Let Me Dirty Up Your Mind

In 1996, I was 16 years old. Most of the time, I watched MTV. 

All I did was to listen music, but hadn't enough money to buy many records -I was so lazy and never considered to get a job- and also I was so frustrated 'cause I would never have the opportunity to hear Nirvana in a live show. 

Supposedly, they had played in Tijuana back in 1989, or so, long before Nevermind overthrew Dangerous' King of Pop. It was the closer they ever played to Mexico City, and I'm pretty sure that I still cared about Thundercats then.

At some point, in almost all MTV shows, people started to talk about a band in which Butch Vig was the drummer. I was so curious to listen to this band they talked about. Would they sound like Nirvana or Nevermind? Would I like their music?

It was a sunny afternoon in the middle of  autumn, when I finally heard Garbage. 

As usual, after another day in school, I sat on the living room and turned on the TV. 
The guy on MTV said he was about to show for the first time Queer, another single of the debut album of Garbage. 

He also said that Garbage's Stupid Girl and Only Happy When It Rains videos' were on a regular rotation on MTV and that people just loved them. 

via GIPHY

I felt hypnotized. It was a cryptic video, but I loved it. The music didn't sound like Nevermind at all, but I liked it, too -even though I wasn't, and I'm not, really a guy of loops and sfx. 

Nevertheless, I felt more attracted to the singer. She was beautiful, irreverent and provocative. Also, her voice was so sweet and soft. She sounded like a real singer, nothing to do with Courtney Love, which was almost the only female I used to listen up to. 

Monday night was my first Garbage experience -they played with Blondie and it was the last show of the Rage And Rapture Tour- and I just bought a couple of tickets a week ago. 

For a long time, I hadn't listened to the band. So I bought Strange Little Birds -and I loved Empty, Blackout and Even If Our Love Is Doomed- and in a few days I listened all the Garbage records' I own. 

Listening to their debut album, made me feel nostalgic. Didn't remember that once I met girl that used to be a Shirley copycat.  

While Shirley Manson sang and Butch Vig played the drums and both Duke Erikson and Steve Marker played guitars and Eric Avery -from Jane's Addiction!- played bass guitar, I wondered why in the hell I hadn't been in a Garbage live show. I know they've played in Mexico City constantly. Shirley said so. 

Even though they didn't played Queer, I loved the show. 
I'm becoming a big fan of their music, even though I still like garage punk bands. 
I'm sure at some point I'm going to read their book. 
   

Setlist, Palacio de Los Deportes, August 14th, 2017.

Queer

I Wanna Fly With You

It was spring. It was Friday. An undergrad wanted to be accepted in the lab. 

A few days earlier, my advisor had asked him to prepare a seminar about anorexia nervosa. 

I was an advanced postgraduate student and I had an experiment at that precise time.

Even though the talk was so damn boring, I didn't want to be a pain in the neck for my advisor –meaning I didn't want to provoke his typical rage–, so I had to switch between the experiment and the seminar. 

Now that I think about it, I really enjoyed performing experiments. On those days, I'd been performing some experiments with the passive avoidance paradigm. The idea was more elaborated, but in brief: since in my most recent published paper of the time, we had shown that an endocannabinoid acting in the lateral hypothalamus increased REM sleep for almost 24 hours, I was evaluating if an inhibitor of the synthesis of this molecule could block avoidance learning. Then I had a couple of published papers as first author and a couple of manuscripts in preparation more. 

Though I had proposed to my advisor this experiment and another one which ended up in NeuroReport, a couple of weeks before this seminar he had yelled at me in front of the undergrads.

It had been so annoying. He'd said that I just followed his instructions and that I didn't have ideas. 

Obviously it pissed me off. 

Now that I think about it, that's why I acquired an aversion to perform experiments. 

Each time since then, I remember those days and I feel like an idiot. 

Well, that Friday I would have like to focus in the experiment, but I didn't want to piss off my advisor, so, at a moment, I had to cancelled the experiment. 

 
After an hour or so, I was really bored. 

The undergrad didn't know how to explain the brain circuitry responsible for food intake regulation. 

All I wanted to do was to get away from the lab and to get drunk. 

On those days, I was really stressed, and I drank and did some other drugs basically from Friday to Sunday, to deal with my stress problems. I used to get wasted and to return tired and unhappy to the lab on Mondays. 

Alma Delia was an invited professor at the lab. She was about ten years older than me. 

She was kind of pretty, but a conflictive woman. All the undergraduate students worked for her and she didn't recognized them. My advisor trusted her in a pretty sickening way. 

I had the impression that she was responsible for the sickening environment we suffered at the lab, when my advisor experienced his worst times. 

Four years earlier or so, when I'd arrived to the lab, I had a few hours as a half-time professor at the School of Psychology. Alma Delia immediately looked at me in a pretty hostile way. 

Maybe she thought we would become enemies. I dunno. 

Then she used to dressed up in blouses with a pronounced neckline. Her nipples were visible all the time. She even had a nickname. The older postgrads called her “Miss Nipples”. 

