Holy Sons

Recorded: 2002

BackStory

- edited/released in '02 (my favorite part of the record)

The summer of '95 was a gnarly one,, one of the best and worst times of my life... there were too many catastrophes to list,, but Mark (who is actually returning to the live holySons band for the upcoming tour after having not been in the band since '95) kicked off that summer by saying it was gonna be a memorable one... some of the highs and lows:
- Eric (who painted the cover of Lost Decade) jumped into the shallow end of a swimming pool and broke his neck... fortunately the neck brace did not hamper his out-goingness with young ladies...
- we burned down the McMasters Street house on Easter weekend by accident... certain people in Chapel Hill will tell you that I did this but it technically wasn't me, although I was there...
- a week later a friend from the burned-down-house situation fell off a roof on Franklin Street and broke most of his bones right where someone had scrawled 'GG Allin lives' in the concrete...
- things peaked when I got in a drunken fight with a drifter who broke an acoustic guitar over my head causing me to destroy my car while trying to run him over by driving thru heavily wooded areas before eventually getting taken to the ER to get 17 staples put into my head...
...as most of us were going downhill pretty fast we were catalyzing it weekly with LSD sessions that helped complicate both our relationships and the all-around ability to function... one of my childhood friends, who everyone had always assumed was just odd/shy/different, was hanging around a bit and I was probably too distracted to notice that he wasn't navigating the chaos with the same lackadaisicality... we had one particular trip that was really overwhelming where I jokingly nudged the leg of a small chair he was sitting in and he fell over on the ground and for the next hour he would only speak in a British accent... then he reported that half of his body had lost all feeling straight down the middle,, and you could see that the left side of his body and face was hanging limp... 'twas scary,,, at one point I left the room and started to feel the two halves of my body splitting in half which was really frightening so I ran back to be around people and try to forget about it as my mind was getting away from me/starting to develop theories on how all people are symmetrically split down the middle and/or divided from themselves,, one side could attack the other etc.-- I was probably 17,, my best friend was a 32 yr old gay deadhead and we worked at the same restaurant... after a couple more not-great-trips my childhood friend showed up to the restaurant with some rape pamphlets in his hand and said he had to talk to my gay deadhead friend about his recent behavior... it was totally out of nowhere and groundless and the weirdest thing we'd ever seen him do...--somewhere along the way,, someone in passing mentioned a correlation between schizophrenia and homophobia that stuck in the back of my mind...
-some of us went off to college after all this,, my staples got taken out in the first week of school,, I heard from my mom that my childhood friend had been having trouble in school and was dropping out after saying he'd randomly seen a man shoot himself in the head,,, someone said he'd been taking acid again at school... my mom told me the childhood friend's mother had also been showing signs of similar over-the-top eccentricities indicative of the same illness the more she worried about him,,...
-...probably about a year later I was at a bar with two friends that were massive trouble-makers and they got in a fight,, the bar kicked us out and they kept fighting as we walked down Franklin St,, one of them punching the other in the face as we walked... I was trailing behind them picking up things they were dropping as we went and I saw the other old childhood friend coming towards us from the opposite direction... I hadn't seen him in awhile and kind of froze up because I'd heard he hadn't been well,, I do remember possibly grabbing his arms and saying something like "...these dudes must be tripping!" in reference to the fight,,, I immediately regretted referencing tripping... perhaps in a completely unrelated conversation, months before, I may have off-handedly said something about maybe 'all people are really asexual'... but that wasn't any sort of staple of my thinking or something I would've said often,, I had been developing some early ideas about typical relationships being a type of slavery but I would never have argued anything that seriously about sexuality itself...
...eventually when I came home for X-mas break from my first year of college I was sitting in the kitchen when my mother said 'oh, did I tell you about your childhood friend's mother's phone message'... I got my handheld tape-recorder and she hit play and the rest is secret-track history... In her mind,, his mother was getting some sort of revenge on us for what she'd imagined we'd done,, hence accusing my mom of suffering from menopause to hurt her feelings... ...I can only guess that my childhood friend and his mother had begun to believe my mom and I were sympathizers of a Nationwide Homosexual Conspiracy and that I was a sort of agent who'd go out and convince young men that 'we are all asexual' to turn them out er whatever...

*...just listened back,,, the whole idea that I was 'offering people money or to get high for sexual favors' part is amazing!... forgot about that...*