It's A Story Of A Man Who Works As Hard As He Can

It must be the autumn of 1994, when I heard Duff McKagan's So Fine. 

Kurt Cobain had recently been found lifeless in the greenhouse of his house of Lake Washington, but I didn't even know of Nevermind success.  

I was so childish. I was so alienated by soccer. 

For three years, I had been dealing in Junior High School with guys who didn't really care about punk rock. 

There were more into Beverly Hills 90210-like sitcoms, basketball and rap. 

The craziest music they heard at parties was the 1990's What's Up? hit of 4 Non Blondes.

A few months later, Michael Jackson's Dangerous World Tour had arrived to Mexico City and a friend of mine had invited me to the show. His grandparent owned private boxes in the stadium. It was an event nobody wanted to miss. 

Then Michael Jackson represented my closest connection to music.  
Since I was a child, I had watched almost all of his music videos. 
They were so elaborated and they appeared on TV like a movie.
I knew a lot of his songs. 

Though I enjoyed his music and his videos a lot, and though the way he danced was so contagious, there was something about Michael Jackson that didn't seem right to me.

I was a confused teenager and so I believed that Michael Jackson didn't look so defiant and rebellious as a musician had to be. 

It was weird that even my grandparents adored him. It was unacceptable that I had the same musical preferences of my grandparents! 

I wanted to change my mind and I was looking for another options. 

Besides, I really didn't feel that I wanted to dance like he did. 

Though my friend and myself never found the private boxes of his grandparent and we had to watch the entire show in one of the corners of the stadium, standing all the time, so far away from the stage, it was awesome.

I still remember myself walking thru the alleys of the stadium before the show started, lights were hypnotizing and people were freak out. Beatles' songs sounded as loud as I haven't ever heard them.

Everything changed when I met Guns N' Roses. 

Those were my last vacations before High School and I saw a lot of TV.
Dunno why, but there was a fever for rock n' roll videos.

Estranged was a pretty impressive video. I saw it for entire weeks, wondering who those irreverent and hairy guys on the video were, wondering what kind of music was that.

It didn't sound like King of Pop's music at all. 
They looked defiant and rebellious on the video. 
The singer even wore a T-shirt with Charles Manson's face. 

A few days before my first day on High School, I bought Use Your Illusion II.

So Fine precedes Estranged on the album.
I was so excited and very expectant.
I was about to hear Estranged with high quality sound for the first time!
I was about to meet different people in High School. 

The association between these songs was so intense that it still gives me the creeps each time I hear So Fine. 

Now that I think about it, So Fine it is kind of a conditioned stimulus. 

Except that, for more than twenty years, it hasn't suffered extinction, nor has suffered habituation. 

So Fine

Restless Soul, Enjoy Your Youth

A friend of mine told me about the most recent album of Pearl Jam.

It was the summer 0f 1995, or so, and the album had just came out six months ago. 

He had bought Vitalogy at El Chopo, the most underground market of music at Ciudad de México -you could find out punks and the most unaccessible music, there-, and one day he lent it to me. 

I really loved the music and the fact that it was a pretty recent album. 

All I had heard then was old. Nirvana was my favourite band of all times, but since Kurt Cobain's death it had elapsed one year and the last studio album of the band would be Unplugged In New York. 

It was sad to realize that Nirvana would never play again. 

I had heard Ten and I kinda thought Pearl Jam was the opposite to Nirvana, that they did not have the same anti-commercial attitude of Nirvana, even though they'd just had sued Ticketmaster.

Pearl Jam wanted to be fair with their fans and they hated that Ticketmaster elevated the cost of the tickets for their shows and the fact that the company was the only one able to sell the tickets. 

I had read alot of interviews in which Kurt Cobain expressed his animadversion to Eddie Vedder. He said Vedder was a fake guy and he hated that Vedder pretended to be a nice guy with a high social consciousness, but I think it was more related to the fact that Kurt Cobain saw a bad reflection of himself in Eddie Vedder. 

  

I was really touched by the album, when I met a girl named Nancy. 

She was younger than me and she looked really beautiful and happy.

She was blonde and overweight. 

Except for her overweight, she looked like a girl I felt in love with when I was in elementary school. 

Veronica was from Aguascalientes and she was a tiny girl and the blondiest girl I ever met.  

Veronica left elementary school so soon -her family went back to Aguascalientes- and I couldn't get close to her.

Nancy had a sister and they used to wear the same clothes. 

It was pretty funny 'cause one day Nancy wore the clothes that her sister wore the day before, and so on.

I spoke to her once and asked her if we could meet. She did not understand why, but was nice and agreed. I realized she had green eyes, just like Veronica, and I felt so happy.

Obviously I wanted to make her my girlfriend. 

via GIPHY

We spoke several times, but soon it became pretty evident that I was not attractive to her. 

I don't even remember in what she was interested on, nor what we talked about.

I just remember that I gave her away a cassette with my favourite songs and that she started to hang out with and older guy who was some sort of dealer in the school.

We has so old, that he was a bearded guy. I always suspected he was "un porro" -a term we use in México to refer to the guys that the autorithies of the schools buy to get rid of troubles with the real students-, but I have to accept that he was also a pretty good looking guy and that alot of girls were crazy about him.

Sometimes he played football or basketball, but he sucked.

He was very clumsy. 

One day, I was having a good time with Nancy and he suddenly appeared and stared at me with a very hostile look.  

Later that day, I was in the high school gym watching a basketball game. 

It supposed to be an important game, between the school team and its worst enemy, or something like that, and this guy was sort of controlling the crowd -as I mentioned, he was kind of an employee of the school authorities- and someone in the crowd pushed me and I fell  on the floor of the court, just a millimeters away from him.

He was sitting but got up immediately and looked at me with his characteristic hostile look.

Dunno why I felt so strong and angst -maybe 'cause he was dating Nancy- and I stared at him with a very hostile look, to. 

He approached me, walking like the rough guys of Michael Jackson's Bad music video, and I just told him:

Are you sure, you want to have troubles?  

Dunno where that sentence came from.

Obviously I was not looking for a fight. 

My words surprised him and he pretended that one of his friends calmed him and he went back to his place in the high school gym.

via GIPHY

While doing it, he persisted in staring at me with his hostile look.

I felt stupid and contagious, and, since we were a teenage crowd in a high school gym, I thought it had just been pretty similar to the Smells Like Teen Spirit video of Nirvana.   

It was so cool and dumb, but funny. 

Every time I hear Vitalogy -and particularly, Not For You-, I almost smell the parfum of Nancy's blonde hair and wonder why would she think about me right now. 

Would she still believe that I am not enough for her?

This Is Not For You!!!