We're The Litter On The Breeze

This week, strange associations made me thought of Suede.

They started on Tuesday. 

On a topic of Neuropharmacology and Addiction I will finish to teach in a couple of weeks, I asked my pupils to read a scientific paper and to elaborate some answers. 

One of the main findings of the paper was that a low dose of morphine increases the preference for this drug in food restricted rodents. Thus my pupils also had to write a few paragraphs of morphine pharmacodynamics. 

As expected, a student wrote that opiates stimulate mu, delta and kappa receptors and modify the permeability to specific ionic channels on the cell membrane, but she also wrote that they “induce indifference to pain”. 

As I found this statement pretty simple and pretty convincing, her description remained in my head as I continued reviewing some other works. 

Suddenly, I was listening “Trash” and thinking about the increasing rate of worldwide opiate addiction and concluding that the world is so painful that we need to take pills to deal with pain. 

This idea guided me to another idea. 

Almost four years ago, I heard Suede for the very first time.

 

A cousin of my wife gave us tickets for Corona Capital, in Mexico City. On that particular edition of the festival, Suede was one of the special guests.

The festival occurred in the cold Sunday night of November 20th. 

On May 4th, after a long period of hopelessness, medical ineffective treatments, unappetizing diets and zero alcohol and nicotine to deal with gastroesophageal reflux, I'd had a surgery.

I still had to take tons of pills and I had to eat tasteless food and I had to drink plain water all day long, to avoid suffocating with my own gastric acids and to mitigate nauseas, and so I still felt weak and miserable at the festival. 

We arrived to the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez around five or six in the afternoon and we listened to Peter, Bjorn & John and to Eagles of Death Metal –I guess it was their first show after the tragic show at Bataclan– and then we moved to the stage in which Suede would play. 

 

As we walked, we passed by another stage on which a band produced by John Frusciante was playing. The music was so loud and the audience was so frenetic, but the lights and the sounds made me experienced an awful reminiscence of my illness. 

On those previous miserable weeks following surgery, one day I accidentally mixed Gabapentin to deal with the mononeurophaties provoked by the excessive amount of drugs I had taken for months and Tramadol to deal with the pain provoked by the surgery. It was a dangerous combination. I felt so dizzy and nauseating and paranoid that I believed I was about to stop breathing. I just turned off my body.

Finally, as we left behind these lights and sounds, my wife and myself stepped close to the Suede's stage and we found a nice place pretty close to it. As the wind fiercely blew and I felt that I was about to threw up, the band came onto the stage and I tried to enjoy their music. 

 

As the show progressed and the frontman and the audience connected as if they were longtime lovers who were able to see each other for the first time after centuries of censorship, prohibition and loneliness, and I felt weak and nauseating and I remembered that awful experience with Gabapentin and Tramadol, I felt l was a heroin addict dealing with cold turkey. 

As I was paying attention to the lyrics of “Trash”, I also remembered how meaningless I felt in my job. Then I was on my second year of posdoc. Apparently, in general, the students of my colleagues and the colleagues of other departments and their students saw me at me as undergrad. It was annoying. 

I wanted to make a difference, but I was so weak and worried about my condition. Sometimes I even felt that I was invisible and pathetic. Sometimes I felt so sick that I abruptly had to leave my job without telling anyone how sick I was.    

Before the surgery, I was so ill and weak that I wasn't even able to perform a stereotaxic surgery from the beginning to the end, or to read a single paper for five consecutive minutes. Nobody knew and cared about my condition.

I've been listening to Suede the entire week and thinking about how miserable I was. 

I guess all these thoughts their music reminds me of, made me not to listen to their music very often. 

Nevertheless, though I have a lot more responsibilities and I feel a lot more involved in my job, sometimes I still feel I am trash. 

Innocence Creates My Hell

 

It must have be a Saturday afternoon when I bought my first copy of Facelift. It must have be August, 2001. As I remember it and as I write these lines, I still can't believe Layne Staley would be dead eight months later. I still can't believe his parents would find his corpse half decomposed from an overdose, at his apartment, eight months later. Still can't believe his death would tragically coincide with the eight anniversary of Kurt Cobain's death. 

Anyway, even if I knew these data, I wouldn't mind. I kinda disliked Alice In Chains 'cause they were the favorite band of Suzy's ex. She was my girlfriend but we had a murky relationship. She always spoke of him. She always kept him informed about our relationship and so he appeared each time we had a fight, like if he were a gentleman and a mature guy.

Though he was almost thirty years old and we were in our early twenties, he behaved like a silly teenager. He was a hypocrite, a coward and a blackmailer. Short after Suzy and myself started to hang out, he blackmailed her. He told her that he would commit suicide, if she didn't become his girlfriend again. He told her that he and his friends were going to kidnap me and to torture me to make me feel the pain he was suffering. He was such an idiot. Suzy broke with him several times before we started to hang out 'cause he was a moron. I had nothing to do with it. I didn't help him out to be a moron. He was an expert in being a moron. 

