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.

Then My Veins Might Burn

As I hear for a countless occasion “Down In The Dark” on my old iPod Classic of 120 GB –it's not that I am freak of technology: I love physical albums and in fact I dislike Apple 'cause my iPod is on perfect conditions and it seems that it is suffering “scheduled obsolescence”, but there are not many options to hear (converted) physical albums while you take a rest from work– and as I cannot stop thinking about a man waiting for the rush as he tells to a girl that she will make it a little better for a while, I would like to write that I heard about Mark Lanegan long before The Winding Sheet was released by Sub Pop in May 1990.

Nonetheless, first I listened Screaming Trees (when I watched Singles, back in 1998... or something like that...?) and, in particular, I heard for the first time this song on which Kurt Cobain sang and played guitar, when I downloaded it from Napster... almost 20 years ago. 

I was a teenager, Internet was “on fire” and I was crazy about Nirvana –I still like their music– and, in Napster, the song was suspiciously labeled as “an unknown song of Kurt Cobain”. 

What I've written so far, might look like an ordinary thing, but I have a different story: almost three years ago, on a pretty awesome period of my life, I saw Mark Lanegan, face to face, and we shook hands after a show. 

His band came to Mexico City. They were touring Gargoyle –Lanegan's tenth solo studio album– and they played at El Plaza Condesa. It was a pretty emotive show. I was about to cry over and over again. In the most Freudian sense of the term, it was a cathartic show for me. 

For more than five years, in which I went from being a postgraduate mentally ill student to being a postdoctoral physically ill researcher, I had been listening to his music.  

In between, I had a few miserable years. 

When I started my postdoctoral research, I was diagnosed with gastroesophageal reflux and I followed various unsuccessful medical treatments. Independently of the terrible suffocating experiences inherent to the disease and independently of the endless awful nauseas provoked by antibiotics, gastroenterologists told me that reflux was eroding my esophagus in such a way that it was very likely that it progressed to a cancerous tumor. 

On the previous months I got to the operating room, I listened Mark Lanegan's music more than ever. I associated his sad music with my ill mood, but, somehow, music turned my negative emotions into something positive.

From his solo career, Blues Funeral was the first album I heard –I bought it almost immediately it was released by 4AD on February 2012–, then I listened The Winding Sheet –couldn't resist to the bunch of papers I'd read over the years pointing it as a big influence on Nirvana's MTV Unplugged In New York– and then Bubblegum and Gargoyle, and then his collaborations with Queens Of The Stone Age, Duke Garwood and Isobel Campbell's Belle & Sebastian.

As I write these words, I have heard all his albums. 

I could try to explain why “Bleed All Over”, “My Shadow Life”, “Emperor”, “St Louis Elegy”, “Deepest Shade”, “When Your Number Isn't Up”, “One Hundred Years”, “Bombed”, “Wild Flowers”, “Juarez”... gave me the chills, but I won't.

Words aren't enough. 

I respect him as an artist. He truly seems one of the very few artists with enough guts to quit “the Seattle Sound” of the nineties. (I know: Screaming Trees were from Ellensburg, but I guess you get my point.) 

At a more personal level, his lyrics were a powerful inspiration on my worst days. They made me think of my disease and they made me realize that my disease was not the worst disease in the world. It was funny, 'cause I really didn't feel OK. My life sucked.

Sometimes I was so tired of not even being able to eat regular food or drink something other than plain water. Sometimes I hated my life. I felt nauseated all day long. I was endlessly clearing my throat. I ate without hunger just a very few selected meals. Eating was so monotonous that I lost a few pounds. 

Day after day, I woke up sick, hopeless and nauseated. I couldn't even tolerate regular smells. They made me threw up. I had to take everywhere my own bag of emergency in case I threw up. I couldn't even read a single paper for 30 consecutive minutes. 

By September 2018, I was finally feeling like a normal guy. Three to four months after surgery, I'd re-started to eat regular food and I could even drink a beer or orange juice. 

Obviously, I was so happy. Besides I was feeling OK and I was so excited by the show at El Plaza Condesa, one day before the show, my then most recent research paper was accepted for publication. 

That paper was the result of my last three devious postdoctoral years and it meant a lot to me. Although I had written all my previous papers in which I was first author –of course they were supervised by my PhD advisor–, it was, officially, my first paper as a corresponding author.

