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Strange Things (demo)

by Pat and His Whiny Bullshit

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    NOTE: THE BONUS TRACK IS REALLY SUPER LOUD. I apologize for this. It was done at a different studio (my bathroom on my tape recorder). You were warned.


    To Charlie and Captain Kirk.
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1.
Intro 00:21
2.
Hardcore 02:13
I used to be hardcore. Dressed in all black and wore chains on my clothes (not for fighting, mind you, but for fashion). I listened to a bunch of angry bands from Scandinavia and I thought I was the shit. At least, that's what I told people. But really I was hardcore because I held a butcher knife up to the middle of my chest and I thought about taking one last dive for my life. Then I started reading the bible and telling everyone else they were going to hell because I was already in hell and it was not fire and brimstone (don't let anybody tell you any different) but staying up late wondering if your parents would have stayed together if you'd just let the cancer kill you. It took me seventeen years of life to get that off my chest and when I found God, she was smoking her cigarettes in the middle of a rainstorm and talking to me about her third abortion. So if you've never stared down a half-full bottle of codeine at three o'clock in the morning don't tell me how you can save my soul. The only prayer I ever meant had to do with death. Thinking about the image of my two dead friends: one from brain cancer and one from some boyfriend with a belt. Have you ever lingered too long in front of the bus? Don't tell me that the road to recovery is a straight shot because I will show you the scars from the wrong turns and the potholes and the "sure thing" twelve-step programs. This poem is to anyone who ever said that they would kill themselves if the grocery store didn't have their favorite candy. I'm three therapists deep and they still don't know if I can swim. I meet a new me every day because the chemicals in my brain are off. But when I look in the mirror, I still see that kid in all black and the knife on my chest and God smoking her menthol cigarettes.
3.
I affection you. Baby, I compassion the shit out of you. I wrote you a letter for our anniversary and I signed it, "with all the desire in my heart." P.S. I like fucking you. I when-you-kiss-me-I-get-butterflies you. I want you. I want you to hold me. I want you to tell me I'm beautiful. I don't want to sleep alone. I really really wish that you'd say what you feel. Four letter words don't mean as much when they apply to both pizza and you.
4.
A tormented artist meets another tormented artist and they have (very passionate) but tormented sex. This leads them to have conflicting, but still very tormented, feelings about one another because she cannot read the words he does not write and he cannot see the movements she does not make. He is left to read between the lines, while she sees the moving picture of forever. Sometimes I, I mean "he", forgets you, I mean "she", cannot see the brilliant pictures painted through the scars tattooed on his brain. Maybe if we were both young and alive and not so caught up in Holocaust films and reading about people who do drugs, respectively, we would be able to admit that waking up next to each other some days was not easier. We would say that sometimes it scares us to know that someone somewhere (no right here!) knows the pattern of our scars and feels free enough to trace them. Connecting the dots. Reminding us that the sidewalk never ended and we never gave up our search for the man under the bed, but we did try love once. We also tried to cut ourselves open to get a hole wide enough to peek inside. We knew that our blood was red, but we wanted to see what existed within us beyond primary colors. What we found was a holy sweater. Not something blessed by some deity, but full of holes (so reminiscent of our tormented artist). As the blood spilled from my body, I put it on carefully and crawled inside myself. Though shaking, I was not yet cold.
5.
Family is abortion, moving through divorces and pulling up in Porsches. Family is a screaming match. Don't scream but catch your mama on the backlash. Family is a smash hit the movie that never went off even though it had Bogart. Family? Family is a new black dress and low access to sex ed. Family is a car crash. A giant gash in the side and the side effects of a giant rash decision. Family is 2.4 kids with no lids on their mouths but no smiles in their eyes. Family is dying and getting so choked up at your sister's funeral because you knew she was only nineteen. Family? Family is when you get this and Christmas is not another long gift list but triplets and treasured times and prying minds. No desire dies and nobody cries. Family is a shallow grave and leaving your bag at the door because you're lazy. It's growing up with no dad but two bats and a roomful of hats with hats off to my gramps and his fly pants. Family is a brave struggle. A bad getaway. An escape van with no gas. A spoon in the road and a rainy day. I'm no Robert Frost, but I know the cost of broken armor. Or was it an armoire? I'm not trying to harm you, but it's funny: my mom's never had any money and I never had a little pet bunny. But my life still had sunny moments.
6.
Judas 03:58