Anyway, as I believed I was so ugly and so stupid to call the attention of another woman and as Suzy was so afraid of loneliness, we had this murky sickening relationship. We believed we were adults, but we behaved like teenagers. We hated each other but we we're so co-dependent that we could barely be apart. We were working on the experiments of our bachelor's degree thesis', so we had to see each other from Monday to Friday.   

Earlier on that day, we went to a mall and I bought Facelift and Broken at the record store. for a reason I don't remember, she slept that night at my parent's house. All I wanted to do was to listen to this album, but she had another plans. 

As soon as we got to my parent's house, we must climbed up the stairs and we must went to my bedroom. We must smoked a cigarette on the balcony and then we must lied on the bed and then we must spoke about silly things. 

She must have told me that she had to make a confession. 

I Try And Feel The Sunshine, You Bring The Rain

I remember myself playing with soccer action figures ripped away from several birthday cakes, on a blanket on which I had drawn a soccer field with an indelible marker, while this song sounded in the boombox that my younger brother had bought with his savings a few weeks earlier. Perhaps the sound was so loud that it provoked the windows cracked. 

I was on my knees beside my bed, feeling ashamed of behaving like a kid. The door was locked and the boombox was playing Use Your Illusion II.

I didn't want to be disturbed nor to be discovered. I felt so guilty. I felt divided in two personalities: a playful kid, attracted to silly toys, and a rebel teenager, attracted to the tough world of rock n' roll music. 

While Izzi's voice sang something about what seemed to be his teenager life, I was focused in recreating a soccer match with these soccer action figures I had started to collect in junior high school. 

Since my brothers were born in the same month of different years, sometimes my parents celebrated their birthdays in the same day. A few years before I discovered Guns N' Roses on TV, they did so. 

By that time, it happened that I'd just begun to play in the soccer team of elementary school and I'd just begun to watch soccer matches on TV, so I had a soccer fever. 

That birthday my parents gave in to my whims –my brothers didn't complain at all– and they bought a soccer birthday cake. From then I'd asked my dad almost once per month to take me to the cake shop and to buy me some other soccer action figures. Once in a while my dad had accepted. He must have bought me around forty action figures without a cake. Now, it makes me feel we were some sort of partners in crime. He always did the what he thought it would be the best he could do for me. 

I'd discovered this dangerous band one day I was so bored from having nothing to do on summer holidays that I decided to turn on the TV. Boredom coincided with a music video called “Estranged”.

It was an incredibly crazy video. It included clips of a rock n' roll band concert in the old Munich Olympic Stadium and tattooed tough guys walking thru the streets, smoking with fantastic women in bars, descending from an enormous airplane, playing a terrific guitar solo in the middle of a storm in the ocean, jumping from a big fishing ship and swimming with a dolphin*. 

This eccentric video lasted almost ten minutes and it was supposed to tell a chaotic story of a troubled man named Axl Rose, who, apparently, tried to hide from police in the closet of a mansion and also tried to overcome the rejection of a woman he loved desperately. 

While “14 Years” sounded, I made a pause from my silly entertainment and begun to pay attention to the lyrics and to the music. It was raining outside. It must be one of the last days of summer. It must be Sunday. I'm pretty sure that the next day it would be my first day in senior high school. I was so excited. 

I was about to celebrate my fourteenth birthday on December. I wanted to quit my childhood, but it was so comfortable. A few hours earlier, my dad had drove us my brother and myself to the record store of the neighborhood. 

At the record store, I had looked desperately for the section of the Guns N' Roses albums' and, particularly, for the album on which “Estranged” appeared. I was obsessed with the song. It had transmitted me feelings I had never experienced with music. 

Finally, I had found the album and I had bought it on cassette. It was 1994 and I guess compact discs were rare. I'm not even sure if they were available by then. Vinyls, as nowadays, were so expensive. 

While it was raining outside and I was locked in the bedroom I shared with my brother, I was listening to it for the first time. It was a rad experience. Though my interest was to listen “Estranged” with high quality –I was so obsessed with the song, that I had recorded it several times from the music video directly from TV, and the sound totally sucked 'cause the boombox had also recorded the environmental hissings and the sounds of the living room–, this song caught my attention.  

I thought it told a story of a guy like me, trying to leave behind his childhood and trying to fake he was a man. I was so innocent. 

This morning, as I wrote this post, I just read on the internet what fans around the world think this song is about. They seem to be convinced that Izzi Stradlin tells the story of Guns N' Roses. Apparently, it took them fourteen years to become the biggest band they became right after Appetite For Destruction was released on July 21st, 1987. Other fans are convinced that Izzi tells the story of his fourteen-year friendship with Axl. 

Regardless of what they speculate, as I listen “14 Years” for a countless time –a few weeks earlier, I started to play it on guitar and I was so surprised that the chords are not a pain in the neck–, I prefer to believe it is about what I thought it was about, when I was about to have my first day in senior high school and when I was about to celebrate my fourteenth birthday. 

Up To My Neck In Sorrow

_________

*Ironically, by the time “Estranged” was filmed, Izzi had quit the band.