It's A Celebration, Bitches

Blink 182, "Dumpweed"
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, "The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth"

There is, of course, a whole generation of men careening towards the great hereafter to whom the term "D-Day" means something profoundly significant. There are also somewhere between twenty and twenty-five people only recently of legal car-renting age to whom the term "D-Day" means something else altogether. And while the odds may be, shall we say, improbable that our D-Day - my D-Day - will ever be presented as filtered through the everyman gravitas of Tom Hanks, I feel obliged to offer you the opportunity to judge for yourselves which was more important: (1) a day which saw thousands of young men forging their characrters by throwing themselves against a wall of fascist bullets, or (2) D-Day.

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The haze of anticipation surrounding D-Day was so thick that you practically had to wave your hand in front of your face just to get through the days leading up to it. I forget whether Anna was actually the first of my friends to turn 18 or whether that's the kind of detail your mind fills in after a few years go by, but either way I absolutely remember everyone involved in the planning and execution of D-Day being dead set on turning Anna's birthday into the first "big" party we'd all be remembering for the rest of our lives, right down to the gifts - I remember Cesar getting Anna some cigarettes, Jared getting her some pants-wettingly hilarious man-porn...fuck, even I had to snag a strikingly dildo-esque children's toy from my job at a local profit-oblivious hippie-oriented toy store. And then, of course, the hooch - I mean, yeah, in retrospect it was a decidedly high-school-y haul of Wild Turkey, Southern Comfort, and an overabundence of the laughably misnamed Aristocrat Vodka (Durham's legendary brand of five-dollar-a-handle potato-"liquor", whose label unironically proclaimed it to be "a fine vodka", prompting jokes about suing for false advertising that persist to this day), but christ, we probably bought enough liquor to help Dean Martin get a good buzz going; the plan, after all, was for the "D" in "D-Day" to stand for "Drunk".

We very nearly succeeded.

The plan, to be fair, left very little room for error: first we would all assemble at Cesar's mom's house after she left for a weekend-long vacation, and then we would drink our bargain-basement firewater with all the gusto of a thousand Deadwood prospectors. Admittedly, this is a pretty hard plan to fuck up, and needless to say nobody disappointed - in fact, things were going so well that executive decisions were made to expand the scope of party operations as Jared broke out The Bag and Cesar took his first recreational painkiller, a full 40-milligram Oxycontin (for reference's sake, this would be twice the dosage of most subsequent OCs most of us would regularly encounter). As you can imagine, that's when shit really started getting loud and awesome...just in time for Cesar's dad to stop by.

Panic.

Now I don't know if you've ever seen ten to twenty high-school kids scramble to all hide silently in the same microscopic bathroom before, but I sure hadn't. I also hadn't ever played basketball against someone flush for the first time with the licked-raw-by-tiny-kittens effects of prescription narcotics under the frigid black canopy of an October night in North Carolina, but hey, we had to do something to throw Cesar's dad off the scent of a party that'd likely have everyone involved grounded until graduation (although how we settled on the least plausible ruse ever remains a mystery to me to this day). It was, as you can probably imagine, a whole night of firsts, including probably the first time in history that any scheme half as retarded as Jittery Night-Time Basketball ever convinced a parent that everything is as it should be; throwing open that bathroom door, welcoming the terrified kids huddling inside to a Cesar's Dadless fate is probably about as close as either Cesar or I will ever get to liberating a concentration camp. Suffice it to say, that's when people started intoxicating themselves for realz.

Except me. Somehow, you see, my friends had managed to convince me to be the designated driver, possibly because I was the only choice but more probably because my friends could and frequently did get away with being huge cocks towards me. To their credit, they swore up and down that they'd save me some liquor, which they did; to their permanent and unalterable shame, when I got back from dropping off Dan, the last casualty of the War Against Sobriety who wasn't staying the night*, I found the sum total of the alcohol they'd saved for me barely filling a shot glass halfway to the top. My blubbery, ineffective anger, however, would soon be mollified by the twin fists of shitty Durham weed and my first experiences watching people do Whip-Its. Whip-Its, for those of you who've managed to shelter yourself from awesomeness, are what creatively self-destructive suburban kids call CO2 cartridges when they're turned from Pinewood Derby propulsion units into a three-second headrush that's not called "white man's crack" for nothing. I've done precisely one Whip-It in my life; it literally caused me to start wailing that I was retarded. Needless to say, Whip-Its are fucking awesome, especially when consumed by actual irresponsble kids as opposed to weekend warriors like myself - I mean, shit got nuts. People were running all over the place, tacking pictures ripped from Anna's birthday porn to the walls and throwing darts in their general direction, flinging cake all over the kitchen for no apparent reason, all that good stuff. I could still hear it going when I slunk off to find an empty bed somewhere around four AM to get maybe four hours of sleep. As it turned out, I picked a rather providential block of time to be unconscious. What follows is a list, by no means complete, of what Cesar's dad saw when he came back to the house around six-thirty that morning:

- Cake-smeared walls, carpets, and furniture
- Whip-It cartridges and liquor bottles littering the floor
- A rather startling array of pictures of naked dudes
- The acrid stench of stale pot and cigarette smoke
- Seven to eight people in various stages of intoxication scattered around the house
- Cesar, passed out fucked up in his bed, with his momentary ladyfriend Catherine putting her socks on
- Jared, passed out on the couch with his bowl fully loaded for a good old wake-n-bake session
- and most miraculously of all, not me.