People say that you are your own worst enemy and in my case that is literally true because I had cancer at the age of two and no one really knows what causes cancer but they do know that it lives in you. So I'm twenty-two years old and I have osteoporosis. And it's all because of the drugs that they had to give me in order to keep me from dying from cancer at the age of two. Every two years my body betrays me in a new way. Yet, I still have to live with it because our divorce is not yet finalized and I really want to keep the house. People say that beauty is not skin deep but I cannot stand to look at myself and that is without even imagining what's going on inside. Sometimes all I do is cry because of really irrational things and the doctors tell me this is because I have a thing called depression and this thing called depression has been with me since I was fourteen and that's because at 14 I first thought about killing myself because no fourteen year old should have to tell himself that he didn’t end his parent’s marriage and that's because nobody’s parents should divorce two years after their child gets off of treatment for cancer because the child will try to tell himself that it was the cancer, will try to comfort himself, but a person can only lie for so long. When I look into the mirror, I stare at the scars of cancer. When I hear myself babble on and on to my therapist, I listen to the scars of cancer. When I try to get out of bed in the morning and it takes me a little longer because of the osteoporosis in my spine, I feel all the scars of cancer. And when I taste a kiss from someone else’s lips and know that this means I am alive, I taste the scars of cancer. And when my father calls his new wife “beautiful” I hear the scars of cancer (Even though it’s been ten years). When I try to love someone and end up running away because I remember how much I thought my parents loved each other and I see what that did to their kids and I don’t want to do that to my kids. And I don’t even want to have kids sometimes because I know that with some cancers the father carries the genes and I would be the father and the kid would have my genes and the kid may not be able to get out of bed as fast in the morning at twenty-two because that kid may have osteoporosis and that kid may have had cancer and even though it may have survived the cancer it might still be dealing with the scars and who would want to do that to a kid? Then I remember that my body is Judas Iscariot and that my spirit is not as resilient as Jesus’ spirit and even if it was he had to die in order to overcome Judas’ kiss and maybe I don’t want to die because I’m scared of death. Because a friend of mine who was perfectly fine one day dropped dead four years later because sometimes cancer gets in your brain and sometimes people don’t know this until you get into a car accident and sometimes even if you get lucky as hell to get hit by a drunk driver so that the doctors discover that you have cancer in your brain, you still die from it. And that seems really unfair. So maybe I am afraid of death and maybe I have a right to be. But, sometimes, the nights are lonely when all you have to share them with are scars.
7.
The saddest thing my mother ever told me was that the last time she saw the man she loved was the night before her wedding. He died six months later. The ceremony went on without a hitch. This is a lesson for anyone who thinks that, as soon as you make a decision, someone somewhere is pouring concrete into a mold that cannot be broken no matter how hard he punches. As for my father, he's always been a second choice, which is why he's the first to leave. He once left a woman because her daughter died of cancer. He said that she looked different. It might have been the alcohol. It might have been her daughter. It might have been him. Sometimes, we forget to fix our hair in the morning. I once left a girl because I got too sad. Thought about killing myself again and I didn’t want anyone to have to bury me. She asked me if it was something she did. I laughed. Sometimes, I’m an asshole. Sometimes, we forget to start acting in the morning. My best friend forgets to sleep sometimes, says that the best things in life happen between cigarette breaks and break ups, late papers and hangovers. She asks me if love is alive and I tell her, sometimes the stars forget to wake up at night because they are hiding behind the clouds. And sometimes people get married because it is convenient and they really need a second income to make a downpayment on their dream home. Sometimes people fall in love in cardboard boxes or one bedroom apartments with just enough room for their shoes and, though they die of frostbite in the next winter, they die in love. So, yes, love is still alive, but, sometimes, we forget to fix our hair in the morning.
8.
