sears was great. I was allowed to grow facial hair, which allowance I made use of by growing an under-the-chin beard to match my recently dyed black hair.

An anecdote that I felt was of enough importance to record in my mostly-neglected personal journal during my time at Sears reported a conversation that I had with one of my coworkers, a girl my age named Chrissy. While visiting with Chrissy I learned that she was a student at Orem High and that she knew one of my former Teriyaki Stix coworkers, a girl named Kristie. Chrissy told me that Kristie had talked a lot about a skater kid she worked with who she had a crush on. At first, I assumed this was Matt, a guy who actually knew how to skate board and considered himself to be pretty hard core straight edge. But as it turned out, Kristie had said the boy was the manager who had interviewed her for the job. Quoth the record, “I kind of laughed as I said, ‘I interviewed her.’ That was funny, it was great to find stuff like this out. It’s really funny–oh life.”

Humble bragging in my journal.

There was one employee at Sears, though, that really intrigued me. Influenced as I was by the lyrics of cheesy pop/punk songs, the line from an early version of an MXPX song, “I’m a sucker for a short-haired girl with a pretty smile,” had set me up to be attracted to Mimi. Her short hair and large selection of different color Chuck Taylors occupied many of my thoughts. She was a stock associate, so I didn’t see her very often, and when I did I rarely said anything to her. I was shy, and she seemed way out of my league.

My first real conversation with Mimi took place just after I quit working at Sears to return to Teriyaki Stix. We happened to see each other at a concert at Wrapsody, and did the “Hey, you work at Sears, right?” thing. I think she had just quit there too. During the course of this conversation I learned that she was Jason Ware’s sister-in-law (a connection that would eventually lead to me sleeping in Jason’s bed one night while he was out of town), and also that she would be interested in coming to see Rash play the next week at Wrapsody.

Those five months at Sears constituted the shortest length of time I have ever had a particular job. Once again, my decision to leave Sears and return the world of chicken bowls and shifts ending at 2 am was very selfish. This time, though, there was not a girl involved, just the knowledge that Mike, the owner of Teriyaki Stix, had connections with Mr. Mac and could get me a great discount on missionary clothing, and I wanted that perk before leaving on my mission.

Mike, however, was not impressed with my black hair and effectively demanded that I change it. And that’s how I came to have bleached hair for a good portion of my senior year.

Being the type of person that I am, which is a people-pleaser, I wrote a song that I sang at a company meeting at Teriyaki Stix not long after returning to work there. Here are the words to the song:

ODE TO TERIYAKI

1995 marked the birth of a new era in fast food,

Mike and Rick Clayton then decided that sandwiches only wouldn’t do.

And so was born a Japanese restaurant with an American twist

“Teriyaki Bowl” they called it, now it’s Teriyaki Stix.

For one full year just one store existed, it was on Bulldog Blvd.

It employed some cool people, Cheree, Shanna, Yoshi, it’s where I made my start.

June, ’96 I was making Karokee and Katsu too,

Then I moved up to the big leagues, cook, front, and drive through.

Whoa Teriyaki Stix, while I was at Sears I did miss

The grease and the fun we had.

Closing never really was that bad.

About one year later came the next chapter in my life

Riverwoods opened and I was manager, still too young to use the slicer knife.

Cutting chicken was a favorite past time for our employees

Down in the commissary where they had some lemons to squeeze

Now we order everything and boil chicken in Yoshida Sauce.

I didn’t understand what Thomas was saying when he said, “Onagashimas.”

Over three years I’ve worked here and I still get twenty percent,

That’s ok, though, it’s still more than I’d like to spend.

Whoa Teriyaki Stix, while I was at Sears I did miss

The grease and the fun we had.

Closing never really was that bad.

Lego my Super Ego

What makes life meaningful for me is consciousness. I would guess this is probably the case for others too. Consciousness allows me to realize that things are happening and that I am a part of some of these things, and that I am making choices and acting and contributing to experience; my own experience and that of others. The most meaningful parts of life are those experiences that include other people, or shared experience. The thing with consciousness, though, is that it allows me to think about, and therefore interpret, or give meaning to, life’s experiences. And from reading, or listening, about how other people write or talk about experiences that we have shared together, it is clear to me that no experience is exactly the same for two people.

For this reason, I don’t think I could ever be a psychologist. I see too many differences in everybody, too many unique aspects of personality, that I wouldn’t be able to claim to know where common ground was.

One thing I know about myself, though, is that I am inherently selfish. When interpreting life events, I tend only to think about how they affected me. Most of the decisions that I make in life are made with the intended result to make myself feel happier.

So it was in 1999.

It was my last semester of high school. I had a class schedule that included things like art, photography, choir, and other such grueling classes. I no longer had a girlfriend. My band, Rash, was on its way to the height of high school popularity, with our self-covered hit song, “It’s Comin’ Back Again,” getting stuck in the heads of most of the student body at Provo High.

Self-covered? The song was written back in the earlier days of the band, when Matt was our lead singer/song writer. He wrote the song and the lyrics. He was on his mission in 1999, and we played the song, but with a slightly different set of lyrics.

There were newspaper features written on Rash. One in the Provo High School newspaper, and one in the local community paper, The Daily Herald.

Things were good, especially with Rash. We played at assemblies, in the Seminary talent show, and at local venues where we would get a decent turn out most of the time.

I was working at Sears at the time, and so was a girl with short hair and a large collection of Chuck Taylors. I didn’t know her name, but I happened to see her at a show (not one of Rash’s) in March. We started talking and I invited her to Rash’s next show, which was going to be on the Monday after I got back from a trip to California with the art club.

That should create enough segues for the next few installments of this story.