A few minutes before the show, at the stand of Mark Lanegan's official merchandise, I would have loved to buy Phantom Radio or I Am The Wolf, but I was so broke. Instead I bought a lithography. It's strange how sometimes you don't have money when you really need it. 

At the end of the show, Mark Lanegan came out of stage to sign some things. 

I was the first in the line. I was the first in the audience to shake hands with him. He was so polite and he signed the lithography I'd bought and my copy of Uncle Anesthesia (one of the most popular albums of Screaming Trees, which was produced by Chris Cornell).

I would have liked to tell him a few things about the way his music had changed my perspective on life, when I was so sick, but I didn't want to bother him. Neither I wanted to act like a moron. I just told him: “It was a great show”. And I really meant it. 

Under the dim lights of the forum, I saw Mark's smiling. 

For a moment, I looked at his red hair and then into his eyes –he wore thick glasses– and I tried to guess how many times did he had heard the very same words from another silly fans around the world and I felt so stupid. 

Then I gave him my hand and he politely gave me his. We shook hands. 

I walked away feeling numb.

My copy of Sing Backwards And Weep –Mark Lanegan's memoir– arrived a couple of days ago. As I started to read it, I checked my twitter time line and the first thing I found was a tweet on which Mark Lanegan quoted a passage I had just read on his book. 

He said that the Sex Pistols changed his life. 

Then I stopped reading and started to write this post. Hope someday he'll read a few lines of how his music saved my (miserable) life. 

Down In The Dark

I'm So Excited, I Can't Wait To Meet You There

As the quietly room is occupied by cats and sunlight and street sounds and wildlife, I start to forget you. Before the soft and blue substance of these thoughts vanished, I will make my best to maintain you on this secret spot I have been building for the last decade. 

I just can't ignore this calm that invades me. I just can't ignore this atmosphere. It smells like freshly washed sheets and it evokes several cozy ideas on me. It makes me feel like a stupid teenager. It makes me close my eyelids and to travel miles away from my real life.

I almost see myself from my inside.

We are in 1999. 

I'm walking to the swimming pool. 
My parents decided to bring us to these cabins in Cuernavaca.
It's the first time we spend a weekend in this place. 
I can't tell how they find it out, but it's a nice place. 

There are soccer fields and basketball and tennis courts. 
There are twenty or thirty cabins, next to a forest.
There is also a restaurant.  

A few hours ago, we played a soccer game with some tourists. 
We were giving them up a ridiculous beating. 
They were so stupid to play soccer. Most of them were fat and clumsy. 
A moron didn't tolerate the humiliation. He hit the soccer ball so hard that it made my dad bled. I hated him. I'm thinking on revenge.   

I've been also playing tennis with one of my brothers. 
I didn't remember how much I enjoy to play tennis. I even used to watch tennis matches on TV when I was a kid, instead of watching cartoons. I guess female tennis players attracted me. I loved the way the air made their skirts flew thru the court as they ran to hit the ball with the racket. I also loved the shapes of their firm legs. It also surprised me that women seemed fragile and quiet, but they could be so strong and they could scream violently. 

I'm thinking that I barely have the opportunity to play tennis. I think it sucks. 

I'm kind of pissed off. I would have preferred to stay home. 
I have realized that I just find it awkward to be surrounded by my family. 
It's not like our last holidays. We even brought our small nephew with us. He's four years old and seems to be the only really happy one. 

I love my family, but I just don't feel OK. 
I'm just a teenager, pretending to act like an adult. 

The university is on a strike since April. It is a disaster. The last time I went to see how it was goin' –some of my classmates and a few hundred other students, are “taking care” of the facilities–, the School of Psychology was a hotel and the Central Library was a dinning room. The entire Ciudad Universitaria was a dump surrounded by cyclonic mesh. 

It was so creepy. 

Nobody knows it, but it's a pretty stressful situation for me. I'm lost. I'm worried. I'm depressed. The only thing I do, is to be a student. I'm such a coward. 

Why haven't I just looked for a job, to keep my mind busy...? 

I've been obsessively thinking on the uncertainty of my academic future. 
I've been supposedly reinforcing my History of Psychology lessons, but, to be honest, I just cannot tell you about a single topic. I have had difficulties to learn. 