For this one we're gonna go back a little ways... When I was a kid, my favorite outfit was a vomit green shirt with matching shorts. It had the Tasmanian Devil on it and I wore it everywhere. When I got a little older, I used to make up stories like I could do a backflip on my bike... or I invented Pepsi Blue in a laboratory underneath my dad’s garage using a well orchestrated army of lab rats. I had an active imagination. I started swearing at age 11 and, when my stepmom found out, I got a lecture from my dad. He told me, “cut that shit out”. I had an active imagination. When I got to middle school, the teachers kept trying to tell me to skip a grade. They told my mom that the reason I hated school was because I was bored, when really it was that my dad owed me $300 because I’d had straight As since 4th grade math and he made a really stupid bet. When I was in high school, I got stood up by the same girl eight times. I’ve always been a hopeless romantic. When I was a freshman in college, I went to lunch with a girl and her boyfriend because I was too nice to say no and she was too nice to tell me she had one the night before. I’ve always been a hopeless romantic. When I was a sophomore, I met this girl who I thought I’d marry. I’m not married. You see, back when I loved that matching outfit, it was captured in the last picture of a friend before she died of cancer. I still have that picture. I survived cancer. And back when I made up stories, my dad married his best friend’s ex-wife. And back when I started swearing, I first thought about killing myself. And back when I made all those As, my first kiss moved to Tampa. and I haven’t seen her since. And back when I was in high school, I first went to therapy. And back when I was a freshman in college, I found out that God might not have cured my depression. And then I went back to therapy. And now… I’m violently way too high strung and sometimes I can’t sleep because I think back to that time I invented Pepsi Blue and the woman I thought I’d marry and that puke green pair of shorts.
9.
Colors 06:37
This last one goes out to anyone who has ever been called a terrorist. I always wanted to be the black Power Ranger, but I was told that was racist. To be honest though, I really wanted to be the yellow Power Ranger. But she is a girl and I am not. They always ask me “what are you?” Who are you? Are you one of us? What is one of us? Am I one of us? If us is the human race than I am, but if us is white or black or brown or yellow or orange (or whatever colors humans come in these days) than I am not. My mother always told me to answer them, "I am a human being". And I guess… that is what I am. I am a human being. I am a human being. But human beings tend to do things like commit genocides and start wars based on religion or because your women are put lower than our women or because we think they are or because we know they are or because some politician told us they were. I don’t want to be a human being if that’s to be a human being. I want to be a fish. Because fish seem to me like they have not a care in the world. They just swim around in their oceans and they look at the pretty colors on the other fish, but they don’t judge the other fish on their colors. I always see blue fish playing with red fish and silver fish playing with black fish and all the fish are just swimming around aimlessly and eating food. But then one of the fish gets caught by a hook and gets slowly drug up to the surface and I always imagine that the other fish were swimming around and trying to process what is happening to their fish friend who they haven’t been judging. Then that fish gets taken out of the water and they don’t see him again. And that fish is taken out of the water by a human being. And that human being might be a racist. Probably is a racist because I think we all are a little racist. (Some of us are a lot racist.) What are you? Well I’m not black. And I’m not white. And, no, I’m not a Mexican. I’m not Hispanic. I’m not Cuban. I’m not Puerto Rican. I’m not a terrorist. I wasn’t aware all terrorists looked the same. I wasn’t aware that it was an appropriate question to ask another human being what are you? It’s pretty obvious to me. I’m not a lion or a chimpanzee. I’m not a fish (even though I might want to be). I’m not some sort of blimp. I’m not a car. I’m not a house. I’m not some sort of brick lying on the side of the road. I’m not a rock and roll star. I’m not a preacher. I’m me. And I think that’s all I really ever needed to be. So be careful before you go throwing around a dictionary and trying to define every single person based on one term or based on one idea that you think you might have of them. Saying he’s black or she’s white or she’s American or he’s a terrorist. Don’t throw these things around mindlessly like a tornado in a room full of blank sheets of paper. Maybe... that black man over there is a professional concert pianist. Or maybe that “terrorist” is a CEO. So much like that game of shapes and pegs and holes that we use to teach toddlers what a triangle is, you’ll come to find out that the more you try to fit something into one of these holes. The more you need a bigger hole... or perhaps an ocean.

about

I'm Pat. This is my bullshit. If I could play an instrument, these would be punk songs. There is a hidden track. I included a photo of myself in the download so you would know who to blame. There's a bonus track if you download the whole album. Any banter that you hear at the end of the tracks was unscripted and intentionally kept by my fam, Hip Hop Duke.

credits

released April 11, 2014

Produced by: Hip Hop Duke (Bunduki Ramadan)

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Pat and His Whiny Bullshit Gainesville, Florida

I'm Pat. I write poems. Currently a member of Signs of Life (a hip-hop theatre troupe in Gainesville).

Website header photograph credit: Phaedra Brady

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