Seriously - there are times when I wonder if I used all the luck I'm ever going to have in my life up that night, because Lord knows the hammer of the Gods came down on everyone he caught in that house. To this day, I have no idea how Cesar's dad missed me - he'd seen me playing "basketball" earlier that night, he'd apparently checked the room I was in for bodies, and according to legend, as he stalked past Jared out the door, Jared half-woke from a deep sleep to bellow "HEY JAMES, COME HIT THIS BOWL" or something to that effect. And yet I got off scott-free - fuck, people were getting caught at D-Day who weren't even there (notably Molly, who left before the Whip-Its broke out but whose parents got a call anyway when Cesar's dad mistook another girl for her), and somehow I of all people end up getting off scott-fuckin'-free.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, was D-Day.

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D-Day is, to this day, one of my favorite stories to mentally revisit, but as you can probably imagine, I'll never be able to do it justice, mostly because there's just no way to tell it that's half as effective as screening the night's imagery in my mind to the dulcet tones of any of a thousand interchangeable Orange County pop-punk songs (note: these songs don't necessarily have to come from Orange County; I can go through the story just as easily with, say, Less Than Jake's "History of a Boring Town" as with "Dumpweed", although the latter really does work wonders). The older I get, the more respect I find myself assigning to all - and I mean all - that shitty pop-punk stuff - not that it's suddenly more musically relevant, of course, but the further I move away from my misspent youth into my misspent adulthood, the more all that shitty three-chord nonsense seems to sum up a lot of my life with an almost painful ease. I mean, of course I'd love to say that my high-school years were best accompanied by Stereolab or the Wu-Tang Clan or the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion or what the fuck ever, but as it turns out, at least musically, my life was a one-to-one match with the most oblivious, navel-gazing G105 addict (I mean, who'd'a thunkit?). After all, sometimes what a song sounds like bears more relevance than what it's about, and when you're seventeen and unknowingly dodging a bullet like the Matrix simply by powerlessly watching your friends drink all the awful, awful Aristocrat before you get your crack at it, a song as suffused with violent frustration as "Dumpweed" probably should sound a lot more appropriate to your life than, say, U.N.K.L.E.'s "Lonely Soul", and the only people who'd expect anything other than the most ubiquitous-sounding music available to describe it probably don't really grasp the idea that people are fundamentally alike at least in some ways**. I mean, frustrated is frustrated is frustrated, whether it comes from your friends cockblocking you or a particularly difficult idea in a Harold Bloom book - is it so unrealistic to think that maybe, just maybe, Mark Hoppus may have been able to tap in to that aspect of frustration rather than Your Specific And Beautifully Nuanced version? And is it necessarily worse as a result?

I bring this up, you see, because I recently realized that Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, a James Cobo bete noire for however long it's been since I started pointing my music-dork friends out here in their direction last May, make an awful lot more sense as indie-rock's Blink 182 than as indie-rock's Talking Heads 2.0. I mean, lord knows they're popular enough to support the comparison (in spirit if not in scale); fuck, I came to this realization after catching "The Skin Of My Yellow Country Teeth" playing in the background of that episode of The Office where Phyllis accidentally lets it slip that everyone thinks Pam's having some sort of illicit office romance with Jim while they're at his house for a party - in terms of exposure, that's about as close to TRL status as indie-rock's going to get outside of Don't Call It That. But hey, we all need a push sometimes, and in this case, that push came in the form of being prominently featured in one of the two or three shows in the history of television that actually seems to be reflecting my life even a little bit - but god did it ever do the trick. The magic moment in "The Skin Of My Yellow Country Teeth", of course, comes midway through the last verse when Alec Ounsworth goes from Affected Plaintative Bleat to Flat-Out Heartbreakingly Plaintative in the space of one line, howled with all the furious misery that only ever comes from unchecked powerlessness; I just can't imagine a better way of getting the point of a line that reads "Hoooooooooooooow/Can I keep you from moving" across any more flawlessly than Ounsworth does - I've actually caught myself playing that line in my head almost as shorthand for miserable powerlessness an awful lot lately, which is as high a compliment as my mind knows how to unconsciously pay a song.

I dunno. I have a hard time drawing conclusions from any of this, aside from trenchant observations like "liking stuff is good" and "it's okay to like stupid stuff" and so on, but somehow I don't think that's the point. The central irony about pop music is that it's exponentially more fluid than anyone who consumes it - there may be a billion love songs out there and a billion more waiting to be written, and they may all sound completely different from one another, but at the end of the day, they're all still about the same thing. Liking pop music, therefore, is like opening a bottle of wine - you can do all the research and put all the thought into it that you want, but ultimately the experience you get is more a product of the moment you yank out the cork than anything else. And sometimes, your life isn't best suited for a two-hundred-year-old hundred-rated bottle.; sometimes, all you've got is an empty bottle of Aristocrat.

Click here to buy Enema of the State from Amazon.com
Click here to buy Clap Your Hands Say Yeah from Insound

*Dan, despite facing a critical college interview at NC State bright and early the next morning, elected to spend D-Day in avid pursuit of the knowledge of what the bottom of a bottle of Southern Comfort tasted like. At the time, this was mildly scandalous; now, of course, it almost seems as appropriate a thing to put on an NC State application as a list of your AP classes.

**I am, incidentally, one thousand percent positive that this explains the popularity of all those palpably mortifying bands like My Morning Jacket and My Chemical Romance, but then again I wasn't really expecting The Post 9/11 Kidz to define their lives by anything other than melodramatically exploring their own isolation in the first place. I suppose this is where I should admit that I've never heard a song by either band, I guess. MOVING ON.

ELSEWHERE
- By the way, this is my hundredth post here, which is more than the total number of posts I've ever made on all my other blogs ever. Thanks to everyone who's linked to or read this blog; odds are pretty good that I'd be doing it without your help, but lord knows y'all made it a lot more fun.