Seven thirty, and just leaving the office. Bad day at work. Too many phone calls, too many problems, too many people worked up and yelling about things that they shouldn’t be. We’re all going to die you realize, I want to say, just to remind them. Do you want it to be because you had a stroke over a software bug? Do you want that on your headstone? I’ll never say it if course. But it helps me in my mind.
Once I leave the office building the motions are automatic: Walk through the parking lot. Get in the car and close and lock the doors. Turn the key and wait for the music to start. I have a CD all keyed up and ready to go, you see. Prepared just for this occasion.
( .....what am I supposed to do I lost my shit because of you.....)
Turn on the headlights and stick it in gear. Another day dead and the sun gone down already. Someday I’ll make it out of the office at a decent time. Someday I’ll enjoy my job. Someday. Someday I’ll be dead too.
Drive out of the parking lot, blinking against the headlights, contacts sticking like two angry pieces of plastic to my eyes.
(.......nothing... can stop.... me..... nowwww....)
Stop sign. I peer over the steering wheel and into the sky. No stars tonight. Sky is just one big cloud. Late winter in Pennsylvania. The sun may or may not come back. Let a Mercedes go by before I turn, a Lexus, a 4x4. How much money you make, you fuckers? You got pretty little titles like mine?
Assholes, all of us. You don’t fool me.
Pull out onto the road, left foot tapping to the backbeat. Not too hard yet. Like fucking. Gently at first. Spare the eardrums. I remember reading somewhere that loud volumes makes pieces of your ears flake off. You lose bits of yourself. Small price to pay. I turn up the volume.
(.,,,,,if there is a hell.... I’ll see you there...)
Red light, and I look in the rearview mirror to see a co-worker staring at the back of my car, face red with my brakelights. He's squinting at my back window. Trying to read the stickers there. I doubt that he knows the band names. But you never know. Sometimes you just can’t know about people. I smile as the light turns green and the next song begins.
(--BOOM chee BOOM chee BOOM BOOM chee--)
March of the Pigs. You could break your ankle trying to keep up to those drums.
I drive out of the corporate park, towards the highway and the heavy traffic-
( .....all the pigs all lined up....)
Around the ramp and towards the lanes ahead. Fuck gently merging with traffic-- I see a spot and accellerate. Only pussies use their breaks when they merge. Slice like a knife into the traffic, barely safe, barely legal, and yet somehow still both. I never could manage to break the rules right anyway. Speedometer at 50, at 60 at 65-
(...now doesn’t it make you feel better?)
-at 70, at 75, and moving into the left lane, not quite but very nearly cutting off a large piece of american shit with so many dents that I’m sure he won’t mind adding one more if I piss him off.
Smooth into 80 miles an hour behind a Reliant and I can start to zone.
Strip off the wet skin of the corporate employee, expose the raw thing underneath, and try to forget worrying about the customers, about my managers, about my appearance... Time passes and I think about nothing but the music, the road ahead, the beat of the drums as the songs change.
(...help me get away from myself...)
Do people even get this song? They call it the fuck you like an animal song, the cheap titty theme song of the sexually repressed yet ultraextremist 90s. Amazing that people don’t get the real meaning. It’s so obvious. Obvious if you were ever there, that is.
(....help me become somebody else...)
I close my eyes halfway, lick my lips, stare at the car in front of me. I play a little mind game and pretend that I’ve got the guy’s cock in my mouth, that he can somehow feel this, the motions of my tongue, that maybe he'll get distracted and slow down so I can pass him...
(...I drink the honey inside your hive...)
I smile slightly, almost drunk from the beat, swaying gently with the music.
(...-you are the reason I stay alive...)
cheesyass backbeat, he called it. Fuck that. It’s heaven.
The Reliant in front of me puts on its signal and moves over out of my way. I was tailgating apparently. You can get me closer to Dodge, I think, as I pass. I glance over at the driver, who glances at me and smiles. Just another blonde chick. I don’t respond. The next song is on, my mood is changed, and already singing to the music as I pass:
(...serving his shit to his flies...)
I pass a roadsign and realize I’m halfway home. Ah time flies when you’re going deaf.