Her nipples were so impressive. They looked like a couple of tough craters. 

At the beginning, when we toasted for the end of the year or the end of a congress or the end of a symposium, Alma Delia got wasted. 

She became a crazy sexual woman. Sometimes undergrads had to take care of her. 

She used to loss her head and to make sexual comments that other researchers found like a proposal to get involved with her. When I saw her drunk for the first time in a party, she even told me some sort of joke about she giving me a blowjob. It was so sickening.  

As the undergraduate student tried to decipher the opposing roles of leptin and ghrelin in anorexia nervosa, my need to get stoned increased. I had a seat beside Alma Delia. I could watch her and she could watch me. 

She dressed up a tiny skirt. Her legs were terrific.

 

Sometimes, when she got over bored, she stretched her legs and then leaned her back against the back of the chair. Her breast was exposed on plain view. I just couldn't ignore her.    

She did so, several times. Her legs were terrific. They made think of a story of Bukowski and Bukowski made me desire to get wasted. I couldn't focus on anything else. I couldn't stop watching them. I believed I understood why Bukowski was mad about legs. 

At some point, she discovered I was watching her. 

She smiled to me for a few milliseconds. 

Her smile was sort of diabolic. Alma Delia made me have insane thoughts. It made me analyze if sometimes she was flirting on me. I guess we were all stressed out. As I'm about to get wasted, I put this song on my iPod and I kinda remember that I did the same on that Friday, after the boring seminar ended up and I got home. I would have love to write something about Alma Delia and Bukowski, but I just got wasted. 

'Cause It's Not, Not What It Seems

Lola was younger than me. 

I saw her for the first time in an English class. 
She was an advanced student -just like me- and someday our teacher asked us to work together. Our teacher wanted us to participate in some sort of academic exchange. 

That day, Lola arrived at the classroom and sat beside me. 
At the beginning, I did not take care of her appearance. 
I just kind of sensed that she was a skinny white girl with glasses and that her look resembled that of  John Lennon in the Abbey Road era.

In one of the activities we were working on -it was sort of a questionnaire-, I decided to give her my real telephone number. 

At that point, I'd just kind of noticed that she was attracted to me and I wanted to confirm if I was right. 

She couldn't stop watching me. 
She was so shy and looked like if she was about to have a nervous breakdown all the time. 
She hesitated about all her responses. 

A couple of days later, a mysterious girl started to calling me up on the telephone, almost three times per week. 

Dunno remember exactly how it was, but we talked for hours. 

Even though the mysterious girl didn't want me to say her name, it was so obvious. 
Those telephone conversations were so funny. 
She did not tell me her name, but said she liked The Cranberries.
She admired Dolores O'Riordan. 
She talked about all the discography of the band and promised me to, eventually, lend it to me. 

Once I was convinced that she was the mysterious girl, I started to look for her in the school. 

Guess I wanted to contact her personally, 'cause I had really sympathized with her. 
Besides, she had confessed that she was interested on me, and I started to consider the possibility to make her my girlfriend. All I needed it then was to have a girlfriend. 

I found her sooner than I expected. 
At school, Lola was following me almost all the time. 

Someday, between classes, I saw her alone having lunch and then I approached to her and asked her if she was the one who was calling me up on the telephone. 

She denied it, but she blushed.

On a few days we talked regularly, in person. 

At some point, she told me she had a boyfriend. 

It was weird 'cause she liked me -and it was the reason she started to contacting me- but didn't want to break up with his boyfriend. 

Sometimes, as we were on the telephone, her boyfriend arrived at Lola's home and we just had to hang out. 

We used to sneak out from some classes. At the beginning, we just talked. Eventually, we started to kiss.

The first time it happened, we were in the middle of a play in the school theatre. 

A friend of mine was playing Poseidon, and I asked Lola to watch the play with me. 

It had been a rainy day and we had been together for hours. I couldn't stop looking at her moist hair. It seemed a water lily. 

Lola was eating Ruffles, or some sort of junk food. 

Suddenly, she saw me behind those Lennon-like glasses and hold my hand. 

Her eyes adopted a wild attitude, like if they were possessed by some sort of spell, and she put her lips around mine. She started to push back and forth. The softness of her tongue started to surround my mouth, and I was so surprised. As I sensed the taste of the junk food in my mouth and Lola watched me with cozy eyes, I realized I never thought she would kiss that way. 

Last night, accidentally I heard a Cranberries' song, and it reminded me of her. 
Music always have exerted a strong emotional effect on me. 
I remember several issues on detail if they're associated to a song in particular.

I saw Lola for the last time, almost 20 years ago. 
I'd just had a couple of weeks in college and I missed her a lot.  
One day I surprised her and went to my old school -then she was in the last grade of high school-, but Lola was sort of annoyed and cold.

I guess she was waiting for her boyfriend to arrive anytime. 

I was bothered, completely deceived by her attitude and I ran away. 
Never looked for her ever again.

I wonder what happened to her.

She wanted to be an English teacher. 

Salvation