I also have been reading Dante Alighieri's most famous book and I just have had difficulties to enjoy it. I've been daydreaming with my own Beatrice and I've been suffering my own private hell. 

What would happen if I dared to give a 180° turn to my life...?

I could work on Mix up, I could work as a waiter on a coffee shop, if I really wanted to. 
I'm so apathetic. I'm so pathetic. I just can't quit my comfort zone. 

Besides daydreaming with the sudden appearance of my own Beatrice, I read 19th century writers, I write 19th century like-poems and weep and complain.  

The sun rays irradiate my childish body as I walk to the swimming pool.  

“I'm so excited, 

I can't wait to meet you there...”

sings Kurt Cobain inside my head, as my heart beats so hard. 

Though it is the calm part of the song, I'm sure that my heart sounds louder than Dave Grohl's drums and that Kurt Cobain's Jaguar on the noisy part of the song. 

My most precious treasures are an old Aiwa walkman, my headphones and my small collection of cassettes. This time, obviously, I'm listening Lithium. 

Music is so important to me. Nirvana has accompanied me since I started senior high school. It has been sort of a cursed. I am stuck in the past. I know I should listen to different genres and to listen different bands (alive ones?), but even though I have tried, it just hasn't work. 

I've been trying to listening No Code, too. I can't tell exactly why there is something about Eddie Vedder I dislike. This album seems so 1995. 
  
I have a crush. I'm almost sure that I will find you in the swimming pool, like I did the first time I saw you. I'm really excited. 

Suddenly, my legs start to shake.  

Though I don't even remember your face, I feel so enthusiastic about seeing you again.

A few days later, I watched a soccer game on TV. 
Our national team won its most relevant tournament so far. 
The Mexican players beat up Brazil in an exciting game. A young player named Ronaldinho was on the field. TV commentators said he was the next star of Brazilian soccer. He's nineteen years old, or so. 

At the time of the game, it was raining. It had been a hot day. 
At a moment, before the soccer game, I was so bored that I went to swim.

And then I saw you.  

You had a black swimwear. Your natural way of behaving left me breathless. 
You looked so gorgeous. Your brown long hair floated on the water like a living miracle defying the laws of gravity. I would like to write an elaborated thought about each component of your beauty, but I would be a liar. I have to admit it. I couldn't ignore your breasts. They made me feel weak and strong at the same time. 

Immediately, I dove into the water to hide my excitement.
I sort of swim to get close to you. You were swimming, too. 

At a moment, as we stopped swimming, we made eye contact. 
It could be for a second, but it felt like eternity. 

I believed you smiled and waited for me to speak to you.
I sensed it, in the very same way I sensed it in those girls in junior high school I kissed. 

Despite all our efforts to make it clear that we own a neocortex, we're still mammals. 
Our brain has evolved, but we still need water and food, to survive. Our brain has evolved, but we still need sex to perpetuate our specie. Our brain has evolved, but we still have to cut it off when we're starved, no matter if we have to interrupt our most sophisticated cognitive abilities. Hormones, olfaction and sight remind us that we are still animals. It's hard to be exempt from our nature.  

Of course, I didn't speak to you. 
 
                              

Though I barely saw you then, I couldn't stop thinking about you. I have felt like a confused young, like I think of Marcel Proust when he wrote how he idealized mysterious women on his vacations on Balbec. 

(In fact, as I am pounding the keyboard and trying to capture you on this secret spot, I see myself as the main character of In the shadow of young girls in flower.)

Since that hot day, your presence has been haunting me. 

I closed my eyelids this morning, while I was in the shower. 
I had impure thoughts about you. I also thought about your eyes and your beautiful hair floating in the swimming pool. Yesterday, as I fell asleep, I started to have hypnagogic hallucinations on which you allowed me to watch your naked breasts behind that black swimwear. It was so exciting. The images left me breathless. For a second, as I woke up, I had no reasons to consider that dreams aren't better than life. 

I finally arrive to the swimming pool. 
I sit in a chair, a few steps from the water.
I sense on my face the reflection of the summer sun diving into the water.  
My lungs are penetrated by the singular smell of chlorine. 
I'm so happy. 

I turn on the volume of the walkman. I focus on Kurt Cobain's voice. I focus on Dave Grohl's cymbals and snare drum. I focus on Krist Novoselic's bass. 

I take a deep breath. 
I look for you. 

There you are. 

Lithium