I see a driver flash his headlights at me from behind. I move over out of his way slowly, amusing myself with my personal theory about fast shiny cars and tiny limp dicks. 90 miles an hour, I think, as he passes. I wonder what he’s listening to.
I frown at the CD player as I move back into the left lane and think, okay, time for the next song, flick the switch. Metallic sounds, distorted screams in the background.
(...I’m stuck in this dream... it’s changing me, I am becoming...)
Strong memories return with the song. Breakup memories. Memories of pain, of hollowness. So very cliché and ane. But true. Utterly true.
My, how I hated myself back then.
(...the me that you knew isn’t here anymore....)
Amazing that I lived through that time, that I was able to emerge from it. I would have died without this music, I think. Maybe not physically, but some part of me would have crumbled upon itself.
Wonderful talent of mine, turning pain into guilt into depression. It had never occurred to me until that summer to turn it into something much better. Anger.
(...wont give up wants me dead goddamn this noise inside my head...)
Some urge strikes me and I flick the CD forward until I hear the sound of bees buzzing. For some reason I say to myself: "Bees, Chris, I need bees."
80 miles an hour in the left lane of the Pennsylvania Turnpike and I’m buzzing to myself. Zzzzzzzzzz at the guy in the Taurus ahead of me.
What a dork I am, I think.
I stretch out my left ankle as I turn up the volume. Pounding my foot too hard on the floor again. I’ve found bruises on myself in the past after listening to this music. On the left side of my knee, from slamming my leg into the door to the beat of the drums. On the sides of my arms from hitting the steering wheel. Bruised on the outside, I think, but I was always better on the inside afterward. Ah what a beautiful catharsis is anger. Why in the hell did it take me so fucking long to find that out? Too many years playing the good girl.
I flick the CD forward one more song. Awfully finicky tonight.
(...oh my beautiful liar oh my precious whore...)
Nasty little song. I have a friend who loves this song. Too much I think. The ten million dollar question is why. I wish I could ask her. I don’t have the balls. I think of it often when we listen to the song. But I don’t say a word.
(...-I now know that the depths I reach are limitless-)
That was me once, I think, remembering those many months, lost, lost, lost...
The McDonalds slips by on the other side of the highway. Almost home. I wonder what tv dinner awaits me there, chilling in the oven. I remember briefly home cooked meals, steaming mashed potatos and beef barley soup and my mom in the kitchen when she used to have the energy to cook, before the times in the hospital. Missed, but not important.
I would rather have a thousand nights of lean cuisine than be without my mother. Whatever god resides above, I think, I thank you for letting her stay with us. I thank you for all I’ve had to go through. I’d do it again.
(...he couldn’t believe how easy it was... he put the gun into his face...)
I stare into the darkness as my exit approaches. They talk about the courage of suicide and it disgusts me. "He couldn’t believe how easy it was." Big fucking surprise. Leaving the world and its problems is a picnic compared to sticking them out. You know what hard is? Hard is not sucking the business end of a shotgun. Hard is staying at your mother’s side in the ICU and lying to her as you tell her she doesn’t need to be afraid to sleep, that of course she’ll wake up again. Hard is watching your father cry. Hard is knowing that your parents will never see your children.
Final song, and I’m pulling up in line at the toll booths.
(...everyone I know goes away in the end...)
The guitars take over and I’m staring at the car ahead of me. The taillights blur, and I have to reach up to wipe my eyes. No time for this now. Later.
I pull up to the toll booth, hold out the ticket and a few bucks to the toll booth attendant. He glances over at me as he makes his change. He can hear the song. I turn down the volume slightly. Music is fading anyway.
"Who is that?" he asks. The final sounds of "Hurt" are drifting away.
"Nine Inch Nails." I tell him, then add for some reason "The Downward Spiral."
"Oh yeah," he says, and hands me a few quarters back. "They do that fuck me like an animal song, right?"
I smile. "Yeah. That’s them. Music for titty bars. Have a good night."
He leans out of the booth as I drive away, listening after the sound
of laughter as it fades into the night.
To whomever wrote the story I just read in this website, the only word I say is, deep. To some extent I believe I have had as deep as emotions as you, I a diffrent situation, of course. Keep writing, one day I'll probably be discussing your lyrics on a website.
Return to my NIN discussions page.